It is enormously gratifying and comforting to be reminded that readers continue to have affection for mystery fiction, a field in which I have found profound pleasure in both my personal and professional lives.

One recent bestseller list in the New York Times (generally regarded as the most important one, however flawed and suspect its methodology may be) placed eleven mystery/crime/suspense/thriller fiction titles in the top fifteen. For more than a quarter of a century, this distinguished genre has comprised at least half the titles on virtually every one of those lists.

We all became so used to seeing the most widely read mystery writers on the list that we would have been shocked or baffled to see a year pass without finding certain names in their customary spot at or near the top. The books by James Patterson, Sue Grafton, Dick Francis, Robert B. Parker, Harlan Coben, Mary Higgins Clark, Elizabeth George, P. D. James, John le Carré, Elmore Leonard, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Nelson DeMille, Michael Connelly, John Grisham, Scott Turow, and many others continued to find a wide readership year after year, to the delight of their legions of fans.

What has recently surfaced as a surprise to me has been the evident resurrection of the mystery short story. It has been axiomatic in the publishing world that books of short stories, whether a collection (all stories written by one author) or an anthology (featuring stories by multiple authors), simply don’t sell. These words of wisdom and warning were imparted to me at the very beginning of my career as a publisher.

Not being wise enough to heed the advice of professionals who knew what they were doing—which I quickly concede I did not—I started my own publishing company, the Mysterious Press, by publishing collections of short stories. Ross Macdonald, Cornell Woolrich, Donald E. Westlake, Patricia Highsmith, and Stanley Ellin were among the authors who allowed me to publish their stories. Those collections had some success and the Mysterious Press went on to publish novels by some of those outstanding authors, and that imprint remains happily alive today as part of Grove Atlantic.

Furthermore, as poorly as short story collections sell, I was assured that anthologies perform even worse. As an unrepentant lover of the short form, I need to point out that I have never had any difficulty in finding enough books to sate my appetite. An entire wall in my library, with a ceiling so high that I need a rolling ladder to reach the top shelves, is devoted exclusively to anthologies, and author collections number in excess of a thousand volumes. A large section of my bookshop is devoted to anthologies (not counting the shamelessly egotistical shelves devoted to those I edited).

How can all this publishing knowledge pertain when so many anthologies continue to be published? This series, The Best American Mystery Stories, is now twenty-two years old. Random House, under its Vintage imprint, has been publishing my series of Big books (The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, The Big Book of Female Detectives, etc.) annually for more than a decade. Is this just a display of generosity, of downright charity, on the part of publishing houses? Is the corporate mindset one that indicates it doesn’t mind losing money on these publications because it is in the public interest to issue these profit-draining volumes?

This situation is being raised because I noticed this year that an astonishing number of anthologies have been published. Inevitably, a few have come from major houses, but a large number have come from small, even out-and-out tiny, publishers. Many are regional, where it seems that groups of mystery writers, almost certainly all known to each other in writing groups or other coteries, contribute stories to books, almost always in trade paperback form. These anthologies often have themes, sometimes outré, that elicit occasionally clever, creative stories that might not otherwise have found a home.

In 2017 more than forty such anthologies were published, at least half of which came from publishing houses that have never issued any other books. Whether they are one-and-done or the beginning of a lasting contribution to the mystery field remains to be seen. The literary genre described as “mystery” is large and inclusive. I define it liberally, to mean any work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is integral to the theme or plot, and you will find a great range of styles and subgenres in the present volume of BAMS.

A contributing factor to this cornucopia of crime is the ease with which individuals or groups can produce their own printed volumes at reasonable cost. It appears likely that the proliferation of independently produced books is a factor in the reduction of electronic magazines, which were growing in number as recently as a half-dozen years ago. Many of the best have fallen by the wayside, notably Thuglit, which had numerous stories selected among the fifty best of the year.

The person who reads all these e-zines and anthologies is my associate, Michele Slung, without whose extraordinary good taste and speed-reading skills these annual volumes would take three years to produce. Reading or at least partially reading more than three thousand stories a year, she passes along likely candidates for me to read, from which I cull the fifty best, which are then read by the guest editor, who selects the twenty that go into the book. All this dedication to the written word places me further in her debt, as has been the case for all twenty-two editions of this series.

Speaking of being in debt, words would be difficult to adequately describe my gratitude to Louise Penny, the guest editor for BAMS 2018. Best-selling writers are besieged relentlessly by demands on their time. Touring to promote a book—and not only in America—give a speech or a talk, read a manuscript in order to give it a blurb for the dust jacket, participate in a charitable event, write a story or article—the requests go on and on. And since authors are people too, dealing with their personal lives—cooking, shopping, doing laundry, paying bills, having time for family and friends—uses up still more of those precious twenty-four hours of the day. But Louise Penny agreed to be the guest editor as soon as I asked her.

As the author of thirteen novels in thirteen years, Louise Penny has enjoyed tremendous and well-deserved success with her series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide department of the Sureté de Quebec, a character heavily based on her husband of more than twenty years before his death in September 2016. She has been a bestseller for a decade and has won or been nominated for every major award in the mystery world, often many times. Set in her native Canada, her beautifully written books are among the rare few works reminiscent of the golden age of the British detective novel.

A debt of gratitude is also due to the previous guest editors, without whose generosity this series would not have had the success it happily enjoys, so sincere thanks to Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton, who were followed by Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen, George Pelecanos, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais, Lisa Scottoline, Laura Lippman, James Patterson, Elizabeth George, and John Sandford.

I would like to take a brief moment to mention the passing late last year of the mystery community’s sweetheart, Sue Grafton, the author of the universally loved “alphabet series” featuring her series character Kinsey Millhone, and the guest editor for the second book in the BAMS series in 1998.

The hunt for stories for next year’s edition has already begun. While Michele Slung and I engage in a relentless quest to locate and read every mystery/crime/suspense story published during the course of the year, I live in terror that I will miss a worthy story, so if you are an author, editor, or publisher, or care about one, please feel free to send a book, magazine, or tearsheet to me c/o The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. If a story first appeared electronically, you must submit a hard copy. It is vital to include the author’s contact information. No unpublished material will be considered, for what should be obvious reasons. No material will be returned. If you distrust the postal service, enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard, on which I will happily acknowledge receipt of your story.

To be eligible, a story must have been written by an American or Canadian and first published in an American or Canadian publication in the calendar year 2018. The earlier in the year I receive the story, the more it is likely to warm my heart. For reasons known only to the dunderheads who wait until Christmas week to submit a story published the previous spring, this happens every year, causing severe irritability as I read a stack of stories while everyone else I know is busy celebrating the holiday season. It had better be a damned good story if you do this, because I already hate you. Due to the very tight production schedule for this book, the absolute firm deadline is December 31. If the story arrives two days later, it will not be read. Sorry.

I cannot write short stories, any more than I can write poetry. I’ve tried, and the result, for both, is piles of something soft and smelly.

But oh, how I love to read them.

And how I admire both poets and those who can craft short stories. I think they come from the same taproot. A great short story is like a great poem. Crystalline in clarity. Each word with purpose. Lean, muscular, graceful.

Nothing wasted. A brilliant marriage of intellect, rational thought, and creativity.

I am in awe of those who can write short stories.

So when Otto Penzler asked me to be guest editor for this volume, I could not agree fast enough. To be honest, it’s just possible he did not ask me but rather was (quite sensibly) asking me to suggest others who might be better placed to judge.

But I didn’t care. I wanted to do it.

My love of the form started, as yours might have too, in infancy. With the stories read and reread at bedtime. While I was curled up, snug and warm and safe in bed, my mother would read, conjuring cowboys and princesses and untamed horses and wary piglets. Bringing whole worlds magically into the bedroom.

My first literary crush (I know I can trust you not to tell anyone) was Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Not Holmes but Watson. I have tried not to spend too much time analyzing that.

Did you know that Arthur Conan Doyle first planned to call John Watson “Ormond Sacker”?

I have to wonder if I’d have fallen quite so hard for Ormond Sacker.

I devoured all the Conan Doyle stories, and was quite upset when Watson married Mary Morstan and sincerely tried to feel bad for his “own sad bereavement.” But failed.

At university I spent a semester wearing a deerstalker. I began to question that fashion choice when I saw quite an attractive transvestite walking toward me, only to realize it was me in a mirror. After spending the semester date-free, I retired the deerstalker. But my love of all things Holmes (and Watson) remains to this day.

About that time I also met, figuratively speaking, Edgar Allan Poe, and while I did not develop a literary crush (nor did I repeat the deerstalker role-playing and have myself entombed prematurely—also bad for the love life), I have been haunted ever since by the horror of the telltale heart, the vivid images of the murders in the Rue Morgue, the house of Usher split apart by otherworldly forces. Poe’s short stories are romantic, oddly sensual, deeply disturbing, and unforgettable.

Only later did I hear that the great cryptologist William Friedman had been inspired as a boy to study ciphers after reading Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.” Friedman was instrumental in cracking a key Japanese code during World War II. How about that? A short story won the war in the Pacific. Or at least helped.

The Canadian writer Alice Munro recently won the Nobel Prize for literature for her contributions to the short story discipline.

And discipline is, I believe, the word to use. That’s what it takes to create a world, to breathe life into characters, to make us care about them. To give them flesh and blood, emotions and histories. All in a few well-chosen words.

A novel is a hundred thousand words, sometimes less, often more. But the works contained between these covers are only a few thousand. These writers are masters of the craft who, like Picasso and his sinuous line drawings, use a few short strokes to bring plot, characters, setting to life.

It takes creativity. Skill. Discipline. Knowledge of the form while not being formulaic. In a short story there is nowhere to hide. Each must be original, fresh, inspired.

And that’s what you have here.

The stories in this collection have been chosen from the thousands published in the United States and Canada in the past twelve months. From all of those, twenty made the cut. You can imagine how good these are. Varied. Imaginative. Ingenious. But, oh, the misery in trying to get it down to twenty! Felt at times like gnawing off a limb. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it was painful.

I was far from alone in the task of choosing. Otto Penzler, the Godfather of the Short Story (I believe that is actually his official title), led the way. He is indeed a leader in promoting this literary field. Elevating it. Making sure short stories are recognized and given the respect they deserve and have earned.

Just as (to return to the poetry analogy) haiku is not the baby sister of the sonnet, so too the short story is not a lesser version of a novel. It is its own literary form. With rules made to be both followed and transcended. Done well, as they are here, short stories entertain, enthrall, amaze, haunt.

You will recognize some of the writers. Lee Child has been brilliant and generous in providing a near-novella. Michael Connelly’s contribution is as smart and layered as you’d expect. The magnificent Joyce Carol Oates has a story that gets under the skin and into the marrow. And nests there.

Some of the writers will be new to you, as they were to me.

How thrilling it has been to discover new talent. To be a sentence, two, into a story and realize you’re in the hands of a master. Then to look again at the name of the author and realize it’s new to you. I think you’ll have that experience more than once in this book.

If it’s an exciting time to be a crime writer, it’s an even better time for those of us who love reading crime fiction.

It has been a singular honor to be asked to be guest editor of this anthology. The only difficulty, and it was awful, was having to winnow the collection down.

If someone had told me as I wandered the halls of academe in my deerstalker, searching for clues as to why I wasn’t being asked out, that one day I’d get to read all these marvelous short stories and guest-edit this volume, well, I’d never have believed it.

Not even Holmes could have predicted this. Now, my dear Dr. Watson…

Friday lunches were boiled as a rule, and today’s was no exception. With a feeling of numb resignation, Mr. Hank Crute guided his fork around the slab of corned beef, the bed of wild rice, the clutch of blanched green beans. His hand trembled just a hair as he let the fork drop to the table and pushed the plate away.

“Not hungry anyway,” he announced, to no one in particular.

Some days, indeed, he ate so little he was amazed to find himself still alive. Some days the only reason to get out of bed was so they wouldn’t come knocking for him. One of those stern Eritrean gals reminding him he had less than half an hour of breakfast left.

“Get a move on, Mr. Hank!”

For after breakfast, they would remind him, there was Morning Chairobics and a bus trip to CVS and the weekly meeting of the Card Club. And later on the Scrabble Club and the Scrapbooking Society and, still later, the Sing Along ’n Snacks Social and the ring toss and Twilight Walk with Miss Phyllis.

“Oh, and don’t forget! Hair styling from Miss Desdemona!”

Never mind that Hank Crute had gone eighty-four years on God’s earth without requiring a hair stylist. This was the kind of place that would foist activity on you whether you wanted it or not. As he sat staring at the ruin of his lunch, Hank grew a little dizzy thinking of all the places he was supposed to be or not supposed to be—the wheels that were already in motion on his behalf, ferrying him from one part of the Morning Has Broken facility to another without taking him anywhere.

He closed his eyes. Waited for some hard intention to contract out of the darkness.

My room, he thought.

Gripping the rim of the table, he edged his chair out and rocked himself to standing, only to see that another plate had materialized alongside the plate he had just pushed away. Almost identical, right down to the forked trails in the rice and the splayed green beans.

A prickle of terror climbed the back of his neck. Surely he hadn’t actually gotten two plates for himself? Surely someone had joined him along the way. Someone whose name and face he had temporarily forgotten (as he was always doing). What other reason could there be for two plates of boiled food?

With a lurch, he took a step back and surveyed his surroundings. Among the semiambulatory and near-bedridden residents of Morning Has Broken, Hank took no small pride in being able to travel without walker or wheelchair, but that lonely eminence meant that sometimes he had to stand for upward of a minute orienting himself, and even after plunging forward, he might have no clear suspicion of where he was heading. As often as not, he would wait for something to rear up before him before concluding that this was the very thing toward which he had been tending.

In this manner, he came upon the elevator.

And concluded that yes, this was just where he’d been traveling. He was—he remembered now!—going back to his room. And once there, he would take a nap and forget all about corned beef and wild rice and lunch companions who slipped away when you weren’t looking. It was a treacherous world.

He stabbed the Up button with his index finger, listened for the rumble of the car. A light flared above him, and the elevator doors exhaled open. So intent was he on bustling inside that he very nearly collided with a woman who was equally intent on leaving. For several seconds they stood regarding each other.

“Why, it’s Mr. Hank,” she said at last. “Good morning.”

Her lips were dark and shrunken. Her walker rested on punctured tennis balls.

“It’s afternoon,” he said.

“So it is.”

She wasn’t moving.

“I’m Mrs. Sylvia,” she said.

“I know who you are.”

It was one of the curious things about this place that the residents only knew each other reliably by first name. Possibly Mrs. Sylvia had once divulged her last name, but that secret lay buried.

“You should come to the movie matinee today,” she said. “It’s a Stewart Granger movie.”

“Who?”

“Stewart…” She had a flash of panic, wondering if she’d gotten it wrong. “Stewart Granger.”

“Little bushed,” he mumbled.

“Nothing a fifteen-minute snooze wouldn’t fix.”

“Could be.”

“Will I see you at dinner?” asked Mrs. Sylvia.

“That’s as may be.”

She was still watching him when the doors closed.

He let out a current of air and leaned back against the wood paneling. From somewhere in the not-distant past, a mocking voice (whose?) came curling back. “Man at your age, still able to walk. Why, you must be the rooster in the henhouse.” He never felt less like a rooster than in the company of Mrs. Sylvia. Or any of the other widows who tried to cajole him into Bingo Night or wine, cheese, and crossword socials. He could remember some old crone flashing her aquamarine rings at him and crooning, “It’s not right for a man to be alone. It’s all right for a woman, but not for a man.”

Well, it was all right for this man.

He must have dozed for a second, because when he next opened his eyes, the elevator doors were wide open and the gold-and-royal-green carpet of the ninth floor spread before him. Taking care to lift his sneakers clear of the shag, he traveled past the two wing chairs, past the vague seascape, turned the corner, and made his way to number 932, nearly at the end of the hall.

On the sconce alongside his door was a bud vase with a single white artificial carnation. Above the sconce an embossed nameplate: HENRY CRUTE. He had long ceased to notice it. The only nameplates he ever noticed were the ones that went away. Vanished overnight, some of them, leaving nothing but a rectangular outline on the wall.

Once inside, he stood for a moment gripping the door handle, then tottered toward his red corduroy armchair—collapsed into it with a despairing grunt. By habit his eyes swung toward his prescription-pill dispenser on his coffee table. Those seven small chambers with their soothing litany: M, T, W, TH, F, S, SU.

Pills, he thought. Had he taken his pills?

But his eyelids were already scrolling down, and in the grayness that swirled through him, not a single definite proposition could be entertained—until something that was not gray broke through, sharp and clear.

A voice.

Hank opened his eyes. A woman was standing over him.

That fact was so overladen with surprise that it very nearly mastered him. How had she gotten in? Had he left the door open? Had he been so unpardonably sloppy as that?

“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Hank,” she said. “I was wondering if you had a moment.”

He made to lever himself out of his chair, but even as she said, “Don’t get up,” he was already falling back.

“How are we doing today?” she said.

She was young. On the lower side of her thirties, he would have thought (though he could no longer trust himself on this score). She wore a smart lab coat, with a nametag pinned over her coat pocket and over her shoulder a leather satchel.

“I’m Dr. Landis,” she said.

Next moment she was extending a clean, strong white hand, ringless. He held the hand briefly in his, felt the pulse of warmth beneath its lightly veined skin.

“If you say so,” he said.

“I believe we had an appointment.”

“We did?”

“I believe so.”

“No one said anything to me.”

“Um…” She slid some kind of phone contraption out of her coat pocket; her fingers gavotted across the screen. “Hank Crute… one o’clock to one fifteen… Yep, I got it right.”

She was smiling at him now. Nothing too gaudy, the lightest pearling of teeth.

“I’ve got loads of appointments,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Can’t be bothered to write them all down. I’d be doing nothing else.”

“Shall I sit here?” she asked, lowering herself decorously onto his bed. His face pinked, but just as he began to protest, he recalled there was nowhere else in the apartment for anyone to sit.

“We’ve met before,” said Dr. Landis.

“I meet a lot of people.”

“Well, to refresh your memory…” She gently dragged the coffee table into the space between them. “I’m the head clinician. And one of my jobs is to track the—the cognitive function among our residents.”

“Why?”

“Because we want to make sure everyone at Morning Has Broken is healthy and happy and ready to roll.” The words were chirpy, but the voice was cool, and the eyes were softly appraising. “So if it’s all right, Mr. Hank, we’re just going to run a few simple tests.”

He said nothing.

“We’ll be done before you know it,” she said, “and you can get on with your afternoon.”

“I hope so,” he answered gruffly, wondering in the same breath how many times he had met this woman. How long had she even been working here? A month… a year…

“Mr. Hank? May we proceed?”

He curled his lip and folded his arms across his chest. “Get on with it.”

She reached into her leather satchel, drew out three cards, and laid them on the coffee table.

“Now, Mr. Hank, each card has a word printed on it.”

“I have eyes.”

“Can you please read the words for me? Left to right.”

“Banana. Triangle. Six.”

“And again?”

“Oh, for… Banana. Triangle. Six.”

“Very good,” she said, sweeping the cards back into the bag.

“That wasn’t so hard,” he muttered.

“No, it wasn’t. Now in a few minutes I’m going to ask you to repeat them back to me, all right?”

“Fine.”

Quickly and with minimum fuss, she took out a clipboard, lined with gridded paper, and uncapped a ballpoint pen.

“Mr. Hank, can you tell me what day it is today?”

“What do you mean, day?”

“Day of the week.”

Normally the question would have panicked him, but it so happened that the smell of corned beef was still on his skin, and from there the inferential chain was startling in its efficiency. Corned beef was boiled beef. Boiled beef was boiled food. Boiled food was…

“Friday!”

He spit the word out with such force she actually drew back an inch. But the look of self-possession never wavered.

“That’s correct. Now maybe you can tell me the date.”

“Maybe I can.”

“As in month and date.”

“Let me think about that and get back to you.”

“Okay.”

Her hand sloped across the clipboard, leaving a trail of words in its wake.

“Do we do this every month?” he asked.

“Yes indeed.”

“So the next time you come… that’ll be Friday.”

Pathetic, he knew. Clinging to his sole triumph.

“I’ll be back on the twenty-fifth,” she said. “Which will beee…” Her fingers once more set to dancing across her phone screen. “Sunday. But I take your point, Mr. Hank. Hey, can you tell me the name of our president?”

He blinked at her. “President?”

“Yes.”

“Of what?”

“The United States.”

“Ohh…” His mouth contracted to a point. “So many to choose from. I mean, there was Nixon and Reagan. Kennedy.”

“That’s true.”

“What’s to separate one from the other? They’re all crooks.”

The tiniest flutter on Dr. Landis’s lips. “But only one of those crooks is currently our president.”

“Well, you can…” His hands made a shooing motion. “You can take the whole lot, for all I care. And don’t even ask me who my congressman is. I haven’t voted in ten years. Bunch of shysters.”

Dr. Landis’s pen hovered gently over the paper.

“What state do you live in, Mr. Hank?”

“Virginia.”

“What town?”

“Falls Church.”

“I believe that’s where you last lived.”

“They may be calling it something else. I still call it Falls Church.”

She contemplated him for a brief time, then set her pen down.

“Now, Mr. Hank. Just a few minutes ago I showed you three words. Can you tell me what they were?”

“Three words,” he said noncommittally.

“That’s right.”

“I’m sure you said a lot more than three words.”

“I didn’t say them, Mr. Hank. I showed them to you.”

“Sure you did.”

“I’ll give you the first word. It’s banana.”

“Banana,” he said. “That’s ridiculous. Why would you… there’s not a banana in sight.”

“I didn’t show you an actual banana. I just showed you the word.”

“Well, what good is a word if it—if it doesn’t have a thing attached to it? That’s just crazy talk.”

He felt her dry, light, unsurprisable gaze. “The next word was triangle,” she said.

“Well, I mean, these are not words I use in daily conversation. I mean, I don’t eat bananas. I don’t… I don’t come into contact with triangles. I mean, if you’d said rectangles…”

He was conscious that every word that came out of his mouth dug him in deeper. Yet wouldn’t silence do the same? His hands, for want of instruction, began to rake the arms of his chair, leaving little furrows in the corduroy.

“I’m kind of tired, you must know.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are, Mr. Hank, and I do appreciate how hard you’ve been working. I just had one last question for you.”

“Make it quick.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“My…” His breath lodged just shy of his larynx. “My wife.”

“That’s right.”

His hands spidered around his knees.

Very deliberately now, he angled his eyes away from her.

“Take your time,” she said.

“I don’t need to. I don’t need to take my time. Asking me about my wife. That’s goddamn rude is what it is. Why don’t I ask you about your husband?”

“I’m not married, Mr. Hank.”

“Well, there you are,” he said, with an air of finality.

The silence fastened around them now like manacles.

“I know the name of my wife,” he said. “I just don’t care to share it with you.”

“Do you know if she’s alive or dead, Mr. Hank?”

“Well, she’s not here, is she?”

That much he was sure of. If she were here, she’d be here, in this fifteen-by-fifteen square. But no matter where his eyes darted, there was no sign of another. He interrogated the remote control resting by his foot. The pair of reading glasses, slightly bent, on the bedside table. The row of tan Sansabelt slacks hanging in his closet. Over by the door, the pair of galoshes that sat waiting for him day after day (though he rarely went outside and never in the rain). Each object irretrievably and ruinously his.

Hank palmed his eyes shut. He thought, If I concentrate hard enough, I can make this woman go away. I can make this whole thing stop. I can…

“Silly me!”

Her voice in that moment was so different from what it had been—so sweet and disarming—that his eyes immediately sprang open, as if seeking reprieve. And there she was, smiling as sweetly as any woman had ever smiled.

“You didn’t get a fighting chance, Mr. Hank.”

“How… how’s that?”

“You didn’t take your meds.”

Instinctively his gaze swerved back to the medication dispenser on the coffee table. There, in Friday’s chamber, lay the usual troika: white, yellow, and blue. Untouched. Unconsumed.

“Well, Christ!” he shouted. “I could’ve told you that!”

Before she could stop him, he snatched the pills and dry-swallowed them. “There!” he cried, shoving the container away.

Dr. Landis had already averted her eyes, as if he had just started to undress himself. She was still looking away when she said, “Why don’t we give it a few minutes to kick in?”

“Why the hell not?”

Here, he decided, was one benefit of getting old. You weren’t obliged to make conversation. You could just sit in silence. Indeed, as the minutes passed, the only sound was the pattering of his Timex quartz on the bathroom washbasin. (Why hadn’t he worn it?) If anything, it was the light that was making noise. Bright one moment, gray the next. He could’ve sworn he was nodding off, but every time he looked over at Dr. Landis, she was exactly as he had left her, patient and abiding.

