Work Done for Hire

1.

Something must have shown on my face when I returned to the restaurant. Mario was by the grill chopping onions and he came over with the big chef’s knife in his hand. “Something wrong,” he said.

“Hate to leave you in the lurch, man. We have to get out of here.” Kit untied her apron wordlessly and started folding it.

“You have to?”

I nodded.

“Shit happens,” he said, setting the knife down. He went around the counter and punched the cash register hard and scooped out two C-notes and a fifty from the till.

“We couldn’t, Mario,” Kit said.

He put the money on the counter and looked at me. “I never seen you guys.” He turned to go back to his onions. “Good luck anyhow. In bocca al lupo.” He’d taught us that phrase, like “break a leg.”

We had Plan A mapped out completely. Every morning before we left for work we packed everything we owned into two knapsacks, so we could go into the apartment and out in seconds.

There was a bike shop on the way. The two we’d picked out, a couple of sturdy touring Treks, had been sold—but two new ones had just come in; he’d unboxed them this morning and almost had them together. It seemed like a good omen, starting out fresh, so we bought them and two sets of rear baskets.

While the kid was bolting the baskets on, we went back to the apartment and picked up the knapsacks and left the key on the dresser. As an afterthought Kit left a note saying we’d been called north, and expected to be back before the first, but if we weren’t, go ahead and rent the room. We left our Jazzy Pass RTA cards with the note.

We had two detailed route maps that took us from New Orleans to Miami on back roads, and then down A1A to Key West. We would travel apart, Kit leaving an hour before me, the routes slightly different wherever possible. They’d be looking for a couple our age traveling together.

Not trusting cell phones, we’d bought a pair of kids’ walkie-talkies from the Phone Shop. I would call her every hour on the hour, and let it buzz once. If she didn’t buzz back soon, it meant she was in trouble—or we’d been betrayed by cheap Phone Shop technology, not impossible.

We split our cash down the middle, $4,320 each. Decided to go ahead and use her credit card for the bikes, since the Feds knew where we were anyhow. All my cards were flat.

I’d downloaded lists of bicycle-friendly hotels for the states we’d be going through. We chose one just out of town, about twenty miles away, for the first night, and I sent Kit on ahead.

Locked my bike up outside the Black Cat, our favorite tavern, and had one last imported beer before taking off into the land of country general stores and Bud Light. We’d made up our routes from a library copy of the Southern Tier Trail “southern tier” tourist maps, which kept you away from highways and cities, and decent beer.

It’s very close to what my hero in the novel was doing, in reverse, but the only reference to that in the whole world was buried in Duquest’s files; maybe my agent’s. Under anybody’s radar.

Kit was carrying the fake Glock, the pellet gun with the orange nose spray-painted black, figuring that if one of us was going to need it on these deserted country roads, it would be her. My thinking had gone a little beyond that, though.

The one morning drunk at the bar got up and left. I took a G-note out of my pocket and smoothed it onto the bar. “Jimmy,” I said to the bartender, “maybe you can help me with a little problem.”

Two hours later I was down in bayou country, headed east on Route 90, a bright red accessory bag on a quick-release clip in the center of my handlebars. It held my wallet, maps, some nuts, and a candy bar—and a snub-nosed Taurus .38 Special, the favorite little pistol of TV detective actors. Actual criminals probably favor something with more punch, but a new .357 Magnum would have cost nearly a thousand more.

I didn’t want anything bigger anyhow. When I unsnap the bag and carry it into a convenience store, I don’t want the clerk to gauge its weight and reach for his own gun.

I’d bought it from a black guy who had conspicuous tracks on his left forearm and hadn’t bathed in a while. But his hands were steady and his eyes clear, so I assumed he was a cop, or worked for them. Which didn’t bother me too much. If somebody tried to bust me I would have Sara Underwood rain some Homeland Security shit on them. Though she might just ask them to lock me up and throw away the key.

There was enough truck traffic to keep me from being bored, and the road was pretty rough. The bikes were set up for endurance rather than speed, medium-fat tires with Kevlar inserts. Fewer miles per day but no flats, and we could go off-road if necessary.

There were no good scenarios that involved that, though. If someone was after us with a car, we were just caught. I wasn’t going to hit the dirt and lay down a field of fire, not with five rounds of .38 Special ammo indifferently aimed. Twenty-five rounds if I had time to reload a few times, which didn’t seem likely.

I guess the gun was more a psychological crutch than actual protection. As my M2010 had been in the desert, most of the time—if you live with a weapon 24/7 it becomes like another limb, and anytime it’s out of sight you start to panic.

(So when is a crutch not a crutch? When you could walk better without it?)

