as Mr. Hyde was from Dr. Jekyll. The night side was often disgusting and sometimes dangerous, and although he had never sunk to using that odious cop slang for dead addicts and abused prostitutes—NHI, no humans involved—ten years on the force had made him cynical. Sometimes he brought those feelings home (try often, he told himself when he was willing to be honest), and they had become part of the acid that had eaten away at his marriage. Those feelings were also, he supposed, one of the reasons he had remained so closed off to the idea of having a kid. There was too much bad stuff out there. Too many things that could go wrong. An alligator on a golf course was the very least of it.
When he took the night knocker job, he would not have believed that a township of fifty-four hundred (much of it in the outlying rural areas) could have a night side, but DuPray did, and Tim discovered he liked it. The people he met on the night side were actually the best part of the job.
There was Mrs. Goolsby, with whom he exchanged waves and quiet hellos on most nights as he started his first tour. She sat out on her porch glider, moving gently back and forth, sipping from a cup that might have contained whiskey, soda pop, or chamomile tea. Sometimes she was still there on his second return swing. It was Frank Potter, one of the deputies with whom he sometimes ate dinner at Bev’s, who told him that Mrs. G. had lost her husband the year before. Wendell Goolsby’s big rig had slid off the side of a Wisconsin highway during a blizzard.
“She ain’t fifty yet, but Wen n Addie were married a long, long time, just the same,” Frank said. “Got hitched back when neither of em was old enough to vote or buy a legal drink. Like that Chuck Berry song, the one about the teenage wedding. That kind of hook-up usually doesn’t last long, but theirs did.”
Tim also made the acquaintance of Orphan Annie, a homeless woman who many nights slept on an air mattress in the alley running between the sheriff’s office and the DuPray Mercantile. She also had a little tent in a field behind the rail depot, and when it rained, she slept there.
“Annie Ledoux is her real name,” Bill Wicklow said when Tim asked. Bill was the oldest of the DuPray deputies, a part-timer who seemed to know everyone in town. “She’s been sleepin back in that alley for years. Prefers it to the tent.”
“What does she do when the weather turns cold?” Tim asked.
“Goes up to Yemassee. Ronnie Gibson takes her most times. They’re related somehow, third cousins or something. There’s a homeless shelter there. Annie says she doesn’t use it unless she has to, on account of it’s full of crazy people. I tell her look who’s talkin, girlfriend.”
Tim checked her alley hideaway once a night, and visited her tent one day after his warehouse shift, mostly out of simple curiosity. Planted in the dirt out front were three flags on bamboo poles: a stars and stripes, a stars and bars, and one Tim didn’t recognize.
“That’s the flag of Guiana,” she said when he asked. “Found it in the trash barrel behind the Zoney’s. Pretty, ennit?”
She was sitting in an easy chair covered with clear plastic and knitting a scarf that looked long enough for one of George R. R. Martin’s giants. She was friendly enough, exhibiting no sign of what one of Tim’s fellow Sarasota officers had named “homeless paranoid syndrome,” but she was a fan of late-night talk radio on WMDK, and her conversation sometimes wandered off into strange byroads that had to do with flying saucers, walk-ins, and demonic possession.
One night when he found her reclining on her air mattress in the alley, listening to her little radio, he asked her why she stayed there when she had a tent that looked to be in tip-top condition. Orphan Annie—perhaps sixty, perhaps eighty—looked at him as though he were mad. “Back here I’m close to the po-lice. You know what’s behind the depot and them warehouses, Mr. J.?”
“Woods, I guess.”
“Woods and bog. Miles of slash and muck and deadfalls that go on all the way to Georgia. There’s critters out there, and some bad human beings, too. When it’s pissing down and I have to stay in my tent, I tell myself nothing’s likely to come out in