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hotcakes. “He’s hated my guts ever since I accused him of working over those gypsy kids last summer, putting one in the hospital. That would have cost him his job, except the higher echelons were being ‘foursquare behind their dedicated law enforcement officers’ that season. Still, it didn’t help his reputation with the town any.”
    “We don’t tolerate that kind of thing in these pa’ts,” Jacobs said grimly. “Hell, Will, those kids are a royal pain in the ass, but—” But not in these pa’ts, he told himself, not that. There are decent limits. He was surprised at the depth and ferocity of his reaction. “This a’n’t Alabama,” he said.
    “Might as well be, with Riddick. His idea of law enforcement’s to take everybody he doesn’t like down in the basement and beat the crap out of them.” Sussmann sighed. “Anyway, Riddick wouldn’t stop to piss on me if my hat was on fire, that’s for sure. Good thing I got other ways of finding stuff out.”
    Jed Everett came in while Jacobs was ordering coffee. He was a thin, cadaverous man with a long nose; his hair was going rapidly to gray; put him next to short, round Sussmann and they would look like Mutt and Jeff. At forty-eight—Everett was a couple of years older than Jacobs, just as Sussmann was a couple of years younger—he was considered to be scandalously young for a small-town doctor, especially a GP. But old Dr. Barlow had died of a stroke three years back, leaving his younger partner in residency, and they were stuck with him.
    One of the regulars had moved away from the trough, leaving an empty seat next to Jacobs, and Everett was talking before his buttocks had hit the upholstery. He was a jittery man, with lots of nervous energy, and he loved to fret and rant and gripe, but softly and goodnaturedly, with no real force behind it, as if he had a volume knob that had been turned down.
    “What a morning!” Everett said. “Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle—’scuse me, Myna, I’ll take some coffee, please, black—I swear it’s psychosomatic. Honest to God, gentlemen, she’s a case for the medical journals, dreams the whole damn shitbundle up out of her head just for the fun of it, I swear before all my hopes of heaven, swop me blue if she doesn’t. Definitely psychosomatic.”
    “He’s learned a new word,” Sussmann said.
    “If you’d wasted all the time I have on this nonsense,” Everett said fiercely, “you’d be whistling a different tune out of the other side of your face, I can tell you, oh yes indeed. What kind of meat d’you have today, Myna? How about the chops—they good?—all right, and put some greens on the plate, please. Okay? Oh, and some homefrieds, now I think about it, please. If you have them.”
    “What’s got your back up?” Jacobs asked mildly.
    “You know old Mrs. Crawford?” Everett demanded. “Hm? Lives over to the Island, widow, has plenty of money? Three times now I’ve diagnosed her as having cancer, serious but still operable, and three times now I’ve sent her down to Augusta for exploratory surgery, and each time they got her down on the table and opened her up and couldn’t find a thing, not a goddamned thing, old bitch’s hale and hearty as a prize hog. Spontaneous remission. All psychosomatic, clear as mud. Three times , though. It’s shooting my reputation all to hell down there. Now she thinks she’s got an ulcer. I hope her kidney falls out, right in the street. Thank you, Myna. Can I have another cup of coffee?” He sipped his coffee, when it arrived, and looked a little more meditative. “Course, I think I’ve seen a good number of cases like that, I think , I said, ha’d to prove it when they’re terminal. Wouldn’t surprise me if a good many of the people who die of cancer—or a lot of other diseases, for that matter—were like that. No real physical cause, they just get tired of living, something dries up inside them, their systems stop trying to defend them, and one