Practical Demonkeeping

captain had relented and it had been set up. Rivera could hear him now. “Rivera, if you got made by a drugged-out loser like Belew , maybe we should put you back in uniform, where your high visibility will be an asset. Maybe we can put you in P.R. or recruitment.”
    Rivera’s ass was hanging out worse than that drunken jerk in the trailer. Who was he, anyway? As far as anyone knew, The Breeze lived alone. But this guy seemed to know something. Why else would he give Rivera such a hard time? Maybe he could pull this off with the drunk. Desperate thinking. A long shot.
    Rivera memorized the license number of the old Ford truck parked outside The Breeze’s trailer. He would run it through the computer when he got back to the station. Maybe he could convince the captain that he still had something. Maybe he did. And then again, maybe he could just climb a stream of angel piss to heaven.
     
    Rivera sat in the file room of the sheriff’s office drinking coffee and watching a videotape. After running the license number through the computer, Rivera found that the pickup belonged to a Robert Masterson, age twenty-nine. Born in
Ohio
, married to Jennifer Masterson, also twenty-nine. His only prior was a drunk-driving conviction two years ago.
    The video was a record of Masterson’s breathalyzer test. Several years ago the department had begun taping all breathalyzer tests to avoid legal-defense strategies based on procedural mistakes made by arresting officers during testing.
    On the television screen a very drunk Robert W. Masterson (6 ft., 180 lbs., eyes green, hair brown) was spouting nonsense to two uniformed deputies.
    “We work for a common purpose. You serve the state with your minds and bodies. I serve the state by opposing it. Drinking is an act of civil disobedience. I drink to end world hunger. I drink to protest the United States’ involvement in Central America. I drink to protest nuclear power. I drink…”
    A sense of doom descended on Rivera as he watched. Unless The Breeze reappeared, his career was in the hands of this tightly wound, loosely wrapped, drunken idiot. He wondered what life might be like as a bank security guard.
    On the screen the two officers looked away from their prisoner to the door of the testing room. The camera was mounted in the corner and fitted with a wide-angle lens to cover anything that happened without having to be adjusted. A little Arab man in a red stocking cap had come through the door, and the deputies were telling him that he had the wrong room and to please leave.
    “Could I trouble you for a small quantity of salt?” the little man asked. Then he blinked off the screen as if the tape had been stopped and he had been edited out.
    Rivera rewound the tape and ran it again. The second time, Masterson performed the test without interruption. The door did not open and there was no little man. Rivera ran it back again: no little man.
    He must have dozed off while the tape was running. His subconscious had continued the tape while he slept, inserting the little man’s entrance. That was the only viable explanation.
    “I don’t need this shit,” he said. Then he ejected the tape and drained his coffee, his tenth cup of the day.

5
AUGUSTUS BRINE
    He was an old man who fished off the beaches of Pine Cove and he had gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. This, however, was of little consequence because he owned the general store and made a comfortable enough living to indulge his passions, which were fishing and drinking
California
wines.
    Augustus Brine was old, but he was still strong and vital and a dangerous man in a fight—although he had had little cause to prove it in over thirty years (except for the few occasions when he picked up a teenage boy by the scruff of the neck and dragged him, terrified, to the stockroom, where he lectured him alternately on the merits of hard work and the folly of shoplifting from Brine’s Bait, Tackle, and Fine Wines). And while a weariness had come upon him with age, his mind was still sharp and agile. On any evening one might find him stretched out before his fireplace in a leather chair, toasting his bare feet on the hearth, reading Aristotle, or Lao-tzu, or Joyce.
    He lived on a hillside overlooking the Pacific, in a small wooden house he had designed and built himself, so that he might live there alone without having his surroundings seem lonely. During the day, windows and skylights filled the house with light, and