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could piss on what doorstep.
    I looked around, at the corkboard with its neat rows of Post-it notes, the ceramic-framed photo of a family from some fifties TV show, and the diploma awarded by Southwestern, as Sergeant Van Zandt wound down from his sermon on jurisdiction and proper channels. His wasn't all that different in kind from the sermons with which I'd grown up courtesy of Brother Douglas and successors back home among First Baptist's stained-glass windows, polished hardwood pews, and book-thick red carpeting. As kids, strung out by an hour of Sunday school followed by another hour or more of church service, my brother and I staged our own versions of such sermons over Sunday dinner, Woody preaching, me by turns amen-ing, egging him on, and falling out with rapture. Pressed by our mother, Dad would eventually succumb and send us from the table.
    "Nice cubicle," I said when Van Zandt stopped to refill his lungs and drink the coffee that had gone lukewarm during his hearty polemic. "What is it, MPD's finally got so top-heavy with management that they've run out of offices?"
    Sometimes you just can't help yourself.
    Tracy Caulding's glance toward me and half smile said the rest: Always more generals, never enough soldiers.
    Tracy, mind you, was no longer on the force, she was now, God help her, a clinical psychologist, but she'd kept her hand in. She was one of the ones the department called on to counsel officers and evaluate suspects. And she was the one I called when I first hit Memphis.
    The M.A. in social work she'd been working on when we met turned out not to be a good fit. She'd figuratively gone in the front door of her first job, she said, and right out the back one, back to school. To me she seemed one of those people who skip across the surface of their lives, never touching down for long, forever changing, a bright stone surging up into air and sunlight again and again.
    We'd met for breakfast at a place called Tony Weezil's to catch up over plates of greasy eggs and watery grits before breaching the cop house to submit to further abuse. Tony Weezil's served only breakfast, opening at six and shutting down at eleven. After all, Tracy said, lifting a wedge of egg with her fork to let equal measures of uncooked egg white and brown grease find their way back to the plate, you've got one thing down perfectly, why mess with it.
    She was telling me about a conference she'd attended, "What Is Normal?" with authorities from all over delivering talks on Identity and Individuation, The Social Con Tract, Passing as Human, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Got Right Back Up. Some seriously weird people hanging around the hotel, she said—some of the weirdest of them giving the lectures.
    "You miss it?" she said as the waitress, an anemic-looking thirtyish woman dressed all in pink, refilled our coffee cups.
    "Why would I?"
    "Not the professional stuff, the trappings. But the patients. Talking to so many different kinds of people, getting to know them on that level."
    "I'm not sure I did, in any real sense. There's this kind of call-and-response involved—"
    "You hear what you listen for."
    "Right. And they figure out their side of it, what they're supposed to say. The good ones catch on right away, the others take a while. But sooner or later they all get there."
    She poured milk into her coffee, which she had not done with the first two cups, and absentmindedly watched it curdle. I signaled the waitress, who brought another of the small stainless steel pitchers, the same ones they used for pancake syrup.
    "Maybe I'll reach that point," Tracy said. "You did try to warn me about social work, after all."
    "And like most warnings—"
    "Exactly. But for now I like what I'm doing. I believe in it.
    What she was doing, aside from the consultations, was working with disturbed children. "Troubled teens," she had said. "Put it that way, it sounds like something out of Andy Griffith, they'd meet in the church basement, have cupcakes,