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“Or do you have a family of thirty-seven to feed?”
    He smiled. “Something like that,” he said.
    She studied him. “Say,” she said. “Aren’t you Sergeant Alan? I know who you are. You stopped me in Valley Springs and gave me a ticket that wiped out all my savings!”
    “What was that name?” he asked.
    “Karen Kerr,” she said.
    “Yeah, I do believe I remember you, on account of that name that sounds phony. I reckoned as how it might just be a alias, but it’s sure-enough your real name, aint it?”
    “It’s not my maiden name,” she said.
    “I seem to recollect you was doing fifty or so in a thirty-five mile zone.”
    “I was late for work, and I nearly got fired.”
    “Well, I reckon you told the judge that, but the law is the law. Aint my fault you broke it.”
    “I’ll get a boy to help you bag and load all this stuff.”
    “I can do it.”
    After driving away he reached for a cigarette and found the slip of paper with a list of a whole bunch of other stuff he’d meant to buy at that market, and he looked it over and swore at the items he’d have to go back for, or get somewheres else: Vienna sausages, canned orange juice, Pet milk, and coffee , for godsakes: he already had several cases of big-can coffee but it was something he couldn’t grow and he drank his share of it and was bound to run out by and by.
    He stopped, turned around, and drove back to the big parking lot of the supermarket, where he parked inconspicuously and turned off the motor and just sat and waited patiently for a long, long time to see when Karen Kerr might leave work. Whenever she took off, he could go back in that store for the rest of the stuff on his list, including beef jerky: somebody had told him that beef jerky would keep forever. He wouldn’t take the chance of her seeing him load up a lot of other stuff.
    For a while as he waited he entertained himself by watching an occasional youngster go by. School had let out and kids were either going grocery-shopping with their moms or in some cases by themselves or with their friends, and every now and again he’d see a pretty cute one, and imagine in his mind what it would be like if she was the one. But not one of those he saw really grabbed him. He knew that when he found the girl of his dreams he would know it on the instant.
    He went around to the back of the truck to fish in one of the sacks for the new issue of Police Gazette he’d just bought. He reached to give Bitch a little pat on the head and found her missing and realized she wasn’t his dog anymore. Then he sat and read through Police Gazette, a lively tabloid which was his favorite reading-matter, shoot, practically his only reading matter, and he knew that he was going to miss it in the months and years ahead. It was always a real pleasure to come across the articles on the disappearance of kids, that had lots of photographs. He knew backward and forward what made up the profile of a so-called child molester, which he wasn’t, because he hadn’t never in his life molested nobody. Sure, he’d done a couple of naughty things with a couple of little bitty old gals, but not against their will, and he was hoping that the companion of his coming months and years would never once have any occasion to feel that what he was doing was against her will. He had for several years assisted his buddy Jack Samples in the CID ’s pedo squad, helping Jack make collars and interrogations, and in their time they had nabbed dozens of fellers who were genuine pure-dee pervert molesters , old boys who raped and killed tykes and even tots. Jack had once said to him, “Sog, I be damned if you aint got a nose on you that can smell out pedos where I’d never of found ’em.” He hadn’t told Jack the reason he could find pedos so easy was because he really felt a kind of…not brotherhood or nothing but a real understanding of the way their minds worked and their hearts felt and their dicks stood. Your typical