Free Hardscrabble Road by Jane Haddam Page A

They got him
     cleaned up. He’s had a shower, and a shave, and a haircut—does Sherman need haircuts? Isn’t he practically bald? Anyway, he’s
     had all that and he’s got entirely new clothes on. So he doesn’t smell, and he might not necessarily look like a homeless
     person. And they don’t know where he is.”
    “Did they go down to that place, the Benedictine place?”
    “Yes, they did, and there was no sign of him. The nuns haven’t seen him. And you know Sherman. He’s a creature of habit. So
     they’re worried. He looks prosperous from the perspective of other homeless people and drug addicts. They’re afraid he might
     have been rolled.”
    Ray Dean considered this. One of the things he hadn’t expected when he first came to work here—it hadn’t been true in the
     place he’d volunteered in Nashville in college—was that he would develop relationships with some of the people who needed
     his services. They weren’t the kind of relationships he had with his parents, or his friends, or even Shelley, but they were
     relationships nonetheless, with histories, and futures, and private understandings. He could honestly say that Sherman was
     one of the people he had developed a relationship with. Sherman was not as addled as he liked to look. He could keep the contents
     of a conversation in his head, if he hadn’t had too much to drink too recently, and he remembered things over time ina way that the mentally ill homeless never could. There weren’t many clients who made Ray Dean wonder how they had ever ended
     up the way they had ended up, but Sherman was one of them.
    “Sherman’s pretty good about neighborhoods,” he said now. “It wouldn’t be like him to get rolled.”
    “He’s pretty good about neighborhoods when he’s on his own, yes, but the Justice Project people put him up in an SRO. Not
     that I said anything about that to Chickie, of course. I mean, they meant well. I just wish all the people who meant well
     would think before they ran around doing things to ‘solve’ the problems of the homeless. What I’m thinking is that he’d have
     had to have left the SRO room and made his way through some fairly nasty territory to get back to where he was used to, and
     along the way anything could have happened.”
    “Crap,” Ray Dean said. Somebody else would have said, “Shit.” He just couldn’t. There was a difference that being from his
     kind of people made in the way you behaved that nobody up here had managed to call him on yet.
    Shelley came all the way into the room and closed the door behind her. “The thing is,” she said, sitting down on the edge
     of Ray Dean’s desk, “we don’t want anything to happen to him.”
    “Of course we don’t.”
    “I mean, for more than the usual reasons. You know and I know that if Sherman isn’t around to carry on with that lawsuit,
     Drew Harrigan’s people are going to paste that whole sorry drug mess on him and Drew Harrigan is going to end up walking off
     scot-free.”
    “They’re going to try to do that even if he is around to carry on with the lawsuit.”
    “I know that. But it won’t be the same, will it? Sherman might win the lawsuit and that would leave Drew Harrigan in a lot
     more trouble than he would be otherwise, or Sherman might lose it and then they’d want to put him in jail and you know as
     well as I do that they couldn’t put Sherman in jail without putting Drew Harrigan in too, at least for a while. Think how
     it would look otherwise. Think of the political fallout.”
    “So?”
    “So there’s good reason for us to take a little extra time tonight and try to find him and bring him to safety. If he doesn’t
     want to live at the SRO—and I don’t blame him, those places are hellholes—maybe we could bring him back here and let him sleep
     in the storeroom. He wouldn’t be any trouble to anybody and he’d be warm.”
    “He’d end up pissing on the printer paper.”
    “No, he