Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

a man obsessively aware that there are always two sides. Craine gave him, for the most part, legwork, paperwork; and though his squeamishness was, to Craine, a source of irritation, he made no attempt to reform him. They’d grown old together, “worn out in the service,” as Meakins said. From the lugubrious tone (his voice, however, was high, like a boy’s), you’d have thought he had in mind some kind of church service. But Craine more or less understood Tom Meakins; had a good deal in common with the man, in fact. Meakins too had been drinking too much since God knew when. His belly and hind end were as soft as Bunny Bread; his huge, rumpled trousers hung limply from his suspenders like some poor woman’s wash from a clothesline. On his right hand, his gun hand, he was missing two fingers, and you couldn’t help but trunk, from the looks of him, that he’d lost them by pure carelessness, maybe just misplaced them in the junk on his desk. He was, like Royce, a doomed man. Self-destructive tendency, indifference to disaster.

“Don’t fool yourself, Meakins,” Craine had said that morning, looking at him over his spectacles, severe, or mock-severe. (Craine himself could hardly have said which—in fact he no longer remembered exactly what he’d said, if anything; he had a tendency, in these reveries, to make things up—but his voice had been, or would have been, intense, as if someone had done him a disservice.) “Society needs us. We redress grievances.”

Though it might have been sarcasm and then again might not, Meakins took it simply. He lifted his eyebrows, feeble and inoffensive. “Not often,” he said. “At least that’s my opinion. Mostly, seems to me, we just snoop into other people’s business.” He turned away, pivoted toward his office like an elderly, fat dancer or a slow-brustling whale, ready to dismiss it. But not Craine, not today.

“That’s true too,” Craine barked, and his voice went taut as harpoon line, holding him. “But we’re professional snoops. Imagine what the world would be like out there if all those crazies did their own snooping.” Boredom and irritation lured him further, toward rhetoric. High-falutin language was one of his talents, a gift he’d inherited from his grandfather, perhaps. “We’re objective, dispassionate. Bring me your suspicions, your free-floating guilt, your grudges, your fears, your dark secret hungers and unmentionable willies; I’ll defuse ’em, lay yer ghosts in triplicate, guaranteed! It’s a fact, Meakins. To them—” He pointed out angrily at the street. “—to them it’s a matter of life or death: revenge, safety after dark, reputation. To us it’s statistics. So many credit skips, so many divorces, so many cases of dogs fed glass. We’re the pressure valve, Meakins! We dry up their fury to courtroom talk!”

Hannah Johnson was bent forward at her desk, looking in through the door at him, eyes yellow-white against her midnight skin, her halo of steel-wool hair.

“All I meant,” Meakins said, staring at Craine’s glass.

Craine glanced down suddenly to the writing in reverse, like Arabic or Hebrew, on his desk blotter. “I wonder,” he said, “what happens to all that emotion we defuse?”

“Beg your pardon?” said Meakins.

“Nothing,” Craine said, and with eyes gone suddenly petulant he shot out a look at the man, more annoyed at the stupidity of his own muttered question than at Meakins’ having half overheard it. “Talking to myself.”

“Sorry,” said Meakins, and tentatively bowed. He moved away toward his own, smaller office, at the far end of the suite.

“Damn right,” Craine said, his hand slowly coiling around the whiskey. Something stirred behind him, and he turned his head slowly, glancing—heart racing—past his shoulder.

“Meakins!” he said, and carefully raised his glass.

“Sir?”

It seemed to Craine that there was something odd about the way Meakins stood, as if it were not really Meakins but someone else, an ingenious impostor, master of disguise. He thought, God knew why, of the article he’d read over breakfast that morning, or some other morning, black holes spiralling out through space, grinding up all that came near them, even light, even dreams, Tom Meakins’ fourth and middle fingers, and—the opposite of black holes—white holes in space, energy fountains inexplicably spewing out brand-new creation—soybean hamburgers, pyramids for sharpening old razor blades—and between those murderous black holes and strangely fecund white holes, million-mile chasms crazed with time warps, gloomy with intelligence, aclutter with vast, unearthly bodies drifting phlegmatically through patches of antimatter, leavings of some older universe, perhaps, like dark, archaic ships sailing mine-filled seas. He felt a queer trembling coming over him and saw an image of a towering ship, ablaze with lights, all around it blackness.

Meakins stood waiting with his hand on the doorknob, his mouth slightly open, eye bags sagging down his dull, freckled face. If he were not Tom Meakins, father of prostitutes, he would be, perhaps, some god of the rain forests gazing morosely through the veil of illusion, weighty with ruinous knowledge and unlikely to speak.

“Never mind,” Craine said at last, and waved him away. Again Meakins bowed, distant, perhaps wounded, and something flashed through Craine’s mind—a faintness. When that too passed, Craine’s world, though normal, felt odd, endangered, as he felt when alone after dark in some faraway place like Moline, where there were whores on prowl, laughing, circling outward from the darkest streets, dimmed-out rubies, practically invisible; yet he felt, at the same time, back in command: he’d found the thread of conversation again. Detectives were objective, dispassionate. Yes. (He thought of Inspector McClaren and suppressed quick alarm.) Did their work without personal involvement: bored professionals.

“Hired killers do the same,” some observer might have told him, gaze moving off toward the corner of the room.

Good point,” Craine muttered, loud enough to hear, then slyly glanced around to see if anyone, anything, was listening.

So Craine’s mind ran, half remembering, half dreaming, making up his life out of bits and pieces, some real, some not, as if Gerald Craine were indeed fictitious—Craine almost wholly unaware that he was