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important than how we feel about each other.”
    For once I agreed with him.

7
    No great excitement had been stirred at the hospital by Brennan’s call that I was coming. A nurse glanced at me, saw that my head and limbs were still connected to my body, and said, “Have a seat.” I had one. I had one for about half an hour before the doctor came around.
    The pin on his white tunic said “Jameson.” Jameson was sandy-haired, around thirty, and of medium height. He had brown-rimmed glasses over eyes that never looked at you, even when they did. He seemed bored.
    “How are we feeling?” he said.
    “So-so.”
    “What have we had happen?”
    “We were kicked in the nuts, and just about everywhere else.”
    So he took us into an examining room, and we took off our pants. We coughed to the left and to the right while cold fingers poked. Then we sat on a cold steel table and were probed some more, all over. Occasionally we said ouch.
    After a while the probing stopped. “We’d better have some X-rays taken.”
    “Okay.”
    “Can we have them taken tomorrow morning at nine? The X-ray technician will be on duty then.”
    “What’s the problem anyway?”
    More probing. “Some broken ribs, perhaps.”
    “How many?”
    “We won’t know for sure until we’ve had an X-ray. Awfully sensitive on the right side, and some ribs could well be broken. Or maybe just cracked.”
    “I see.”
    “You can pay at the desk.”
    He was gone.
    I knew there’d be a catch.
We
got examined, but
I
paid.
    Which I did, at the desk, after getting back into my pants. As I was putting my lightened billfold back in my hip pocket, Lou Brown walked into the lobby. The deputy was as pale as ever and looked vaguely upset.
    “Buy you some coffee, Mallory?”
    I said okay and followed him into the hospital coffee shop. It was about 8:55 and they closed at nine, so we got dirty looks from the waitress to go with the coffee. I ordered a sandwich, too, and got a look so dirty I almost lost my appetite.
    But the coffee was hot and good, and it came right away. Lou sipped his and said, “How you feeling, Mallory?”
    “I’ve had better nights.”
    “Me too. This is the first murder I ever worked.”
    So that was why he seemed upset.
    I said, “How long you been a deputy, Lou?”
    “About eight months.”
    There generally aren’t more than one or two murders a year in a small town like Port City, and when there is one, it’s the city police who handle it. This particular murder fell in the sheriff’s domain because it had occurred outside the city limits and was therefore county business.
    “Well, Lou, in your job, you got to expect to come onto a crime of violence now and then.”
    “Oh, it’s not that. I seen blood before. We’ve had plenty of accidents to cover, and hell, I was an MP in the service—saw some rough goddamn things. But never this. Never an old woman beat up and killed.”
    “Is it pretty definite she was beaten?”
    “I don’t know. Too early for any official word. But it looked that way to me.”
    I nodded. “That was my impression, too. She wasn’t bloody or bruised, but her hair and clothes were all mussed up, and I just had the feeling she’d been slapped around before she died.”
    “Heart attack, probably. You know, Mal, when I was taking those pictures of her, I kind of studied her, tied there in the chair, and I could almost see what happened to her. Guys asking her where she kept some damn thing and slapping her to make her tell, and her heart just gives way. Crazy thing is, these goddamn guys probably never intended killing her, just meant to tie her up and sack the place. Damn.”
    “Damn,” I agreed. “What’s up, Lou? Why aren’t you still with Brennan?”
    “Through for the night. Heading home. Brennan just said to stop here on my way and see how you were.”
    “I’m touched at his concern.”
    Brown grinned. “Yeah, what’s the deal? Do you two hate each other, or what?”
    “We’re not