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beehive hairdo and a tablet of tickets from the pocket of her uniform. “The lunch special today is two tacos with a side of beans. That, or meat loaf and gravy.”
    Joanna and Marianne both ordered tacos.
    “You go first,” Marianne said, once Daisy had taken the pot and their order and headed back to the kitchen. “What’s going on?”
    “If the board of supervisors wanted me to do a seven and-a-half percent across-the-board budget cut,” Joanna groused, “why didn’t they tell me that before I took delivery on all those new Crown Victorias? They were all contracted for last year by Walter McFadden’s administration. It seems to me it would have been easier to renege on the purchase of several vehicles than it’s going to be to cut head count in either patrol or jail personnel. I’ve got a fifteen percent increase in caseload and an eighteen-percent increase in jail population, but I’m supposed to handle all of it with seven and a half percent less money than we originally budgeted. And that, I might add, was far less than the department should have had to begin with.”
    Marianne smiled at Joanna over the top of her coffee cup. “Sounds like loaves and fishes time. You’ll just have to take what you have and make it stretch.”
    “Right,” Joanna said. “But how? They won’t let me move any of the money from one category to another. According to Melanie Hastings, the funds used to pay for the cars came out of the capital-improvement budget. That money had to he spent for the vehicles or we would have lost it entirely. According to her, those figures were frozen. So here I sit with ten brand new cars in a department where I’m expected to gel by with two fewer deputies to drive them. It doesn’t make sense.”
    “Since when do bureaucracies have to make sense, Joanna?” Marianne asked.
    Joanna sat back in the booth. “All right now,” she said. “Your turn.”
    Marianne shrugged. “Same song, second verse. Bureaucracies are the same all over.”
    “The adoption people?” Joanna asked.
    Marianne nodded. “That’s right,” she said.
    Jeff Daniels, Marianne’s career homemaker husband, had left for China the day after Christmas on what was supposed to be a two-week expedition to bring home an orphaned baby girl. Those two weeks had stretched into three and now al-most four, with no end in sight.
    “What do you hear from Jeff?” Joanna asked.
    “Not much,” Marianne replied. “I talked to him last night. He said there’s lots of coal dust in the air. I’m worried sick.”
    Joanna frowned. “How come? Is Jeff allergic to it or some-thing?”
    “It’s code,” Marianne explained. “We talked to some of the other parents who’ve gone through this same agency. They warned us that the Chinese authorities sometimes monitor phone calls, so before we left, Jeff and I established a code. The orphanage is located in Chengdu. People there mostly burn coal for heat, so in the winter especially the whole city is hazy with smoke and soot. The coal dust gets into everything.
    “Since visiting Americans always complain about the coal dust, Jeff’s talking about it on the phone shouldn’t worry the authorities, but it does me. It means trouble.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “That’s just it. I don’t know, but he did tell me that he’s got to have more money. I spent the rest of the night worrying about where I’m going to get it.”
    “How much more money does he think he’ll need?” Joanna asked.
    Marianne sighed. “Five thousand dollars.”
    Joanna whistled. “That sounds like a lot.”
    “It is,” Marianne told her. “It’s exactly double what we’d been told to expect. What I’m afraid is that the authorities have changed their minds. Maybe the baby is sick and they don’t want to release her. From what Jeff said, it sounds as though, if we don’t come up with the extra money, they won’t let us have her.”
    “What are you going to do?” Joanna asked.
    “There’s a