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  The deputy took Jordan’s driver’s license off his clipboard, looked at it again, and said, “Let me see your ID, just to be sure.”

  “Uh. Well, I don’t carry it when I’m on vacation, like now.”

  “You don’t?” the deputy said, as if someone had sug­gested to him that maybe he shouldn’t strap the big iron onto his hip first thing in the morning, before he brushed his teeth. His hand closed around Jordan’s license. “I’ll just make a call,” he said, turning back toward his car.

  “Uh,” Jordan said, the one syllable enough to halt the officer’s retreat. “I just left the office recently, as a matter of fact.” He could feel his face reddening, as if he’d been out in this damned blazing sun for an hour. He felt like a jerk for having let the deputy jump to the wrong conclusion. The deputy’s mouth had compressed again. “This is my first trip since I quit, actually,” Jordan said hastily. “I was in the DA’s office so long sometimes it seems like I’m still there. You know how that is.”

  There was no longer a person behind the mirrored lenses, there was only a law officer. The deputy snapped open his ticket book and started writing.

  So eight years in prosecution didn’t leave any reservoir of good feeling with former fellow law enforcement agents, like money still sitting in the state retirement fund? No, of course not, because when he admitted to being a former prosecut­ing attorney, that made Jordan now one of the most prized targets of law officers everywhere: a stinking, slimy lawyer.

  Well, hell Jordan glanced at the ticket, reading upside down. “Madera County? Is that where we are? Are we in­side your jurisdiction?”

  “We have statewide jurisdiction, sir.”

  Jordan didn’t think that was true of sheriffs’ deputies, but he couldn’t remember offhand.

  “Besides, you crossed the county line about a mile back,” the deputy said smugly. “We both did.”

  “So you weren’t even in your own county to start with? You’re staked out in the neighboring county?”

  The deputy said nothing for a moment to emphasize that he owed Jordan nothing, but he couldn’t help justifying him­self. “I’m on my way home, sir. From San Antonio.” With a glint of superior amusement. Hey, I’m a world traveler, too. “You mean you’re not even on duty?”

  “We’re always on duty, sir. When you put on the uniform in the morning—”

  Oh, Jesus. Out of all the cars on the highway heading to the Gulf coast, Jordan had had the bad luck to have Barney Fife coming up on his bumper. “So you’re just bagging a trophy on your way back to the office to show the boss how alert you always are, even after a big time in San Antonio.”

  Oh, that brown face behind the mirrored lenses was taut. “We don’t think of them as trophies, sir,” the deputy said.

  “All right, all right” Jordan put his own sunglasses back on, hope of human contact lost “How fast do you say I was going?” he asked idly.

  “Seventy-three, sir.”

  Brother. The speed limit on this stretch of rural interstate was sixty-five, and the universal wisdom was that you wouldn’t be stopped for going less than ten miles over the limit That is, not by a normal law officer.

  “Mind if I verify that for myself?” Jordan asked. He was close enough to the patrol car to glance in its windshield.

  “Step away from the vehicle, sir.”

  Jordan didn’t. In fact, he stepped closer, puzzled. “Where’s your radar?”

  “Step away from the vehicle!” The deputy’s hand was on his gun again. Jordan obeyed but stood with his hands on his hips, waiting for an answer. “This vehicle isn’t equipped with radar,” the deputy finally said. “It’s not a traffic con­trol vehicle.”

  “Then how do you know how fast I was going?”

  “I was pacing you, sir.”

  “Pacing me?”

  “I stayed behind you, driving the same speed you were going—”

  “I know what pacing means.”

  “—and saw from my own speedometer that the speed was excessive.”

  “You drove the exact same speed as me, not one mile an hour’s difference. Bull,” Jordan said distincdy, as if he had completed the word. “Then how did you catch up to me?”

  “After I determined your speed, I caught up to you and pulled you over.”

  Jordan shook his head. “No. You weren’t hanging back there behind me long enough to clock me without me notic­ing.”