“You don’t remember me,” she said at last.

“Sure I do.”

“Then you remember what we talked about. The last time we talked.”

“Naturally.”

“Then you won’t be surprised to learn how sorry I am.”

His confusion registered now as a dull ache, rising up from his extremities and gathering in the joints.

“What’ve you got to be sorry for?” he demanded. “I’m the one ought to be—”

“When it comes to this part,” she said, “I’m always sorry.”

There was, in fact, a new warmth in her hazel eyes. A warmth too in her white hand, pressing on his.

“We only have a few minutes,” she said.

For what? he was going to ask, but she was speeding straight on.

“Now if you promise not to get up or cry out, I’m going to show you a piece of paper. Is that all right with you?”

“Like I’ve got a choice,” he grumbled.

“It’s a piece of writing, okay?”

She drew out a sheet of taupe stationery, folded in half. With soft fingers, she spread it out on the coffee table.

“Hank, I’m going to ask if you recognize the handwriting.”

But he misunderstood. He thought she was asking if he knew how to read. As if he could forget that! D. E. A. R. Dear. H. A. N. K. Hank. Dear Hank.

Why, it was a letter to him. Of course it was.

“You should keep reading,” she said.

This is you talking, Hank. YOU.

He frowned down at the words. Noted the strange curlicue of the h, the heavy dot over the i, the rather showy underswoop of the y. It was his own cursive, staring back at him.

“This… this doesn’t…”

But as his fingers glided across the page, he realized they were moving in perfect synchronicity with each letter. Forming each word as it came.

With an inrush of air, he heaved his head back up. “I don’t…”

“Keep reading, Mr. Hank.”

Kids. Kids…

Stop reading, he told himself. Stop.

But his eyes, without his volition, kept scanning, and his brain, that fevered contraption, kept interpreting, and the words rolled on… .

His breath was growing ragged now as he raised his eyes to the woman on his bed.

“You… you don’t work here at all.”

She smiled softly, shook her head. “I work for an organization called Timely Endings. You don’t remember, but you contacted us two years ago.”

“But… but who gave you this letter? Who told you to—”

She pointed to the bottom of the page. There, like some childish prank, lay his own name, in his own hand.

As real as anything could be. So real that everything around him grew more preposterous the more he contemplated it. Corned beef and Mrs. Sylvia and Stewart Granger. Bingo Night and hair styling with Miss Desdemona. The cord that bound him to Morning Has Broken, to waking and sleeping, had without another thought been severed. There was nothing to do now but drift.

From somewhere in the slipstream he could hear Dr. Landis’s not-unsympathetic voice. (“We always make sure our clients write their own letters in advance. Just so they know it was their idea. It’s always their idea.”) He could see—just barely see—her soft white hands refolding the stationery, returning it to her leather satchel. (“Your account is paid in full, and there won’t be any problem with medical examiners.”) He could feel the air vibrating around her slender alabaster form as it rose. (“And of course your children will know nothing. We are the soul of discretion.”) For a time she seemed to be floating away with the rest of his world, until suddenly, shockingly, she was kneeling beside him.

“Hank,” she whispered. “This is what you wanted. When you still knew what you wanted.”

“I didn’t… I didn’t…”

I didn’t want this.

But what was this? What was not this? There was no way of separating one from the other.

“It’s all right,” she said, her breath stirring against his cheek. “I’ll stay with you.”

In that moment, how beautiful she loomed (though he could no longer see her, though he had forgotten her name). Her creamy white hands, pressed snugly over his. Her face, soft and plangent, parting now before another face. A face he recognized from the moment he saw it… parting now by the tiniest of fractions to emit a name…

Celia.

Dear God, it had been there all along. Her name. And with it a whole caravan of sensory data. A smell of sage. A crimson mouth. A drily tickled voice. Hair feathered across a pillow.

Celia. Celia.

If he could just speak it, he might yet stay tethered to the here and now. He might buy himself another month, another year. But his tongue had thickened into a slab, and his throat had dried to flint, and his lungs were crouching like beggars over their last remnants of air. So that when the end came for Mr. Hank Crute, his wife’s name was nothing more than soundless drops, bathing his stilled brain.

“What’s the Y stand for?”

We were staring at the package on Fender’s glass coffee table, a quart-sized zip-lock bag full of gray-white powder. It looked like cocaine cut with fireplace ashes. There was a red sticker on the package with a black Y scrawled with a Sharpie.

“I’m not sure,” Fender said. “That’s just the street name.”

Fender said it was the newest thing in Asia, some kind of opiate mixed with cocaine alkaloid and crushed dinosaur bones. Not just any dinosaur—one specific skeleton that was stolen from a Hong Kong museum. Fender couldn’t remember the name of it. He said it was supposed to be like China’s version of the Allosaurus, but I didn’t know what the fuck that was either.

Because Y came from only one skeleton, that meant it was just short of impossible to get. Which is what made it attractive to Fender—who was a collector as much as he was a dealer.

“Have you tried it yet?” I said, but I could tell from the package that he hadn’t touched it.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m a businessman. Each snort is probably worth ten grand. But I am curious,” he added.

Fender and I were sitting in the living room of his spacious penthouse apartment. He had a nice view of Lake Erie out his window. The sky was overcast, the water gray.

Collector guitars decorated the walls of Fender’s apartment. An acoustic guitar reputedly owned by Johnny Cash. An electric from Eddie Van Halen. One with burn marks on it that was supposedly from that Great White concert where the pyrotechnics got out of control and killed a bunch of people.

Fender once joked that it was hard to know what was more valuable in this apartment, the guitars or the drugs. But I was as skeptical of the stories about the guitars as I was about the origins of Y.

We shared a joint and each had a bottle of beer, and talked about whether we thought the dinosaur-bone story had any truth to it. Fender said he believed there were real dinosaur bones in there—that much was probably true—but he doubted they contributed to the high.

“It’s like a rhinoceros horn,” he said. “People think it contains magical qualities, but that’s all bullshit. The real rush is that you’re snorting something rare. Exotic. We’re talking about a supply so finite that it’s practically nonexistent.”

Fender was wearing a silk robe with silly leather slippers, and his shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a ponytail. He had a soul patch and hoop earrings and looked quite a bit different from the kid I shared a room with when we were freshmen in college.

I told him I didn’t think the drug was going to go over well here. This was America. People here didn’t believe in that crap about rhinoceros horns, and they wouldn’t buy any mumbo-jumbo about mystical dinosaur-bone dust.

“I already got a buyer lined up,” he said. “We’re just haggling over price.”

“Speaking of buying things, I need to get a move on.”

He took me back to his study and unlocked the safe. I turned away so I wouldn’t see the combination. It made me uncomfortable how leisurely he was about opening it in front of me. Did that mean he was like that with other people? I hoped not.

The safe was the size of a small refrigerator. A series of shelves lined the left side, some stacked with cash, others with every kind of drug you could think of. On the right side were guns: a shotgun, some kind of military rifle, a handgun. There was also a pearl-handled switchblade, which I’d seen Fender open lots of bags of drugs with.

Fender reached in and brought out a brick of marijuana.

I handed him a stack of bills.

I shoved the marijuana into my knapsack, and we headed back to the living room.

I excused myself to his restroom before I left. When I came back, Fender and my backpack were sitting on the couch, but the bag of Y was gone.

“Why isn’t there a Chinese symbol on the package instead of a Y?” I said.

At the bar I managed, I used rat poison that was from China—poison that I’m sure was illegal as hell here in the U.S.—and there were Chinese symbols all over the packaging. I would think that whether Y was the real thing or someone was just pretending it was an exotic Chinese drug, either way it would make sense to use a Chinese character instead of an English letter.

“Beats me, man. Maybe they’re trying to Americanize it.”

I smirked at Fender and shook my head.

“I think you’ve been had,” I said. “Someone cremated a fucking dog and put it in a bag and you just paid God knows what for it.”

“Ye of little faith,” Fender said, clapping me on the back.

He opened the six deadbolts on his door, led me into the foyer, and opened the six deadbolts on the exterior door.

“See you,” he said.

“Wouldn’t want to be you,” I said.

“Bullshit,” he said, just like every time we said goodbye. “You wish like hell you were me.”

What he couldn’t have imagined, even in his bleakest assessments of the future, was the boredom. He’d sat there in the hospital while Jan lay dying, holding her hand after each of the increasingly desperate procedures that had left her bald and emaciated and looking like no one he’d ever known, thinking only of the bagel with cream cheese he’d have for dinner and the identical one he’d have for breakfast in the morning. If he allowed himself to think beyond that, it was only of the empty space in the bed beside him and of the practical concerns that kept everything else at bay: the estate, the funeral, the cemetery, the first shovel of dirt ringing on the lid of the coffin, closure. There was his daughter, but she had no more experience of this kind of free fall than he, and she had her own life and her own problems all the way across the country in New York, which was where she retreated after the funeral. A grief counselor came to the house and murmured in his direction for an hour or two, people sent him cards, books, and newspaper clippings in a great rolling wave that broke over him and as quickly receded, but nobody addressed the boredom.

He got up at first light, as he always had. The house was silent. He dressed, ate, washed up. Then he sat down with a book or the newspaper, but his powers of concentration weren’t what they once were, and he wound up staring at the walls. The walls just stood there. No dog barked, there was no sound of cars from the street—even the leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom seemed to have fixed itself. He could have taken up golf, he supposed, but he hated golf. He could have played cards or gone down to the senior center, but he hated cards and he hated seniors, especially the old ladies, who came at you in a gabbling flock and couldn’t begin to replace Jan anyway, not if there were ten thousand of them. The only time he was truly happy was when he was asleep, and even that was denied him half the time.

The walls just stood there. No dog barked. The water didn’t even drip.

The letter came out of nowhere, a thin sheet of paper in a standard envelope that bore a foreign stamp (England: Queen Elizabeth in brownish silhouette). It was buried in the usual avalanche of flyers, free offers, and coupons, and he very nearly tossed it in the recycling bin along with all the rest, but it was his luck that at the last minute it slipped free and drifted in a graceful fluttering arc to the pavement at his feet. He bent for it, noticing that it was addressed to him, using his full name—Mason Kenneth Alimonti—and that the return address was of a bank in London. Curious, he wedged the sheaf of ads under one arm and pried open the envelope right there in the driveway while the sun beat at the back of his neck and people drifted by like ghosts out on the street.

Dear Mr. Alimonti, the letter began, kindly accept my sincere apologies for contacting you out of the blue like this, but something very urgent and important has come to our notice and we seek your consent for the mutual interest of all.

His first thought was that this had something to do with the estate, with Jan’s death, more paperwork, more hassle, as if they couldn’t leave well enough alone, and he glanced up a moment, distracted. Suddenly—and this was odd, maybe even a portent of some sort—the morning seemed to buzz to life, each sound coming to him separately and yet blending in a whole, from the chittering of a squirrel in the branches overhead to a snatch of a child’s laughter and the squall of a radio dopplering through the open window of a passing car. And more: every blade of grass, every leaf shone as if the color green had been created anew.

The letter was in his hand still, the junk mail still tucked under one arm. When Jan was alive, he’d bring the mail in to her where she’d be sitting at the kitchen table with her coffee and a book of crosswords, and now he was standing there motionless in his own driveway, hearing things, seeing things—and smelling things too, the grass, jasmine, a whiff of gasoline from the mower that suddenly started up next door. I am Graham Shovelin, the letter went on, Operations & IT director, Yorkshire Bank PLC, and personal funds manager to the late Mr. Jing J. Kim, an American citizen. He died recently, along with his wife and only son, while holidaying in Kuala Lumpur, and was flown back to England for burial. In our last auditing, we discovered a dormant account of his with £38,886,000 in his name.

This is a story, he was thinking, a made-up story, and what did it have to do with him? Still, and though he didn’t have his glasses with him so that the letters seemed to bloat and fade on the page before him, he read on as if he couldn’t help himself: During our investigations, we discovered that he nominated his son as his next of kin. All efforts to trace his other relations have proved impossible. The account has been dormant for some time since his death. Therefore, we decided to contact you as an American citizen, to seek your consent to enable us to nominate you as the next of kin to the deceased and transfer the funds to you as the designated heir to the deceased.

There was more—a proposed split of the proceeds, 60 percent for him, 38 percent for the bank, 2 percent to be set aside for expenses both parties might incur (if any) during the transaction. At the bottom of the page was a phone number and a request to contact the bank if the abovementioned transaction should be of interest, with a final admonition: Please also contact me if you object to this proposal. Object? Who could object? He did a quick calculation in his head, still good with numbers though he’d been retired from the college for fifteen years now: 60 percent of 38,886,000 was 23 million and something. Pounds, that is. And what was the conversion rate, one point two or three to the dollar?

It was a lot of money. Which he didn’t need, or not desperately anyway, not the way most people needed it. While it was a sad fact that the bulk of what he’d set aside for retirement had been swallowed up in treatments for Jan the insurers had labeled “experimental” and thus nonreimbursable, he still had enough left, what with Social Security and his 401(k), to live at least modestly for as long as he lasted. This offer, this letter that had him standing stock-still in his own driveway as if he’d lost his bearings like half the other old men in the world, was too good to be true, he knew that. Or he felt it anyway.

But still. Thirty million dollars, give or take. Certainly there were places he’d like to visit—Iceland, for one, the Galápagos, for another—and it would be nice to leave his daughter and his grandson something more than a mortgaged house, funeral expenses, and a stack of bills. There were stranger things in this world—people won the lottery, got grants, prizes, estates went unclaimed all over the place, and it wasn’t as if he was desperate. A voice warned him against it, but what did he have to lose? The cost of a phone call?

The phone picked up on the third ring, and the first thing he heard was music, a soft trickle of music that was neither classical nor pop but something in between, and for a moment he thought he was being put on hold before the music cut off abruptly and a deep crisp voice—so deep it surprised him—swelled inside the receiver. “Yorkshire Bank, PLC, Graham Shovelin speaking. How may I help you?”

He’d rehearsed a little speech in his head, along the lines of establishing his authority as the person solicited rather than soliciting, but it deserted him now. “Um, I,” he stuttered, “I, uh, received your letter?”

There was the faintest tick of hesitation, and then the voice came back at him, so deep he couldn’t help thinking of Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River” on one of the old ’78s his grandmother used to play for him when he was a boy. “Oh, yes, of course—delighted to hear from you. We have your number here on the computer screen, and it matches our records… Still, one can never be too careful. Would you be so kind as to identify yourself, please?”

“Mason Alimonti?”

“Mason Kenneth Alimonti?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, well, wonderful. We’ll need verification of your identity before we can proceed, of course, but for the moment, since we’re just beginning to get acquainted, I am satisfied. Now, what do you think of our proposal?”

He was in the living room, sitting in the armchair under the reading lamp, using the old landline phone his daughter told him he ought to give up since the cell was all anybody needed these days and she really didn’t know anyone, not a single soul, who still paid for a landline. But for something like this—an overseas call—he somehow felt better relying on the instrument he’d been using for thirty years and more. “I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds too good to be true—”

The man on the other end of the line let out a booming laugh, a laugh that scraped bottom and then sailed all the way up into the high register, a good-natured laugh, delighted, a laugh of assurance and joy that proclaimed all was right with the world. “Well, of course, it is,” the man boomed, and here came the laugh again. “But sometimes we just have to accept the fact that luck has come our way—and be grateful, Mr. Alimonti, kick up our heels and embrace what life brings us, don’t you think?”

For a moment he was confused. He felt as if he’d gone out of his body, everything before him—the loveseat, the houseplants, the blank TV screen—shifting on him so that it all seemed to be floating in air. The phone was in his hand. He was having a conversation. Somebody—the man on the other end of the line—wanted something from him.

“Mr. Alimonti—you there?”

“Yes,” he heard himself say. There was something odd about the man’s accent—it was British, proper British, Masterpiece Theatre British, but the syntax was off somehow. Or the rhythm, maybe it was the rhythm. “Why me?” he asked suddenly.

Another laugh, not quite so deep or pleased with itself as the last. “Because you’ve lived an unimpeachable life, because you pay your debts and you’re as solid an American citizen as anyone could ever hope to find. Oh, rest assured we’ve vetted you thoroughly—as we have each of the nine other final candidates.”

Nine other candidates? The receiver went heavy in his hand—molded plastic, but it might as well have been cast of iron.

“Am I hearing surprise on your end of the line, Mr. Alimonti? Of course, you understand, we must protect ourselves, in the event that our first choice doesn’t wish to accept our offer for any reason—and I can’t really imagine that happening, can you?—but as you are the first on our list, the single most qualified individual we’ve examined to date, we have to say—I have to say—that we are delighted you’ve contacted us ahead of any of the others.”

He felt a wave of relief sweep over him. The phone was just a phone again. He said, “What next?”

“Next?” the voice echoed. “Well, obviously we have to make certain that you’re the man for us—and that we’re the men for you too. Do you have any question about the figures I presented in my letter to you? You agree that a sixty/thirty-eight percent split is equable? You’re content with that?”

He said nothing. He was back in himself, back in the moment, but he didn’t know what to say—did the man want him to negotiate, to quibble over the way the money would be split?

“Again, let me anticipate you, Mr. Alimonti. You are wondering, no doubt, what’s in it for us.” The laugh again, but truncated now, all business. “Self-interest, pure and simple. If this account has not been claimed within a five-year period, the whole of it goes to the government and we receive nothing, though we’ve been the guardians of the late Mr. Kim’s fortune for a quarter century now. We need you, Mr. Alimonti, and that is the bottom line. We need an American citizen in good standing, with an unblemished record and absolute probity, to be the designee for your fellow American, Mr. Kim.” A pause. “Otherwise, none of us receives a shilling.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Oh, nothing really, not for the moment. We’ll need banking information, of course, in order to transfer the funds, and our solicitors will have to draw up a contract so as to be sure there are no misunderstandings, but all that can come in time—the only question now is, are you with us? Can we count on you? Can I hang up this phone and check the other nine names off my list?”

His heart was pounding in his chest, the way it did when he overexerted himself. His mouth was dry. The world seemed to be tipping under his feet, sliding away from him. Thirty million dollars. “Can I have some time to think it over?”

“Sadly, we have but two weeks before the government accounting office swoops in to confiscate this account—and you know how they are, the government, no different, I suppose than in your country, eh? A belly that’s never full. Of course you can think it over, but for your sake—and mine—think quickly, Mr. Alimonti, think quickly.”

The rest of the day he really couldn’t do much more than sit—first in the armchair and then out on the deck in one of the twin recliners there—his mind working at double speed. He couldn’t stop thinking about England, a country he’d visited only once, when he was in his twenties, along with Jan, in the year between grad school and the start of his first job, his daughter not yet even a speck on the horizon. They’d gone to Scotland too, to Edinburgh and where was it? Glasgow. He remembered he took to calling Jan “lassie,” just for the fun of it, and how one day, leaving a fish and chips shop, she’d got ahead of him on the street and he cried out, “Wait up, lassie,” and every woman’s head turned. That was England. Or Scotland, anyway. Same difference. And they had banks there, of course they did, London the banking capital of Europe, though he couldn’t remember actually having gone into one. He closed his eyes. Saw some sort of proud antique building, old, very old, with pillars and marble floors, brass fixtures, an elaborate worked-iron grate between customers and tellers, but here again, he realized, he was bringing up an image from one BBC drama or another, and what was that one called where they showed the lives not only of the lords and ladies but of the servants too? That had been Jan’s favorite. She’d watch the episodes over and over, and sometimes, at breakfast, she’d address him as “my lord” and put on a fake accent. For the fun of it.

Yes, sure. And where was the fun in life now?

At some point, when the shadows began to thicken in the trees, he went into the house and clicked on the TV—sports, a blur of action, a ball sailing high against a sky crippled with the onset of night—but he couldn’t concentrate on it, and really, what did it matter who won? Somebody had won before and somebody had lost and it would happen again. And again. Unless there was a tie—were there ties in baseball? He couldn’t remember. He thought so. In fact, he distinctly remembered a tie once, but maybe that was only an exhibition game… or an all-star game, wasn’t that it?

It was past eight by the time he remembered he ought to eat something, and he went to the refrigerator, extracted the stained pot there, and ladled out half a bowl of the vegetable-beef stew he’d made last week—or maybe it was the week before. No matter: he’d been rigorous about keeping it refrigerated, and in any case the microwave would kill anything, bacterial or otherwise, that might have tried to gain a foothold in the depths of the pot. The important thing was not to waste anything in a world of waste. He poured himself a glass of milk, scraped two suspicious spots from a slice of sourdough bread and put it in the toaster, then sat down to eat.

The walls just stood there. But the silence gave way to a sound from the other room, where the TV was, a long drawn-out cheer and the voice of an announcer unleashing his enthusiasm on the drama of the moment, and that was something at least. What was the time difference between here and England? Eight hours? Nine? Whatever it was, it was too early there to call yet. He was thinking he might like to endow a fellowship in Jan’s name at the college—maybe in the art department; she’d always liked art—and if he gave enough they’d install a plaque, maybe even name a building after her. Or a wing. A wing at least. Maybe that was more practical, really. He saw her face then, not as it was in those last months, but her real face, her true face, fleshed out and beautiful even into her seventies, and he pushed himself up from the table, scraped his bowl over the trash can, and set it on the rack in the dishwasher, decided now, his mind clear, really clear, for the first time all day.

In the morning, after breakfast (no rush—he wouldn’t want to come across as overeager), he would settle himself in the armchair, pick up the phone, and make the call.

Of all days, this was the one he wound up oversleeping, so that it was past eight by the time he sat down with his morning coffee and punched in the bank’s number with a forefinger that didn’t seem to want to steady itself, as if this wasn’t his finger at all but some stranger’s that had been grafted on in the middle of the night. This time there was no music and the phone picked up on the first ring. He was all set to tell Mr. Shovelin—Graham, can I call you Graham?—that he’d found his man, that they’d grow rich together, though of course, as a bank employee, he didn’t imagine that Mr. Shovelin would actually get any of the money, but a bonus maybe, there had to be that possibility, didn’t there? Imagine his surprise then when it wasn’t Shovelin, with his rich booming basso, who answered the phone, but a woman. “Yorkshire Bank, PLC, Chevette Afunu-Jones speaking,” she said in a thin weary voice. “How may I help you?”

Again he drew a blank. This whole business made him nervous. The phone made him nervous. London made him nervous. “I was,” he began, “I mean, I wanted to—is Mr. Shovelin there?”

A pause, the sound of a keyboard softly clicking. “Oh, Mr. Alimonti, forgive me,” she said, her voice warming till you could have spread it on toast. “Mr. Shovelin, whom I am sorry to say is away from his desk at the moment, instructed me to anticipate your call. And let me say, from all the good things he’s had to say about you, it is a real pleasure to hear your voice.”

He didn’t quite know how to respond to this, so he simply murmured, “Thank you,” and left it at that. There was another pause, as if she were waiting for him to go on. “When do you expect him back?” he asked. “Because—well, it’s urgent, you know? I have some news for him?”

“Well, I can only hope it’s the good news all of us on Mr. Shovelin’s staff have been waiting to hear,” she said, her voice deepening, opening out to him in invitation. “Rest assured that Mr. Shovelin has given me full details and, in my capacity as his executive secretary, the authority to act on his behalf, though he’s—well, he’s indisposed today, poor man, and you can’t begin to imagine what he’s had to go through.” Here she dropped her voice to a whisper: “Cancer.”

This hit him like a blow out of nowhere. Jan’s face was right there, hovering over him. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

“Believe me, the man is a lion, and he will fight this thing the way he has fought all his life—and when he returns from his treatment this afternoon, I know he will be lifted up by your good news, buoyed, that is…” Her voice had grown tearful. “I can’t tell you how much he respects you,” she whispered.

What he heard, though he wasn’t really listening on an intuitive level, was an odd similarity to the accent or emphasis or whatever it was he’d detected in Shovelin’s speech, and he wondered if somehow the two were related, not that it mattered, really, so long as they stayed the course and checked those other nine names off the list. He said, “Please tell him from me that I hope he’s feeling better and, well, that I’ve decided to take him up on his offer—”

She clapped her hands together, one quick celebratory clap that reverberated through the phone like the cymbal that strikes up the band, before her voice was in his ear again: “Oh, I can’t tell you how much this will mean to him, how much it means to us all here at the Yorkshire Bank PLC… Mr. Alimonti, you are a savior, you really are.”

