The Last Day

SIX

Watcher sat in his hide in the woods, sipping a sports drink to stay hydrated. When he heard the tone, he opened his pack and saw on his GPS receiver that the black BMW was leaving the airport lot in Charlotte. Thirty- seven minutes later, it pulled into the garage. Two months earlier, Watcher had duct- taped a GPS transmitter to the big car's frame near the gas tanks, and had placed a second unit inside the engine compartment in the Lexus SUV Dr. McCarty drove. He could see at a glance where the pair was at any given time.

Watcher was a shadow, a bad situation that would grow and grow until Ward and Natasha McCarty were as doomed as hooked fish cast up onto a grassy, sun- baked slope. Watcher was a reckoning. Watcher's patience was a rapidly emptying hourglass.

Toy Boy-a fitting, albeit whimsical, nickname he had selected for his quarry-was a man hanging onto his life by a rope that had been fraying steadily since the day his son died. In three days the McCartys would endure the first anniversary of their son's death, and, Watcher would ensure, their last day on earth.