I’d gone unarmed for most of eight years, but the feeling of symbiosis, of dependence, came back immediately. It made me feel more calm, in control, even though my rational brain knew that was nonsense. If any of our enemies produced a weapon, it would trump the hell out of a Dick Tracy snub-nose .38 not-so-Special revolver.

But it was better than nothing. Nothing would be total helplessness, being a target rather than a foe. And even though Sara Underwood probably already had a memo on her desk with the serial number and exact provenance of my .38, whoever was after us probably didn’t know yet. That might buy us a second or two in a few of the less likely futures that we faced.

2.

We had figured that it would be safe enough if we came together each night. Two people on bicycles might be conspicuous at a mom-and-pop motel, but two car-less bikers at two separate motels would be even more conspicuous, and we felt safer together.

She called me on the walkie-talkie and said there was a vacancy at the place we’d tentatively chosen, the Southern Comfort motel, a half mile up the road. On the way there I stopped at a convenience store and bought a pint of that odd beverage, honey-flavored whiskey. At a 7-Eleven. God bless Louisiana’s liquor laws!

We celebrated our first day as two-wheeled fugitives with a couple of big plastic cups of ice and the sweet liqueur, sitting on folding chairs on a screened porch overlooking some bayou. The mosquitoes were pretty fierce for our being technically indoors, but after we swatted a dozen or so they showed us some respect.

We’d brought the bikes inside the motel room rather than risk them being stolen or identified, and Kit had just nodded when I showed her the .38. She didn’t bring it up until we were halfway through the “Judy Collins Juice,” as my father called it. The sun was a dull crimson ball behind a confusion of spindly trees and power poles and lines.

“You know about guns and I don’t,” she said, “but I thought we decided back in Iowa…”

“Yeah, we did.” I could’ve bought a regular pistol at the Kmart where I’d bought the pellet gun. But I didn’t want to raise the ante, at the time. “I guess it was Blackstone getting killed. Like they’re playing hardball now.”

She nodded, staring at the dying sun. “Hardball. You sound like somebody on TV.”

I laughed. “Guess I do.”

“But guns are real to you, from being a soldier. That’s something we’ll never share.”

What could I say? “Hope not.”

The sun disappeared and a dozen birds swifted by overhead, talking about dinner. A good still moment.

“Would you show me how?”

“How what?”

“How to use the gun. If something happens to you that doesn’t happen to me.”

“’Course.” I stood up and stretched. “Not that I’m an expert.”

We went inside and I unzipped the red bike bag and took out the pistol, feeling a little foolish. The thin film of gun oil had collected some lint and grit. I took a tissue from the box on the desk and wiped it clean.

I thumbed the catch and the cylinder swung out. Looked down the barrel, using my thumbnail to reflect light up; it wasn’t even dusty.

Shook the cylinder into my palm but only one round dropped; I used the built-in ejector rod to push the others out. “Never had one like this,” I said apologetically. “Couldn’t fit an assault rifle into the bike bag.”

I snapped it shut and passed it to her with the nose pointed to the ceiling. “Rule Number One, they say. There’s no such thing as an unloaded gun.”

“That must save a lot on ammunition.” She took it. “Sorry; I’ll be good.”

“It does hurt a lot of soldiers, forgetting the round in the chamber. I don’t think you will, though.”

“No.” She held it like a ticking time bomb. “Heavier than it looks.”

“Always.” I passed her the handful of cartridges. “Load it up?”

She fumbled and dropped two, which was a complete lesson in its way. “Easier in the movies,” she said with a nervous laugh.

“I hear it happens to cops,” I said. “They practice for years, but when they have to reload under fire they’re all over the place.”

“I won’t be doing anything ‘under fire.’ Running, maybe.” She pushed the cylinder into place with a soft click.

“Me, neither, I hope.” I took it back from her and unloaded it again. “You don’t really aim a gun like this. You can’t hit the wall with it, anyhow, no matter how well you aim.” I pointed it at the TV and click, good-bye weather girl. “You know what a sight picture is?”

“No, I never heard the term.”

I handed it to her. “Point it at the door?”

She did, and I stood behind her and wrapped my hand over hers, and raised the pistol up to eye level. “The thing in the front is the blade sight. You line it up with the notch in the back and the bullet ought to go in that direction.”

She rocked it up and down. “You can’t focus on three things at once.”

“That’s right.” I peered over her shoulder and thought about what my eyes were doing. “I guess you look at the target, then bring the front sight in line with it, and then the rear sight, and then squeeze the trigger.” She did, and the hammer clicked down.

“I didn’t ‘squeeze’ it. I just pulled it.”

“Yeah, and the nose went up a little. But you’re just trying to hit the wall. Do it again?”

