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either. The missing parts, the ones Felker didn’t know or didn’t remember, made it seem more likely. Harry had asked Alfred Strongbear, "If you want a mustache, why don’t you just grow one?" The old man had told him, "It comes in too thin. People would know I’m an Indian."
    Jane said, "All right. You can get up now." She relaxed her arm to let the gun muzzle point down at the floor and walked into the living room.
    "You’ll help me?" he asked.
    "I didn’t say that," she said. "I’m just not afraid enough of you to shoot you. Go connect my phone."

6
    She waited in the living room and watched John Felker come in and sit in the chair across the room. She picked up her telephone, listened to the dial tone, then put it back in the cradle. "You were a policeman." The light was behind her, so it shone over her shoulder to illuminate him and remind her that there wasn’t much time left before dark.
    "Eight years. You want to know why I’m not now."
    "Yes."
    "It’s a long story."
    "What else have we got to do?" It sounded wrong, even to her. It was almost flirtatious. She tried to be businesslike. "I’ve got time."
    "It came to me that the job just wasn’t what I pretended it was."
    "What was it?"
    "You take a long, close look at all the people you’ve arrested, sometimes the easy way, sometimes the hard, with broken bones and blood and abrasions. They’re mostly the kind of person who, when you talk to him, just hasn’t got a clue."
    "A clue about what?"
    "It isn’t just that they don’t know there’s a law about resisting arrest. They’re not too clear on laws like cause-and-effect and gravity. The world goes on around them and steps on them all their lives, but they don’t have any idea why, and it drives them half crazy. They don’t know why the guy next door has a new television set and they don’t. Later on in prison they get tested and they can barely read, and they’re addicted to everything, and their future is nothing."
    "You felt sorry for them?"
    "Not sorry enough to stop arresting them. What happened to me was that I could see that my own future was the same as theirs. I was going to have to spend twelve more years with these people—dragging them in, because they don’t even know that much, that when they’re driving at a hundred and ten, the helicopter over their heads isn’t going to lose sight of them if they go a hundred and twenty, or that fifteen cops at their door aren’t going to give up and leave them alone, no matter how hard they fight. If you spend all your time with them, you’re just living the other half of their lives."
    "Twelve more years—that was until retirement?"
    "Yeah."
    "So you quit?"
    "I quit. I drew my credit-union balance and went to school. I got a C.P.A. license and went to work as an accountant at Smithson-Brownlow."
    "What’s that?"
    "It’s the twelfth biggest accounting company in the country. The St. Louis office is one of seventeen."
    "Sorry, I count my own money. What happened?"
    "I lasted almost five years. Then one day I was at work and I ran across a problem. I think it was an accident, but I can’t even be sure of that. Somebody may have been setting me up to see it."
    "See what?"
    "One day a guy I didn’t even know, on a different floor of the building, comes in, turns on his computer, and a message on the screen says, ’Bang. You’re dead.’ Then everything that was in his hard disk rolls across the screen and disappears forever. It’s a computer virus. You know how they work, right?"
    "Sure," she said. "You lost everything."
    "No," he said. "They lost everything on his machine and five or six others and the mainframe. But one of the bosses was in early, kept his head and stopped the rest of us from turning ours on. The computer company sent over a program doctor, like a detective. He managed to find out how the virus worked, and delete it from the program. It took him about two weeks. He also searched every floppy in the office and found