How does a teenage cigarette carton thief and a wild partying kid who disappeared for two years after running away from home and Columbia in general, wind up a decorated police sergeant given the highest responsibility for field leadership? How too, does it happen that she is charged with tracking down whoever is the latest impersonator of Elvis Presley and keeping crazed citizens calm enough so that they don’t kill each other over disagreements about tracking The King?
Carbie has always wondered (and partly feared) questions she has about her ability to hear things others don’t and to see in the dark. She is tortured some by those propensities and her general desire to figure out the human puzzles that being a police officer presents to her. Sleeping is difficult. She burned herself out on booze for too many years until she got sober in every way.
Maybe being of mixed descent and heritage in a part of the country that has drifted into a different dimension politically is part of Carbie’s edgyness. Maybe she’ll figure things out sooner than she thinks. Maybe Elvis isn’t exactly what she thinks he is.