be okay. His brother’s with him—Gutaale—and he says he’s seen those two dirtbags before. Couple of times.”
“Dey wuz casin da joint,” Tim said.
“No doubt. I sent Tag Faraday over to take both brothers’ statements. Tag’s the best I’ve got, which I probably didn’t need to tell you.”
“Gibson and Burkett aren’t bad.”
Sheriff John sighed. “No, but neither of them would have moved as fast or as decisively as you did last night. And poor Wendy probably just would have stood there gawking, if she didn’t faint dead away.”
“She’s good on dispatch,” Tim said. “Made for the job. Just my opinion, you know.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, and a whiz at clerical—reorganized all our files last year, plus got everything on flash drives—but on the road, she’s damn near useless. She loves being on the team, though. How would you like to be on the team, Tim?”
“I didn’t think you could afford another cop’s salary. Did you all at once get a payroll increase?”
“Don’t I wish. But Bill Wicklow’s turning in his badge at the end of the year. I was thinking maybe you and him could swap jobs. He walks and knocks, you put on a uniform and get to carry a gun again. I asked Bill. He says night knocking would suit him, at least for a while.”
“Can I think about it?”
“I don’t know why not.” Sheriff John stood up. “End of the year’s still five months away. But we’d be glad to have you.”
“Does that include Deputy Gullickson?”
Sheriff John grinned. “Wendy’s hard to win over, but you got a long way down that road last night.”
“Really? And if I asked her out to dinner, what do you think she’d say?”
“I think she’d say yes, as long as it wasn’t Bev’s you were thinking of taking her to. Good-looking girl like her is going to expect the Roundup in Dunning, at the very least. Maybe that Mexican joint down in Hardeeville.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Not a problem. You think about that job.”
“I will.”
He did. And was still thinking of it when all hell broke loose on a hot night later that summer.
THE SMART KID
1
On a fine Minneapolis morning in April of that year—Tim Jamieson still months from his arrival in DuPray—Herbert and Eileen Ellis were being ushered into the office of Jim Greer, one of three guidance counselors at the Broderick School for Exceptional Children.
“Luke’s not in trouble, is he?” Eileen asked when they were seated. “If he is, he hasn’t said anything.”
“Not at all,” Greer said. He was in his thirties, with thinning brown hair and a studious face. He was wearing a sport shirt open at the collar and pressed jeans. “Look, you know how things work here, right? How things have to work, given the mental capacity of our students. They are graded but not in grades. They can’t be. We have ten-year-olds with mild autism who are doing high school math but still reading at a third-grade level. We have kids who are fluent in as many as four languages but have trouble multiplying fractions. We teach them in all subjects, and we board ninety per cent of them—we have to, they come from all parts of the United States and a dozen or so from abroad—but we center our attention on their special talents, whatever those happen to be. That makes the traditional system, where kids advance from kindergarten to twelfth grade, pretty useless to us.”
“We understand that,” Herb said, “and we know Luke’s a smart kid. That’s why he’s here.” What he didn’t add (certainly Greer knew it) was that they never could have afforded the school’s astronomical fees. Herb was the foreman in a plant that made boxes; Eileen was a grammar school teacher. Luke was one of the Brod’s few day students, and one of the school’s very few scholarship students.
“Smart? Not exactly.”
Greer looked down at an open folder on his otherwise pristine desk, and Eileen had a sudden premonition: either they were going to be asked to withdraw their son, or his scholarship was going to be canceled—which would make withdrawal a necessity. Yearly tuition fees at the Brod were forty thousand dollars a year, give or take, roughly the same as Harvard. Greer was going to tell them it had all been a mistake, that Luke wasn’t as bright as they had all believed. He was just an ordinary kid who read far above his level and seemed to remember it all. Eileen knew from her own reading that eidetic memory was not exactly