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

busy; no way to be sure. He intensified his effort, cranked up his cunning. Once, turning suddenly, he spotted Two-heads Carnac at the back of an old building, sorting through large cardboard boxes. Craine flattened himself more against the wall, then crept away. Carnac sorted on, holding first one box, then another, up to the sun. “Hoo! Ha! Nah bad! Sum-bitch!” He smiled like a man sorting paintings.

So Craine continued for another twenty minutes. Turning corners, moving through the town’s decayed center, he would step off quickly in the new direction, then stop, hidden by the brick or wood of the building on the corner he’d just rounded, and would light his pipe, squinting, waiting, his right hand wandering with a mind of its own toward the whiskey bottle. Once or twice, drawing out the bottle, sack and all, he took a quick restorative. So far as he could tell, no one who came around the corner was the one he was waiting for. He saw old women with shopping bags, their eyes forlorn; fat businessmen angrily gesturing and talking or simple-mindedly beaming, dreaming of profits—makers of instruments of torture, for all he knew (America was the number one manufacturer of instruments of torture, he’d read); students on fire escapes or skipping across streets, some with long hair, some with Afros; a minister with whom he’d done business once; doctors, college professors, most of them young, full of twitches and fierce opinions, their faces as innocent as the faces of children; heavy-booted asparagus- and hog-farmers, bespectacled, scholarly, awkward down off their tractor seats, all with that look of slight confusion, as if they suspected that somehow they’d been tricked. Craine knew the whole dreary catalogue of their troubles, past, present, future—the troubles peculiar to each of them, from the old women to the fanners. Mortal tribulation was his stock in trade. But their troubles were not what he was thinking about now. People noticed him, some of them, but hardly registered the fact, hurrying on; and after a moment he would hurry on behind them, moving more or less in a spiral that would lead to his office.

He glanced at his watch. It had stopped at a quarter to eleven, or so he thought. (At the bookstore, he’d fixed one fifteen in his mind. It was now his settled conviction that it must be two or so.) His secretary, Hannah, would be fit to be tied, wondering where he was; but no matter. He was his own boss, and he had nothing to do that couldn’t wait. He hadn’t been involved in what he’d call a real case—or would have called a case in his Chicago days—in years. He scowled, carefully not thinking about the past, stepping on the squares of the sidewalks, not the cracks, and abruptly, surprising himself, he stopped and, throwing one arm out for balance, spun around. The student he’d seen in the bookstore, in the oversized red sweater, was crossing the street diagonally, pretending not to know Craine was there. He was hurrying—loping, in fact, arms economically swinging like a jogger’s. Given the distance and the weakness of Craine’s eyes, that was as much as Craine could tell, but it would do. He knew about coincidence, probability. Heart thudding violently, he ran out into the street—a screech of tires, the bright yellow hood of a car bobbing downward with the suddenness of its stop—and Craine shouted, “You!”

The boy turned, jumping like a rabbit, looked at Craine, and ran. Craine ran after him. “You!” he yelled again. He lifted his long feet high to keep from tripping.

“Help!” the boy yelled. “Murder! Police!”

“Easy now!” someone said, and seized Craine’s arm. The man’s grip was firm as iron, official, planted right square on the crazybone. Craine, lifted half off his shoes, swung his head around and squawked.

“Some kind of trouble, Mr. Craine?” the man said. He was a tall, professorial person of about fifty—Craine had a feeling he’d seen him before. High, pink dome, horn-rimmed glasses, dark flat trapezoid smile with crooked little teeth behind it. Though he meant it to be genial, the smile had a hint of ferocity, flashing like a knife.

“That’s a criminal there,” Craine yelled, pointing toward where the boy had disappeared. He tried to pull his arm free.

“That why he’s calling for the police?” the man said, and smiled again. The heavy, dark shadows of buildings and trees, sprawled along the street, gave a shudder of disgust or laughter, then lay quiet again.

Craine had placed the man by now: Detective Inspector McClaren, professor of crime and correction at the university, lately made part-time criminal investigator with the Carbondale P.D. It came to Craine the same moment that it was not the boy who’d been spying on him, but someone else, he’d settled that long since. Some young woman. Yet how odd, he thought, suddenly putting his hand over his mouth, that McClaren should be planted just here, just now, perfectly set to intercept him.

Craine’s face, unbeknownst to him, put on its cunning look. “He’s been tailing me,” Craine said. “Follows me everyplace.”

“That so?” Detective Inspector McClaren said, brown shaggy eyebrows lifting. He studied Craine, looking down from high above him, then slightly loosened his grip on Craine’s elbow. “Well, never mind, Gerald,” he said. “We’ll see to it. I’ll have someone look into it.” If the use of Craine’s given name was intended to intimidate, the obscene trick worked. It made McClaren seem securely, ominously adult. One could imagine him signing important papers, giving firm, polite orders, shooting his cuffs for increased efficiency, sitting serious-minded and metaphysically alone at his orderly desk, head and shoulders thrown back, a certified, no-nonsense, horn-rimmed intellectual, beloved and feared by his inferiors.

Craine glared at him, angry as a goat, still trying to jerk free. “How the hell do you intend to look into it? You don’t even know him, and you’ve let him get away!”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Inspector McClaren said, blushing again, red as a