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Stan Beebe, who was still on disability leave, showed up in civilian clothes around ten o’clock, eyes bloodshot, unsteady on his feet, reeking of alcohol.

We sat him down in the kitchen and poured him a mug of black coffee. Normally Stan drank coffee by the bucketful, but this morning he only sipped it and played with the handle of the mug.

Click stood in the corner with his arms across his chest.

Wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt, Stan Beebe cupped the coffee mug in his thick hands and stared at the surface of the liquid. His hair was cropped short and peppered with lint. There was animal hair on his pant leg, food stains on his shirt.

Ordinarily, Stan was as meticulous as a parson’s cat.

I had never seen him drunk.

In fact, I couldn’t recall ever seeing Stan do anything more than hold a paper cup of malt liquor, not even at the wildest department party ever, which we’d had last year at Joel McCain’s place. Click and Clack had gotten into a playful tousle and ended up smashing Mary McCain’s tea table. Jackie had gotten so juiced, she took a leak in the corner of the spare bedroom and fell asleep on the floor by the dog dish. I spent an hour in the dark on the sofa downstairs with Karrie. The volunteers yukked it up and tossed horseshoes over parked cars, my pickup included.

Mary McCain grew so disgusted with the drunken antics that she made her husband break up the party early.

“You look like you’ve had a couple, Stan,” I said.

“A couple? Man, I’m smashed.”

“We all feel bad about Joel.”

“It’s not about Joel. Tell me something, Jim. What’s the worst thing you can imagine? How about you’re here, but you’re not here. You’re dead, or close enough that only a few people can tell the difference. You’re miserable to the nth degree, plus your existence makes your loved ones miserable, too. What I don’t understand is why they don’t have the best medical care for Joel. I know they have that religion, but when somebody’s life is at stake, you’d think—Would you? Jim? Back when you were religious, would you have been willing to die for your beliefs?”

“Probably. When I was a kid, I almost drowned in Lake Washington stepping off a dock. Went down like a piece of angle iron. I had just turned eight, and I’d been told if I had enough faith, I could walk on water. Some big kids pulled me out.”

Beebe placed his lips on the rim of the coffee mug and inhaled the aroma. He set the mug down on the table and slowly spun it around in his hands. “Mary McCain’s just like you were stepping off that dock. I called her last night. She thinks Joel’s going to be healed. Jesus healed, and Christian Scientists think they can heal, too. See, they feel the majority of world thought is against them—”

“It is.”

“—that the majority of thought on this earth is causing the problem. Joel once said if everybody believed the way he did, there would be no sickness or evil. ’Course Joel told me there wasn’t any matter, either.” Stan pinched himself. “No matter. We’re all spiritual beings. Everything else is false.”

“You mean we’re really floating around in ether like ghosts?”

“Something like that. Joel said you had to demonstrate these things a step at a time. You wake up from the dream one step at a time.”

“Look, Stan, I’ve been around zealots all my life, and if there’s anything a religious freak is good at, it’s seeing what he wants to see and ignoring everything else.”

“Don’t call Joel a freak.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Or maybe I did. His mother-in-law stuffed half an apple down his gullet because she thought he was healed. You think she’s tuned in to reality?”

Stan’s eyes met mine for the first time in over a minute. We broke into simultaneous laughter as we thought about the apple sliding across the floor. His mood quickly grew dark again.

“You going to be all right, Stan?”

“Yesterday I told you I was dying. Now you ask if I’m going to be all right. That’s the trouble with you, Jim. We have to spell everything out for you.