``Sorry, Orville. I thought you hadn't come in yet.''

``I've been here for some time.'' He stood up, cocked his head and eyed Gun coldly. ``The sergeant is just leaving.''

It had come as no great surprise to Matson that the hot water in the showers didn't work, that Loren Severe had thrown up all over the stairs, or that some thieving bastard of a cop had walked off with his cigarettes. It was the best he could hope for on a watch that had ended with a session in Killpath's office.

Now, as he passed the open counter that divided the assembly room from the business office, he nodded and said good night to the station keeper and his clerks, not stopping to hear the day-watch playback of his chewing out.

Not that he gave a damn what the grapevine sent out about Killpath's little speech on the comportment of platoon commanders. He just didn't want to talk about it. If the acting captain wanted his acting lieutenant to sit on his ass around the station all night, Killpath would just have to go out and drag Gun back by the heels once an hour; because he'd be damned if he was going to be a mid-watch pencil-pusher just to please his ulcerated pro-tem captain.

At the doorway he squinted up at the gray morning overcast and patted his jacket pockets for the cigarettes, remembering then that he'd left them at the Doughnuttery. He could pick up another pack on his way home, if he were going home. But even before he started across the oiled road to his Plymouth, parked in the lot under the cypress trees across from the station, he knew that he wasn't going home.