  The deputy ignored him, continuing to write. “You’re writing that down, seventy-three? I’m not going to agree to that”

  “You’ll have your chance to contest the ticket in court,” the deputy said, holding out the clipboard toward him. Then something else occurred to Jordan.

  “Wait a minute. You weren’t out patrolling for speeders. You’re on your way home from San Antonio. And you caught up to me. Which means if you say I was going seventy-three, then you were really speeding.”

  Jordan could feel the deputy’s glare through both their sunglasses. It was time to back off, a little voice was telling him, but the voice was overpowered by the anger he felt at being bullied by this smug bureaucrat.

  “I’m in a patrol vehicle, sir, we’re allowed—”

  “But you weren’t on patrol, you were just on your way home. So you can go blasting down the road at whatever speed you want, but any ordinary citizens that get in your way, you’ll pull them over and harass them just for the fun of it Right?”

  The deputy pulled the clipboard back, stuck it under his left arm, and laid his right hand on his gun again.

  “Come with me,” the deputy said flatly.

  “What? Where?”

  “I think we’d better go see the judge right now.”

  “No. I’m on my way. We’ll hash this out—”

  “What you’re doing,” the deputy snapped, “is coming with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of your refusal to sign the ticket, promising to appear in court”

  “I didn’t refuse. Give me the ticket, I’ll sign it”

  The deputy, confident of having the upper hand again, wore a tight little smile, tiny as the button on a doll’s shirt. “Sorry, sir, you only get one opportunity.”

  Jordan lifted his hands. “When was my one opportunity?”

  “This is ridiculous,” Jordan said, going up the steps of the courthouse. Deputy Delmore (Jordan had made sure to read his nameplate) was close behind him, occasionally touching

  Jordan’s back to herd him, which made Jordan flinch—from anger, not fear. “You know, if somebody smashes into my car, or steals it, your liability will be personal.”

  “If the judge assesses you a jail sentence, I’ll retrieve your vehicle personally,” Deputy Delmore said.

  “Jail? You’re crazy.”

  Walking into the courthouse in his shorts and thin shirt was like one of those bad dreams. As in a dream, too, the courthouse didn’t look right. Jordan had never before seen the Madera County Courthouse. It wasn’t a fourth the size of the Bexar County Courthouse he was used to, nor of the same antiquity. The building was red brick, which gave it a dark, cool appearance on the summer day. It created its own shade. They went through a simple glass door into the linoleum-floored interior.

  Jordan began to relax a little. They were in his territory now, even if it was Deputy Delmore’s home county, because in some fundamental way all courthouses are the same. The judge would be a lawyer, he and Jordan would implicitly acknowledge their professional camaraderie. They might drop a couple of phrases that would pass over the deputy’s head. Now that the threat of being shot to death on the side of the road had passed, Jordan felt equal to the situation.

  He just wished he weren’t dressed like a college student on spring break.

  The ground floor hallways were laid out in a simple “plus” sign with short arms. At the end of one of the arms, the deputy stopped outside an open office door. “Sit there,” he said, indicating a wooden bench like a church pew. After Jordan sat,
Delmore removed his hat and his sunglasses, revealing raccoon eyes from wearing the mirrored lenses in the sun all the time, and stepped just inside the doorway of the office. The sign above the door proclaimed the office as that of the clerk of the municipal court

  The deputy had only stepped halfway inside the doorway, so Jordan was able to hear the tone of the conversation inside the office. Deputy Delmore announced himself to lit­tle response, made his request, and was met with some kind of problem. Jordan listened happily as the deputy was re­duced to cajoling and whining. The clerk, if that’s who it was, was giving Delmore indifferent hell. The deputy had a problem, but it wasn’t the clerk’s problem, and she had no intention of sharing it.

  “Judge Waverly’s the only one here, and he said he’d handle whatever came in,” came the clerk’s peremptory voice.

  Deputy Dimbulb reached to tip the hat he was no longer wearing and stepped away quickly. “Come on, you,” he snarled at Jordan.

