“I worried when I saw that briefcase because you were always so charming, so good at the general picture but you didn’t do well at the details. A few nights ago you were watching Johnny Carson. I watched you flipping a coin until my feet got tired.”

“It was just curiosity.” Which was the truth. A hundred flips turned up fifty-three to forty-seven. He also remarked on the exact time he went to bed every night, right down to the last digit of his digital watch, 12:11:37 and time to turn in.

“I love you and want you to have a good life. Good night.” She embraced him.

“I think I got a handle on it,” he said at the door. “I’m changing it in a lot of ways. Good night.”

He went to the refrigerator and picked at the ample amount of rare meat Diana and La Verne had left on their steak bones, washing it down with a cold Stroh’s. He felt the solid, adventurous clarity of a trapper setting off into the mountains, an unknown vastness, for another season.

Chapter 19

On Tuesday morning he awoke to one of those totally grim thunderstorms that wrack the Midwest in the summer; the windowpanes of the old farmhouse rattled, the bedroom walls lit up bluish with the closer strokes of lightning, and Hudley howled under the bed—not so much a howl really as an endlessly protracted moan interrupted by gulps of air. The dog didn’t howl in thunderstorms when Diana was there to hold a paw and stroke his grizzled head. Warlock reflected that in his own childhood his mom had been definitely more comforting than his dad during thunderstorms; his dad, in fact, would say “That’s God barking at you for being such a miserable little pissant.”

The dog drove him to the kitchen without anger—his own fears were far ranging: fire, the dark, people with one eye, people with goiters, tall blacks, homosexuals, generals, school principals, priests, Lutheran ministers, airplanes, drop forges, fast drivers, sexually aggressive women, large Japanese, psychiatrists, cancer, cheating wives, fistfights, death. In that his father had always been a policeman he did not fear the law. You have nothing to fear from the law if you don’t break it, was a truism he had been raised on. He grew up with a definite wariness of shifty eyed people who might try to hurt his father.