“I do not need this shit,” Terry Mooney said. He was a small man with a lot of red hair, wire-rimmed glasses that were tinted pink and a wardrobe of three-piece glen plaid suits.

I hate the little bastard, John Roscommon thought after their meeting. Roscommon had said that aloud on many occasions when there was nobody around but other State cops. “That little bastard,” Roscommon said, “here he is, about thirty years old, got more hair on him’n a fuckin’ buffalo but less brains, and he’s got this diploma from some half-assed law school and that gives him the right to order everybody around. He thinks. The little shit.

“This guy,” Roscommon told Mickey and Don and every other trooper in the Attorney General’s office, “this guy was appointed directly by God to clear up all of the problems of suffering mankind. Here I am, I have been running around the world and dealing with the Japanese when I was a kid with fuzz on my cheeks and they have got Nambu machine guns with which they have got every intention of blowing my ass off before we finally get Douglas MacArthur safely at home in Tokyo, and they didn’t make it. I went out there in the goddamned jungle like I was Wyatt fuckin’ Earp and I keep my head down and no goddamned Jap blows my ass off and I in the meantime blow the asses off of several Japs.

“I live through that,” Roscommon said. “I will not eat beef teriyaki and I will not go down to some fake Jap restaurant where the chefs idea a good time is waving a knife around and screaming ‘Banzai’ every time somebody heaves a piece of cow in front of him, but I come out of my adventures with the Japs all in one piece and that is pretty good going, considering what I see happen to some other fellows I was somewhat acquainted with for a little while.

“I live through that,” Roscommon said.