  “Judge Lucas is on vacation,” he added, more to himself than to his prisoner as they emerged from the hallway’s arm and stopped for a moment at the foot of the stairs.

  “It seems like an omen, doesn’t it?” Jordan suggested.

  “I don’t work for omens,” Delmore snapped. The ex­change restored the deputy’s feistiness and his almost invisi­ble smile. “Up,” he said.

  Because the command was so peremptory, Jordan took his time on the stairs, putting his sunglasses back on. They somehow made him feel better dressed.

  The atmosphere of the second, the top, floor of the court­house was different from the first. The ground floor had hardly been an antbed of bustle, but there’d been a few people about and the halls had been lined with offices. Up­stairs there was a hush. During working hours in Jordan’s home courthouse there were always people in the halls, fam­ilies moaning together, trials starting up or at least threat­ened. Here all was silence. It wasn’t the hush of justice being performed, though. At the top of the stairs the pebbled glass door of the courtroom—the courtroom, Jordan noted wryly—was open, revealing the courtroom was empty.

  Delmore passed him without a word, infected by the si­lence, and Jordan followed him to the door of the office that would be situated behind the courtroom. The deputy knocked quietly before entering.

  “Hello, Cindy. I hate to bother the judge, but I need to see him if he’s available.”

  The girl—little more than that—behind the desk in the office that was small enough to seem very crowded once Delmore and Jordan were inside gave the deputy a smile of encouragement, paid Jordan no notice at all—after all, he was obviously a criminal—and said, “He doesn’t have any­body with him, T. J. Go ahead and knock.”

  The deputy knocked on the only imposing door Jordan had yet seen in this courthouse—it was of solid dark wood, with ten inches of molding around its frame—and a voice from inside said a single quiet syllable.

  Deputy Delmore took Jordan’s arm—more for comfort, Jordan suddenly felt, than as an exercise of authority—and they entered. The inner office was four times the size of the secretary’s. The desk alone seemed the size of the entire outer office. The office was dim. There were four windows on two walls, but the shade was only up on one of the four, so that the heat of the day outside was confined to a rectan­gle of sunlight that hit the desk’s surface. Behind the desk, seated in a high-backed swivel chair, was a man in his fifties who wore age like an accomplishment, not like a disease to be avoided. In fact, he might have been younger than he looked; his hair was white but had receded only enough to make his forehead imposing; his head looked as if it con­tained activity. His hands, resting in the sunlight, were long-fingered and strong. The judge’s eyes looked very dark. His most arresting feature was a nose that was remarkably strong, saved from hawkishness by flaring nostrils and a thick moustache.

  The eyes did not blink or change their waiting expression as the two men came toward him.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Judge,” Delmore began, “but Judge Lucas’s clerk said that you were the only judge in the building and that you’d offered to handle whatever—”

  “What can I do for you, Deputy?”

  “Just setting bail, Judge. This fellow here—”

  Jordan quickly doffed his sunglasses and stepped around the desk to shake hands. “Jordan Marshall, Your Honor, I’m an attorney from Bexar County. I’m afraid you need to instruct your officer here that speeding is not an arrestable offense in this state.”

  And Jordan stayed where he was, allied with the judge, as if the two of them were judging the deputy who remained in front of the desk.

  “Mr. Marshall is right about that, Deputy Delmore,” the judge said mildly. “Or did you arrest him on some other charge as well?”

  Delmore’s bands were circumnavigating the brim of his hat. “Yes, sir, Your Honor, there was the matter of him misrepresenting himself to me as being an assistant district attorney, too. He tried to say—”

  Jordan started to jump in with a contradiction, but before he could, the judge interrupted in that same mild, flat tone of voice as if he were simultaneously conducting some more important business inside his head.

  “While falsely claiming to be a prosecuting attorney is certainly reprehensible, it is not, unless the legislature has been busy behind my back this week, a criminal offense. Besides, what difference would such a claim make to you anyway, Deputy, in issuing a speeding ticket?”