This time she held it level and the nose stayed down when it snapped.

“I never used one in combat,” I said. “The Glock, we had one day of disassembly and cleaning, and a half day on the range, mostly safety procedures. I was never really issued one.” I did carry an automatic for a week, when I was TDY’ed to Shiraz, but I was advised to keep it inside the shrink-wrap so I wouldn’t have to clean it. Not exactly hardcore.

“Well, you’re a boy; you have it in your blood.”

“You never played with cap guns as a kid?”

She laughed and it felt good on my chest. “Mom would have a heart attack.”

“With dear old Dad a soldier?”

“Especially.” She raised the back of my hand to her lips and kissed it. “He’s so jealous of you.”

“Getting shot. He can have it.”

“You know what I mean.” She set the gun down on top of the TV and rotated inside my arms. Her voice was muffled in my shoulder. “Is it true you soldiers are really good lovers?”

“I think you mean bicycle riders.” She smelled so good. “Soldiers can get it in the hole they’re aiming at, usually. Bike riders know to hug the curves, though.”

“Idiot,” she said, and pulled down my shorts.

3.

The road made us go northward for a couple of hours, which annoyed me in an obscure way. If we just wanted to go to Key West, we could’ve flown, or even hopped a train in New Orleans. False names, tickets bought with cash; in one day we’d be off the grid and almost off the map. But we’d also be, to complete the trio of clichés, at the end of the line. And not that hard to trace.

If they did follow us to Key West, we’d be cornered. Just as true with bicycles as a train or plane, but maybe after that much pedaling, we’d be in good enough shape to dive in and swim for Cuba.

I hadn’t been to Key West since I was a little boy, but from what I heard it sounded like a good place to drop out of sight. Like New Orleans, it had lots of off-the-grid work for low pay, though in fact we did have enough cash to live on for a few months, a year if we were parsimonious. Best to find a little room and disappear into it. I could write well that way, I thought, and Kit was content to read and draw.

Give “the Enemy” time to lose interest in me. We started calling them that. Sometimes you could hear the capital E in both our voices.

Agent Underwood hadn’t called. Just before noon, I called her number; someone said she was out of the office and would call tomorrow morning. That was okay by me. I can handle truck traffic, and I can handle spies, but I’d just as soon not do both simultaneously.

After a day of pretty serious riding we were dead tired. We took a couple of McDeathburgers to the Holiday Inn and almost fell asleep during the thrill of eating them. I slept ten hours, about four more than usual, and woke feeling like I’d come in second best in a bar fight. Some hard roads, and I’d been off the bike for a couple of weeks.

Holiday Inn coffee is nontoxic and the machine was quiet enough not to wake Kit. In the pool of light from the desk lamp I made a list of the facts we knew about the Enemy, and the assumptions we held. Sometimes the distinction between fact and conjecture was not clear.

1. They were not “the government” in any conventional sense. Sara Underwood would have acted differently if she worked with the Enemy. (Maybe some sinister cabal of meta-spies like in the movies. Not likely.)

2. They nevertheless seemed to have resources comparable to a government agency’s. But Kit pointed out that this might not be true if, for whatever reason, I was their only project. If you really wanted to fuck with one person’s mind this way, it wouldn’t even be a full-time job.

3. This raised the interesting possibility that I might be somebody’s hobby. An agent like Blackstone could be a one-man “Let’s drive Jack Daley insane” club, working a couple of hours a week. But why would he?

4. There might be an army connection. They had easy access to my records, and of course had plenty of M2010s lying around.

5. They were watching us—and not being obvious about it. We’d been on the lookout since Iowa City, often on deserted back roads, and hadn’t seen anything.

6. It seemed likely they could track me from a distance. Maybe a tracer implanted when I had surgery in Germany.

7. They were serious enough to kill a federal agent. They used a rifle like mine, possibly. Setup or coincidence? An unrelated murder? Sure, there are snipers everywhere.

But it all pointed back to the big question: Why me? There were probably a hundred thousand people who could shoot a rifle as well as I can. A small fraction of them would probably shoot a stranger just for the thrill, or for the hell of it, let alone for a roll of G-notes. (Thriller writers sometimes assumed there were people on the government payroll who would do this sort of thing, but I always doubted they could keep it secret. A civil servant whose morals allowed him to murder on assignment could also be bought by a tell-all journalist.)

When Kit got up she read over the list. “Number 6, the implant. I guess we’ll find out about that. If they show up now, they must be physically tracking you.”