He was trying to picture her, this British woman all the way across the country and the sea too, a young woman by the sound of her voice, youngish anyway, and he saw her in business dress, with stockings and heels and legs as finely shaped as an athlete’s. She was a runner, not simply a jogger but a runner, and he saw her pumping her arms and dashing through what, Hyde Park?, in the dewy mornings before coming to work with her high heels tucked in her purse. He felt warm. He felt good. He felt as if things were changing for the better.

“Now, Mr. Alimonti,” she said, her voice low, almost a purr, “what we need you to do is this, just to get the ball rolling—officially, you understand?”

“Yes?”

“We will need your banking information so that we can begin transferring the funds—or at least cutting you a preliminary check—before the Royal Fiduciary Bureau for Unclaimed Accounts moves on this.”

“But, but,” he stammered, “what about the contract we were supposed to—?”

“Oh, don’t you worry, darling—may I call you darling? Because you are, you really are darling—”

He gave a kind of shrug of assent, but nothing came out of his mouth.

“Don’t you worry,” she repeated. “Mr. Shovelin will take care of that.”

Once the banking details were in place (within three working days, and he had to hand it to Shovelin for pulling strings and expediting things), he received his first disbursement check from the dormant account. It was in the amount of $20,000, and it came special delivery with a note from Shovelin, who called it “earnest money” and asked him to hold off for two weeks before depositing it in the new account, “because of red tape on this end, which is regrettable, but a simple fact of doing business in a banking arena as complex as this.” The check was drawn on the Yorkshire Bank PLC, it bore the signature of Graham Shovelin, Operations Director, and it was printed on the sort of fine, high-grade paper you associated with stock certificates. When it came, when the doorbell rang and the mailman handed him the envelope, Mason accepted it with trembling hands, and for the longest time he just sat there in his armchair, admiring it. He was sitting down, yes, but inside he was doing cartwheels. This was the real deal. He was rich. The first thing he was going to do—and the idea came to him right then and there—was help out his daughter. Angelica, divorced two years now, with a son in high school and barely scraping by, was the pastry chef at a tony restaurant in Rye, New York; her dream was to open her own place on her own terms, with her own cuisine, and now he was going to be able to make it happen for her. Maybe she’d even name it after him. Mason’s. That had a certain ring to it, didn’t it?

That evening, just as he was ladling out his nightly bowl of stew, the phone rang. It was Shovelin, sounding none the worse for wear. “Mason?” he boomed. “May I call you Mason, that is, considering that we are now business partners?”

“Yes, yes, of course.” He found that he was smiling. Alone there in his deserted house where the silence reigned supreme, he was smiling.

“Good, good, and please call me Graham… Now, the reason I’m calling is I want to know if you’ve received the disbursement.”

“I have, yes, and thank you very much for that, but how are you? Your health, I mean? Because I know how hard it can be—I went through the same thing with Jan, with my wife…”

The voice on the other end seemed to deflate. “My health?”

“I’m sorry, I really don’t want to stick my nose in, but your secretary told me you were, well, undergoing treatment?”

“Oh, that, yes. Very unfortunate. And I do wish she hadn’t confided in you—but I assure you it won’t affect our business relationship, not a whit, so don’t you worry.” There was a long pause. “Kidney,” Shovelin said, his voice a murmur now. “Metastatic. They’re giving me six months—”

“Six months?”

“Unless—well, unless I can qualify for an experimental treatment the insurance won’t even begin to cover, which my physician tells me is almost a miracle, with something like a ninety percent remission rate… but really, forgive me, Mason—I didn’t call you all the way from England to talk about my health problems. I’m a banker—and we have a transaction to discuss.”

He didn’t respond, but he was thinking of Jan, of course he was, because how can anybody—insurers, doctors, hospitals—put a price on the life of a human being?

“What I need you to do, Mason—Mason, are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Good. I need you to deposit twenty thousand dollars American in the account we’ve opened up at your bank, so as to cover the funds I’ve transferred to you until they clear. You see, I will need access to those funds in order to grease certain palms in the Royal Fiduciary Bureau—you have this expression, do you not? Greasing palms?”

“I don’t—I mean, I’ll have to make a withdrawal from my retirement, which might take a few days—”

“A few days?” Shovelin threw back at him in a tone of disbelief. “Don’t you appreciate that time is of the essence here? Everyone in this world, sadly enough, is not as upright as you and I. I’m talking about graft, Mason, graft at the highest levels of government bureaucracy. We must grease the palms—or the wheels, isn’t that how you say it?—to make certain that there are no hitches with the full disbursement of the funds.”

There was a silence. He could hear the uncertain wash of the connection, as of the sea probing the shore. England was a long way off. “Okay,” he heard himself say into the void.

But it wasn’t a void: Shovelin was there still. “There are too few men of honor in this world,” he said ruefully. “Do you know what they say of me in the banking industry? ‘Shovelin’s word is his honor and his honor is his word.’” He let out a sigh. “I only wish it were true for the unscrupulous bureaucrats we’re dealing with here. The palm greasers.” He let out a chuckle, deep and rolling and self-amused. “Or, to be more precise, the greasees.”

Two weeks later he was on the phone again, and if he was upset, he couldn’t help himself.

“Yes, yes,” Shovelin said dismissively. “I understand your concern, but let me assure you, Mason, we are on top of this matter.”

“But the people at my bank? The Bank of America? They say there’s a problem with the check—”

“A small matter. All I can say is that it’s a good thing we used this as a test case, because think of the mess we’d be in if we’d deposited the whole sum of $30,558,780, which, by the way, is what our accountants have determined your share to be, exclusive of fees. If any.”

He was seeing the scene at the bank all over again, the cold look of the teller, who seemed to think he was some sort of flimflam man—or worse, senile, useless, old. They’d sat him down at the desk of the bank manager, a full-figured young woman with plump butterfly lips and a pair of black eyes that bored right into you, and she’d explained that the check had been drawn on insufficient funds and was in effect worthless. Embarrassed—worse, humiliated—he’d shuffled out into the sunlight blinking as if he’d been locked up in a cave all this time.

“But what am I supposed to do?”

“Just what you—and I, and Miss Afunu-Jones—have been doing: exerting a little control, a little patience, Mason. The fact is, I am going to have to ask you to make another deposit. There is one man at the RFB standing in our way, a scoundrel, really—and I’ll name him, why not? Richard Hyde-Jeffers. One of those men born with the gold spoon in his mouth but who is always greedy for more, as if that were the only subject they tutored him in at Oxford: greed.”

“He wants a bribe?”

“Exactly.”

“How much?’

“He wants twenty thousand more. Outrageous, I know. But you’ve—we’ve—already invested twenty thousand in him, the greedy pig, and we wouldn’t want to see that go down the drain—do you use that expression, ‘down the drain’?—or watch the deal of a lifetime wither on the vine right in front of our eyes.”

Shovelin was silent a moment, allowing him to process all this. Which, he had to admit, was difficult, increasingly difficult. Nothing was as it seemed. The house slipped away from him again, everything in motion, as if an earthquake had struck. Spots drifted before his eyes. The phone was cast of iron.

“I promise you,” Shovelin said, his voice gone deeper yet in a sort of croon, “as I live and breathe, this will be the end of it.”

He’d never been comfortable in the air, never liked the feeling of helplessness and mortal peril that came over him as the great metallic cage lifted off the tarmac and hurtled into the atmosphere, and over the years he’d made a point of flying as little as possible. His most memorable—and relaxing—vacations had been motor trips he and Jan had taken, usually to one national park or the other or just exploring little out-of-the way towns in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia. The last flight he’d been on—to Hawaii, with Jan, to celebrate their golden anniversary, or was it the silver?—had been nightmarishly bumpy, so much so he’d thought at one point the plane was going down and he’d wound up, embarrassingly, having to use the air-sickness bag. He couldn’t help thinking about that as he found his way down the crowded aisle to his seat in economy, both his knees throbbing from his descent down the jetbridge and his lower back burning from the effort of lugging his oversized suitcase, which he’d randomly stuffed with far too many clothes and even an extra pair of shoes, though he was only staying two nights in London. At the expense—and insistence—of Yorkshire Bank PLC.

In the four months that had dragged by since he’d first received the letter, his expenses had mounted to the point at which he’d begun to question the whole business. That little voice again. It nagged him, told him he was a fool, being taken, and yet every time he protested, Graham—or sometimes Chevette—telephoned to mollify him. Yes, there was graft, and yes, part of the problem was Graham’s health, which had kept him out of the office at crucial junctures in the negotiations with Mr. Hyde-Jeffers of the Royal Fiduciary Bureau, but he needed to have faith, not simply in the Yorkshire Bank PLC but in Graham Shovelin’s word, which was his honor, as his honor was his word. Still, Mason had posted funds for fees, bribes, something Chevette called “vigorish,” and beyond that to help defray Graham’s medical expenses and even, once, to underwrite a graduation party for Chevette’s niece, Evangeline, whose father had been run over by a bus and tragically killed the very week of his daughter’s graduation (Mason had been presented with an itemized bill for the gown, corsage, limousine, and dinner at a Moroccan restaurant that had cost a staggering $1500). All to be reimbursed, of course, once the funds were released.

It was Graham who’d suggested he come to London to see for himself “how the land lies,” as he put it. “After all this time, to tell me that you don’t have absolute faith in me, my friend—my friend and partner—is to wound me deeply,” Graham had said, pouring himself into the phone one late night in a conversation that must have gone on for an hour or more. “You hurt my reputation,” he said in a wounded voice, “and worse than that, Mason, worse than that, you hurt my pride. And really, for a man in my condition, facing an uncertain future and the final accounting up above, what else is there for me to hold on to? Beyond love. Love and friendship, Mason.” He’d let out a deep sigh. “I am sending you an airline ticket by overnight mail,” he said. “You want your eyes opened? I will open them for you.”

If the walls just stood there back at home, he didn’t know it. His life, the life of the widower, of the griever, of the terminally bored, had changed, and changed radically. Graham Shovelin himself took time off from work—and his chemo—to pick him up at the airport in a shining maroon Mercedes and bring him to his hotel, all expenses paid. Of course, there was a little contretemps at the airport: Mason, exhausted from a cramped and sleepless night and at eighty no steadier on his feet than he’d been at seventy-nine or expected to be at eighty-one, had mistaken this heavyset fortyish man with the shaved head and hands the size of baseball mitts for a porter and not the operations director of the Yorkshire Bank PLC. But then he hadn’t expected him to be black. Not that he had any prejudices whatsoever—over the years he’d seen and worked with all types of students at the college and made a point of giving as much of himself as he could to each of them, no matter where they came from or what they looked like—but he just hadn’t pictured Graham Shovelin this way. And that was his failing, of course. And maybe, he thought, that had to do with Masterpiece Theatre too, with the lords and ladies and the proper English butler and underbutler and all the rest. So Graham was black, that was all. Nothing wrong with that.

The hotel he took him to wasn’t more than a twenty-minute drive from the airport, and it wasn’t really a hotel, as far as Mason could see, but more one of these bed-and-breakfast sort of places, and the staff there was black too—and so were most of the people on the streets. But he was tired. Exhausted. Defeated before he even began. He found his bed in a back room and slept a full twelve hours, longer than he could ever remember having slept since he was a boy at home with his parents. In fact, when he finally did wake, he couldn’t believe it was still dark outside and he had to tap the crystal of his watch to make sure it hadn’t stopped.

He lay there for a long while after waking, in a big bed in a small room all the way on the other side of the world, feeling pleased with himself, proud of himself, having an adventure. He pushed himself up, fished through his suitcase for a pair of clean underwear and socks. Just then an ambrosial smell, something exotic, spicy, began seeping in under the door and seemed to take possession of the room, and he realized he was hungry, ravenous actually. Vaguely wondering if he was too late for breakfast—or too early—he eased open the door and found himself in a dim hallway that gave onto a brightly lit room from which the odor of food was emanating, a room he took to be the kitchen.

He heard a murmur of voices. His knees hurt. He could barely seem to lift his feet. But he made his way down the hall and paused at the door, not knowing what the protocol was in a bed-and-breakfast (he and Jan had always stayed in hotels or motor courts). He gave a light knock on the doorframe in the same instant that the room jumped to life: a gas stove, spotless, with a big aluminum pot set atop it; a table and chairs, oilcloth top, half a dozen beer bottles; and someone sitting at the table, a big man, black, in a white sleeveless T-shirt: Graham. It was Graham Shovelin himself, a newspaper spread before him and a beer clutched in one big hand.

“Really, Mason, you must forgive me for any misunderstanding or inconvenience regarding the accommodations, but I am only acting in your best interest—our best interest—in putting you here, in this quite reasonable bed-and-breakfast hotel rather than one of those drafty anonymous five-star places in the heart of the city, which is where Mr. Oliphant, president of the Yorkshire Bank PLC, had urged me to put you up. And why? To save our partnership any further out-of-pocket expense—unnecessary expense—until we are able to have the funds released in full. Tell me, have I done right?”

Mason was seated now at the table across from Shovelin, a bowl of stew that wasn’t all that much different from what he ate at home steaming at his elbow while a woman who’d appeared out of nowhere provided bread and butter and poured him a glass of beer. She was black too, thin as a long-distance runner and dressed in a colorful wraparound garment of some sort. Her hair was piled atop her head in a massive bouffant and her feet were bare. She was very pretty, and for a moment Mason was so distracted by her he wasn’t able to respond.

“Just tell me, Mason,” Shovelin repeated. “If I’ve done wrong, let me know and I’ll get in the car this minute and take you to the Savoy—or perhaps you prefer the Hilton?”

He wasn’t tired, that wasn’t it at all—just the opposite, he was excited. A new place, new people, new walls! And yet he couldn’t quite focus on what Shovelin was saying, so he just shrugged.

“I take that to be accord, then?” Shovelin boomed. “Happily, happily!” he cried. “Let’s toast to it!” and he raised his glass, tapped it against Mason’s, and downed the contents in a gulp. His eyes reddened and he touched one massive fist to his breastbone, as if fighting down indigestion, then turned back to Mason. “Now,” he said, so abruptly it almost sounded like the sudden startled bark of a dog, “let’s get down to business. This lovely lady here, in the event you haven’t already divined her identity, is none other than my executive secretary, Miss Afunu-Jones, who is taking time out of her hectic schedule to devote herself to your comfort during your brief stay. She has my full confidence, and anything you feel you must say to me you can say to her and she can handle any and all inquiries…” His voice trailed off. “In the event… well, in the event I am, how shall I put it?, indisposed.”

Mason felt his heart clench. He could see the pain etched in the younger man’s face and he felt the sadness there, felt the shadow of the mortality that had claimed Jan and would one day claim everyone alive, his daughter, his grandson, this man who’d reached out across the ocean to him and become not only his friend but his confidant.

Shovelin produced a handkerchief, wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “Forgive me for injecting an element of what, pathos, into this little party meant to welcome you to our land, and I know it’s not professional”—here he employed the handkerchief again—“but I am only human.” He looked up at the woman, who hovered behind them. “Chevette, perhaps you will take over for me and give Mr. Alimonti—Mason—the explanation he’s come for—”

Chevette, her eyes filled too, pulled up a chair and sat beside Mason, so close their elbows were touching. She took her time, buttering a slice of bread and handing it to him before taking a sip of beer herself and looking him directly in the eye. “We will see this business through to the end, believe me, Mason,” she said, her voice soft and hesitant. “We will not desert you. You have my word on that.”

“About tomorrow,” Shovelin prompted.

Her eyes jumped to his and then back to Mason’s. “Yes,” she said, “tomorrow. Tomorrow we will take you to the central office, where you will meet with our president, Mr. Oliphant, and iron out the final details to your satisfaction.” She paused, touched a finger to her lips. “I don’t know that all this is necessary, but as you seem to have lost faith in us—”

“Oh, no, no,” he said, fastening on her eyes, beautiful eyes, really, eyes the color of the birch beer he used to relish as a boy on family jaunts to Vermont.

“But the explanation is simple, it truly is. What I mean is, just look at us. We are not wealthy, we are not even accepted by many in white society, and I’m sorry to have to repeat it like a mantra, but we are diligent, Mr. Alimonti, diligent and faithful. The fact is, as my—as Mr. Shovelin—has told you, we are dealing with corruption, with thieves, and all the unconscionable holdup in this matter is to be laid at their feet, not ours, Mason, not ours.” And here, whether conscious of it or not, she dropped a hand to his thigh and gave him the faintest squeeze of reassurance.

The next day, his last day, and not even a full day at that, as his plane was scheduled to depart at 6:45 in the evening, he was awakened from a dreamless sleep by Chevette, who stood at the foot of his bed, softly calling his name. She was dressed in the sort of business attire he’d envisioned when he’d first heard her voice over the phone, she was wearing lipstick and eyeshadow, and her hair had been brushed out over her shoulders. “Mr. Alimonti,” she said, “Mason, wake up. I have some bad news.”

He pushed himself up on his elbows, blinking at her. His knee throbbed. He seemed to have a headache. For a minute he didn’t know where he was.

“Unfortunate circumstances have arisen,” she was saying. “Graham has had a seizure and they’ve taken him to hospital—”

He fumbled to find the words. “Hospital? Is he—will he?—”

She made a wide sweeping gesture with one hand. “That is not for me to say. That”—her eyes hardened—“is in the hands of the insurers, who keep denying him the life-saving treatment he so desperately needs. And we, we are but humble bank employees and we are by no means rich, Mason, by no means. We’ve exhausted our savings… yes, we, because now I must confess to you what you must already have suspected—Graham is my husband. We didn’t want to have to tell you for fear you might think us unprofessional, but the cat is out of the bag now.” She caught her breath. Her eyes filled. “And I love him, I love him more than I could ever put into words—”

He was in his pajamas in a strange bed in a strange place, a strange woman was standing over him, and his heart was breaking.

“Please help us,” she whispered. “Please?”

He’d given her all he had on him—some $800 in cash he’d brought along for emergencies—and written her a check he’d be hard-pressed to cover when he got home. As the expenses had mounted, he’d taken out a second mortgage and depleted his retirement account so that things were going to get very difficult financially if the funds didn’t come through soon. But they would, he was sure they would, every minute of every day pushing him closer to his goal. Chevette had tearfully assured him that Mr. Oliphant would see things through, whether her husband survived his emergency operation or not. “Truly,” she told him, “he lies between this life and the next.”

It wasn’t until he’d buckled himself in and the plane was in the air that it occurred to him that he never had gotten to meet Mr. Oliphant, see what an English bank looked like from the inside, or even sign the agreement Graham had kept forgetting to produce, and now—he felt his heart seize again—might never be able to. He had two drinks on the plane, watched bits of three or four jumpy color-smeared movies, and fell off into a sleep that was a kind of waking and waking again, endlessly, till the wheels touched down and he was home at last.

Three months later, after having missed four consecutive mortgage payments and receiving increasingly threatening letters from the bank, letters so depressing he could barely bring himself to open them, he telephoned his daughter to ask if she might be able to help him out with a small loan. He didn’t mention Graham Shovelin, the Yorkshire Bank PLC, or the windfall he was expecting, because he didn’t want to upset her, and, more than that, he didn’t want her interfering. And, truthfully, he wasn’t so sure of himself anymore, the little voice back in his head now and telling him he was a fool, that he’d been defrauded, that Graham Shovelin, whom he hadn’t heard from in all this time, wasn’t what he appeared to be. He had hope still, of course he did—he had to have hope—and he made up excuses to explain the silence, excuses for Graham, who for all he knew might be lying there in a coma. Or worse. He could be dead. But why then didn’t anyone pick up the phone at the Yorkshire Bank PLC? Chevette, though she may have been grief-stricken, would certainly have had to be there, working, no matter what had befallen her husband, and then there was Mr. Oliphant and whatever secretaries and assistants he might have had.

At one point, despairing, after he’d called twenty times without response, he went online and found a home page for the Yorkshire Bank PLC, which didn’t seem to list the names of the bank officers at any of their branches. He did find a general-purpose number and after having been put on hold for ten minutes spoke to a woman who claimed she’d never heard of a Mr. Oliphant, and of course he was unable to supply any specifics, not with regard to which branch Oliphant was affiliated with or even what his given name might be. He felt baffled, frustrated, hopeless. He called his daughter.

“Dad? Is that you? How are you? We’ve been worried about you—”

“Worried, why?”

“I’ve called and called, but you never seem to be home—what are you doing, spending all your time at dance clubs or what, the racetrack?” She let out a laugh. “Robbie’s starting college in a month, did you know that? He got into his first-choice college, SUNY Potsdam, for music? The Crane School?”

He didn’t respond. After a minute, when she paused for breath, he said flatly, “I need a loan.”

“A loan? What on earth for? Don’t you have everything you need?”

“For the mortgage. I—well, I got a little behind in my payments…”

It took a while, another five minutes of wrangling, but finally she got it out of him. When he’d told her the whole story, everything, the $30 million, the disbursement, the bribe money, Graham’s treatments, even the two-day debacle in London, she was speechless. For a long moment he could hear her breathing over the phone and he could picture the expression she was wearing, her features compressed and her lips bunched in anger and disbelief, no different from the way Jan had looked when she was after him for one thing and another.

“I can’t believe you,” she said finally. “How could you be so stupid? You, of all people, a former professor, Dad, a math whiz, good with figures?”

He said nothing. He felt as if she’d stabbed him, as if she was twisting the knife inside him.

“It’s a scam, Dad, it’s all over the papers, the Internet, everywhere—the AARP newsletter Mom used to get. Don’t you ever read it? Or listen to the news? The crooks even have a name for it, 419, after the Nigerian antifraud statute, as if it’s all a big joke.”

“It’s not like that,” he said.

“How much did you lose?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Jesus! You don’t even know?” There was a clatter of pans or silverware. He could picture her stalking round her kitchen, her face clamped tight. “All right,” she said. “Jesus! How much do you need?”

“I don’t know—ten?”

“Ten what—thousand? Don’t tell me ten thousand.”

He was staring out the window on the back lawn and the burgundy leaves of the flowering plum he and Jan had planted when their daughter was born. It seemed far away. Miles. It was there, but it was shrinking before his eyes.

“I’m coming out there,” she said.

“No,” he said, “no, don’t do that.”

“You’re eighty years old, Dad! Eighty!”

“No,” he said, and he no longer knew what he was objecting to, whether it was his age or the money or his daughter coming here to discipline him and humble him and rearrange his life.

The house belonged to the bank now, all of it, everything, and his daughter and Robbie were there helping him pack up. He was leaving California whether he liked it or not, and he was going to be living, at least temporarily, in Robbie’s soon-to-be-vacated bedroom in Rye, New York. Everything was chaos. Everything was black. He was sitting in his armchair, waiting for the moving van to take what hadn’t been sold off in a succession of what Angelica called “estate sales” and haul it across the country to rot in her garage. In Rye, New York. For the moment all was quiet, the walls just stood there, no dog barked, no auto passed by on the street. He was thinking nothing. He couldn’t even remember what Jan looked like anymore. He got to his feet because he had an urgent need to go fetch a particular thing before the movers got hold of it, but in the interval of rising, he’d already forgotten just what that particular thing was.

So he was standing there in the ruins of his former life, a high desperate sun poking through the blinds to ricochet off the barren floorboards, when the phone rang. Once, twice, and then he picked it up.

“Mason?”

“Yes?”

“Graham Shovelin here. How are you?”

Before he could answer, the deep voice rolled on, unstoppable, Old Man River itself: “I have good news, the best, capital news, in fact! The funds will be released tomorrow.”

“You’re”—he couldn’t find the words—“you’re okay? The, the treatment—?”

“Yes, yes, thanks to you, my friend, and don’t think I’ll ever forget it. I’m weak still, of course, which is why you haven’t heard from me in some time now, and I do hope you’ll understand… but listen, we’re going to need one more infusion here, just to assure there are no glitches tomorrow when we all gather in Mr. Oli­phant’s office to sign the final release form—”

“How much?”

“Oh, not much, Mason, not much at all.”

When Beau James raised the twin service-bay doors of the converted Conoco station at 11 a.m. Tuesday morning, he had already been smoking brisket and ribs for more than eight hours, just as he had six days a week since opening Quarryville Smokehouse twelve years earlier. Rain or shine, Tuesday through Sunday, he served a two-meat menu, offering a single side and no dessert, and closing when he had no brisket, ribs, or coleslaw remaining.

