Shattered

open to the proper plastic envelope, and passed the whole thing over to the policeman.
        Ackridge looked at it for a long time. The billfold was small in his large, hard hands. “First Thunderbird you've owned?”
        Alex could not see what that had to do with anything, but he answered the question anyway. “Second.”
        “Occupation?”
        “Mine? Commercial artist.”
        Ackridge looked up at him, seemed to stare through him. “Exactly what is that?”
        “I do advertising artwork,” Doyle said.
        “And you get paid well for that?”
        “Pretty well,” Doyle said.
        Ackridge started to leaf through the other cards in the wallet, taking a couple of seconds with each. His sober, intense interest in these private things was almost obscene.
        What in the hell is going on here? Doyle wondered. I came here to report a crime. I'm a good, upstanding citizen-not the suspect!
        He cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Captain.”
        Ackridge stopped flipping through the cards. “What is it?”
        Last night, Doyle told himself, I faced a man who was trying to kill me with an ax. Today I can surely face this two-bit police chief.
        “Captain,” he said, “I don't see why you're so interested in who I am. isn't the most important thing-well, going after this man in the Automover?”
        “I always believe it pays to know the victim as well as the victimizer,” Ackridge said. With that, he went back to the cards in Doyle's wallet.
        It was all wrong. How on earth could it have gone sour like this-and why had it?
        So that he would not be humiliated by watching the cop pry through his wallet, Alex looked around the room. The walls were institutional-gray and brightened by only three things: a poster-sized framed photograph of the President of the United States; an equally large photograph of the late J. Edgar Hoover; and a four-foot-square map of the immediate area. Filing cabinets stood side by side along one wall, breaking only for a window and an air-conditioning unit. There were three straight-backed chairs, the desk, the chair in which Ackridge sat, and a flagstand bearing a full-sized cotton-and-silk Old Glory.
        “Conscientious objector?” Ackridge asked.
        Alex looked at him, surprised. “What did you say?
        Ackridge showed him the selective service card in his wallet. “You have a CO rating here.”
        Why had he ever kept that card? He was under no legal obligation to carry it with him, especially not now that he was thirty years old. They had long ago stopped drafting men over twenty-six. Indeed, the draft was pretty much of a forgotten thing for everyone . Yet he had transferred the card from one billfold to the next-through maybe three or four of them. Why? Subconsciously had he believed that possession of the card was proof that his non-violent philosophy was based on principle and not cowardice? Or had he simply given in to that common American neurosis-the reluctance and sometimes the inability to throw away anything with a vaguely official look to it, no matter how dated it might be?
        “I did alternate service in a veterans' hospital,” Doyle said, though he did not feel he needed to justify himself to Ackridge.
        “I was too young for Korea and too old for Nam,” the cop said. “But I served in the regular army, in-between wars.” He handed back the driver's license and the wallet.
        Alex put the license in the wallet, the wallet in his pocket, and he said, “About the man in the Chevrolet-”
        “You ever try marijuana?” Ackridge asked.
        Easy, Doyle thought. Be damn careful. Be damn nice.
        “Long time ago,” he told the cop. He no longer tried to find a way to get back to the man in the Automover, because he saw that for whatever reasons, Ackridge didn't care about that.
        “Still use it?”
        “No.”
        Ackridge smiled. It was the same bad imitation. “Even if you did use it every day of the week, you wouldn't tell a crusty old cop like me.”
        “I'm telling the truth,” Doyle said, feeling new perspiration on his forehead.
        “Other things?”
        “What do you mean?”
        Leaning across the desk, his voice lowered to a melodramatic whisper, Ackridge said, “Barbiturates, amphetamines, LSD, cocaine…”
        “Drugs are for people who don't really care for life,” Doyle said. He believed what he