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they saw his uniform and they knew who was right and who was wrong.
    Doe shoved her into the back of the cruiser, behind the passenger seat, and then went around to the driver’s side. He waited for a break in the traffic and then pulled out onto the road.
    They had gone less than a quarter of a mile before she managed to get any words past her sobbing. “What’s going to happen to me?”
    “I guess you’ll find out,” he told her.
    “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
    “Then you don’t have to worry. Isn’t that the way the law works?”
    “Yes,” she managed. No more than a whisper.
    “There you go, then.”
    Doe turned off the road just before they got near the hog complex. It smelled something terrible from the waste lagoon, which was what they called it. A fucking shithole for a bunch of pigs that needed to be killed before they could die on their own, was what he called it. Smelled like shit, too. Worse than shit. Like the worst shit you could ever imagine. Rancid rotting shit. It smelled like the shit that shit shits out its asshole. Some days you couldn’t hardly smell it at all unless you got close, but when it was humid, which was a lot of the time, and when there was a good easterly wind, all of Meadowbrook Grove stank like frothing, wormy, bubbling, fermented shit. But that’s what the hog complex was there to do. To smell bad. So no one could smell that other smell, that moneymaking smell.
    And that pig shit smell had some other useful features, which was why Doe liked to bring his girls there. Not just because it was isolated and no one ever came down this road, but also because he knew what that smell did. They’d get the feeling even before they realized they were smelling it. It crept up on them, like their terror.
    Doe pulled the car a good quarter mile up the dirt road through the haphazard pines to just around a bend. He had to get out to unlock the flimsy metal gate, there as a line pissed in the sand rather than as real security. Then he went back in to pull the car through, out again to lock up, and back behind the wheel one last time. But safety first was his motto. They were pretty well shaded by the cluttered growth of trees, and he’d be able to see someone coming, in the unlikely event that some lost driver decided to head that way.
    In the clearing, the hog lot stood like a massive metal shack, and behind that was the waste lagoon. Doe turned off the motor, and as he did so he realized he was grinning; he’d been grinning for so long that his cheeks ached. Christ, he must look like a jack-o’-lantern from hell.
    “So, Lisa. You got a job?” He leaned back in his seat, settling into that familiar good sensation—hard and light at the same time. He finished off his bottle of Yoo-hoo. The bourbon had kicked in strong, and he felt just about right. Nothing but bourbon, either. He knew that people, people in the know, figured he was doing crank, but he didn’t touch the stuff. He knew what it did. Shit, just look at Karen. Turned her all skank. Look at Bastard. Turned him half-incompetent.
    The woman in the back pivoted her head, checking out her surroundings for the first time, perhaps, noticing that they were in a clearing in the middle of nowhere. Her nose wrinkled, and then her whole face creased as she got a whiff of the waste lagoon. “Where are we?”
    “Things are kind of busy down at the station. I thought we’d do our interrogation right here. More comfortable, don’t you think?”
    She struggled a bit, as though that would get her anything but more metal slicing into her skin. “I want to get out of here. I want to call a lawyer.”
    “A lawyer? What for, honey? You said before you didn’t do nothing wrong. Lawyers are for criminals, ain’t they?”
    “I want to see a lawyer. Or a judge.”
    “Judge is just a fancy lawyer, in my book.”
    Doe got out of the car, taking his time, taking a minute to admire the blue of the sky, the long wisps of clouds like the