Beau worked the indirect-heat pit alone, not allowing anyone to learn his technique for preparing fall-off-the-bone beef ribs and moist brisket with dark peppery crust, and four days a week he also worked the counter alone. He only hired help—his girlfriend’s teenage daughter, Amanda—on the weekends, when business typically doubled. The Quarryville Smokehouse lunch plate consisted of a choice between chopped brisket, sliced brisket, or beef ribs, accompanied by a scoop of coleslaw, four bread-and-butter pickle slices, a slice of sweet onion, two slices of Mrs Baird’s Bread, and a twelve-ounce can of Dr Pepper. He offered no sauce and had been known to refuse service to anyone who requested it.

That Tuesday morning he wore his graying black hair in a ponytail that hung below his shoulders and a red paisley bandanna covered the expanding bald spot on the crown of his head. He had on an untucked black T-shirt that covered the tattoo on his left upper arm, faded blue jeans, and well-worn black harness motorcycle boots, a clothing selection that never varied and simplified dressing in the dark. He had gained a few pounds since opening the smokehouse, but at six foot two, he remained slender.

Like most mornings, Tommy Baldwin was sitting at one of the picnic tables beneath the canopy that had once sheltered the gasoline pumps. He had retired from Shell Oil after a lifetime spent as a roustabout, was living comfortably on his pension, and had nothing better to do each morning than read, eat barbecue, and visit with Beau. As the service-bay doors rolled up, Tommy stood and grabbed the popular state-named magazine he had been reading. He walked through the six picnic tables arranged in the service bays and into the former Conoco station’s showroom, which had been transformed into the smokehouse’s order and pickup counter.

“The usual?” Beau asked of the grizzled retiree.

Instead of answering, Tommy tossed the open magazine on the counter. “Have you seen this?”

Beau wasn’t much of a reader, so he hadn’t. He picked up the magazine and found himself reading a review of Quarryville Smokehouse, a review that referred to his place as “the best-kept secret in West Texas, certain to be a serious contender in the forthcoming roundup of the fifty best barbecue joints in the Lone Star State.” Next to the review were a photograph of the chopped brisket lunch plate and another of him working behind the counter—a photograph for which he had not posed.

“Jesus H.” He threw the magazine down and glared at Tommy. “When did you get this?”

“This morning’s mail.”

Beau swore again. He had been relocated to Quarryville thirteen years earlier so no one could find him. Without asking again if Tommy wanted his usual order, Beau scooped chopped brisket into a Styrofoam three-compartment takeout container, added coleslaw and accessories, and shoved the container across the counter, not realizing he’d gone heavy on the brisket, light on the coleslaw, and had completely forgotten the pickles. He slammed a cold can of Dr Pepper on the other side of the still-open magazine.

Tommy slid back exact change. “I thought you’d like the publicity, maybe get more business. You can’t be making much from this place.”

“I get by.” Beau glared at his most reliable customer. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

“What about that girl of yours? You want to take care of Bethany, don’t you? Her and her daughter?”

“What do they have to do with it?”

“I see the way she looks at you,” Tommy said. “I’ve never had anybody look at me the way Bethany looks at you. I’ve seen you look at her the same way.”

“So?”

“You can’t live for yourself, Beau. You have to live for the people you love,” Tommy explained. “I thought I could help, so about a year ago I sent a letter to the editor, telling her about your barbecue.”

Beau stabbed at the magazine article with his forefinger. “This is your fault?”

“I suppose so.” Tommy glanced at the magazine and the open Styrofoam container next to it. “You forgot my pickles.”

“Fuck your pickles.” Beau didn’t bother with the serving spoon. He reached into the pickle jar, grabbed a handful of bread-and-butter pickle slices, and threw them on top of Tommy’s chopped brisket lunch plate, flinging juice across the counter, the magazine, and Tommy.

The retiree shook his head, tucked the magazine under his arm, and carried his lunch to one of the picnic tables outside, where he adjusted the holster hidden at the small of his back and set aside most of the pickles before he began eating.

The lunch rush, such as it was, kept Beau busy for the next few hours. After he sold the last order of ribs, put the cash and checks—he didn’t accept credit or debit cards—in the office safe, and shut everything down, he saw Tommy still reading his magazine. He rolled down the service-bay doors, carried two cold cans of Dr Pepper outside, and settled onto the picnic table bench opposite Tommy. “Don’t you ever go home?”

Tommy looked up. “There’s nothing there for me.”

Beau put one Dr Pepper in front of Tommy and opened the other. After a long draw from the can, he said, “About earlier.”

“Sorry for the surprise,” Tommy replied. “I didn’t think a little publicity would be a problem.”

“You have no idea the world of hurt that’s about to crash down on me,” Beau said. He drained the last of the Dr Pepper. “There’s no way you could know.”

Beau had been one of the United States Marshals Service’s easiest Witness Security Program relocations, a man without baggage. He had no family and no desire to drag any of several random female companions with him into a new life. The San Antonio office had recommended Quarryville, a dried-out scab of a town in West Texas that had once shipped granite east to Dallas. After the quarry closed in the early 1950s, the town began a long, slow slide into oblivion, and few people lived there by choice. With the U.S. Marshals Service’s assistance and money from the Harley-Davidson he’d sold before disappearing into his new identity, Beau purchased and renovated a foreclosed home. On his own he later purchased the abandoned Conoco station he could see from his front window and turned it into Quarryville Smokehouse.

He mentioned none of this to Tommy as they sat in the afternoon heat watching traffic pass the smokehouse on the two-lane state highway. When they finished their drinks, Tommy excused himself to use the men’s room around the back, leaving behind the magazine he’d been reading all morning.

Beau spun the magazine around, thumbed through the pages until he found the article about his smokehouse, and read it again. Had it not been for the accompanying photo capturing his face in three-quarter profile, nothing about the article would have bothered him. In fact, everything the author wrote was quite complimentary.

The club where the oil-field people hung out was called the Hungry Gator. It stood on pilings by a long green humped levee in the Atchafalaya Basin, a gigantic stretch of bayous and quicksand and brackish bays and flooded cypress and tupelos that looked like a forgotten piece of Creation before fish worked their way up on the land and formed feet. There were no clocks inside the Gator, no last names, sometimes not even first ones, just initials. By choice most of us lived on the rim. Of everything. Get my drift?

I liked the rim. You could pretend there was no before or after; there was just now, a deadness in the sky on a summer evening, maybe a solitary black cloud breaking apart like ink in clear water, while thousands of tree frogs sang. It was a place I didn’t have to make comparisons or study on dreams and memories that would come flickering behind my eyelids five seconds into sleep.

I worked on a seismograph rig, ten days on and five days off; on land, I sometimes played drums and mandolin at the club and even did a few vocals. My big pleasure was looking at the girls from the bandstand, secretly thinking of myself as their protector, a guy who’d been around but didn’t try to use people. The truth is I was a mess with women and about as clever in a social situation as the scribbles on the washroom wall.

I’d blank out in the middle of conversations. Or go away someplace inside my head and not get back for a few hours. People thought it was because I was at Pork Chop Hill. Not so. I was never ashamed of what we did at Pork Chop.

I was thinking on this and half in the bag when a woman at the bar touched my cheek and looked at me in a sad way, probably because she was half jacked on flak juice too, even though it was only two in the afternoon. “You got that in Korea?” she said.

“My daddy made whiskey,” I replied. “Stills blow up sometimes.”

Her eyes floated away from me. “You don’t have to act smart.”

I tried to grin, the scarred skin below my eye crinkling. “It wasn’t a big deal. On my face it’s probably an improvement.”

She gazed at herself in the mirror behind the liquor counter. I waited for her to speak, but she didn’t.

“Buy you a drink?” I said.

She lifted her left hand so I could see her ring. “He’s nothing to brag on, but he’s the only one I got.”

“I admire principle,” I said.

“That’s why you hang out in here?”

“There’s worse.”

“Where?”

I didn’t have an answer. She picked the cherry out of her vodka collins and sucked on it. “It’s not polite to stare.”

“Sorry.”

“I get the blues, that’s all,” she said.

“I know what you mean,” I replied.

I couldn’t tell if she heard me or not. Kitty Wells was singing on the jukebox.

“Will you dance with me?” I said.

“Another time.”

Through the screen door the sun was bright and hot, and heat waves were bouncing on the bay. The electric fan on the wall feathered her hair against her cheeks. She had a sweet face and amber eyes, with a shine in them like beer glass. There was no pack of cigarettes or an ashtray in front of her. She bent slightly forward, and I saw the shine on the tops of her breasts. I didn’t think it was intentional on her part.

“I played piano for Ernie Suarez and Warren Storm at the Top Hat in Lafayette,” she said.

“Looking for a job?”

“My husband doesn’t like me hanging in juke joints.”

“What’s he do?”

“He comes and goes.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Not what you’re thinking. He flies a plane out to the rigs.”

“How’d you know I was in Korea?”

“The bartender.”

Her face colored, as though she realized I knew she’d been asking about me. “My name is Loreen Walters.”

“How you do, Miss Loreen?”

“Where’d you get the accent?” she asked.

“East Kentucky.”

She put her wallet in her drawstring bag. The leather was braided around the edges and incised with a rearing horse ridden by a naked woman. It was a strange wallet for a woman to carry. I glanced at Loreen. She seemed to be one of those people whose faces change constantly in the light, so you never know who they actually are.

“Are you fixing to leave?” I said.

“There’s nothing wrong in talking, is there?” she said.

“No, ma’am, not at all.”

I could see myself close to her, next to the jukebox, my face buried in her hair, breathing her perfume and the coolness of her skin. I felt my throat catch.

“Then, again, why borrow trouble?” she said. “See you, sweetie. Look me up in our next incarnation. Far as I’m concerned, this one stinks.”

I went back on my seismograph barge early the next day. The sun was red and streaked with dust blowing out of the cane fields, the steel plates on the pilothouse dripping with drops of moisture as big as silver dollars.

Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, fifty-two weeks in a year. Reacher ballparked the calculation in his head and came up with a little more than 30 million seconds in any twelve-month span. During which time nearly 10 million significant crimes would be committed in the United States alone. Roughly one every three seconds. Not rare. To see one actually take place, right in front of you, up close and personal, was not inherently unlikely. Location mattered, of course. Crime went where people went. Odds were better in the center of a city than in the middle of a meadow.

Reacher was in a hollowed-out town in Maine. Not near a lake. Not on the coast. Nothing to do with lobsters. But once upon a time it had been good for something. That was clear. The streets were wide, and the buildings were brick. There was an air of long-gone prosperity. What might once have been grand boutiques were now dollar stores. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Those dollar stores were at least doing some business. There was a coffee franchise. There were tables out. The streets were almost crowded. The weather helped. The first day of spring, and the sun was shining.

Reacher turned in to a street so wide it had been closed to traffic and called a plaza. There were café tables in front of blunt red buildings either side, and maybe thirty people meandering in the space between. Reacher first saw the scene head-on, with the people in front of him, randomly scattered. Later he realized the ones that mattered most had made a perfect shape, like a capital letter T. He was at its base, looking upward, and forty yards in the distance, on the crossbar of the T, was a young woman, walking at right angles through his field of view, from right to left ahead of him, across the wide street direct from one sidewalk to the other. She had a canvas tote bag hooked over her shoulder. The canvas looked to be medium weight, and it was a natural color, pale against her dark shirt. She was maybe twenty years old. Or even younger. She could have been as young as eighteen. She was walking slow, looking up, liking the sun on her face.

Then from the left-hand end of the crossbar, and much faster, came a kid running, head-on toward her. Same kind of age. Sneakers on his feet, tight black pants, sweatshirt with a hood on it. He grabbed the woman’s bag and tore it off her shoulder. She was sent sprawling, her mouth open in some kind of a breathless exclamation. The kid in the hood tucked the bag under his arm like a football, and he jinked to his right, and he set off running down the stem of the T, directly toward Reacher at its base.

Then from the right-hand end of the crossbar came two men in suits, walking the same sidewalk-to-sidewalk direction the woman had used. They were about twenty yards behind her. The crime happened right in front of them. They reacted the same way most people do. They froze for the first split second, and then they turned and watched the guy run away, and they raised their arms in a spirited but incoherent fashion, and they shouted something that might have been Hey!

Then they set out in pursuit. Like a starting gun had gone off. They ran hard, knees pumping, coattails flapping. Cops, Reacher thought. Had to be. Because of the unspoken unison. They hadn’t even glanced at each other. Who else would react like that?

Forty yards in the distance the young woman scrambled back to her feet and ran away.

The cops kept on coming. But the kid in the black sweatshirt was ten yards ahead of them and running much faster. They were not going to catch him. No way. Their relative numbers were negative.

Now the kid was twenty yards from Reacher, dipping left, dipping right, running through the broken field. About three seconds away. With one obvious gap ahead of him. One clear path. Now two seconds away. Reacher stepped right, one pace. Now one second away. Another step. Reacher bounced the kid off his hip and sent him down in a sliding tangle of arms and legs. The canvas bag sailed up in the air and the kid scraped and rolled about ten more feet, and then the men in the suits arrived and were on him. A small crowd pressed close. The canvas bag had fallen to earth about a yard from Reacher’s feet. It had a zipper across the top, closed tight. Reacher ducked down to pick it up, but then he thought better of it. Better to leave the evidence undisturbed, such as it was. He backed away a step. More onlookers gathered at his shoulder.

The cops got the kid sitting up, dazed, and they cuffed his hands behind him. One cop stood guard and the other stepped over and picked up the canvas bag. It looked flat and weightless and empty. Kind of collapsed. Like there was nothing in it. The cop scanned the faces all around him and fixed on Reacher. He took a wallet from his hip pocket and opened it with a practiced flick. There was a photo ID behind a milky plastic window. Detective Ramsey Aaron, county police department. The picture was the same guy, a little younger and a lot less out of breath.

Aaron said, “Thank you very much for helping us out with that.”

Reacher said, “You’re welcome.”

“Did you see exactly what happened?”

“Pretty much.”

“Then I’ll need you to sign a witness statement.”

“Did you see the victim ran away afterward?”

“No, I didn’t see that.”

“She seemed okay.”

“Good to know,” Aaron said. “But we’ll still need you to sign a statement.”

“You were closer to it all than I was,” Reacher said. “It happened right in front of you. Sign your own statement.”

“Frankly, sir, it would mean more coming from a regular person. A member of the public, I mean. Juries don’t always like police testimony. Sign of the times.”

Reacher said, “I was a cop once.”

“Where?”

“In the army.”

“Then you’re even better than a regular person.”

“I can’t stick around for a trial,” Reacher said. “I’m just passing through. I need to move on.”

“There won’t be a trial,” Aaron said. “If we have an eyewitness on the record, who is also a military veteran with law enforcement experience, then the defense will plead it out. Simple arithmetic. Pluses and minuses. Like your credit score. That’s how it works now.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Ten minutes of your time,” Aaron said. “You saw what you saw. What’s the worst thing could happen?”

“Okay,” Reacher said.

Detective Nicholas Zelinsky was with the first body when the captain called for him to come outside the house. He stepped out and pulled the breathing mask down under his chin. Captain Dale Henry was under the canopy tent, trying to protect himself from the desert sun. He gestured toward the horizon and Zelinsky saw the black helicopter coming in low under the sun and over the open scrubland. It banked and he could see FBI in white letters on the side door. The craft circled the house as if looking for a place to land in tight circumstances. But the house stood alone in a gridwork of dirt streets where the planned housing development was never built after the big bust a decade earlier. They were in the middle of nowhere seven miles out of Lancaster, which in turn was seventy miles out of L.A.

“I thought you said they were driving out,” Zelinsky called above the sound of the chopper.

“The guy I talked to—Dixon—said they were,” Henry called back. “Probably realized that would take them half the day driving up here and back.”

The helicopter finally picked a landing spot and came down, kicking up a dust cloud with its rotor wash.

“Dumb shit,” Henry said. “He lands upwind from us.”

One man got out of the chopper as the pilot killed the turbine and the rotor started free-spinning. The man wore a suit and dark aviator glasses. With one hand he held a white handkerchief over his mouth and nose to filter the dust. With the other he carried a tube used to carry blueprints or artwork. He trotted toward the canopy.

“Typical fed,” Henry said. “Wears a suit to a multiple-murder scene.”

The man in the suit made it to the canopy. He put the tube under one arm so he could shake hands and still keep his handkerchief over his mouth and nose.

“Agent Dixon?” Henry asked.

“Yes, sir,” Dixon said. “Sorry about the dust.”

They shook hands.

“That’s what happens when you land upwind from a crime scene,” Henry said. “I’m Captain Henry, L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. We spoke on the phone. And this is our lead detective on the case, Nick Zelinsky.”

Dixon shook Zelinsky’s hand.

“Do you mind?” Dixon said.

He pointed to a cardboard dispenser on one of the equipment tables containing breathing masks.

“Be our guest,” Henry said. “You might want to put on the booties and a spacesuit along with the mask. A lot of chemicals floating around in the house.”

“Thank you,” Dixon replied.

He went to the table and put the tube down as he swapped his handkerchief for a breathing mask. He then took off his jacket and pulled on one of the white plastic protection suits, followed by the paper booties and latex gloves. He pulled the suit’s hood up over his head as well.

“I thought you were driving out,” Henry said.

“We were, but then I got a window on the chopper,” Dixon said. “But it’s a short window. They need it this afternoon for a dignitary surveillance. So should we go in, see what you’ve got?”

Henry gestured toward the open door of the house.

“Nick, give him the grand tour,” he said. “I’ll be out here.”

Dixon stepped through the threshold into a small entranceway that had been remodeled as a mantrap with fortified doors on either end. It was typical of most drug houses. Zelinsky stepped in behind him.

“I assume the captain filled you in on the basics when you talked,” Zelinsky said.

“Let’s not assume anything, Detective,” Dixon said. “I’d rather get the rundown from the case lead than the captain.”

“Okay, then. This place was a sample house built before the crash in ’08. Nothing else was ever built out here. Made it perfect for cooking meth.”

“Got it.”

“Inside we have four victims—all in different parts of the house. Three cooks and a guy you would call the house security man. There are several weapons in the house, but it looks like nobody got off a defensive shot. It looks like they were taken out by fucking ninjas, to tell you the truth. All four are heart-shot with arrows. Short arrows.”

“Crossbow?”

“Most likely.”

“Motive?”

“It doesn’t appear to be robbery, because there are bags and full pans of product in all the rooms and all of it readily visible for the taking. It just looks like a hit-and-run. And there is something else we didn’t put out on the bulletin that I think you’ll want to see.”

“On the phone I think the captain mentioned this is a Saints and Sinners operation.”

“That’s right. Lancaster and Palmdale is their territory and this is their place, so it’s not looking like a turf thing either.”

“Okay, let’s see the rest.”

“First, your turn. What made the FBI jump on the bulletin we sent out?”

“The arrows. The crossbow. If it connects to something else we have working, I will tell you once I confirm it.”

Dixon stepped through the second door and paused to look at the front room of the house. It was furnished like a normal living room with two leather couches, two other stuffed chairs, a coffee table, and large flat-screen television on the wall. There was another, smaller screen on the coffee table and it was quadded into four camera views of the scrubland and desert surrounding the house.

There was a dead man sitting on the couch in front of the security screen, his body turned to the left, his right arm reaching across his body toward a side table where a sawed-off shotgun waited. He never got to it. A black graphite arrow had pierced his torso back to front, a heart shot, as Zelinsky had said, penetrating the leather vest he wore with the Saints & Sinners motorcycle club logo—the grinning skull with devil horns and angel halo tilted at a rakish angle. There was very little blood because the arrow had struck with such high velocity that the entrance and exit wounds sealed around its shaft.

“We have this guy as victim number one,” Zelinsky said. “Name is Aiden Vance, multiple arrests for drugs and acts of violence—ADWs and attempted murders. Did a nickel up in Corcoran. Your basic motorcycle gang enforcer. But it looks like they got the drop on him here. He apparently didn’t see them coming on the monitors, didn’t hear them pick the lock or come through the mantrap. Until it was too late.”

“Neat trick,” Dixon said.

“Like I said, ninjas.”

“Ninjas? More than one?”

“Doesn’t feel like a one-man op, you ask me.”

“The cameras—are there digitized recordings?”

“No such luck. Purely for live monitoring. I guess they didn’t want digital evidence of their own goings and comings here. It could have put them away.”

“Right.”

They proceeded further into the house. There were several evidence technicians, photographers, and detectives working throughout. Yellow evidence markers were placed on the floor, on furniture, and on walls everywhere Dixon looked. The place had been used as a cook house for crystal meth, which was the main income stream for the Saints & Sinners. Zelinsky explained that this was only one of several such houses operated by the group and scattered through the desert northeast of Los Angeles, where the finished product was shipped to and distributed to dealers and then to the hapless victims of the devastatingly addictive drug.

“The starting point,” Dixon said.

“Starting point of what?” Zelinsky asked.

“The trail of human misery. What was cooked in this house destroyed lives.”

“Yeah, you could say that. A place like this—it was probably producing seventy, eighty pounds a week.”

“Makes it hard to feel sorry for these people.”

It was a three-bedroom house, and each bedroom was a separate cook room that was probably in operation twenty-four hours a day, with two or three shifts of cooks and security men. In each cook room there was another body pierced by an arrow and sprawled on the floor. Each one a man in a protection suit and wearing a breathing mask. No blood, just a clean heart shot each time. Zelinsky gave Dixon their names and criminal pedigrees as part of the tour.

Dixon didn’t seem to care who they were, just how they died. He squatted down and studied the arrows protruding from each of the bodies, seemingly attempting to find some clue or confirm something from the markings on each shaft.

Zelinsky took Dixon into the master bedroom last because here was the only anomaly and the only visible blood. The victim here was on the floor on his left side. The sleeve of his protection suit had been pulled back and the right hand was cleanly severed at the wrist.

“Guys,” Zelinsky said. “Give us some space.”

Two forensic technicians stepped back from the wall where they had been working. There above a meth drying pan on a folding table was the victim’s severed hand, pinned to the wall by the long-bladed knife most likely used to hack it off the body. The fingers had been manipulated. The thumb and first two fingers were up and tightly together, the second two were folded down over the palm. On the wall surrounding the hand was a circle drawn in the victim’s blood.

“Seen anything like that before, Agent Dixon?” Zelinsky asked.

Dixon didn’t answer. He leaned down and in close to the wall and studied the hand. Blood had dripped down the wall into the drying pan below.

“Kind of like the Cub Scout salute, if you ask me,” Zelinsky added. “You know, two fingers up?”

“No,” Dixon said. “It’s not that.”

Zelinsky was silent. He waited. Dixon straightened up and turned to him. He held his hand up, making the same gesture as the hand pinned to the wall.

“It’s the gesture of divinity often seen in the paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance period,” Dixon said.

“Really?” Zelinsky said.

“Have you ever heard of Hieronymus Bosch, Detective Zelinsky?”

“Uh, no. What or who is that?”

“I’ve seen enough here. Let’s go outside and talk.”

Under the canopy they cleared space on a table and Dixon took the end cap off the cardboard tube. He slipped out a rolled print of a painting and stretched it out on the table, using the boxes of latex gloves and paper booties to weight the ends.

“This is a to-scale print of the third panel of a painting that hangs in the Prado in Madrid, Spain,” Dixon said. “The original is five centuries old, and the artist who painted it was named Hieronymus Bosch.”

“Okay,” Zelinsky said, his tone betraying in the one word that he knew that an already weird case was about to go weirder.

“It’s part of a triptych—three panels—considered to be Bosch’s masterwork. The Garden of Earthly Delights. You may never have heard of this guy, but he was sort of the dark genius of the Renaissance. While Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were painting angels and cherubs down in Italy, Bosch was up in northern Europe creating this nightmare vision.”

Dixon gestured to the print. It was a tableau of vicious creatures torturing and maiming humans in all kinds of religious and sexually suggestive ways. Sharp-toothed animals moved naked men and women through a dark labyrinth leading toward the fires of hell.

“Have you seen this before?” Dixon asked.

“Fuck no,” Zelinsky said.

“Fuck no,” added Captain Henry, who had stepped over to the table.

“The first two panels, which I don’t have here, are bright and blue because they are about earthly matters. The first is a depiction of Adam and Eve and the garden and the apple and so forth, the Creation story from the Bible. The second—the centerpiece—is about what came after. The debauchery and life without moral responsibility and respect for the word of God. This, the third panel, is about Judgment Day and where the wages of sin lead.”

“All I can say is, this guy had one hell of a warped mind,” Henry said.

Dixon nodded and pointed to a face at the center point of the panel.

“That’s supposedly the artist there,” he said.

“Pious son of a bitch,” Henry said.

