Odd Hours

it if I were in your shoes, even if there’s nothing in the Constitution that requires a person to carry ID.”
    “You’re a constitutional scholar, are you?”
    “No. Well, I guess I could be. I won’t know until I recover my memory. What I think happened was somebody mugged me.”
    Gingerly I felt the lump on the side of my head, which Whittle had raised with his flashlight earlier in the night.
    The chief watched me rub the lump, but he said nothing.
    “Whoever mugged me and gave me amnesia, he must have taken my wallet.”
    “When were you mugged? Tonight on the beach?”
    “On the beach? Tonight?” I frowned. “No, sir. I think it must have been a lot earlier in the day.”
    “People don’t get mugged in my town in broad daylight.”
    I shrugged.
    Clearly, he did not like the shrug. I couldn’t take it back.
    “So you’re saying you were mugged before you jumped off the pier this afternoon?”
    “Yes, sir. In fact the first thing I remember is walking along the boardwalk toward the pier, wondering who I am and where I am and whether I had lunch or not.”
    “Why did you jump off the pier?”
    “Since being mugged unconscious, sir, my behavior hasn’t been entirely rational.”
    “Why did you tell Utgard that a thirty-foot tsunami was coming?”
    “Utgard?”
    “Utgard Rolf.”
    “Is that a person, sir?”
    “You’ll remember him. A walking mountain with a chin beard.”
    “Oh, yes. He seemed nice. Excellent taste in Hawaiian shirts. I don’t remember telling him about a tsunami, though. I must have been delirious from the mugging.”
    “Utgard put a hand on your shoulder—and saw the very thing I just saw when I touched your hand. He described it to me.”
    “Yes, sir. You and him. It happened twice now. It’s the dream I had while I was mugged unconscious, before I found myself on the boardwalk, heading toward the pier.”
    “Tell me about your dream.”
    “There’s not much to tell, sir. You saw it. The red sky, the sea full of light, the sand so bright, very scary.”
    The pupils of his eyes grew wider, as if he intended to switch off the lights and hunt me down like a serpent chasing a mouse.
    “Very scary,” I repeated.
    “What do you think it means?”
    “Means? The dream, sir? I’ve never had a dream mean anything. That’s for those old movies with Gypsies.”
    Finally he looked away from me. He stared so long at the third chair in the corner that I turned my head to look at it.
    Mr. Sinatra sat there. I don’t know how long he had been in the room. He pointed at me as if to say Looking good, kid.
    Hoss Shackett did not see the Chairman of the Board. He was staring into space, perhaps envisioning my evisceration.
    The chief bent his fingers and studied his well-manicured nails as though checking to be sure that no dried blood remained under them from his most recent interrogation session.
    He gazed at the massive door for a while, and I suppose he was recalling how effectively it had contained the screams of those who had been in this room before my visit.
    When he shifted his attention to the oppressively low ceiling, he smiled. He had the kind of smile that, if he turned it on the sky, would cause birds to fall dead in flight.
    He looked down at the steel top of the table. He leaned forward to consider his blurry image in the surface, which had been burnished by years of wear and by a multitude of sweaty hands.
    His reflection was not recognizable as his face or as a face at all. It was a series of smears, dark whorls, lumpy and distorted.
    He seemed to like himself that way, however, because he smiled once more.
    Chief Hoss was making me so crazy that I wished he would look at me again.
    My wish was answered. He met my eyes.
    He said, “Kid, what do you say—let’s you and me be friends?”
    I said, “That would be swell, sir.”

 
    TWENTY-SIX
    CHIEF HOSS SHACKETT UNDERWENT A CHANGE worthy of one of those intelligent alien machines in that toy-based movie, Transformers, that can morph from an ordinary period Dodge into a giant robot with a hundred times the mass of the vehicle from which it unfolded.
    I do not mean that the chief suddenly filled the cell and left me without elbow room. He metamorphosed from Mr. Hyde, if Mr. Hyde had been a sadistic warden in a Soviet gulag, into the benign Dr. Jekyll, if Dr. Jekyll had been a folksy sheriff from a small town where the biggest crime in twenty years had been when Lulamay copied Bobbijune’s rhubarb-jam