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and clinging and her “Daddy Daddy Daddy.” Pam was getting older, but she still had a decent face, okay tits, and an acceptable if ever-spreading ass, and the kid had Chief Jim Doe for a daddy, so why was his own daughter so damn repulsive? And they needed to stop feeding her whatever it was they fed her, because it was chock-full of ugly and she was turning into a pig. A man who’d been around could tell it like it was, and Doe knew that fat and ugly was an evil combination for a girl.
    Doe climbed out of the cruiser and stood there for a moment, peering over at the driver behind his mirrored sunglasses. He wanted to get a better look and let her take in the sight of the big, bad cop who had her in his crosshairs. He knew what he looked like. He never missed the surprised little smiles. Well, hello, Officer. Like one of those male strippers they had for bachelorette parties. So what if he had a little gut now? Women didn’t care about things like that. They cared about power and swagger, and he had plenty of those.
    When Doe walked over to the window of her Jap sports car, she pressed her lips together in a smashed, fat little smile. Hello there, good-looking. “Is there a problem, Officer?”
    Doe hitched up his belt, which he liked to do so they could see all the stuff—the gun and the cuffs and nightstick—it was like Spanish fly. He took off his wide-brimmed brown hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He put the hat back on and shot her a smile. He knew his teeth were perfectly white, despite the fact that he didn’t brush as often as he ought to. And maybe they were a little crooked, but it was the sort of thing only he would notice because he was so hard on himself.
    “License and registration, ma’am?”
    She had them ready and handed them over. “Can you tell me what this is about? I’m sort of in a hurry.”
    “I sure got that impression, way you was driving,” Doe said. “Lisa Roland from Miami, huh? Miami’s pretty far away.”
    “I was visiting a co-worker who moved up here. I was just heading over to the highway.”
    They always wanted to tell their life story, like they wanted his approval or something. “Why’re you in such a big hurry to get home, Lisa? You don’t like this part of the state?”
    “I just wanted to get home, is all.”
    “You like all them hotels and tourists in Miami?”
    “It’s where I live.”
    “You got a boyfriend back there waiting on you? Is that it?”
    “Look, what is this about?”
    “What is it about? Lisa, you know you was speeding?”
    “I don’t think I was.”
    “You don’t, huh? Well, it so happens I got you on the radar gun going a pretty good amount above the speed limit.”
    “You must be mistaken.” She bit her lip, looked to her side, behind her. She must have been nervous about something. If she hadn’t been speeding, then why was she so nervous?
    “Must I, now? Well, if I am, I don’t know about it.”
    “Come on, Officer. It just so happens that I’d been looking at my speedometer, and I was sticking very closely to the fifty-five mark.”
    “I got you at fifty-seven, Lisa.”
    “Fifty-seven. Christ. I mean, come on. I can’t believe you would even stop me for going two miles above the limit.”
    “Well,” he said, taking off his hat again and giving his forehead a wiping, “way I see it, the speed limit is the limit. That don’t mean it’s the speed you want to be sort of near. It means that’s the fastest you can go. The limit. Now, if you have a water heater and it says that you can’t put your water over two hundred degrees or it will explode . . . what you gonna do? Let it get to two hundred and two and then say you were only two degrees over? I think if it gets to one ninety-five, you’re going to do everything you can to put things right. Speed limit’s the same, in my view.”
    “Don’t those radar detectors have a margin of error to within a few miles per hour?”
    “I guess they might,” Doe told