“Okay,” Zelinsky said. “So he was a dark fucking guy and all of that, but he’s been dead five hundred years and is not our suspect. What are you telling us? What do we have here?”

“You have the third panel uprising,” Dixon said.

“What the fuck is that?” Henry asked.

“Dixon tapped his finger on several images on the print.

“Let’s start with the arrows,” he said. “As you can see, the weapon of choice here is the arrow. Supposedly the arrow in Bosch’s work symbolized a message. This is what the scholars tell us. The arrow shooting from one individual to another meant the sending of a message. So there is that, and there is this.”

Now Dixon tapped heavily on a specific point on the print. Both Zelinsky and Henry leaned down over the table to see the tiny detail. Depicted in the lower left quadrant of the panel was a man being pressed against what looked like the slab of a tomb by a demon animal with a round blue shield on its back. A knife piercing a severed hand was stabbed into the shield. The fingers of the hand were configured like those of the hand attached to the wall inside the cook house behind them.

“So what are we talking about?” Zelinsky asked. “Religious zealots, end-of-the-world nut jobs, what? Who exactly are we looking for?”

“We don’t know,” Dixon said after a pause. “This is our third scene like this in fifteen months. The commonality is the targets are purveyors of human misery.”

He gestured toward the house.

“They make meth here,” he said. “This starts the trail to addiction and human misery. In March we found a similar scene in a warehouse in Orange County used by human traffickers. Three dead there. Graphite arrows. Purveyors of human misery.”

“Sending a message,” Zelinsky said.

Dixon nodded.

“Four months before Orange County we were in San Bernadino, where four members of a Chinese triad were slaughtered in the kitchen of a noodle restaurant. They were involved in extortion and smuggling in workers from mainland China to work in kitchens as slave labor while the triad held family members hostage back home. Three scenes, eleven dead, all of it tied together by this painting and this panel specifically. A piece of it re-created at all three scenes.”

“By who?” Zelinsky asked. “You have any suspects?”

“No identified suspects,” Dixon said. “But it’s a group that calls itself T3P. Short for ‘the third panel.’ Within a day, maybe two, they will reach out to you in some way to take responsibility for this and to vow to continue the work they believe law enforcement is failing to do.”

“Jesus Christ,” Henry said.

“We believe they are an offshoot of something that started in Europe two years ago. It was the five hundredth anniversary of Bosch’s death and his work was displayed in a Holland exhibition that drew tens of thousands and probably sparked the uprising. Since then there have been similar multideath attacks in France, Belgium, and the U.K.—all of them targeting the purveyors of human misery.”

“It’s sort of like they’re terrorists against the bad guys,” Henry said.

Dixon nodded.

“An international meeting with Interpol and Scotland Yard is scheduled for early next month,” Dixon said. “I’ll make sure you get the details.”

“What I don’t understand is why you haven’t gone public with this,” Henry said. “There’s gotta be people out there who have to know who these people are.”

“We most likely will after the international meeting,” Dixon said. “We’ll be forced to. But up until now we hoped the two cases were it and we’d have the chance to quietly identify and move in on them.”

“Well, this one is going to go public,” Henry vowed. “We are not going to wait around for fucking Interpol.”

“That’s a decision above my pay grade,” Dixon said. “Right now I just came out to confirm the connection and I need to get the heli­copter back. The special agent in charge of the Los Angeles Field Office will be reaching out to the sheriff’s department to discuss task-force operations locally.”

Dixon turned toward the helicopter. The reflection off the cockpit windows made it impossible to see the pilot. Dixon raised his arm and twirled a finger in the air. Almost immediately the turbine engine turned over and the rotor blade began to slowly turn. Dixon started peeling off the protection suit.

“Do you want to keep the print?” he asked. “We have others.”

“I would, yes,” Zelinsky said. “I want to study the fucking thing.”

“Then it’s yours,” Dixon said. “I just need the tube—my last one.”

The helicopter blade started kicking dust up again. Zelinsky reached up and grabbed one of the canopy’s cross struts when the tent threatened to go airborne. Dixon put his suit jacket back on but kept the mask on to guard against breathing the dust. He picked up the empty tube and recapped it, then tucked it under his arm.

“If you need anything else, you know where to reach me,” he said. “We’ll talk soon, gentlemen.”

Dixon shook their hands, then trotted back toward the helicopter as the turbine began to obliterate all other sound. Soon he was inside the cockpit and the chopper lifted off. As it rose Zelinsky saw that the F in the FBI decal was starting to peel off in the downdraft from the rotor.

The craft banked left and headed south, back toward L.A.

Zelinsky and Henry watched it go, keeping a steady altitude of no more than 200 feet above the hardscape. As it headed toward the horizon the sheriff’s men then noticed the kickup of dust from an approaching vehicle. It had lights in its grille that were flashing, and it was moving fast.

“Now who the hell is this?” Henry asked.

“They’re in a hurry, that’s for sure,” Zelinsky added.

The vehicle took another minute to get to them, and when it arrived it was clear it was a government vehicle. It pulled to a halt behind the other vehicles scattered on the road in front of the cook house. Two men in suits and sunglasses got out and made their way to the canopy tent.

They pulled badges as they approached, and Zelinsky recognized the FBI insignia.

“Captain Henry?” one of them said. “Special Agent Ross Dixon with the Bureau. I believe we spoke earlier? This is my partner, Agent Cosgrove.”

“You’re Dixon?” Henry said.

“That’s right,” Dixon said.

“Then who the hell was that?” Henry said.

He pointed toward the horizon, where the black helicopter was now about the size of a fly and still getting smaller.

“What are you talking about, Captain Henry?” Cosgrove asked.

Henry kept his arm up and pointing at the horizon as he began to explain about the helicopter and the man who had gotten off it.

Zelinsky turned to the equipment table and looked at the print of the third panel. He realized that the only thing the man from the helicopter had touched before gloving up was the cardboard tube and he had taken it with him. He moved the boxes that weighted the print and flipped it over. On the back there was a printed message.

Zelinsky stepped out from the cover of the canopy and looked off toward the horizon. He scanned and then sighted the black heli­copter. It was flying too low to be picked up on FAA radar. It was no more than a distant black dot against the gray desert sky.

In another moment it was gone.

Will Parker sat alone on the wooden platform beside the pulpit in the empty church. He was watching, through one of the side windows, the bay horse he’d tied to the hitching rail half an hour ago and the rippling rust-colored leaves of the trees in the distance. It was a sunny October morning, bright enough to light up every corner of the little sanctuary, and the breeze through the open windows was cool but not cold.

Parker crossed his legs, took off his hat, and balanced it on one knee. The pews facing him were as empty as the church, but he had chosen this seat—which wasn’t really a seat—because it offered a clear view of the front door. Whenever possible he sat this way, facing a room with his back to a wall. He remembered what had happened to Bill Hickok.

For the tenth time, Parker checked his pocket watch. He’d been intentionally early, but it was now twenty minutes past the time his client had set for this meeting.

His client. That still sounded strange to him, even after several years as a private investigator. But Parker liked the job, and the agency he and his brother had founded in San Francisco had been surprisingly successful. Granted, most of his recent work was dull—checking backgrounds, locating beneficiaries of a will, uncovering shady deals and/or relationships, etc. (unlike the tough assignments he’d had during his short time with the Pinkerton Agency years ago)—but occasionally he was given something interesting and challenging. He had a feeling this case might be both. After all, he wasn’t often instructed to meet a client at a church in the middle of the week, in the middle of nowhere.

“Mr. Parker?” a voice said.

He looked up to see a tall man in a brown hat and vest standing in the front doorway. Parker had heard no hoofbeats, no footsteps. A quick glance confirmed that his own horse, rented from the livery stable in Dodge early this morning, was still alone at the hitch rail. So much for being watchful.

“Who else would I be?” he said. “We’re probably the only two people within miles.”

“Sorry I’m late,” the tall man said.

Parker stayed seated, watching him. “How’d you get here?”

“Quietly. My horse is tied some distance away.” A smile touched the man’s lips, but only for a moment, there and gone. “The cautious, I have found, live longer.”

“Cautious of what?”

“Of everything.”

With that, the man strode casually down the aisle and extended his hand. “Cole Bennett.”

They shook hands and Bennett took a seat in the front pew, facing Parker from a distance of eight feet or so. Cole Bennett appeared to be in his late fifties, maybe ten years older than Parker. But he looked strong and fit, and had what Parker’s wife, Bitsy, would call a world-weary face. Bennett took off his hat and set it down beside him. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

“You paid for my transportation,” Parker reminded him. “I arrived on last night’s stage.”

“But not from San Francisco. Your brother wired me that you were already fairly close to here at the moment. Redemption, he said?”

“Yes—my wife lived there when I met her. We’re visiting her parents.”

“That was convenient for me.”

“Convenient for me, actually. Less expensive for you.” Parker hooked his thumbs in his gunbelt. “How can I help you, Mr. Bennett?”

Bennett blew out a long sigh. “First I need to tell you a story.”

“I’m listening.”

“Do you remember the Ford brothers? Jesse and Dalton?”

“Barely.”

Again Bennett hesitated, obviously choosing his words. “Some time ago,” he began, “a U.S. marshal, Sam Ewing, shot Dalton Ford during what was said to be the robbery of a bank up in Hays City. The marshal lived here in Dodge but was in Hays the day this happened. Anyhow, Marshal Ewing shot Ford and killed him. Afterward one of the witnesses said Ford was in the bank, sure enough, but wasn’t robbing it—he said Ford was chatting with one of the tellers. Whichever way it happened, the marshal got word he was there, entered the bank, and Dalton Ford—a man wanted for multiple crimes—wound up dead as a pine knot. Dalton’s brother Jesse, who was in prison at the time, heard about the killing, and when he was released a year later he showed up at Ewing’s house just outside Dodge with two of his buddies.”

“Looking for revenge.”

“Yes,” Bennett said. He paused and studied his folded hands.

Will Parker waited, saying nothing.

“According to the official report,” Bennett continued, “Jesse Ford—I’ll just call him Jesse from now on—and his friends arrived one day in July to find Ewing and his twelve-year-old son, Andrew, home in their farmhouse north of town. Not far from here, actually. Mrs. Ewing had died three months earlier, some kind of fever, and Ewing had retired as marshal and took to raising crops and some cattle. Apparently Jesse and his men surprised them. They struck Ewing in the head in the kitchen, held him and the boy at gunpoint, and Jesse ordered his two men to go outside and wait. Five minutes later Ewing got the jump on Jesse and shot him dead, then went out and killed one of Jesse’s friends as well. The other one got away.”

Parker thought that over. “The official report, you said?”

“Yes. It’s what Ewing told the sheriff afterward.”

“Go on.”

“No more to tell. That’s the background,” Bennett said. “The current situation is, I received word recently that things didn’t happen the way everyone thought they did that day at Ewing’s house. I’ve been told that Jesse Ford was shot in the back. One of his two companions was killed with an entry wound in the chest, just like Ewing reported, but—again—Jesse’s wound showed that he was shot from behind.”

“And how did you find all this out?”

“From an old friend of mine. He’d been a sheriff’s deputy in Dodge, back when the incident took place, and saw the two bodies the sheriff brought in. He told me this a few weeks ago, on his deathbed. A week or so after that, I noticed an ad in the newspaper about your agency and sent the wire requesting your services.”

Parker waited for more. When it didn’t come, he asked, “So what is it that you need?”

Bennett turned to look out the window at the small stand of oaks Parker had been watching earlier. The wind had died; the leaves were still. Like Bennett’s expression.

“I need to know what happened that day,” Bennett said. “What really happened.”

“Why don’t you just ask the sheriff?”

“Because the sheriff is dead. So is former marshal Sam Ewing, and even his son, Andrew. The son died young, from an accident on a cattle drive, south of here. They’re all gone now.”

Parker studied Cole Bennett for a moment. “What haven’t you told me, Mr. Bennett?”

“I haven’t told you when all this happened.”

“When did it happen?”

Bennett let out a lungful of air. “Sam Ewing shot Jesse Ford twenty-two years ago.”

“What?”

“My friend—the deputy—said he kept the secret all those years because the sheriff asked him to. Said everybody in town loved Sam Ewing, all the Ewings. Said the sheriff figured what good would it do to tell the whole story? Jesse Ford was dead, along with one of his cutthroat friends, and the world was better off for it. Why complicate things? The deputy said he and the sheriff, and of course Ewing and his son, were the only people who knew Jesse was back-shot. And that only the two Ewings knew how it happened.”

Bennett went quiet then, staring down at his boots as if in deep thought.

Parker let the silence drag out, then said, “I think we have a problem here, Mr. Bennett. If this took place more than twenty years ago and everyone involved is deceased, why do you think I could find out any more than what you just told me?”

Bennett raised his head. “Because I don’t think they’re all deceased.”

“You just said—”

“I said the deputy told me Sam Ewing and his son were the only people who saw exactly what happened. But I think there’s someone else.” He leaned forward in his seat, his eyes locked on Parker’s. “I heard Sam Ewing’s son, Andrew, had a childhood friend his own age, and I heard that in the summers they were inseparable, those two boys, especially in the months after Sam’s wife passed. Way I heard it, this kid was at little Andrew Ewing’s house most every day.” Bennett paused, drew a breath, and said, “I’d be willing to bet—in fact, I guess I am betting, by hiring you—that whoever this boy was, he was probably there with Andrew the day Jesse Ford and his men came to call. I’m betting he never got mentioned because everyone involved was trying to protect him. Again, why make a simple matter complicated?”

Parker gave this some thought. “Do you have a name?”

“No. But I have confidence you’ll come up with one. And when you do…” Bennett paused again, his face solemn. “When you find him, maybe he has what I need to know.”

Another question was nagging at Parker. An important question.

“Why do you need to know?”

Cole Bennett settled back into the pew. “My wife,” he said, “was a Ford. Jesse and Dalton, as worthless as they were, were her nephews. Her brother’s sons. I told her what my deputy friend, before he died, told me about Jesse’s death, and it’s driving her crazy. She says she has to know what really happened in that kitchen that day.”

Parker mulled that over. “All due respect,” he said, “why do you need me? Why couldn’t you ask the same kinds of questions you want me to ask?”

“Because you’re the expert. I checked out the references your brother gave me.” Bennett picked up his hat and stood. “I’m trusting you to solve this for me, Mr. Parker.”

Parker, who had spent a lot of time doing this kind of work, knew a lie when he heard it. He knew Cole Bennett didn’t want to ask around about this matter for the same reason Bennett had picked a remote spot for their meeting today: he couldn’t afford to be connected to all this. What are you hiding, Mr. Bennett?

Parker rose to his feet also, and the two men stood facing each other.

“Your brother told me your name’s Will,” Bennett said.

“That’s right.”

“It occurred to me that you bear some resemblance to another Parker, well known in this part of the country years ago. By reputation, at least.”

“What kind of reputation?”

“He was a gunman. A killer, I’m told.”

“Is that so.”

Bennett tilted his head, narrowed his eyes. “This man’s name was Charlie Parker.”

Parker felt himself shrug. “Sorry. No relation.”

Bennett studied him a moment more, nodded, and left. Parker remained standing where he was. This time he did hear hoofbeats, moments later, receding into the distance.

Parker sighed. All God’s chillun got secrets, he thought.

After another minute or so, Charles William Parker walked outside to the hitching rail, mounted the bay, and headed back to town.

Hector’s truck broke down on a fire road in the Gallatin, on the west side of Custer National Forest. He was just south of the Needles, and GPS put him close to the Yellowstone, so he wasn’t lost, but it was probably a good fifteen miles to the nearest campground, and he’d have to hike it, shank’s mare. From up on the hogback where the truck had died, he could see out across the Absarokas, a couple of thousand feet higher in elevation. Down by Granite Peak, some thirty miles to the southeast, there was a late-afternoon storm system building, thunderheads, the flicker of lightning, a curtain of rain. It looked to be coming on fast, but with luck he could still beat the weather.

David Angola was leaning against Anne DeWitt’s car in the Travis High School parking lot. The bright early-fall sun shone on his newly shaved dark head. It was four-thirty on a Friday afternoon, and the lot was almost empty.

Anne did not get the surprise David had (perhaps) intended. She always looked out the window of her office after she’d collected her take-home paperwork.

Anne hadn’t stayed alive as long as she had by being careless.

After a few moments of inner debate, she decided to go home as usual. She might as well find out what David wanted. Anne was utterly alert as she walked toward him, her hand on the knife in her jacket pocket. She was very good with sharp instruments.

“I come in peace,” he called, smiling, holding out his hands to show they were empty. His white teeth flashed in a broad smile.

The last time Anne had seen David they’d been friends, or at least as close to friends as they could be. But that had been years ago. She stopped ten feet away. “Who’s minding Camp West while you’re gone?” she said.

“Chloe,” he said.

“Don’t remember her.”

“Chloe Montgomery,” he said. “Short blond hair? Six feet tall?”

“The one who went to Japan to study martial arts?”

David nodded.

“I didn’t like her, but you obviously have a different opinion.” Anne was only marking time with the conversation until she got a feel for the situation. She had no idea why David was here. Ignorance did not sit well with her.

“Not up to me,” David said.

Anne absorbed that. “How could she not be your choice? Last I knew, you were still calling the shots.”

For the past eight years David Angola had been the head of Camp West, a very clandestine California training facility specializing in survival under harsh conditions… and harsh interrogation.

Anne had been his opposite number at Camp East, located in the Allegheny Mountains. Since the training was so rigorous, at least every other year a student didn’t survive. This was the cost of doing business. However, a senator’s daughter had died at Camp East. Anne had been fired.

“I was calling the shots until there were some discrepancies in the accounts.” David looked away as he said that.

“You got fired over a decimal point?” Anne could scarcely believe it.

“Let’s call it a leave of absence while the situation’s being investigated,” he said easily. But his whole posture read “tense” to Anne, and that contrasted with his camouflage as an average citizen. David always blended in. Though Anne remembered his taste as leaning toward silk T-shirts and designer jeans, today he wore a golf shirt and khakis under a tan windbreaker. Half the men in North Carolina were wearing some version of the same costume.

Anne considered her next question. “So, you came here to do what?”

“I couldn’t be in town and not lay eyes on you, darlin’. I like the new nose, but the dark hair suited you better.”

Anne shrugged. Her hair was an unremarkable chestnut. Her nose was shorter and thinner. Her eyebrows had been reshaped. She looked attractive enough. The point was that she did not look like Twyla Burnside. “You’ve seen me. Now what?”

“I mainly want to see my man,” David said easily. “I thought it was only good sense to check in with you first.”

Anne was not surprised that David had come to see his former second-in-command, Holt Halsey. David had sent Holt to keep an eye on Anne when she’d gotten some death threats… at least, that was the explanation Holt had given Anne. She’d taken it with a pinch of salt.

“So go see him.” Anne glanced down at her watch. “Holt should have locked up the gym by now. He’s probably on his way home. I’m sure you have his address.” Aside from that one quick glance, she’d kept her eyes on David. His hands were empty, but that meant nothing to someone as skilled as he was. They’d both been instructors before they’d gotten promoted.

David straightened up and took a step toward his car, a rental. “I hated to see you get the ax. Cassie’s not a patch on you.”

“Water under the bridge,” Anne said stiffly.

“Holt had a similar issue,” David said casually. Apparently he was fishing to find out if Anne knew why Holt had left Camp West.

Anne didn’t, and she’d never asked. “What is this really about, David?”

“I’m at loose ends. I haven’t taken a vacation in two years. I’m always at the camp. But until they find out who actually took the money, they don’t want me around. I didn’t have anything to do. So I came to see Greg. Holt.”

That wasn’t totally ridiculous. “I think he’ll be glad to see you,” Anne said. “When will you know the verdict?”

“Soon, I hope. There’s an independent audit going on. It’ll prove I’m innocent. You know me. I always had a lot of trouble with the budgeting part of my job. Holt did most of the work. Makes it more of a joke, that Oversight thinks I’m sophisticated enough to embezzle.”

“That’s Oversight’s job, to be suspicious.” Embezzling. No wonder David had taken a trip across country. You didn’t want to be in Oversight’s crosshairs if the news was bad.

“Okay, I’m on my way,” he said, slapping the hood of his white Nissan.

“Have a good visit,” Anne said.

“Sure thing.” David straightened and sauntered to his rental car. “Holt’s place is close?”

“About six miles south. It’s a small complex on the left, all townhomes. Crow Creek Village. He’s number eight.”

“Has he taken to North Carolina?”

“You can ask him,” she said, smiling pleasantly. Would this conversation never end?

He nodded. “Good to see you… Anne.”

Anne watched until David’s car was out of sight. Then she allowed herself to relax. She pulled her cell phone from her purse and tapped a number on speed dial.

“Anne,” Holt said. “I was—”

“David Angola is here,” she said. “He was waiting for me when I came out of the school.”

Holt was silent for a moment. “Why?”

“He says they asked him to leave the camp while the books are being audited. Money’s missing. He’s on his way to see you.”

“Okay.” Holt didn’t sound especially alarmed or excited.

They hung up simultaneously.

Anne wondered if Holt was worried about this unexpected visit. Or maybe he was simply happy his former boss was in town.

Maybe he’d even known David was coming, but Anne thought not. I’ve fallen into bad habits. I felt secure. I quit questioning things I should have questioned. Anne was more shaken than she wanted to admit to herself when she entertained the thought that Holt might have been playing a long game.

The short drive home was anything but pleasant.

Anne’s home was on an attractive cul-de-sac surrounded by a thin circle of woodland. She’d never had a house before, and she’d looked at many places before she’d picked this two-story red brick with white trim. It was somewhat beyond her salary, but Anne let it be understood that the insurance payout from her husband’s death had formed the down payment.

Anne noted with satisfaction that the yard crew had come in her absence. The flower beds had been readied for winter. She’d tried working outside—it seemed so domestic, so in character for her new persona—but it had bored her profoundly.

Sooner or later the surrounding area would all be developed. But for now the woods baffled the sound from the nearby state road. The little neighborhood was both peaceful and cordial. None of the homeowners were out in their front yards, though at the end of the cul-de-sac a couple of teenage boys were shooting hoops on their driveway.

The grinding noise of the garage door opening seemed very loud. Anne eased in, parking neatly in half of the space. She’d begun leaving the other side open for Holt’s truck.

There was a movement in the corner of her eye. Anne’s head whipped around. Someone had slipped in with the car and run to the front of the garage, quick as a cat. The intruder was a small, hard woman in her forties with harshly dyed black hair.

Anne thought of pinning the woman to the garage wall. But the intruder was smart enough to stand off to the side, out of the path of the car, and also out of the reach of a flung-open door.

This was Anne’s day for encountering dangerous people.

The woman pantomimed rolling down a window, and Anne pressed the button.

“Hello, Cassie,” Anne said. “What a surprise.”

“Lower the garage door. Turn the engine off. Get out slowly. We’re going inside to talk.”

There was a gun in Anne’s center console, but by the time she’d extracted it, Cassie would have shot her. At least the knife was still in Anne’s pocket.

“Hurry up!” Cassie was impatient.

Anne pressed the button to lower the garage door. Following Cassie’s repeated instructions, she put the car in park and turned it off. She could not throw her knife at the best angle to wound Cassie. There was no point delaying; she opened the car door and stood.

“It’s been a long time.” Cassie looked rough. Anne’s former subordinate had never worn makeup, and she certainly hadn’t gotten that dye job in any salon.

“Not long enough,” Cassie said. She pushed her hood completely off her head. Dark hoodie, dark sweatpants. Completely forgettable.

“If you don’t want to talk to me, why are you here? Why the ambush?”

“We need to have a conversation. I figured you’d shoot first and ask questions later,” Cassie said. “All things considered.”

“Considering you threw me under the bus?”

When Senator Miriam Epperson’s daughter had died in the mountain-survival test, Cassie had laid the blame directly on Anne’s shoulders. At the time Anne had thought that strategy was understandable, even reasonable. It didn’t matter that Cassie had been the one who’d kept telling Dorcas Epperson to suck it up when the girl claimed she was ill. Anne clearly understood that the buck would stop with her, because she was in charge of Camp East. There was no need for both of them to go down.

Understanding Cassie’s motivation did not mean Anne had forgotten.

“It was my chance to take charge,” Cassie said. “Let’s go in the house. Get out your keys, then zip your purse.”

“So why aren’t you at the farm on this fine day? Snow training will begin in a few weeks,” Anne said. She unlocked the back door and punched in the alarm code. She walked into the kitchen slowly, her hands held out from her side.

From behind her Cassie said, “Have you seen David Angola lately?”

