“My dad was a police officer in Miami,” Kathy said. “Retired now on a disability. He was shot.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“My two brothers are cops, also in Miami. One with DEA, the other Metro-Dade. My sister’s married to an assistant state attorney.”

“And here you are a probation officer. I’d call that a law enforcement family. How long you been with Corrections?”

“Almost two years. I went to Florida Atlantic…”

“Got married when you were in school?”

“After I got out. While I was working in screening at South County Mental Health.”

That seemed to interest him, the way his eyebrows went up.

“I was working on my master’s in psychology, but changed my mind. Those seventy-hour weeks were too much.”

“So you’re familiar with mental patients, how they act.”

“At South County we had ‘consumers.’ They’re not patients till they’re admitted somewhere for treatment, or we sent them to detox. Most of the ones we saw were on drugs or alcohol, or both.”

“You quit there to work for Corrections?” the judge said. “All you did was trade crackheads for fuckups. You like dealing with misfits, huh, losers?”

“My ex-husband used to ask me that.”

“He was after you to quit?”

“If I could find a job that paid more. I was supporting him. He was in medical school when we got married, a first-year resident when we divorced. No, the problem, he was a superior being, but I didn’t find it out till after we were married.” Bad, talking too much about her personal life and the judge liked it, grinning. She got back to her job. “Working for DOC at least I’m outside most of the time. I have close to eighty-thousand miles on my car.” If he wanted they could talk about her VW she’d bought secondhand that needed new tires again, a battery…

“You’re in the wrong profession, the Probation Office? A bright, attractive girl like you? It’s a dead-end street. Where do you go? Isn’t there something you want to be?”

“When I grow up? I don’t know,” Kathy said, “I’ll probably get married again someday. I’d like to have kids.”

“You already tried that. You have any offenders on Community Control? Wear the anklet, can’t leave the house?”

“In the office. I don’t handle any myself.”

“Sometimes you call it house arrest? Like being in jail at home. Or married to the wrong person. Am I right?”

Kathy said, “I guess you could look at it that way,” wanting to get out of here. Next thing he’d be telling her his wife didn’t understand him, they were married in name only, had separate bedrooms, and that was why he saw other women occasionally and it would be okay if they had dinner together.

But he didn’t. He said, “You studied psychology, you were at South County awhile… I can see you’re a person who naturally feels sympathy for others, their problems.”

He was back on the track, coming at her.

“What would you do if you’re having a conversation with someone and all of a sudden she becomes a different person?”

He had to be talking about his wife.

“Like a mood swing,” Kathy said.

He leaned close over the desk to shake his head at her. “I’m not talking about a change of mood or tone of voice.” The judge speaking now, laying down the law. “I’m telling you she becomes somebody else, in voice and manner and what she says.”

“Your wife,” Kathy said.

“Leanne,” the judge said. “Originally from Ohio.”

Chronically undifferentiated popped into Kathy’s head, but she wasn’t that sure it applied and didn’t want to get too far into this anyway. She tried to pass it off saying, “You’re different now, Judge, than you were in court. Don’t you think?”

“You can call me Bob, or Big, if you like.”

No she couldn’t. She said, “I’m different from time to time…”

“How different?”

“Well, like if something’s bothering me, or I don’t feel too good.”

Or like right now. Wanting to get out of here.

In the next moment he was Bob Gibbs again, this farmer-looking guy, his voice quiet, confiding. He said, “But have you ever been so different you became a twelve-year-old colored girl who lived a hundred and thirty-five years ago in Clinch County, Georgia? A slave girl by the name of Wanda Grace?”

Kathy Baker said, “Your wife might need help.”

“One of us does,” the judge said.

The first time Bob Gibbs saw his wife she was performing sixteen feet beneath the surface of Weeki Wachee Spring, in a mermaid outfit.

He watched her through the glass wall of the underwater theater. Saw her gold lamé tail undulating, saw her long golden hair moving slow motion, Leanne smiling, showing her perfect teeth in that clear springwater before taking the tip of the air hose in her mouth, making a delicate, feminine gesture of it.

Bob Gibbs, already a judge, saw the purity of this healthy girl suspended in crystal water, air bubbles rising out of her, carrying her breath to the sunlight way above. Young enough to be his daughter, but that didn’t matter. The man inside the judge said, “Oh, my,” lured by a mermaid, taken with the idea of landing her.

He saw her outside after, pink shorts molded to her cute butt, hair still wet, turning wide-eyed and no doubt apprehensive, a man coming up to her in a dark suit and necktie. Introducing himself as a circuit court judge didn’t exactly warm her up, but she did start to relax once he expressed how much he enjoyed the show and began asking her questions. He learned that her name was Leanne Lancaster, that she was from Luna Pier, Ohio, and had been at Weeki Wachee-this was her third year and she loved it, even if it wasn’t doing her hair a lot of good. That their changing room was down underneath “where we zip up our tails,” smiling at him by now. There were three mermaids named Kim in the show, out of thirteen, and last year there were four, really, all named Kim. He learned that a hundred thousand gallons of pure water a minute rose from the depths of the spring, up through cracks way way down there, and that he ought to catch the Birds of Prey Show and then take the jungle river cruise, see pelicans, raccoons, sometimes even alligators. Leanne hunched her shoulders and gave him a cute shudder as she mentioned gators. She said they could swim into the spring from the river but hardly ever did ‘cause the water was so cold, hunching her little shoulders again as she said, Brrrr… Bob Gibbs said, “Why don’t we sit down and have a Coca-Cola?”

He told her he was from right here in Hernando County originally, born and raised, but had never seen the mermaid show before today. “You imagine that? The show’s been here what, forty years and this is my first time?” He told Leanne he had returned home to attend a funeral but came here instead, acting on some impulse. Strange? He didn’t mention being hung over from partying the night before, unable this morning to bear sitting through a Baptist eulogy. “And I used to work for the deceased when he was Hernando County state attorney, back before I moved to West Palm as a prosecutor, ran for judge of circuit court and have been presiding ever since.”

Leanne had kept staring at him, nodding very slowly as he spoke.

She said, “I have been visited by a wise man,” her look becoming strange, trancelike. “You’re famous, aren’t you? Sure, I saw you on the cover of a magazine.”

“That’s right. It was Newsweek.”

Nodding again. “But I don’t recall it had your name.”

“On the cover? No, it said, ‘In Florida Maximum Bob Throws the Book.’ It was a story about the courts getting tough on drug traffickers.”

“Just a while ago.”

“Yeah, what they did, they made a big to-do over my giving a drug dealer thirty years, plus a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar fine, when the state attorney was willing to let him off with probation.”