The Blackstone Commentaries Read Online Free PDF Page B

Drusilla, his wife, what she thought. Then he’d told her precisely what he thought himself. It wasn’t flattering. “Relax,” she’d told him. “You look terrific. This county’s going to love it! You’ve got to be bigger than life to survive and get things done around here, Charlie Dugan.” She was right, of course. She usually was.
    Suited up, even wearing the derby that one time, he’d gone and raided a still, then grinned for the cameras and for the first time appeared before a wild crowd on the courthouse square. That smell—the sweet, overblown smell of pure fermented nature, raw whiskey—positively filled the downtown and made him want to fly! It must have permeated his soul, for he went on flying after that; there was no stopping him.
    Pemberton had come into the department the next morning, waving the newspaper and roaring with laughter. “And I thought I was training you for politics!” he had said admiringly. It was one of those moments when the two of them seemed genuinely to connect. There weren’t many of them, though it hadn’t seemed quite so troublesome at first. But the tension was always there, right from that night in the revival tent.
    In the rearview mirror, Dugan saw a stoplight two blocks back turn from red to green, then the streetlights swept over them again like they were underwater, the current gliding overhead, houses buried in deep shadows of trees floating by. It was almost three in the morning, and theCarvers were probably home, but he doubted they could be asleep. Dugan didn’t feel tired at all now, more like he’d drunk twenty cups of strong coffee, but that was his way.
    â€œIt’s good living here, isn’t it Eddie?” They could still turn back. “All the doctors and lawyers and factory owners your heart could desire around here. Cocktails. Tennis on Saturday.” Then they passed a break in a solid city block of brick wall where two big iron gates stood open onto a drive, a coat of arms on the arch overhead—the same coat of arms that appeared on the labels of the clothes made in Trotter Mills. “That’s the Trotter place, isn’t it?”
    â€œThat’s right,” Eddie said, not looking. “About a quarter-mile up the hill.”
    â€œYou’ve been there?”
    â€œSure. Served papers on a gardener from Morehead City while working for Mac. Nonsupport.”
    They were beyond the streetlights now, trees drifting overhead, a soft, new green in the arch of their headlamps.
    Protocol. Technically, Dugan could go anywhere in the county he wanted on his job without anybody’s permission, since he was the county sheriff, duly elected. But this was Damascus, the county seat, and the city had its own police force—a good one, to hear them talk, and it was, actually. They had even tried to take Eddie away from him. “Professionals,” they liked to call themselves, and liked it even more when Harlan Monroe said it in his editorials in the Damascus Gazette & Reformer . The Damascus police were “above the political fray,” Harlan claimed, but Dugan knew you couldn’t have steak without bullshit.
    No one had any quarrels with Dugan, just with the county system and some of the more blatant examples of party patronage, which they knew Dugan could no more help than all the sheriffs before him, though he’d come into office with much higher hopes. Everyone’s entitled to a little youthful stupidity, was the message. Dugan had smarted a bit under it but had remained scrupulous about protocol, etiquette. The cops knew it and appreciated it. The car in front was etiquette. Its left turn signal suddenly began to flash, and Eddie followed suit, already braking for the Pemberton driveway before the lights in front flared red and the police car turned,bounced over a curb cut and disappeared downhill behind a hedge.
    â€œCharlie, we can still turn