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there someplace and he was still here, clueless. He felt the irritation rise in him, a sudden spike of anger he could barely contain, and in order to calm himself he strode over to a display of pamphlets--“How to Protect Yourself on the Street; How to Burglar-Proof Your Home; Identity Theft: What Is It?”--and made a pretense of absorbing the sage information dispensed there. He gave it a moment, then casually turned to the desk.
    “Hello,” he said, and the woman lifted her eyes from the form she was filling out. “My name's Bridger Martin and I've been waiting here since just past eleven--in the morning--and I was just wondering if you could maybe help me...”
    She said nothing, because why bother? He was a petitioner, a special pleader, a creature of wants and needs and demands, no different from the thousands of others who'd stood here before him, and he would get to the point in his own way and in his own time, she knew that. The prospect seemed to bore her. The counter and the computers and the walls and the floors and the lights bored her too--Bridger bored her. Her fellow officers. Her shoes, her uniform: everything was a bore and a trial, ritualized, clichéd, without beginning or end. Her eyes told him that, and they weren't nearly as sympathetic as he'd thought, not up close, anyway. And her lips--her lips were tightly constricted, as if she were fighting some facial tic.
    “It's my--my “girlfriend.” She's been arrested and we don't really know why. I took the whole afternoon off from work just to come down here and”--this was movie dialogue and the phrase stuck to the roof of his mouth--“bail her out, but nobody knows what the bail is or even what the charges are?” He made a question of it, a plea.
    She surprised him. Her lips softened. The humanity--the fellow-feeling and sympathy--came back into her eyes. She was going to help. She was going to help, after all. “Name?” she queried.
    “Dana,” he said. “Dana Halter, H-a-l-t-e-r.”
    She was hitting the keys even as he superfluously spelled out the name and he watched her face as she studied the screen. She was pretty for a middle-aged woman, or almost pretty, now that the vise of her mouth had come unclamped. But he wanted to be charitable, wanted to be helped, babied, led by the hand--she was beautiful, wielder of the sword of justice, radiant with truth. At least for the few seconds it took to bring up the information. Then she lost her animation and became less than pretty all over again. Her eyes were hard suddenly, her mouth small and bitter. “We don't know what we've got here,” she said tersely, “--the charges are still coming in. And because of the Nevada thing, it looks like the Feds are going to be interested.”
    “Nevada thing?”
    “Interstate. Passing bad checks.”
    “Bad checks?” he echoed in disbelief. “She never--” he began, and then caught himself. “Listen,” he said, “help me out here: what does it mean, because it's obviously all a mistake, mistaken identity or something explicable like that. I just want to know when I can get her out on bail? And where do I go?”
    The faintest flicker of amusement lifted the corners of her mouth. “She's got no-bail holds in at least two counties because she walked in the past, which means I don't see anything happening till Monday--”
    “Monday?” he echoed, and it was almost a yelp, he couldn't help himself.
    A beat. Two. Then her lips were moving again: “At the earliest.”

Talk Talk
    Three
    THEY PUT HER IN A CELL that had been freshly scoured by some unseen presence, the caged lights glaring down from above, a residuum of drying mop strokes fanning out from the stainless-steel toilet set like a display model in the center of the room. The smell of the disinfectant, a chemical burn lingering on the clamped close air of the place, made her eyes water, and for the first few minutes she tried to breathe through her mouth only, but that just seemed to make