The Blackstone Commentaries Read Online Free

cruiser. The blue lights shattered the darkness behind Carver and his frazzled hair, making him look like he’d just taken about a thousand volts, the red from the flares tinting one side of his lean, coiled face. For a moment, Dugan couldn’t keep his eyes off him. Everything about the man was coiled.
    Hands on hips, Carver focused on Dugan and the other two officers he was standing with, Trainor and a highway patrolman, pouring his soul into a look none of them could see at that distance. But they all felt it. Dugan knew Carver was waiting his turn to talk to him, waiting for the justice that had been promised him all his life—at home, in church, at school, in political speeches—but which until then he’d never needed, and had probably ceased to believe in before he was out of diapers anyhow, but which he’d insist on now as a matter of principle.
    From time to time, headlights flashed off the bright steel guardrail on the other side of the highway, then off Carver’s Monte Carlo up against that clay bank looking at once derelict and ominous. Most of the traffic was coming up out of Damascus, it being Saturday night. Gaping faces were at the windows. Dugan saw Eddie lean in a time or two and talk to the drivers, if there wasn’t a line. He’d be patient with their burning curiosity, telling them nothing but being pleasant about it, calling people by name if he knew them—and he knew most—before waving them on through the wild pink spots of fire closing the southbound lane. It took but a second more to make people feel respected, and Eddie was superb at that.
    Without a word, Dugan suddenly turned and walked over to Trainor’s cruiser. With a nod to Carver, he opened the back door and squatted so hishead was level with the occupants. Two little girls were inside, a woman between with her arms tightly around them. The woman stared at Dugan like she might scratch his eyes out if he came any closer. The little girl on the far side, whom he judged to be seven or eight years old, leaned forward and took in Dugan with large, quiet eyes. “I’m Sheriff Dugan, child. Are you all right?”
    â€œYes, sir,” the girl said.
    He looked at the woman clutching her girls.
    â€œThey tried to kill us,” she said.
    â€œYes, ma’am,” he said, and waited. But the woman turned and stared out over the hood of the car, dismissing him. He knew she was fighting tears—tears of rage, sure, but above all, shame. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, gently closing the door.
    â€œIt would take at least a .357 to do that,” Junior said as Dugan approached, and in a twang he could not modulate to save his life. He pointed at two holes in the fender just in front of the passenger compartment. “I called for a tow truck, sheriff.”
    Dugan looked for Junior’s eyes but couldn’t see them under the brim of the man’s hat. He stared until the hat turned away, then bent and put his face close to the holes. Christ, how he’d hated the politics from the first, some of the men he’d had to hire on. “If they could just do their jobs,” he would complain, to Eddie only—that being one of Eddie’s functions. Dugan had wanted to change the nepotism and roaring political favors at the outset, but Pemberton had insisted. “We just won for the first damn time since Reconstruction, Charlie! We’ve got promises to keep. Don’t rock the boat all at once or it’ll capsize.” He should have insisted. As Eddie said, “If you don’t rock it at first, it’ll never rock.”
    â€œThey was just coming back from her folks’ up in Bristol,” Trainor began after a long, itchy pause, a slightly submissive note in his voice now. “Her daddy’s not feeling well, may have a cancer. The little darlings were fast asleep in the back.” His tone had become honeyed with drama, like