  “Well, none, Judge, but—he perjured himself, and I thought—”

  The judge’s alertness increased. “You mean you had ad­ministered an oath to him before questioning him, there on the roadside?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then perjury is not the correct word. He may have lied”— the judge glanced upward and Jordan looked solemn—“but lying to a law officer is almost to be expected. I don’t believe we’ve ever charged anyone with that, have we?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t sign the ticket either, Judge.”

  “I begged to sign the ticket,” Jordan interjected.

  “Now there, finally, we have a legal controversy,” the judge said, but as if he were suddenly tired of it all. His hand rested on papers before him; he had been thinking about something when interrupted. “But since you’re both in agreement now, why don’t you have him sign the ticket, Deputy, and we can all go about our business?”

  Delmore, rigid with the embarrassment of acting under someone else’s command, fumbled out his ticket book, of­fered it and the clipboard to Jordan, and after Jordan had signed, tore off the copy and handed it over to his erstwhile prisoner, saying automatically, “Have a nice day.”

  “Have you sworn out the complaint yet?” the judge asked.

  The deputy was almost standing at attention. “No, sir. Judge Lucas is on vacation, sir.”

  “I don’t believe the judge is necessary to begin the pa­perwork. Judge Lucas’s clerk should have the forms. Why don’t you begin that process, Deputy Delmore, and we’ll see if we can speed—that is, send—Mr. Marshall on his way.”

  “Yes, sir.” The deputy beat a hasty retreat, closing the office door gently. Jordan stayed where he was, thinking how beautifully it had gone, how the scene could hardly have been improved if he had written the script for it himself.

  “Thank you, Your Honor. I’m sorry we had to take up your time with this nonsense. I think your deputy there could use some training in the fine points of his job. You must get a lot of complaints about him.”

  “None we pay much attention to. It’s true people he ar­rests aren’t usually very happy with him, but by the time they’re convicted, they’ll usually admit that the arrest was perfectly justified.”

  Jordan realized that the judge hadn’t been siding with him during his mild dressing-down of the deputy, it was just that Delmore had been doing the talking, and Judge Waverly had the kind of mind that seized on whatever it heard and dissected the statement for flaws. Jordan spoke more carefully.

  “Judge,
I’ve been a prosecutor for eight years, I’ve only recently left the office. I’m not some hardcore defense law­yer, I don’t go around whining all the time that people’s rights are being violated. I know the vast majority of defen­dants are guilty, and law officers get used to treating us all that way. By the way, I want to correct that misimpression. I did not tell the deputy that I’m still a prosecutor. Though as I say, I was for a long time.”

  The judge didn’t answer, but not from inattention. He was studying Jordan quite frankly. It must have been difficult for the judge to give any weight to anything Jordan said as the younger man stood bare-legged before him. Jordan felt again that nightmare-quality embarrassment of having gone to work without his pants.

  Judge Waverly’s hand moved across the document be­neath it as if he were reading by Braille.

  “Well, I’m sorry to have taken up your time, Your Honor. I know you have more important things to deal with than speeding tickets.” For Judge Waverly, as Jordan had seen on his office door, was the area’s district judge, meaning he presided over trials of felony crimes and higher-stakes civil suits. Traffic offenses were literally, in this courthouse, be­neath him. “I’ll just—be on my way and see if I can find a ride back to my car. Thank you again for explaining the law to Deputy Delmore.”

  Jordan now sympathized with the deputy’s eagerness to withdraw. Judge Waverly’s steady perusal made him feel that if he lingered longer he would be found guilty of some­thing. Jordan didn’t think those dark eyes had blinked once since he’d come into the office.

  “Perhaps,” the judge said slowly, weight dragging down the words, “I could prevail on you to stay with us a bit and do me a favor.”

  “Certainly, Your Honor,” Jordan said automatically, be­cause that is the way lawyers answer requests from judges.

  The judge appeared to regret having spoken. He glanced again at the papers before him. His mouth tightened in thought, then in decision, and he stood up. The judge wore black suit pants, a long-sleeved white shirt, and a tie muted to the point of solemnity.