Anne had expected that question. She kept walking across the kitchen and into the living room. She bypassed the couch and went to the armchair, her normal seat. She turned to face Cassie. “I’d be more surprised to see David than I am to see you, but I’d be happier. He’s still running Farm West?”

“He was,” Cassie said. She was savagely angry. “We’re both on probation until… never mind. I figured he’d head here, since you’re such a favorite of his. I just found out Greg is here too. He was always David’s man, to the bone.”

“Surely that’s a melodramatic way to look at it?” And inaccurate. Holt was his own man. At least Anne had believed so.

Now she was leaving margin for error.

“I don’t know why both of you are living new lives here,” Cassie said. “In the same town. In North Carolina, for God’s sake. No two people have ever been placed together.”

“Most people get dead,” Anne said. “The point of being here is that my location is secret.”

“It took some doing to find out,” Cassie said. “But by the usual means, I discovered it.” She smiled, very unpleasantly.

“Coercion? Torture? Sex?” Anne added the last option deliberately. Cassie didn’t answer, but she smiled in a smug way. Sex it was.

That’s a leak that needs to be plugged, Anne noted. She should have taken care of it the first time someone from her past had shown up in her house and tried to kill her. At the time Anne had dismissed it as a one-off, a past enemy with super tracking ability and a lot of funds. Now she knew there was someone who was talking. A weak person, but one who had access to records…

“Gary Pomeroy in tech support,” Anne said, making an informed guess. Cassie’s eyes flickered. Bingo.

“Doesn’t make any difference, does it?” Cassie now stood in front of the couch, still on guard, a careful distance away. She gestured with the gun. “Strip. Throw each garment over to me.”

Anne was angry, though it didn’t show on her face. No one can tell me to strip in my own house, she thought. But what she said was, “What are we going to talk about?” She stepped out of her pumps and unzipped her pants.

“Where Angola hid the money,” Cassie said.

“You’ll have to tell me what you’re talking about,” Anne said. “I’m totally out of the loop.” Anne’s jacket came off (her knife in its pocket), then her blouse. When she was down to her bra and underpants, she turned in a circle to prove there was nothing concealed under them. “So, what money?”

Her eyes fixed on Anne, Cassie ran the fingers of her left hand over every garment, tossing the jacket behind the couch when she felt the knife. “Someone in accounting sent up a flare,” she said. “After that, the accountants settled in. Like flies on a carcass.” Cassie waved her gun toward an easy chair. After Anne sat, she tossed Anne’s pants and blouse back within her reach. While Anne got dressed, keeping her movements slow and steady, Cassie sat on the couch, still too wary and too far away for a successful attack.

“Both camps got audited?” Anne said, buttoning up her blouse.

“Yes, the whole program. Our accounts got frozen. Everyone was buzzing. Bottom line, in the past few years over half a million dollars vanished.”

Anne was surprised at the modesty of the amount. It wasn’t cheap to run clandestine training facilities staffed with expert instructors, much less to keep a fully staffed and equipped infirmary. “The money was missing from the budget? Or from the enemy fund?”

“The fund.” Both farms contributed to a common pool of money confiscated—or stolen outright—from criminals of all sorts, or from people simply deemed enemies. The existence of this fund was known only to the upper managers and to Oversight… and because it couldn’t be helped, a high-clearance branch of the tech team responsible for data handling also had access to the figures.

Cassie continued, “It would have been too obvious if it had only disappeared from David’s allocation. It came from the undivided fund. Oversight’s pretending they suspect David. I know they really think I did it. I’m suffering for it. Even when I’m cleared, and I will be, and get reinstated… they’ve halved the number of trainees for next year because of the deficit. I’ll have to let two instructors go.”

This was not a novel situation. A money crunch had happened at least two times during Anne’s tenure. “Consolidating the camps would save a lot of money,” Anne said, because that had been the rumor every time a pinch had been felt. She’d scored a direct hit, from the way Cassie’s face changed. Cassie was the younger administrator; she’d be the one to go if the camps combined.

“Not going to happen,” Cassie said.

Anne knew denial when she saw it. “What do you think I can do about this?”

“David and I are both on suspension until the money is tracked down. I’m sure David will come to see Greg. They’re thick as thieves. Maybe literally.”

“I’ve been here for three years, Holt for two,” Anne said. “It’s hard to see how either of us could be responsible.” But it’s not impossible, she thought. “What do you plan to do if you find David?”

Cassie didn’t answer. “I’ll find him. Are you telling me the truth? You haven’t seen him?”

“That’s what I said.” Why would Cassie expect Anne to tell the truth?

“What’s Greg’s new name?”

“Holt Halsey. Baseball coach.” Anne could see no need to keep the secret. She planned to make sure Cassie never told anyone.

“As soon as it’s dark we’re going to pay Coach Halsey a little visit,” Cassie said. She sat back on the couch and fell silent. But she stayed vigilant.

Anne had plenty to think about. She’d grown into her new identity. She’d become proficient in making her school the best it could be… though sometimes through very unconventional methods. She found it intolerable to believe she was on the brink of losing it all.

Anne was mapping out possible scenarios, imagining various contingencies, and (most important) planning an unannounced visit to Gary Pomeroy as soon as she could spare the time.

Assuming she had any left. Cassie was an emotional wreck, but she was also dangerous and capable.

It would be dark in less than an hour. Anne figured Cassie planned her move—whatever it was—for after dark. But that left an hour she’d have to spend in Cassie’s company. “Want to play cards?” Anne asked. “More to the point, do you want me to touch up your roots? Jesus, girl, go to a salon.”

“Shut up, Twyla.”

“Did you fly into Raleigh-Durham? Surely you didn’t drive all the way?” It was remotely possible Cassie had driven her personal vehicle all the way from Pennsylvania.

Cassie looked at her in stony silence.

It had been worth a try. Anne did not speak again, but she wasn’t idle. She had a lot to plan. A lot to lose. There were weapons here in her living room if she could reach them. She counted steps to each one. Each time she came up just a little short.

“That your family?” Cassie said, and Anne’s mind snapped to the present. Cassie waved her gun at the set of pictures on a narrow table against the wall. The table looked like a family heirloom, maybe passed down from the fifties.

“Yes,” Anne said.

“Your mom and dad?”

“Someone’s mom and dad.”

“Where’d they find the guy posing as your husband? He looks familiar.” Cassie was looking at a picture of Anne and her husband, standing in the fall woods, a golden retriever on a leash. His arm was around Anne’s shoulders. Both were smiling; maybe the dog was too.

“He’s in the acting pool.” Actors came in very handy in training exercises.

“Was the dog from the acting pool too?” Cassie tilted her head toward the framed picture.

“Waffle,” Anne said. “The cook’s dog.”

“How’d your husband die?”

“Skiing accident.” That had been Anne’s choice.

“Who’s the girl?”

Anne had a studio portrait of a young woman on the credenza in her office, so she’d picked an informal shot of the same woman to place in her home. The woman looked not unlike Anne, and she was wearing nurse’s scrubs and holding a plaque. (She’d been named nurse of the year.) “That’s my sister, Teresa,” Anne said. “She lives in San Diego.”

Cassie looked at Anne with a mixture of incredulity and distaste. She said, “At my job I can be who I am. I don’t have to fake a family. And no one underestimates me. How can you stand being here with civilians? Being less?”

“But I’m not less,” Anne said. Anne had never thought of herself as a civilian, the instructors’ term for noncombatants. Anne was still a fighter and strategist. Her regime at the school was sure, focused, and covertly ruthless; very much Anne, no matter what name she was using. She could have told Cassie about the gradual improvement in the school grade-point average, the better win-to-loss ratio of the school teams. (Except girls’ volleyball, Anne remembered; she had to do something about Melissa Horvath, the volleyball coach.)

Anne locked away her concerns with Melissa Horvath. She might not be around to correct the volleyball coach. She couldn’t discount the danger of her situation.

Cassie was obviously pleased to have her former boss at her mercy. That came as no surprise to Anne; Cassie had always wanted to be top dog (or top bitch). She’d never been good at hiding that. She’d waited for the death of Dorcas Epperson, one cold night in a marsh. Then she’d seized her opportunity.

“Did you take care of Epperson?” Anne asked. It was a new possibility, one she hadn’t considered before.

“No,” Cassie said, outraged.

Anne thought, She means it. She wanted to get rid of me, but she didn’t plan the death that brought me down. Idiot.

Anne’s cell phone rang.

“You can get it,” Cassie said after a moment. “No cry for help, or you’re dead.”

Anne nodded. Moving slowly, she rose to go to the kitchen counter. She pulled her phone from her purse. There was a gun hidden not two feet away, and this might be as close as Anne would get to a weapon. But Cassie had stood and was facing Anne, on the watch.

“Hello,” Anne said. She’d seen the caller ID; she knew who it was.

“Are we still on for tonight?” Holt’s voice was cautious.

Anne had been expecting this call since the clock had read five-thirty.

Anne was never late.

“I’m so sorry, I have to cancel,” she said evenly. “I’ve had an unexpected visitor. I don’t get to see her often, so we plan to spend the evening catching up.”

After a moment’s silence, Holt said, “Okay. I’m sorry to miss our dinner.”

“Is it Holt?” Cassie mouthed.

Anne nodded.

“Tell him to come,” Cassie hissed.

“Why don’t you come over here?” Anne said obediently. “I’ve got plenty of salad and some rolls. I’d love you to meet my friend.” Anne really enjoyed Cassie’s face when she said that.

“You sure you have enough lamb?” Holt asked. Anne never ate lamb.

“I’ve got enough lamb for all of us.”

“I’ll be right over,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Me too,” Anne said sincerely. She ended the conversation. “He’s coming over,” she told Cassie.

“You two are on dinner terms?”

“Every now and then.” At least three nights a week, sometimes more.

“Are you bed buddies?”

“My business.”

Cassie could not control her face as well as Anne could. She reddened. Anne had a very faint memory of an instructor telling her that Cassie’d made a play for Holt when they were both at some planning session. That play had been spectacularly unsuccessful.

Even if Anne had not heard the rumor (she was surprised she remembered it, she hadn’t known Holt well at all), Cassie had clearly signaled that she had a history with him, at least in her own mind.

Since Anne had worked closely with Cassie, she’d quickly become aware that her subordinate was very touchy about her looks, doubtful of her own sex appeal. It was a point of vulnerability. Anne began to wonder if this search for David Angola had more than one layer. Interesting, but not important.

After ten minutes there was a knock at the door. When Cassie nodded, Anne answered it.

Holt was clutching a bag of groceries to his chest with his left hand. His right hand was concealed. He’d come armed.

“You’ll never guess who’s here,” Anne said, standing to one side to give him a clear shot if he wanted to take it. “You remember Cassie Boynton?”

Holt smiled and stepped inside. “I did not expect to see you, Cassie,” he said. “It’s been a long time. What are you doing in this neck of the woods?” Anne quietly shut the door behind Holt.

Cassie held up her gun. “I’m looking for some answers,” she said. “Are you going to try to stop me?”

“I am,” said David, behind her. He’d used Holt’s key to come in the back door.

Cassie whirled, but David wasn’t where she thought he’d be. He’d moved as soon as he’d spoken. Holt, who’d begun moving with me, leaped behind Cassie and took her in a chokehold. Cassie clawed at Holt’s arm with her free hand and tried to bring the gun to bear with her other.

Holt made Cassie release her gun by slamming her hand with the butt of his own. Anne heard a bone crack.

And just that quickly it was over, without a shot fired.

Anne had broken a finger once (or twice), so she knew how painful it was. Cassie did not scream. Fairly impressive.

“You’re unarmed,” David said. “You’re under our control. If this was a training situation, what would you tell yourself?”

Cassie did not speak. Her rage filled the room like a red cloud.

“You’d say, ‘Bang, you’re dead,’” David told her. “Did you follow me all this way to try to kill me? Are you trying to prove I stole the money?”

“You did,” Cassie said. Though they were all liars by trade, Cassie believed what she said.

David’s dark face was impassive as he said, “I never took a cent.”

“I didn’t either.” Suddenly Cassie launched herself backward, drawing up her knees to explode forward in a kick that hit David’s chest. He staggered back. Since Cassie’s whole weight was suddenly hanging from Holt’s arm, his hold broke.

With a beautiful precision, Anne pivoted on her left foot and kicked Cassie in the temple with her right. Cassie’s head rocked back, her eyes went strange, and she crumpled.

David had regained his feet by then and he was striving to catch his breath. He held his gun on Cassie, but after a few seconds he was sure she was out. His arm fell to his side, and he sat heavily.

Holt had stepped away from Cassie in case David shot her.

“She sounded like she was telling the truth,” Holt said, after a moment of silence.

“She did, didn’t she?” David looked troubled. “I was so sure it was her.”

“She was sure it was you,” Anne said.

David appeared both confused and angry. “Do you believe I’m an embezzler? Twyla, Greg?”

Twyla said, “Anne,” at the same moment Greg said, “Holt.”

“Does it matter what we think?” Holt continued. “One of you will take the blame. I hope it’s her.”

Anne began to pick up the items that had scattered from the grocery sack. Among them was a knife. Anne smiled. She retrieved her own from her jacket. Then, just in case, she got her gun out of the drawer and put it in a handy spot. After all, everyone else in the room was armed.

She was waiting for the inevitable question. Holt obliged by saying, “What do you want to do with her, David?”

“The options are limited,” David said slowly. “We call Camp East and tell—who, Jay Pargeter, I guess?—to come get her. Or we wait until she wakes up, and we ask her some questions. Or we let her go. Or we kill her now.”

“We’re not part of the system anymore,” Anne told David, pointing from Holt to herself. “We shouldn’t take part in an interrogation.”

“You can’t let her go,” Holt said.

David looked down at Cassie unhappily. “If she was anyone else, I’d put her down. But she’s earned some respect. She’s done a good job since you left, Anne. Until now.”

Holt glanced at Anne and then said, “There’s another choice. You could take Cassie up to Camp East yourself.”

David looked at Holt with narrow eyes. “Why?”

“Enough people know where Anne is already,” Holt said. “Someone had to tell Cassie. If you call from here, at least ten more people will know. Anne, did Cassie say how she found you?”

“Gary Pomeroy in tech support. She also knew you were here, so she figured David might visit.”

“Son of a bitch,” David said, disgusted. “I’ll pay Gary back. Maybe officially. Maybe on my own time.”

“If you don’t, I will,” Anne said. “I don’t want to have to start all over again. It seems to be too easy to pry the information out of Gary. At least we’ll assume it was him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” David tensed.

“You knew all along where I was. You sent Holt here.”

“You were getting death threats!”

“Like that’s new. I never believed that’s the only reason he came.”

David looked at Holt. “So you’ve never told her why you left?”

“We never talked about it,” Holt said calmly.

“We don’t talk about the past a lot,” Anne said, which was absolutely true.

“Well, Anne, you might be interested to know that Holt here, back when he was Greg Baer, was suspected in the disappearance—and probable murder—of a doctor in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” David said.

“And?” Anne was unconcerned.

“I got tipped off Greg was going to be arrested,” David said. “We couldn’t let the police come to the facility, obviously. They believe it’s a wilderness camp for adults, but if they had a closer look, that wouldn’t fly. I had to drive Greg into town to meet with them. They’d flown in from Michigan.”

“They took me to the local police station and put me through the wringer,” Holt said, smiling. “But considering where I work, it was nothing.”

David stared at him. “Man, they were going to arrest you!”

“Maybe.” Holt didn’t sound worried.

“Oversight voted to hide him, on my strong recommendation,” David told Anne, though he sounded as if he considered that was a mistake just at the moment. “Otherwise his background might raise a red flag, though I swore to them that Greg wouldn’t talk about the program. His background fit the opening here. He had his ears modified and his tattoos removed. A nose job. I figured you wouldn’t recognize him right away. You two hadn’t actually met, as far as Greg could remember. You could get to know him as Holt.”

“You’re right, I didn’t recognize him.” He’d made her vaguely uneasy, though, and it had explained a lot when he let her know who he’d been.

David nodded, pleased. “Oversight charged me with arranging your identities. No one else knew.”

“Except Gary in tech support,” Holt said in disgust.

“Except him.”

“Thanks, then,” Anne said. She smiled brightly. Holt was going to have some talking to do after this. From his face, he knew that.

David looked from Holt to Anne. “All right, I’ll take Cassie with me. I’ll call Pennsylvania once I’ve gotten a couple of hours under my belt so no one can find out where I started. I disabled the GPS on the rental. It’s a seven-hour drive?”

“Yes,” Anne said. “Thereabouts. One of us could go with you, fly back. You might need help.”

“No, thanks,” David said. “I need to think. Someone took that money. It wasn’t me, and I believe it wasn’t Cassie. But we both might lose our jobs.”

Holt and Anne glanced at each other, quickly looked away. Yes, they needed to talk.

“Where’s your car?” Anne asked David.

“We drove over here in it,” Holt said. He was staring at Cassie, sizing up her shape and weight. He was a practical man.

“Good. We need to find her car.”

“Search,” Holt said briefly. Since it was possible Cassie was playing possum—though Anne didn’t think so—Anne stood a safe distance away, with Holt’s gun aimed at the prone figure. Holt knelt to search her. In a practiced way he rolled Cassie to one side, then the other. He pulled two sets of keys from her pockets and stood. “Rental,” he said, “and personal.”

“She’s got a cabin five miles from camp,” Anne said. “If she hasn’t moved.”

“She won’t stay out for much longer,” David said. “If I get stopped… I’m a black man. Just saying.” He was saying that not only might he get stopped no matter how carefully he kept to the speed limit, but also that he didn’t want to have to kill policemen. But it would be very, very awkward if he was arrested with a tied-up white woman who was screaming bloody murder.

“I have something to keep her out until you get there,” Anne said. “You sure you don’t want me to come? I could manage her. But I’d have to be back by Monday morning for school.”

“You have no idea how weird it is to hear you say that,” David said, smiling reluctantly. “I’ll take her solo, if she’s drugged. What do you have to keep her quiet?”

Anne ran up the stairs to her attic to open her carefully concealed stash of things she’d figured might prove handy. She was a “waste not, want not” kind of person.

“This should be two doses of thiopental,” Anne said when she returned. She handed the vials of freeze-dried powder to David, along with sterile water and two hypodermics.

“You keep that around? Geez, Anne. What else you got?” David withdrew 20cc of sterile water and injected it into the first vial of thiopental. He shook the solution vigorously and withdrew it into the syringe.

“Oh, this is a holdover from Camp East,” she said. “I picked it up in the infirmary after a trainee broke his leg. I thought it might come in handy someday. I stuck it in my go-kit and I didn’t clean it out… in the haste of my departure.” (In the middle of the night. With two armed and wary “escorts.” Not her favorite memory.)

“Thanks,” David said. He gave Cassie the first injection and prepared the next one, capping the syringe and pocketing it. “Is the other side of your garage free?”

“Yes, there’s a control button by the kitchen door. You can drive right in. Might as well leave the kitchen door open.”

In a few seconds—not long enough to have a conversation—Anne heard the garage door rumble up. She nodded to Holt, who squatted to take Cassie’s feet. Anne took her shoulders. Cassie’s body drooped between them like a hammock.

David had lowered the garage door and opened the trunk. “I’ve disabled the safety latch,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on the clock and stop to give her the second shot. Four hours?”

Anne and Holt laboriously dumped Cassie into the trunk. It was lucky she wasn’t tall.

“Four hours should be right,” Holt said. “Sure you can stay awake?”

“Or I make you a to-go cup of coffee,” Anne said helpfully. She predicted David’s reaction.

Sure enough, he stared at her with ill-concealed suspicion. He said, “No, thanks.”

“Let us know when you get there.” Holt clapped David on the shoulder.

“I hope they find out who took the money,” Anne said.

That was as much goodbye as any of them wanted.

As soon as David backed out, Anne closed the garage door. She and Holt stood in the chilly space.

He was waiting for her to say something first.

“When you were Greg, you had a real family,” Anne said. It was not a guess.

He nodded. “Mom, Dad, brother. My father had stomach cancer. He was having a lot of pain. The roads were icy, and my brother was out of state. So Mom took him to the emergency-care clinic at three in the morning, because it was lots closer than the hospital. I drove from my hotel to meet them there. The doctor on duty was either incompetent or sleepy or both. He gave Dad the wrong drug. Dad died. He would have died soon anyway, I know. And he was suffering. But it wasn’t his time just yet. Mom was sure she’d get to take him home.”

“So you took care of the doctor.”

“Waited three weeks and then went into his house at night.” He smiled. “Snatched him right out of bed and vanished him.”

“Did the police really have evidence against you?”

“I’d said a few things to him that night. So they had a lot of suspicion. When they checked into my background, they had even more. And a neighbor saw a car like my rental backing out of his driveway that night.”

“Nothing decisive.”

“Enough to haul me in for questioning. David didn’t let that happen.”

Anne said, “You did the right thing. So did David. Not that you need me to tell you that.”

He nodded. “Was that really thiopental you gave Cassie?” he said.

“If I’d had something stronger I would have brought it down,” she admitted. “All I’d kept was the thiopental. Cassie might not survive the trip anyway. She was out a lot longer than I’d thought she’d be, and I know she’s had more than one concussion over the years.”

Holt looked hopeful. “That would make things simpler.”

They went into the house. Anne opened a cabinet and brought out a whiskey bottle, raising it in silent query. Holt nodded. She poured and handed him a shot glass, filled one for herself. She leaned against the kitchen island on one side while Holt sat on a stool on the other. They regarded each other.

“Cancer treatment is very expensive,” Anne said at last.

Holt regarded her steadily. “Dad had a long illness. That trip to the clinic was only one of many. The bills… you could hardly believe how much, and the insurance only covered a fraction of the cost. My mother and my brother were scared shitless. The debt would loom over them the rest of their lives. They think I have some hush-hush military job, and they know the military doesn’t pay well. They didn’t expect I could help much. They were really understanding about that. It burned me up inside.”

“So you siphoned off the money from the enemy fund.”

“Yeah. I did.”

So there it was.

“You did a good job covering your tracks. How’d you plan it?”

“It helped that David’s never been confident with numbers. He always sweated budget time, needed a lot of help from me. I remembered a genius accountant, a guy I’d roomed with in college,” Holt said. “Tom was doing the books for a lot of the wrong people. That was how I knew where he was. Tom was glad to help; he’s one of those people who loves to beat the system, any system.”

“Is Tom still around? Can they interrogate him?”

“He began doing bookkeeping for the wrong people. He disappeared a year ago.”

Anne eyed Holt narrowly. “Really?”

“Yes, really.” Holt managed a small smile. “Nothing to do with me. But convenient.”

“So what now?”

Holt’s smile vanished. He looked very grim. “When David showed up today, I felt like the bottom had fallen out. I hated that he was suspected of something I’d done when he’d done nothing but back me up. As people like us go, he’s a good man.”

Anne had thought of suggesting they follow David and run his car off the road. She was glad she hadn’t said that out loud.

Anne had the feeling they were stepping on thin ice, new and fragile territory in their relationship. The two regarded each other in silence.

Finally Anne said, “Do you think David suspects you?”

“No,” Holt said immediately. “He would have tried to take me out. An honor thing.”

“Your family does not know where the money came from. They couldn’t reveal anything accidentally?”

“I told them I’d invested money in an online shopping program and it had taken off. They were too relieved to ask for any details.”

“You think Oversight will come back with questions about your dad’s bills being paid off?”

“If the bills had been paid in one lump sum, it would be suspicious. But I paid in irregular amounts spread out over two and a half years, some of it channeled through my family’s accounts. Less conspicuous.” His mouth twitched in a smile. “And I haven’t worked at Camp West in more than two years. I live on my coach’s salary.”

“And the money’s stopped disappearing. No one’s stealing from the enemy fund now.”

“They’ll still be looking. No one makes a fool out of Oversight.”

“But they might be glad to find a scapegoat.”

“What are you thinking, Anne?”

“I’m thinking we can find Cassie’s rental. We can drive it to Pennsylvania and get there ahead of David. Two drivers instead of one.”

Hoyt looked interested. “Then what?”

“Then we plant money in Cassie’s house, gold or bearer bonds. Untraceable stuff.”

“Anne, I don’t have anything like that. I don’t even have much cash stashed away. Not enough to make them believe she stole everything.”

“I have some backup funds,” Anne said. She looked away.

Holt leaned forward and took her hand. She couldn’t avoid his eyes. “You’d do that?”

“Yes,” she said stiffly. “I would.”

“No regret?”

“No regret.”

