Hardscrabble Road by Jane Haddam

gave our fellow citizens the benefit
     of the doubt. We didn’t think they were out to get us. We didn’t think that perfectly sane people went out and committed murders,
     hired hit men, I don’t know what. We didn’t suspect they were doing God only knows what behind closed doors and always to—to—I
     don’t know—I don’t know what to think anymore.”
    “It wouldn’t be that much trouble to have the drivers actively looking for Sherman. It really wouldn’t. And he’d be easier
     to find than you think. He’s got a red hat.”
    “A red hat?”
    “Chickie told me. They bought him new clothes, and one of the things they bought him was a red hat. It was in the store where
     they took him shopping and he liked it, so they bought it for him. One of those watchman’s hats, you know, except instead
     of navy blue or black, it’s in bright red. You’d probably be able to see him across the street. He’d be no problem to pick
     out in a line of people waiting for dinner at a soup kitchen.”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay?”
    “Okay,” Ray Dean said. “Get the address of the SRO, find out whose route goes by there, have him reconfigure his night a little
     to check the area. Tell the rest of them to look for Sherman if they know him or the red hat if they don’t. We might as well
     keep an eye out.”
    “Excellent,” Shelley said. “I thought you were going to say no. I thought you were going to stand on principle. You spend
     a lot of time standing on principle. It drives me nuts.”
    “This climate drives me nuts,” Ray Dean said. “I mean, what’s wrong with people? When did we all start suspecting each other?
     When did we all start being afraid of each other?”
    “When Reagan was elected,” Shelley said promptly. “It’s the Republicans’ fault.”
    Ray Dean kept his mouth shut as she jumped off the desk and flounced out the door, the very picture of a University of Pennsylvania
     undergraduate with a Serious Interest in Social Justice.
    That was among a number of good damned reasons why Ray Dean had never told anybody here that he was a registered Republican.

8
    T his was the kind of weather that made Alison Standish think she really wanted to own a car more substantial than the Cooper Mini she’d picked
     up only a year and a half ago. She’d told her friends and colleagues that she’d bought it for the fuel efficiency. Cooper
     Minis were the hot car across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania this year. They really were fuel-efficient, and
     if you had to park on crowded city streets, or in university parking lots where half the students owned SUVs that didn’t quite
     fit within the lines of demarcated parking spaces, there was no better vehicle. The problem was, Alison already knew the Mini
     didn’t do all that well in heavy snow. There had been a fair amount of heavy snow last winter, right after she’d bought it,
     and she’d found it was far too easy to get stuck in the snow dunes the DOT piled up or to spin out on black ice when you weren’t
     paying attention. Of course, even SUVs spun out on black ice, and the real solution to the snow dune problem was a DOT that
     took its job seriously and cleared the streets instead of just pushing muck from one side of them to the other, but somehow
     none of that seemed to matter when she was stranded in the road and the people who rescued her were clucking their heads about
     her stupidity in buying such a small car for a city with such bad weather.
    The other problem was that she hadn’t bought the Cooper Mini for its fuel efficiency, or even for its ease of parking. She’d
     bought it because she’d seen it in The Italian Job. The people in the Women’s Studies Department could say anything they wanted
     about being oppressed by media images, but the fact was that Alison liked the idea of herself zipping around town like Charlize
     Theron—of even looking like Charlize Theron. Not that she was all that bad-looking, really.