… No one ever said it was always going to be easy.… Pick up the phone before you pick up a drink.… It’s perfectly okay to want to.…

Lou wasn’t even aware he had taken out his cell phone.

“Cap, it’s me,” he heard himself saying. “I’m inside the Tam.… No, I haven’t.… Okay, I’ll get out now.… Ten minutes. I’ll be out there.”

Sunshine replaced the comforting gloom. The music and the tapes stopped. Robert Burns’s poem faded.

Lou walked across the street and leaned against a building to wait for his sponsor. Nine years and he still wasn’t safe.

Without constant vigilance, he realized, he never would be.

CHAPTER 14

Unable to clear John Meacham out of his thoughts, Lou headed back to the town of Kings Ridge.

The decision to share some of what he knew with Gilbert Stone had essentially been made for him by Cap Duncan and Walter Filstrup—the one, who was certain that there was a pattern of extremely odd thinking and actions at work in the community, and the other, who had decreed that Lou was to have an unexpected bolus of free, unstructured time on his hands.

Stone strode into the police station waiting area from behind an imposing steel door. He was dressed as on the night he and Lou first met—tan uniform, black tie, metal star. His engaging smile showcased what Lou guessed were top-of-the-line caps.

The night just past had been a frantic one for him, with calls from a dozen or so of his PWO clients, who had been informed by Filstrup of his suspension. The best Lou could offer them was his assurance that he would fight to restore his status and continue to be available to them in an unofficial capacity. In the meantime, he promised each of them that he would do everything within the limits of his new situation to continue to help them.

Lou had come away from his roadside encounter with Stone toting a wariness of the man’s oblique manner of asking questions, and an uneasy respect for the degree to which he had his finger on the pulse of his town. Kings Ridge may have looked and felt like Mayberry R.F.D., but this man was no bumpkin.

“Dr. Welcome,” Stone said, shaking Lou’s hand like a human garlic press, “good to see you again, son. That knot and cut there on your head look to have settled down pretty good.”

“It’s fine. Please, call me Lou.”

“Lou it is,” Stone replied, his expression as inscrutable as it had been at the scene of the accident. “I almost said, ‘Welcome, Dr. Welcome.’ I suppose you get that a lot.”

“From time to time,” Lou understated.

In fact, except to tell him and his brother that their name came from “someplace in England,” their father had no knowledge of or interest in its origin. Over the years, Lou had developed a number of different responses to inquiries about it, ranging from that it was modified from the Finnish word velkommen, which was a soft, incredibly cuddly arctic hare, to that his great-great-grandfather had it officially changed to Welcome from the Welsh, Getthehellawayfromhere.