Holt struggled to find words of gratitude, but Anne held up her hand to keep him silent. “If they find unexplained money in Cassie’s house, David’s in the clear, Cassie will vanish, and they’ll consider the theft explained. It’s all good. I know where her house is, and we’ve got the keys.”

“Let’s get on the road,” Holt said.

Anne retrieved half of her escape fund from its secret hiding place—the same place the thiopental had been stored—and she was back down the stairs in less than two minutes.

“If we find the rental quickly,” she said, “it’ll be a sign that we’re doing the right thing.”

Anne and Holt knew where to start looking. Using the key fob to make the lights blink, they found it in four minutes, parked behind a house for sale on the other side of the street.

During the long drive north they made some plans for spring break.

Those plans involved Gary Pomeroy.

Harold was dozing, his head rested against the tiled wall behind his chair, when Mr. Mo placed the brown paper bag in front of him. The bag was nested inside a milky-white plastic shopping bag, through which Harold could make out plastic utensils, packets of soy sauce, napkins, and a folded-up menu. Stapled to the top was a slip with an address on Mott Street.

“Crispy-skin fish rolls,” Mr. Mo said, his high voice cracking like a whip.

Harold looked up at Mr. Mo. The man’s face was flat and unreadable. His blue polo shirt stained with splotches of cooking grease, his slight potbelly and narrow limbs not really fitting into the shirt right. He could have been thirty or fifty. He only ever spoke English when he gave Harold a delivery.

He spoke English one other time, on Harold’s first night. Harold had sat down and pulled an electronic poker game up on his phone. Mr. Mo took the phone out of his hand, turned it off, and smacked it on the table. He placed a Chinese-language newspaper over the phone.

“No play,” he said. “Read.”

“But I can’t read Chinese,” Harold protested.

“Read,” Mr. Mo said, tapping his finger against the newsprint.

It had been three weeks, and Harold’s Chinese hadn’t gotten any better, so he looked at the pictures or dozed off until it was time to work.

Harold picked up the latest delivery and exited Happy Dumpling. The evening air was the kind of humid that made it hard to breathe. It was late, probably getting close to midnight, which meant this would, with any luck, be his last trip for the evening.

He hefted the bag, trying to guess at the contents. Then he pulled out his phone and punched in the address. It was close—just below Grand. He walked north, cut down Hester, and made a right. Found an apartment building with a nail salon on the first floor. The number 4 was circled on the receipt, so Harold hit 4 on the ancient buzzer.

After a few moments the door screamed at him and he pushed it open, climbed the narrow staircase to the fourth floor, where he found himself in front of a door painted glossy black, chipped in spots, gunmetal gray underneath. There was a peephole set at eye level.

The door was ajar, and it opened as soon as Harold stepped in front of it. A frail Chinese man in a wrinkled dress shirt and slacks, his white hair thinning, peered out from inside of the darkened apartment.

Harold opened the bag, first undoing the staple that held it closed, then reaching in for the white takeout container.

He hated this part. The anticipation.

Sometimes he had to bring something back to Mr. Mo. Sometimes he didn’t. He wasn’t always sure which. Mr. Mo wasn’t big on instructions. This was the first time he’d gotten an order for crispy-skin fish rolls and he wasn’t sure what that meant.

Harold placed the bag on the ground and opened up the takeout container, his hands shaking a little. Inside was a single pear. He looked at it for a moment, then took it out and offered it to the man, who breathed in sharply and put his hand to his mouth. Tears cut down his cheeks and he began to shake.

Harold pushed the pear forward into the space between them, but the man refused to take it. Instead he took a step back. Harold got the sense he wouldn’t be bringing anything back to Mr. Mo tonight, so he put the pear on the floor in front of the door and left.

As he climbed down the stairs, he thought he heard the man weeping.

The smell of newly rotting flesh hit Jakaya Makinda. He stopped his Land Rover, grabbed his binoculars off the seat beside him, and trained them in the direction of the odor’s source.

Eighty meters away, mostly hidden by a rocky outcropping of man-sized boulders, lay the carcasses of a dozen or more slaughtered elephants.

Poachers.

Anger coursed through Makinda. He grabbed his Remington pump-action shotgun and, with his broad-brimmed hat shielding his eyes from the early-morning sun, used the binoculars to scan the Serengeti’s tall grass for predators. The poachers were long since gone, but he wasn’t some damn fool white tourist, stepping out of the security of his vehicle, thinking how cute the animals were, all set to launch into “Hakuna Matata.”

Out here, humans were food. Short and wiry, he’d be less of a meal than the overweight Americans whose entry fees paid his salary as senior park ranger, but he had no interest in being any creature’s gristly lunch.

He approached the rocky outcropping cautiously, binoculars dangling from his neck, his shotgun ready and his .38 holstered but loaded.

His stomach gave way when he stepped past the two largest boulders and saw the full extent of the carnage. Beside what had to be close to twenty dead elephants, their missing tusks sawn off at the roots, lay the carcasses of five hyenas, three jackals, and a couple dozen vultures.

The poachers, as they’d come to do, had poisoned the elephants with cyanide, killing them and everything that came to feast on their corpses, most importantly the vultures, who wouldn’t be left circling overhead for rangers such as himself to notice. The poison killed everything in its path but made for an easier getaway.

Makinda gripped his shotgun tightly. He’d get these devils, these parasites who’d invaded even the Serengeti, Tanzania’s greatest treasure. He’d get them if it was the last thing—

Behind him, his Land Rover exploded.

The force of the concussion knocked Makinda face-forward onto the ground. He tasted the tall grass in his mouth. Felt grains of the hard soil between his fingers. His ears rang.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw flames shooting up from the wrecked carcass of his vehicle. Makinda stared in disbelief and horror.

A screaming bright madness of noise and fire—then nothing.

Brooks wasn’t afraid after he went over the top. Before, yes. In the moments just before the assault began, the fear was almost unbearable. As he stood there with his boots sunk in the sucking puddle, rifle lifted, bayonet fixed, the rat-infested dung hole of a trench seemed to him transformed: it had become hearth and home and mother all rolled into one. He would have sold his soul to stay there, never mind the filth of it, never mind the endless crump and boom of the shells falling all around him, that noise that he’d thought, just hours before, was going to drive him mad. Now he hungered to curl up and hide here in the dirt and the din and even the madness. He just wanted to go on living, that’s all.

He stared up white-faced at the trench rim. He sensed all the blanched faces of his men around him, staring too. All these weeks, that’s how he’d thought of them: his men, his charges, though he was younger than most of the platoon. Now they were suddenly strangers, each one alone in his feral terror. He couldn’t do a thing for them, nor they for him—not a single thing that would keep a man from becoming a bloated corpse like Moore had or Wilson or a shrieking legless torso like Miller was when they dragged him to the wagon half a week ago. Brooks knew now what they all knew: they would each of them go through this—this assault, this war, this life, this death—in utter solitude.

It occurred to him he ought to pray. Then the sergeant blew the whistle and Brooks led the way up the ladder, screaming.

They were all screaming, all around him. You didn’t think about screaming, you just did. You screamed and you ran. And what he felt then wasn’t fear anymore. Fear was no longer the right word for it. It was just a kind of blank, blind fever of being. He screamed and he ran through acid-black smoke, over a mud-drenched moonscape lit by shellfire, studded with corpses.

Six months before it had been the rolling green countryside of France.

Staff Sergeant Riley slapped his pointer against the flip chart and barked out the title of today’s training session. “Suicide Prevention,” he shouted. Then he lowered the pointer and paced in a small circle as if contemplating all the burdens of the universe. He looked up suddenly and aimed the pointer at me.

“Sueño. How many Eighth Army personnel committed suicide during last year’s holiday season?”

I shook my head. “Molla the hell out of me.”

He growled, glancing around the room. There were about thirty GIs in various stages of somnolence slouched listlessly in hard wooden seats. About half were 8th Army criminal investigation agents and the other half MPI, Military Police investigators.

Riley slammed his pointer on the table in front of him. “On your feet!” he shouted.

Slowly, every student rose to a mostly upright position. The last person up, as usual, was my investigative partner, Ernie Bascom.

“Okay, Bascom. Do you know who General Nettles is?”

“He’s the freaking chief of staff,” Ernie replied.

“Outstanding,” Riley said. “And do you know how many ways he can screw up your life if he takes a mind to?”

“About thirty?” Ernie ventured.

“At least,” Riley said. “He can mess up your life and the life of every swinging dick in this room in about as many ways as you can imagine.” Riley paused to let the dramatic tension grow. “And there’s no doubt in my military mind that that’s exactly what he’ll do if the 8th Army Christmas suicide rate doesn’t come down and come down fast. Is that understood?”

A few bored voices said, “Understood.” Then someone asked, “Can we sit back down now?” Riley barked, “Take your seats!” Which everyone did.

My name is George Sueño. I’m an agent for the 8th United States Army Criminal Investigation Division in Seoul, Republic of Korea. Riley wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t know. When you’re stationed overseas, pretty much constantly harassed by the pressures of military life, and Christmas rolls around and you’re pulling patrol along the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, life can become pretty depressing. Some guys fire a 7.62mm round into their cranium. Others eat a hand grenade. This, of course, causes quite a bit of consternation back home. Not only do the moms and dads and wives and brothers and sisters complain about the suicide rate, but, more importantly—as far as the honchos of 8th Army are concerned—Congress complains about it. And Congress controls military funding. So the Department of the Army rolls the shitball downhill from the Pentagon to the Pacific Command to 8th Army headquarters to the provost marshal’s office until it splats into those of us working law enforcement on the front lines.

Now that Riley had our attention, he said, “You’re probably wondering what law enforcement personnel have to do with suicide prevention.” Then he grinned, taking on the visage of a death’s head. “The chief of staff is initiating a new program. We’re going to be proactive. All personnel who seem to be displaying evidence of depression or suicidal thoughts will be placed in the new twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week Suicide Prevention Program. They’ll be provided counseling and psychiatric treatment if necessary and they’ll be kept under observation at all times.”

“They’ll be locked up,” Ernie said.

Riley glared at him. “Not locked up. They’ll be provided extra care. And extra training. We want to make sure they make it through the season without harming themselves.”

Another of the investigators raised his hand. “Once they’re stuck in this Suicide Prevention Program, will they be allowed to leave?”

Riley looked embarrassed and turned to his flip chart. After tossing back a few sheets, he found his answer. “They’ll be allowed to leave upon release by medical personnel and the OIC.” The officer in charge.

“So they’ll be locked up,” Ernie repeated.

“Can it, Bascom,” Riley told him.

“What about us?” another guy asked. “What are we supposed to do?”

“You’ll be picking them up.”

“You mean, taking them into custody.”

Riley shrugged. “It’s thought that since CID agents and MP investigators work in civilian clothes, it will be less obtrusive if you take them in rather than having armed and uniformed MPs make the pickup.”

“You want to make it look as if we’re not treating them as criminals.”

“Which we are,” Ernie added.

“I told you to can it, Bascom.”

Riley flipped through the sheets until he found a map of the Korean Peninsula. Assignments were made based on geography, starting in Seoul, then working south and north. We’d be receiving a list daily as to who to pick up, the name of the unit they were assigned to, and where they worked. Then we were to transport them over to the new Suicide Prevention facility behind the 121st Evacuation Hospital here on Yongsan Compound South Post.

“Any questions?” Riley shouted.

Ernie raised his hand. “What about me and Sueño? You didn’t give us an assignment.”

“You two are staying on the black market detail.”

A guffaw went up from the crowd. Some wise guy said, “Somebody has to protect the PX from the yobos.” The derogatory term for the Korean wives of enlisted soldiers.

Ernie flipped him the bird.

As everyone filed out of the training room, somebody murmured, “Lock ’em up. That’ll help lift their spirits.”

Petrichor. That fresh smell of drying grass—or in my case wet pavement after the rain. You didn’t know there was a word for it, did you? The rain had just cleared out. Everyone’s been cooped inside, pent-up energy building, seething. Bad guys couldn’t do their thing. The rain stops, they come out to play. Shards of sun streak through a buttermilk sky. People in L.A. can’t deal with rain anyway.

Petrichor. There’s a word for everything. The word for my life at that moment was hell.

I was finishing up the job from hell, putting together the final bill on the Rence case. Identity theft. If you ever want your life to turn to shit, get your identity stolen. Not only did it turn Rence’s life to hell, but mine too. I’d spent three months on it, mostly barricaded inside, chasing leads on the dark web from the hole, my office. Three months of pure hell till I caught the bad actors—but Rence will spend five years trying to get her name back. I like what I do for a living, though lately, with computers and the Internet, it can get a little boring and tedious—they make it too easy to track people down. Not that it wasn’t boring before, sitting on stakeouts or gumshoeing it, but at least then I was out in the world, among the living, even if it meant sweltering inside a parked car or hiding behind bushes, getting sunburned and having an excuse for all the crappy food.

A man opened the office door, the little bell on it rang. It’s a concession to the old days that makes people feel comfortable, something they don’t often feel when they have to hire a private investigator. It also makes a chime on my computer ring. I looked up, saw him enter on the video monitor. There wasn’t an inch of my office, inside or out, that wasn’t covered in a crossfire of cameras. I even had a camera on the restaurant across the street, shooting the front of my building. I’d done a little work for Lou Hernandez, the owner, and instead of taking money from her I asked if I could put a camera on her place. She agreed. I liked watching my little storefront PI shop on Windward Avenue in Venice. I particularly liked watching it from the hole.

I opened the door to the small front office, covered in pix of Venice from the old days. The piers and amusement parks, people in old-fashioned bathing suits on the beach. The canals and oil wells. And a young surfer dude standing next to his stick, stabbed in the sand. Originally a color photo, I’d printed it in sepia so it would match the others. It reminded me of who I used to be—I didn’t get much surfing in these days. Actually, I hadn’t surfed in years. I thought about it a lot though.

I’m talking about Venice, California. Los Angeles. Hey, the other one in Italy has canals and grand thoroughfares with colonnaded arches. We have grand canals and streets with grand colonnaded arches. Okay, so we don’t have such grand canals these days, most of them have been filled in, including the Grand Canal. And Venice didn’t quite cut it as the cultural paradise-by-the-sea that Abbot Kinney, its founder, had envisioned. Today it was an ever-changing kaleidoscope of people, dudes dancing on skates, musicians, artists. Maybe a few pickpockets here or there. But it was home. And I liked it here.

“Jack Lassen?” the familiar-looking man said from behind expensive shades, entering my place. Tan, very tan. Maybe the kind you pay for, maybe the kind you get from sitting by the pool, sipping mojitos, or whatever the in drink was these days. Loafers without socks—that told me a lot about him. Pastel shirt, Rolex. Definitely not a walk-in off the beach looking for a handout.

I smiled. He didn’t return it.

“You’re a licensed private investigator in the state of California?”

“Want me to show you my photostat?” Of course we don’t have photostats anymore, but he was playing with me, I played back.

“Funny.”

“What can I do for you, Mr… .”

“Lambert, Patrick Lambert.”

I knew the name. As in “A Patrick Lambert Production.” Hey, this is L.A. Everyone aspires to a credit like that or “A Film By.” Few get there. Lambert had been there for twenty years with no signs of coming down. Back in the day he’d been a leading man of the George Clooney variety. Good-looking, athletic. Heartthrob. And richer than God’s Uncle Larry. He’d drifted from acting to producing and become an even bigger player, if that was possible.

“Have a seat,” I started to say. But he was already making himself comfortable, leaning back in one of the guest chairs like he owned the place.

My office was neat as a pin, clean as a whistle—what other clichés can I come up with to describe it? I wanted customers to feel confident in me. On the other hand, sometimes I worried they’d think I had no business if there weren’t a lot of papers strewn here and there, piles of manila folders and the like.

“My wife, Emily, is missing. The cops aren’t moving fast enough.”

“You want me to find her?”

“You’re good.” He stretched.

“Am I boring you?”

“You sure you’ve done this before?”

“Just making small talk.”

“I don’t need small talk. I need someone to find my wife.”

“Did you lose her?” I knew I’d better stop.

He got up, turned for the door. Most people have trouble getting to the point, so I do a little friendly jousting with them. Not him, he was all business, or should I say biz? Unlike all those down-and-out PIs in the movies, my business was doing okay and I didn’t need the money. But I didn’t like the guy—wasn’t sure why, sometimes you just don’t. That didn’t mean I wanted to let business just walk out the door—his money would buy me a meal or two at El Coyote as well as anybody’s. Besides, I needed a break after the Rence case. You think it might have been that Hollywood swagger that put me off?

“Hey, Mr. Lambert, you come to a Venice PI, you get a Venice vibe. Did you come to me specifically or was I just the closest one to you?”

“You’re not the closest. You have a good rep, though I’m beginning to wonder why.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

He seemed to collapse in on himself, lowered his voice. “My wife Emily’s been missing for about a week now. I think she’s been kidnapped.”

“You’re rich.”

His face startled. Hollywood folks, the successful ones, are very wealthy and like to pretend they’re “of the people” while sitting in their modest 20,000-square-foot houses and their $150,000 Teslas.

“I’m just trying to figure out why someone would kidnap your wife. Motive and all that.”

“We’re comfortable. And to answer your next question, no, there’s no ransom demand. Yet.”

Comfortable, the old saw people said when they were way more than comfortable.

“I came home from work on Friday. Drawers dumped out. Whole house ransacked.”

“Forcible entry?”

“The police said it looked like someone jimmied the sliding door open, but they think it was staged. They’ve lost interest. In fact, they think she ran off. That she faked the crime scene to make it look like she was kidnapped.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She wouldn’t.” He sounded very sure of himself. Guys like that always sounded sure of themselves. They were, after all, God’s gift to women and everyone else. Why would anyone ever want to ditch out on them?

“When I came home her car was gone. I think the kidnappers took her in it.”

“Have the cops found the car?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Alarm? Surveillance cameras?”

“Neither was on. We don’t always have them on when we’re home, especially during the day.”

“Help? Servants?”

“Off that day.”

Naturally.

He handed me a stiff piece of semiglossy paper with photos on it. Blond hair, full lips. Overly made up. Pretty in that typical SoCal IWannaBeAnActress way—and if you did want to be an actress, why not marry Patrick Lambert, one of the hottest producers around? Yeah, she was an actress. Hell, what he’d given me was a six-by-nine composite card, the kind that actors hand out to casting directors. It had the standard studio head shot, plus action shots, bikini at the beach, climbing a tree. I’m not kidding. The best for last, steely-eyed holding a Goncz GA-9 pistol—cool-looking high-tech gun, the kind Hollywood loves—dressed in a leather bustier and six-inch stilettos. I hoped that gun didn’t have much recoil.

“Anything better? Normal, y’know, snapshots.”

He slid a wallet-sized photo across the desk. Without makeup she really was pretty. “There’s a ton of pictures of her on her Facebook page.” He wrote down the password to her account. I wondered why he knew it.

I followed him to his comfortable Pacific Palisades house, er, mansion on an acre and a half overlooking the ocean. The house was small by Saudi prince standards but was definitely comfortable. He showed me where the break-in occurred. Sliding door off a pool patio, a slight dent in the doorframe.

“These are the official police photos.” He showed me a dozen police pix from the crime scene. “I have some clout with the PD.”

I bet you do.

The broken door. Ransacked dressers and closets. It was a little too perfect, everything just a little too perfectly out of place, strewn here, strewn there—like on a movie set maybe. But that didn’t really mean anything. Bad guys don’t always do everything according to Hoyle.

He said he’d wire me the money within the hour and gave me the names and numbers of Emily’s besties and sister. He wanted her back, bad. I could see it in his eyes, or maybe he was just afraid what they would say in the tabloids?

Out of the steep snowy ravine. Clutching at rocks, her hands bloodied. And all the while snow falling, temperature dropping to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

How still, the soft-falling snow amid rocks! The yearning, the temptation to lie down, sleep.

He’d wanted her to die. He’d wanted to kill her with his hands. But she has escaped him, he will not follow her. (She vows) he will not find her ever again.

By the time she allowed herself to think, It has happened. To me, it was already too late.

So unexpectedly it had begun. Almost, Alyce would think afterward, as if someone else had acted in her place. She’d stared in astonishment from a little distance.

She hadn’t been drunk. Except so excited, so elated, so—exhilarated.

That he’d even noticed her. Invited her to come with him after the reception. After the lecture. He’d known the speaker, a visiting professor from the University of Edinburgh. Before the lecture she’d seen him speaking with the distinguished white-haired professor, she’d seen them smiling, shaking hands.

A theory of language. Theories of language. How does language originate?—is consciousness a blank slate (as it had been once thought by philosophers like John Locke), or is consciousness something like a field of shimmering possibilities, generated by the particularities of the human brain?

If consciousness can be disembodied, is there the possibility of consciousness persisting after physical death? Is there the possibility of hauntedness?

He’d asked what had she thought of the lecture and Alyce said she could give no opinion, she had not enough knowledge. And he’d said what sounded like, Well, you will. You’ve only just begun.

How flattering to Alyce Urquhart, at nineteen.

They were crossing the darkened campus. Afterward she would realize how subtly he was guiding her—a light touch to her arm, an indication Yes, this way. Here.

Afterward she would recall how at dusk the old gothic buildings of the campus took on a sepulchral air. And how a light mist seemed to radiate from streetlamps as if the very air had become blurred.

Tall straight fir trees rose out of sight. Entering the region of trees was like entering an enchanted forest marking the western edge of the campus.

Her heart swelled, she felt such happiness. If she were to die—if she had already died—it would be this moment she would remember most vividly: the fir trees that were so beautiful, and the young philosophy professor at her side who had singled her out for his attention that evening.

But she did not know him, her instructor, well enough to exclaim, Oh, how beautiful! Look.

Whatever Simon Meech said to Alyce Urquhart that evening, Alyce would not recall precisely. Even in the presence of persons whom she knew Alyce was inclined to shyness, and she did not know Simon Meech at all. Yet suddenly he meant much to her; she had not guessed how much. And only vaguely would she recall how without seeming to do so he led her away from her residence hall. Away from the bright-lit, overwarm, and buzzing dining hall, where at this hour of evening she’d have been pushing along a cafeteria tray in the company of other girls and listening or half listening to their chatter, in a pleasantly neutral state of mind—mindlessness—and not required to think, But who am I, to be doing this? And what will come of it?

“You look like crap, Pen.”

Pendleton Rozier, my longtime mentor, opened the door wide, then coughed into the crook of his elbow. “If only I felt that good.”

I stepped into the entryway of his shotgun shack in Revere, the dump he’d been living in since I met him, and handed over a brown takeout bag. “Here. This’ll help.”

He shuffled over to a beat-up recliner and plopped down, while I sat on a folding bridge chair across from him. He set the bag on a metal TV tray and fished inside. Removed a container of soup and a plastic spoon. “Chicken noodle?”

“They were out. I got lentil barley.” I shrugged. “All they had.”

Pen snapped off the flimsy lid and took a spoonful. Blew on it for fifteen seconds, hand shaking as he did.

I’d known Pen for almost thirty years and had pulled dozens of jobs with him, from the small holdups when I’d just been starting out to an all-out blitz at a UPS warehouse two years ago. He’d shown me the ropes, given me advice. Saved my life a couple of times too. Now my teacher—my friend—looked older than his sixty-four years. He’d been heading downhill for a while.

He slurped his soup, then made a gagging noise as he dropped the spoon onto the tray. “Blech. Who would ruin good soup with lentils, anyway?”

“Sorry.”

He tried to fit the lid back on the container, but after a moment of fumbling around, he gave up and leaned back in his chair. “Kane, as much as it hurts me to say, I’m losing my edge. Afraid I’m going to make a mistake that’ll cost me—or someone else. Feh. I’m gonna hang it up. Retire.” His voice caught. “Right after this one last gig.”

“Didn’t you say you were going to do this until the day you died?” He’d been squawking about retiring for the past ten years, but this time his stone-cold eyes told me he was serious.

“Can’t a guy change his mind? I’m going to relax for as long as I’ve got left. Move to a trailer park in Boca and enjoy some early-bird specials.” Pen sputtered off into a coughing jag. When he finished, he wiped some spittle from his ashen face. “So, how’s the job coming along? Ready for me yet? The ride is gassed up and rarin’ to go.”

I needed some clean wheels for when I dumped the van we were using, and Pen had always delivered. Despite his age—or maybe because of it, no one suspected a geezer waiting in an idling car—he was a damn good driver. At least he used to be. “You sure you’re up to it?”

He waved his hand. “Don’t let the coughing and wheezing deceive you. I’ve never failed on a job yet, and you know it. I got enough left in the tank for this. Wouldn’t do it if I didn’t.”

