Free Hardscrabble Road by Jane Haddam

Cokes. If the part of Congress that was afraid of the universal health care system wanted to set up a
     universal database to track serial killers who went from state to state seeking victims, the part of Congress that had wanted
     the universal health care system would be convinced that the tracking project was a way to worm Big Brother into the lives
     of ordinary citizens and track their every move so that they could be picked up as soon as they showed any sign of opposing
     government initiatives. People owned guns not to protect themselves from crime in bad neighborhoods but in case the government
     came to the door wanting to lock them up for being Christians or socialists. At least the socialists had history on their
     side, if only vaguely. McCarthy had really existed. So had the Red Scares.
    Even so, it was as if the entire world had gone completely insane. It was impossible to get anything done. It was impossible
     to talk calmly and sensibly about solving a problem or even alleviating it. The Republicans thought the Democrats wanted to
     make it a law, on penalty of imprisonment, that everybody had to exercise and eat like vegans. The Democrats thought the Republicans
     were going to tamper with the new digital voting machines so that votes for Democrats would be counted as votes for Republicans
     and nobody would be able to check. It had gone beyond craziness and into some Twilight Zone of schizophrenic delusion where
     there were enemies around every corner, secret agendas behind every closet door, and evil lurking in the hearts of anybody
     who didn’t drive the kind of car you drove, listen to the kind of music you listened to, and eat the kind of food you ate.
    In the meantime, Ray Dean was sitting here worrying about 318 people who were living on the streets in this city, a good 50
     of whom would refuse to come in out of the cold even when cold meant minus eleven degrees, or worse. He had exactly four vans,
     each of which could carry seven people besides the driver. One of those vans was in the shop with brake problems, and one
     of the others was holding two large garbage bags of clothes it had to deliver to one of the shelters, reducing its passenger
     capacity to six. They were going to be out there all night, first collecting the easy ones at the soup kitchens, then going
     through the parks, then looking through the alleys and under the bridges and in the abandoned buildings where the drug addicts
     shot up to be out of sight of the police until they could get high enough notto care if they got arrested. They would look and look, but they would miss some nonetheless, and tomorrow the Inquirer would
     run its story about the people who had frozen to death and how the people trying to help them were understaffed and underfunded.
     It was true, Ray Dean thought, they were understaffed and underfunded. The newspaper people meant well.
    There was a knock at the door and he called out to whoever it was to come in. His attention had suddenly been caught by the
     books on the floorto-ceiling built-in shelves that made up one of his walls: Henry James. George Steiner. W. B. Yeats. Lionel
     Trilling. John Donne. His parents had expected him to give it all up and get a business degree as soon as he graduated and
     come to his senses. He thought he might do that, one of these days, out of exhaustion or desperation. At the moment, he only
     wondered how the two things could exist in the world at the same time: those old men dying of cold under the bridges; John
     Donne telling us all that no man is an island, entire of itself.
    There seemed to be many men who wanted to be islands. Women, too.
    The door popped open and Shelley Balducci stuck her head in, looking frazzled. “I’ve just been on the phone to Chickie George.
     He says they’ve lost Sherman.”
    “Lost him? How do you lose Sherman?”
    “Well, he’s wandered off, you know what he means. And the thing is, Chickie’s afraid he might be hard to spot.