“Lou, Lou, what the hell did these bastards do to you?”

No response. I moved closer and that was when I saw, peripherally, Doran limping away. Molly had her shoulder under his arm and her hand on his stomach. The shoulder I understood. The stomach looked like the female equivalent of a cheap feel.

“Lou, Lou, you got to look at me, Lou!” As he said this, Cliffie snapped on a silver flashlight the size of a ball bat and waved the beam so his officer would come up here and help him.

“Maybe he needs a doctor.”

Cliffie’s facial expression was lost in the shadows but his voice was clear: “McCain, I’m ordering you to disperse this crowd and you to go with them. That permit I gave you is cancelled. And you can tell that to the beatnik pastor too.”

Then he leaned closer, his beer breath scouring my face and said: “That pastor. He’s no pastor.”

Pastor Gerard had replaced Pastor Beaton. Gerard was only twenty-eight, and he and his wife were known to serve wine at their parties and listen to jazz. Beaton had been seventy-nine when he finally retired. A town wag had once claimed that Beaton had fallen into a coma around age fifty-five, only nobody had ever noticed. Cliffie had been heard to call Gerard and his wife “bohemians,” which confused some of the locals of Czech heritage. “Now you get them the hell out of here, you hear me?”

I faced the few remaining protestors. I didn’t have to say anything. They’d heard Cliffie bellering. I saw Molly helping Doran into her car.

The odd thing was that after that first jab of jealousy, I found myself not caring. Molly and I had been going nowhere, anyway.

I was fifteen feet from my red Ford ragtop when a small red Triumph shot into sight so fast I wondered if it would be able to stop before it overshot the parking lot.

The woman who climbed from it shouted, “Where is he, McCain?”

“Cliffie has him. Your father’s not doing very well.”