After the game they drank beer in the parking lot. Jesse was careful with the beer. Hanging around in the late twilight after a ball game drinking club soda just didn't work. But booze was too easy for Jesse. It went down too gently, made him feel too integrated. Jesse felt that it wasn't seemly for the police chief to get publicly hammered. So he had learned in the last few years to approach it very carefully.

The talk was of double plays, and games played long ago, and plays at the plate, and sex. Talk of sex and baseball was the best of all possible talk. Jesse sipped a little of the beer. Beer from an ice-filled cooler was the best way for beer to be. From the edge of the lake a voice said, "Jesse, get over here."

The voice was scared. Carrying a can of Lite beer, Jesse walked to the lakeside. Two men were squatting on their heels at the edge of the water. In front of them, floating facedown, was something that used to be a girl.

Chapter Two

The rest of the Paradise cops didn't like looking at the body. Jesse had pulled it out, and it lay now on the ground illuminated by the headlights of the Paradise Police cruisers.

"She been in the water a long time?" Suitcase Simpson asked Jesse.

"Yeah," Jesse said. "She's only wearing one shoe."

Simpson didn't look. He didn't care about how many shoes she had.

"You seen a lot of floaters?"

"When I worked in L.A., there was a lot of ocean-front," Jesse said. He was squatting on his heels beside the corpse, studying it. He reached over and turned the head a little and studied it some more.

Simpson was trying to look at the body obliquely, so it would only be an impression. He was a big kid, with red cheeks and some baby fat still left. But he wanted to be a cop. He wanted to be like Jesse. And he was trying to force himself to look, the way Jesse did, at the water-ridden thing on the ground.