Free What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy by James Sallis

Sambo’s coming off long late nights, bars in the Overton Square area Randy and I went to afterwards to wind down. After a while it started getting to me. We don’t see anyone but cops anymore, I told him one night.
    “They’re our family.”
    “You have a family.”
    His expression, in the moment before he checked its green card and deported it, told me more than I wanted to know. How much of recent behavior did that expression explain?
    We’d have got into it then but got tagged. No patrols available, could we take it? Speak to the lady at 341 E. Oakside, she’d be standing by the weeping willow out front. And she was, demanding to know before Randy and I even had the squad doors open what could be done about her son, could we please help her, no one should have to put up with this, she couldn’t stand it any longer. The tree was huge, a wild green bouffant mimicking her blondish one, clay irrigation ports at its base. Near as I could tell, she didn’t have those.
    Her son, she told us, kept breaking into her house. Twenty-six years old and he wouldn’t work, wouldn’t do much of anything but hold down the couch, watch TV and eat. Whenever she brought it up he’d say he was going to do better, he knew all that, he was sorry, she had every right and so on, and she’d put up with it a while, but then he’d never follow through, so she’d toss him out again. Change locks, the whole works. But he’d just break in, be there on the couch like nothing happened when she got home. She’d had enough. She’d had it this time. She wanted his fat useless butt off her couch and out of her apartment and she wanted him to know that’s how it was going to be from now on.
    She couldn’t get away right now, everybody else was out of the office, showing houses. Must she go along? Could we . . . ? Old Miss Santesson from across the alley had called to let her know that, after she left for work, Bobbie had gone over the back fence, kicked out the bathroom window and climbed through.
    Some miles of heavy traffic to go. Randy called it in as we pulled away from the willow’s shade. Still holding the mike, he looked out his window and said, “Things haven’t been going real well between Dorey and me.”
    “So I figured.”
    He looked over at me.
    “Kinda lost that sartorial edge you used to have,” I said. “I’d of sworn I actually saw a spot on your coat one time last week.”
    “A spot.”
    “Try club soda.”
    “Club soda, right.” He leaned forward to cradle the mike. “Couple starts having trouble, everyone says they’re not spending enough time together. But it seems like the more we’re together, the worse it gets.”
    “I’m sorry, man.”
    “Me too. So is Dorey. So are our folks. Everyone’s sorry. Betty most of all.” His daughter, what, fourteen now? “She doesn’t say anything, pretends she doesn’t know. But it’s there in her eyes.”
    “Has to be hard.”
    “Scary thing’s how easy it is, some ways.”
    Bobbie put up no struggle. He met us at the front door when we rang (one of the chimes then popular) and told us he knew, he knew, but she had no right, it was his house too. He went on saying that all the way downtown, eyes making contact in the rearview mirror above a stained orange sweat-shirt. He was still saying it when we dropped him off at John Gaston ER on his way to the psych ward. By that time it was nearing shift’s end and the station house loomed before us, this sudden cliff of bright lights, as we pulled up in our little hiccoughing skiff with side mirror flapping like a tiny, useless wing. Randy told me he’d do the paperwork.
    “No way in hell.”
    “Hey—”
    “Go home, Randy. Go home and hug your daughter, fix breakfast for your wife. Talk to them.”
    He didn’t, of course. But at the time I wanted to think he might.
    He called in the next day and again the one following. Captain pulled me over the third morning to see if I’d say anything about what was going