“Sure, sure.” The truth was, I didn’t need Pen—what I had planned didn’t require a fast getaway, and I didn’t anticipate any problems. But I owed him for all he’d done for me, and it seemed fitting to throw a bone his way and send him off to sunny Florida with a few bucks in his pocket—50,000 of them. Call it a token of appreciation for showing me the ropes, watching out for me.

Pen squeezed my arm. “Thanks, Kane, for giving an old guy one last thrill.”

The layoff. The divorce. The gradual erosion of my 401(k). Getting that call from the Houston Police Department to help with the Buffalo Bayou vehicle recovery felt like a birthday present. Especially now, when the economy seemed to be made exclusively of bloodsucking lawyers, bakers of fru-fru cupcakes, and soulless tax collectors.

But as I swam around that ’87 Camaro, peering through the muck, it was hard to get too excited.

The car was covered with silt, reminding me of the drilling mud they use in oil-field drills. That’s my normal gig. Offshore oil rigs. Underwater. I ran my glove along the hood, leaving a bloody scar across the algae, revealing the vehicle’s original crimson.

Above me in an aluminum fishing boat an HPD officer named McCleary and Stephanie, the cute paramedic, sat moored to an oak tree. The police have their own dive team, but if they can go cheaper contracting guys like me, they’ll do it every time.

All week it had been the same: The computer nerds marked the location and vehicle’s general orientation. Trustees from Harris County Jail cleared brush from the bank, and the city brought a winch truck. Then I made sure the vehicles weren’t stuck on anything, found a solid connecting point, and signaled the all-clear with my radio. Up and out they went.

The older ones rusted to skeletons; the newer ones retained their shape but lost their bones. Low-rider Chevys with fancy wheels long since tarnished. Minivans with toys floating around inside. Muscled-up Mustangs and staid company sedans still containing office files disintegrating upon touch. Frozen little time capsules of someone’s everyday life on the move.

The job was scary and sad and strange when the underwater cars were occupied. More complicated too. HPD’s crime lab got involved. More paperwork. The dive felt dirtier—the water connecting you with the dead, both of you just floating objects. Each night of the assignment when I lay down to sleep I smelled the sour, earthy small of the bayou, even fresh out of the shower.

The Camaro in question was wedged into the bank. Moving in slow motion like an astronaut, my rebreathing apparatus making me sound like Darth Vader, I worked my way around it.

No fallen trees near; that was a relief. Cottonmouths nested in them, their bodies tangling like ramen noodles in boiling water—hence the paramedic in the boat. I saw an unintelligible bumper sticker on the back of the car and ran my hand across it to clear off the algae. “Luv Ya Blue,” with a Houston Oilers helmet. I should have known it held nothing but heartache.

I shined my flashlight into the driver’s side window. The bayou’s current, seeping in through various imperfections in the vehicle, tumbled everything inside like a clothes dryer—though with no open windows or doors everything seemed to stay contained. Along with the murky brown water something light blue brushed across the window, then more brown water, then an empty can of Big Tex beer, then something blue again, then a plastic grocery bag. It was like peering at a slot machine before it landed on a lemon or BAR or cherry. Only the next thing that came up wasn’t a cherry or lemon. It was a badge.

The shield ticked against the window as it slid across on its tumble cycle, along with the light blue cloth of a uniform. I stared into the chocolate murk, waiting for it to come around in the current, but the next thing I saw wasn’t a badge but a hundred-dollar bill. Then the Big Tex can again.

Opening the downstream door would cause everything to float straight down to the Lynchburg Ferry, then Trinity Bay and eventually the Gulf of Mexico itself. I told myself that it was the badge I was following up on, not the hundred-dollar bill.

Fighting the current, I opened the upstream door. A cottonmouth slithered out of the back-seat area and snapped at me, its teeth striking my hard plastic diving mask.

A man likes to think he knows where he stands within the food chain of predators and prey; even among other men. But underwater everything gets all shuffled, your awkward limbs and limited breathing placing you much lower in the hierarchy. As I stood catching my breath and feeling the mask for holes from the snake, I saw the hundred-dollar bill float out of the car and shoot downstream toward the Gulf. Damn.

Shining my light inside, a skull stared back at me. Its grin floated across the car’s interior, rotating its head like a model at a photo shoot. A chill danced up my spine.

I’d closed the door and had my hand on my radio, as this was a crime scene now, when another hundred-dollar bill floated past the car’s window. I took my thumb off the radio button. Watched a flathead catfish wiggle along the bottom.

In the days of $147/BBL oil, a hundred bucks wouldn’t last an hour for me at the Pumpjack Pub on Eldridge. I used to find hundred-dollar bills in my truck or wadded up in the laundry hamper every time I was home from offshore. One month on, one month off.

Now, at $30/BBL oil and three years of divorce, I didn’t think twice. I reopened the door, plucked the hundred from the water, and shined the light around inside the Camaro like I meant it.

Bones floated without gravity, like pens in those videos from the space station. Another skull bumped up against the steering wheel and two pale blue HPD uniforms drifted around the seats—angular, irregular shapes. A school of perch flitted past me, one of them nibbling on bone that looked like a fingertip as it passed.

That’s when I saw it. There, in the shotgun seat floorboard—a canvas bag. It took up the whole floor on that side of the car. I wedged a finger into the zipper and opened it, shining the light inside. Bricks of banded cash, seemingly luminescent on the pale green—loose edges floating in the current just begging to be set free.

I did it all so fast, without missing a beat. As if there were no actual decision to be made. No hesitation. No internal debate. I just… did it.

Untying some paracord from my wrist, I zipped the bag back up and floated it out of the car, walking it upstream. Then I wedged it in the mud between a cypress tree and the bank, tying it off. Looping an extra length around the bag and my ankle knife, I jammed the knife into the tree. Then I swam back and clicked three times on my radio.

A minute later I heard a pop and groan. The Camaro pulled free of the bank, swayed in the current, then disappeared into the sky above.

Erick, my Lab-chow mutt, was down at the treeline chewing on something, content, gnawing and licking the marrow from whatever creature he’d rooted up. On the porch, I attempted to keep my wood shavings in a neat pile as I worked on a replica of Erick, made from a soft chunk of poplar. Wood, it seemed, consumed every aspect of my life. I lived in the woods, I worked on a Christmas tree farm, and during my free time I was either splitting firewood or whittling to avoid the wife.

It had been a tough winter for me and Deborah, cooped up together far longer than was tolerable. She’d been pretty removed lately, and I didn’t possess the proper tools to cheer her, neither in my pants nor in my brain. She’d gotten laid off from her secretary job at the dentist’s office (or possibly fired; she’d been a bit murky with the details), so we weren’t exactly happy or flush.

I used the tip of my Buck knife to replicate Erick’s muscular haunches while the real Erick sprawled in the not-yet-green grass, still chomping away. That dog was always scavenging, bringing stuff home—woodchucks, squirrels, a three-foot copperhead once. During the spring melt he’d often drag back field dressings the hunters had left behind, my lawn resembling a full-blown yard sale composed of deer parts.

Inside, Deborah rummaged around, finally awake. She seemed to be sleeping later and later these days, going to bed earlier and earlier. Always on the computer, Facebooking or whatever the hell. Some nights I wanted to climb on the roof and rip down that satellite dish, get rid of our Internet, television, the whole goddamned bundle, as it were, toss it in the fucking dumpster. Hard to justify such luxuries when we had bills to pay, groceries to buy. She’d often talked of getting her degree at Community, but I hadn’t once seen her make a move in that direction. Come to think of it, the only move I’d seen her make lately was toward another beer. Which made me sick. Only added to the problems. I think it’s a weak man (or woman) who uses alcohol to wash away their troubles. Me, well, I never had a taste for it.

My fingers had turned fat and thick from the cold, the unforgiving winter refusing to let go just yet, so my carving was over for the morning. I set my knife and miniature Erick on the table and opened and closed my frozen hands as if casting a spell, attempting to work some blood back in. I whistled for Erick and he popped to attention, his find still stuffed in his jaws.

As he trotted across the yard, wood smoke caught the breeze and trickled down from the chimney, lightly fogging him. Tinges of red shimmered in his black coat when the sun hit it right. He was a tough old bastard. Seventy pounds, solid muscle, total badass. Far as I was concerned, flawless. Deborah felt otherwise.

“He just puked up a baby rabbit on the new rug, Steven,” she’d once said. “Jesus Christ, it stinks.” And it had stunk, granted, but if a dead rabbit was rotting in your gut, you’d probably throw up too. He was just a dog being a dog, couldn’t blame him for that.

He chewed a beer can all to shit one time, which Deborah consequently stepped on, slicing her big toe on the way to the toilet in the middle of the night. He’d puked up plastic Kroger bags on a few occasions. Ate a dirty diaper once. Also an entire junior-sized Wilson leather football. We didn’t have kids and I sure as hell had never changed a diaper. Hadn’t tossed a ball since grade school. Where he’d found such items was a mystery.

Deborah had issues with Erick, fair enough, but you can’t hold a dog accountable for following its instincts. Like now, for instance.

As he got closer, I tried to determine what he held so happily. A naked baby doll? The coloring was right. Shoot, he’d found a football once, why not a Barbie? I went to the top stair to greet him, and that’s when my heart stuttered. Clamped between his jowls was a human foot, sawed off three inches above the ankle, the skin ragged and jagged as if chewed by some toothy monster. Erick swooshed his tail proudly.

“Shit, Erick,” I muttered, glancing behind me. I guess my body language suggested he’d done something wrong, because his tail stopped wagging, his head drooped to hangdog. “It’s okay, boy,” I half whispered. “Drop it.”

He was having none of it. Sensing I was up to something, he tried to make a break for it, unwilling to surrender his trophy. I snatched his collar and grabbed his bottom jaw. “Drop it,” I said again, more forcefully. Erick’s ears pinned back, his front paws digging in. The foot’s stiff toes brushed my wrist, which freaked me out. “Motherfucker,” I grunted through clenched teeth, realizing my only choice was to grasp that slobber-coated foot like it was Erick’s favorite tennis ball. He immediately took it for a game, like a goddamned tug-o-war, and we both pulled and held on with the stubbornness of snapping turtles. But when I said, “Chase? You wanna chase?” that did the trick and he let go.

He started barking when I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. “Be quiet,” I whisper-pleaded, knowing Deborah would open that front door any second now, furious, only to discover me hugging a hairy human foot. I scurried up the steps, grabbed the sports section from a stack of old newspapers, and quickly wrapped that thing as if rolling the world’s biggest joint. I twisted the ends, then rewrapped with the classifieds. Erick was going apeshit, pissed I’d stolen his treasure.

I held the package tight to my chest, then walked inside and beelined for the woodstove. Bacon sizzled in the kitchen, a spatula clinking against a skillet, no doubt Deborah making exactly five pieces for her own self and exactly zero for me, a perfect illustration of where our marriage stood.

“Shut that dog up,” she yelled. I envisioned her bleached hair pulled up high on her head in a ponytail as she squinted, a nasty cigarette waggling in her squeezed lips, her face not nearly as pretty as it once was.

“I’ll try, dear,” I said, stuffing Erick’s offering into the coals, using the poker to push it way back. The man’s leg hairs ignited and I got a strong whiff before closing the door. Deborah didn’t need to know about Erick’s discovery. Not just yet. “Sorry. I think he’s hungry is all.”

“Well, feed him already. Christ, it’s too early. I got a ripping headache.”

I walked back outside, Erick still yammering about how I’d betrayed him. “Come on, boy,” I said, then zipped my jacket snug, grabbed a shovel, headed for the woods. The snow, the ice, it could only keep evil doings hid for so long. “Hike, boy? Wanna go for a hike?”

I read somewhere that breadfruit is one of the new superfoods. They say it contains “high-quality protein.” Not that I have a clue what differentiates high-quality protein from low-quality protein. I do know that here on St. Pierre they have been eating breadfruit well before it was officially deemed a superfood. I’ve eaten it enough here myself, and superfood or not, I prefer a potato, which it resembles somewhat in taste, but a potato most likely has low-quality protein. So when I saw the two large green globes of breadfruit patterned with round bumps on its skin on the counter of my bar, I was not excited. I was, however, very much puzzled.

I was outside in the back of the bar I ran on St. Pierre called the Sporting Place. It was the middle of the day, a slow Tuesday, and I didn’t expect any customers for a couple of hours. I was working on the foundation for a small addition to my bar, adding another five hundred square feet. Since I had owned the piece of land and built the sports-themed bar five years ago, business had grown. There were times when I just couldn’t handle the overflow crowds, like when the Windward Islands All Star cricket team was playing Barbados for the Caribbean title—and when I held an impromptu fete for local calypso legend Lord Ram as he lay dying in St. Elizabeth Hospital. There was space in the backyard of the bar for the addition. I was overdue to expand and had put it off long enough, but I was in no rush. I was in no rush for anything, which was one of the reasons I was living on the Caribbean island of St. Pierre. There were other reasons, but the only one I cared about at the moment was that there was no rush to finish the addition.

It was when I took a break from my work and went inside to grab a bottle of water that I noticed the breadfruit on the bar. I looked around but knew there was no one in the bar. I hadn’t heard anything or anyone while I was working in the back. I took a step out of the front entrance and looked down the road to see if anyone was walking by or had just left. In the distance I saw a dark figure running down the slope of the road. The runner, whose face I could not recognize from the almost 150-yard distance, turned back toward where I stood and then continued to run, his pace quickening. I watched as he disappeared from my sight, turning right onto Victoria Highway, a fully paved, two-way flat of street that on St. Pierre constituted a highway and led into the island’s capital and main port, Garrison.

I went back into the bar and examined the breadfruit. Picked one up in my hand. Its flesh was pliant, and it seemed a little lighter than I recalled a breadfruit being. I ran my thumb over the circular bumps on the green skin of the fruit. I picked up the other. They were almost identical in size and shape, and its weight was the same as the other’s. Maybe they needed more time on the breadfruit tree to ripen. What did I know about breadfruit? I put them back where I found them.

Tubby Levett came in about an hour later. I was out in the backyard again, now cleaning the hollowed-out oil canister we used as a smoker. “You see the two breadfruit on the bar?” he said to me, one foot in and one foot out of the doorway.

I looked up from my work. “I did,” I replied.

He remained in his position straddling the back door. He was waiting for an explanation. When he realized he wasn’t going to get one, he went back into the bar to help set up for the rush-hour crowd. When I say crowd, I mean never more than half a dozen to a dozen in the bar for a Tuesday.

“You want those breadfruits?” I asked Tubby when I came back into the bar, where he was assembling clean glasses on top of the bar.

“What I’m gonna do with more breadfruit?” He shook his head. “My ma has a tree behind the house. The breadfruit fall all year from that tree. We don’t need no more breadfruit. But I wanna know who that is who bring you the breadfruit?”

“I’d like to know that too, Tubby.”

He looked at me as if I wasn’t telling him something or was playing a joke on him. I didn’t know what I could say to him to make him believe that I really didn’t know who brought the breadfruit into the Sporting Place. I didn’t tell him about the runner I saw. What was there to tell, and what did the man running down West Road have to do with the breadfruit? Tubby, who was usually very gregarious, went about his work close-lipped. He thought I was putting something over on him and wasn’t happy about it. He thought I was busting his balls, which, I admit, I did now and then.

“Seriously, Tubby, those breadfruits just appeared there this afternoon. I’m not making that up.”

“Uh-huh,” he mumbled, not looking at me.

In the words of the New York Times, Louis Bayard “reinvigorates historical fiction,” rendering the past “as if he’d witnessed it firsthand.” Bayard’s affinity for bygone eras can be felt in both his recent young adult novel, the highly praised Lucky Strikes (named one of Amazon’s top 2017 titles), and his string of critically acclaimed adult historical thrillers: Roosevelt’s Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, The Pale Blue Eye, and Mr. Timothy.

A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar and the Dagger Award. He is also a nationally recognized essayist and critic whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Salon. An instructor at George Washington University, he is on the faculty of the Yale Writers’ Conference and was the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times.

• How did I go from writing about history to writing about the imminent future? It goes back to the day my mother asked me about my father.

By then Dad had been dead for three years, and my own memories of him were colored by the Alzheimer’s that in his final days had swallowed him whole. Mom’s dementia, by contrast, was gentler and more incremental, and if she sometimes blanked on the names of her grandchildren or forgot something that had happened to us when we were kids, she was able to find some other memory to cling to, even create new ones here and there.

So when she began quizzing me about my dad, I took it at first for minor fact-checking. But then the questions began to run deeper. What did he do for a living? What did he look like? What did he sound like? What was he like? The man with whom she’d spent half a century, the man she’d grieved for so wantonly three years earlier, had simply vanished.

From that realization, a new kind of grief—and, perhaps by way of understanding, a pair of thought experiments.

#1: Imagine learning on unimpeachable authority that from here on out your life will be a continuous cognitive decline. You will go from forgetting people’s names to forgetting people. The smiles and faces dearest to you in the world will, sooner or later, be utterly lost to you, and there will be no reversal, no appeal, no reprieve. Do you get out now? While the going’s good? I suspect most of us wouldn’t. Living is a hard habit to kick, after all, so we would probably muddle along, congratulating ourselves on what we were still able to recall, and by the time the shadows had well and truly descended, it would be too late. We would no longer even be able to mourn our losses, because we would have no memory of what we’d lost.

#2: Now imagine that someone offers to make the call for you—gauge the exact moment when you have slipped into oblivion and afford you the release you no longer have the capacity or awareness to effect for yourself. Do you take them up on it? Knowing that you won’t recall having made the transaction? If so, what will your criterion be? The point beyond which you will not suffer yourself to slip?

Those are the end-of-life questions that haunt “Banana Triangle Six.” It goes without saying that they haunt me too.

ASTOLFO, CATHERINE

The Outlier. 13 Claws, ed. by Donna Carrick, Carrick

BARRETT, LYNNE

Marble. Mystery Tribune, Spring

BELL, RONA

Prey of New York. Where Crime Never Sleeps: Murder New York Style 4, ed. by Elizabeth Zelvin, Level Best

BENN, JAMES

Red Christmas. The Usual Santas, ed. by Peter Lovesey, Soho Crime

COLEMAN, REED FARREL

Breakage. Down & Out: The Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, ed. by Rick Ollerman

DIRCKX, JOHN H.

Futures Off at Closing. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January-February

FUSILLI, JIM

Precision Thinking. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November-December

GASTINEAU, JOHN

A Coon Dog and Love. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November-December

GENEST, JENNIFER

What Guy Says No? Post Road, Summer

HINSHAW, BEN

Brazil and Back. Carolina Quarterly, Fall/Winter

HUDGENS, DALLAS

Terceira. Atlanta Noir, ed. by Tayari Jones, Akashic

KNOPF, CHRIS

A Little Carinoso. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, March-April

LANSDALE, JOE R.

Charlie the Barber. Alive in Shape and Color, ed. by Lawrence Block, Pegasus

LAWTON, R. T.

Black Friday. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November-December

LEE, M. C.

Angel Face. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, May-June

MALLORY, MICHAEL

Aramis and the Worm. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, September-October

McCAULEY, TERRENCE

The Solitary Man. Down & Out: The Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, ed. by Rick Ollerman

McGEE, KAREN

Something of Value. Dark City Crime and Mystery Magazine, April

McMAHAN, ALISON

The Drive-By. Busted! Arresting Stories from the Beat, ed. by Verena Rose, Harriette Sackler, and Shawn Reilly Simmons, Level Best

PARKER, ALESIA

Ma’am. Atlanta Noir, ed. by Tayari Jones, Akashic

PETRIN, JAS. R.

Money Maker. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, May-June

PLUCK, THOMAS

Deadbeat. Down & Out: The Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, ed. by Rick Ollerman

ROZAN, S. J.

Chin Yong-Yun Stays Home. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January-February

RUSS-COMBS, DOMINIC

Manglevine. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November-December

SOLDAN, WILLIAM R.

Houses Burn. Mystery Tribune, Spring

SOOS, TROY

Family Tradition. Mystery Weekly Magazine, February

STRONG, SARAH PEMBERTON

Callback. New Haven Noir, ed. by Amy Bloom, Akashic

TUCHER, ALBERT

Sensitivity Training. Busted! Arresting Stories from the Beat, ed. by Verena Rose, Harriette Sackler, and Shawn Reilly Simmons, Level Best

VASICEK, RENE GEORG

Vera Musilova. Bellevue Literary Review, vol. 17, no. 2

WALKER, JOSEPH S.

Awaiting the Hour. Day of the Dark: Stories of Eclipse, ed. by Kaye George, Wildside

WARSH, SYLVIA MAULTASH

The Ranchero’s Daughter. 13 Claws, ed. by Donna Carrick, Carrick

Louise Penny, guest editor, is the New York Times and Globe and Mail best-selling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache novels, most recently Glass Houses. She has won the CWA Creasey Dagger, CWC Arthur Ellis, Nero, Dilys, and Barry awards. Penny has been given the Anthony Award five times, and has won six Agathas, more than any other crime writer.

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Copyright © 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2018 by Louise Penny

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ISSN 1094-8384 (print) ISSN 2573-3907 (e-book)

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These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Penny photograph © Jean-François Bérubé

“Banana Triangle Six” by Louis Bayard. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2017 by Louis Bayard. Reprinted by permission of Louis Bayard.

“Y Is for Yangchuan Lizard” by Andrew Bourelle. First published in D Is for Dinosaur, edited by Rhonda Parrish. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Bourelle. Reprinted by permission of Andrew Bourelle.

“The Designee” by T. C. Boyle from The Relive Box and Other Stories by T. C. Boyle. First published in the Iowa Review. Copyright © 2017 by T. C. Boyle. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

“Smoked” by Michael Bracken. First published in Noir at the Salad Bar: Culinary Tales with a Bite, edited by Verena Rose, Harriette Sackler, and Shawn Reilly Simmons. Copyright © 2017 by Michael Bracken. Reprinted by permission of Michael Bracken.

“The Wild Side of Life” by James Lee Burke. First published in the Southern Review. Copyright © 2017 by James Lee Burke. Reprinted by permission of James Lee Burke.

“Too Much Time” by Lee Child. First published in No Middle Name. Copyright © 2017 by Lee Child. Reprinted by permission of Lee Child.

“The Third Panel” by Michael Connelly. First published in Alive in Shape and Color, edited by Lawrence Block. Copyright © 2017 by Hieronymous Inc. Reprinted by permission of Michael Connelly.

“Gun Work” by John M. Floyd. First published in Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea, edited by Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks. Copyright © 2017 by John M. Floyd. Reprinted by permission of John M. Floyd.

“Cabin Fever” by David Edgerley Gates. First published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2017 by David Edgerley Gates. Reprinted by permission of David Edgerley Gates.

“Small Signs” by Charlaine Harris. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2017 by Charlaine Harris. Reprinted by permission of Charlaine Harris.

“Takeout” by Rob Hart. First published in Mystery Tribune. Copyright © 2017 by Rob Hart. Reprinted by permission of Rob Hart.

“Death in the Serengeti” by David H. Hendrickson. First published in Fiction River, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Copyright © 2017 by David H. Hendrickson. Reprinted by permission of David H. Hendrickson.

“All Our Yesterdays” by Andrew Klavan. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2017 by Amalgamated Metaphor. Reprinted by permission of Andrew Klavan.

“PX Christmas” by Martin Limón. First published in The Usual Santas, edited by Peter Lovesey. Copyright © 2017 by Martin Limón. Reprinted by permission of Martin Limón.

“Windward” by Paul D. Marks. First published in Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea, edited by Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks. Copyright © 2017 by Paul D. Marks. Reprinted by permission of Paul D. Marks.

“Phantomwise: 1972” by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Copyright © 2017 by The Ontario Review Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Rule Number One” by Alan Orloff. First published in Snowbound, edited by Verena Rose, Harriette Sackler, and Shawn Reilly Simmons. Copyright © 2017 by Alan Orloff. Reprinted by permission of Alan Orloff.

“The Apex Predator” by William Dylan Powell. First published in Switchblade. Copyright © 2017 by William Dylan Powell. Reprinted by permission of William Dylan Powell.

“Waiting on Joe” by Scott Loring Sanders. First published in Shooting Creek and Other Stories. Copyright © 2017 by Scott Loring Sanders. Reprinted by permission of Scott Loring Sanders.

“Breadfruit” by Brian Silverman. First published in Mystery Tribune. Copyright © 2017 by Brian Silverman. Reprinted by permission of Brian Silverman.

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