I thought for a second, and agreed. “In a city, even New Orleans, we’d be on security cameras enough for them to follow us by face recognition software. They caught those spies that way in Chicago.” It had been fodder for a lot of Big Brother Is Watching You editorializing. The Ramirez couple had even had cosmetic surgery, but it didn’t fool the software. They should’ve left the city instead.

Florida would be safe from that. Their courts had followed North Dakota’s lead, and declared the ubiquitous camera network an unreasonable invasion of privacy.

“But New Orleans is still bothering me,” I said. “Suppose that is why the cops picked me up—computer sorting of routine security images. That’s not the real mystery—I mean, hell, we were on the run. Using false identities, working for cash. They might have picked me up on general principles.”

She nodded. “And so?”

“So the real mystery is not why they picked me up, but why they let me go! The cops talked to someone back at the station, on the car radio, and immediately pulled over and uncuffed me and let me go. What did someone, headquarters, say to them?”

“Maybe that what they were doing was illegal. They can’t just grab someone off the street.”

“Yeah, but they can, if you’re a criminal. They definitely were sent to pick me up, or us. I didn’t think fast enough. I should’ve asked to see a warrant or something.”

“They’d just invoke Homeland Security.”

“But how could they? Homeland Security didn’t know where we were! I hadn’t talked to the DHS woman for two minutes before the god-damned cops showed up!” Though maybe two minutes would be enough, if we were on the right list.

She got up and split the remaining coffee between us. “Maybe it was somebody else in the DHS. They’re not just one woman with a phone up in Illinois.”

“Yeah, and it may not have been Homeland Security business at all. Maybe the guy who sold me the gun ratted on me.”

“Yeah,” she said, glowering theatrically. “Ya shoulda plugged the sumbitch.”

“Next time, Muggsy.” We both laughed.

4.

We dozed till noon and then picked up a cheap cell at a convenience store next to the motel, just to make two calls. Didn’t want our families to worry enough to call the authorities—all we needed was state troopers from Iowa to Mississippi sharing their databases, looking for us as missing persons.

From researching my first novel I knew how to engage a proxy cell host, to make it look like we were calling from New Orleans. It wouldn’t fool a government agency—or the Enemy, presumably—but it would cover our tracks on the domestic front.

Dad wasn’t home, so I left a message saying Kit and I were leaving the New Orleans heat on a road trip up to New England. Kit’s father answered and she improvised a little, saying that we’d probably visit an uncle up in Maine, verifying his address. Didn’t know when we’d get there; she’d be in touch.

I checked my e-mail one last time and there was a note from my agent saying hey, no big rush, but Duquest wants to know how the monster story is coming along.

“Let’s get into Mississippi,” I said. “Find a place in the middle of nowhere and stay for at least a day. I’ll write up another little chapter.”

“And maybe print it out?” she said.

“Yeah, if we find a place.” I was getting nervous, too, not having a paper copy. I did e-mail the manuscript to myself every couple of days, but the dime store computer’s word-processing program was Neolithic and had a small mind of its own. I eased the thing shut and for about the thousandth time regretted not spending a few bucks more, for a machine that could talk to a thumb drive or something.

I’d mailed a paper copy home when we first got to New Orleans, but I was at least thirty pages past that now, and had made changes in the earlier chapters as well.

“Should you call the Underwood woman or somebody?”

I wasn’t sure. “Maybe not. Let’s see what happens if we don’t make it easy for them. But maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

I opened the phone and contemplated it. “We’ve got nine thousand some dollars. Enough to go maybe nine months?”

“I think so,” she said, “living simply, under the grid. With no emergencies.”

“Still not enough. Let me call my agent, see if she can wire us another ten grand or so.”

She was with another client, but called back in a couple of minutes. I told her I was in a real jam, a legal problem I was advised not to tell anybody about.

“Ten grand?” she said. “Jack, if I had ten thousand dollars to spare it would go to the rent on this god-damn place. I’m way overextended.”

“It’s really serious.”

“Life or death?”

“I think it could get there.”

“Want me to try your movie guy, Ronald Duquest? He’s got millions, and I can pretend he owes me a favor.” I said sure.

Hooray for Hollywood. Duquest told her he’d consider it an additional advance against the movie rights—pretty generous, considering that ten grand was all he’d actually paid anyhow. He took a penny away for some IRS thing, and deposited $9,999.99 in my PayPal account.

I couldn’t exactly shake the computer until the cash came out, but it would stay there until we needed it. Once in Key West, I could use nested firewall proxies and retrieve at least 80 percent of it without leaving any trail.

Outside the motel room I gleefully stomped the cheap phone and bundled its mortal remains with our trash and tossed it in the parking lot dumpster. Pure paranoia. There was no way the Enemy could have put a tap on a random phone from a convenience store—but could our benevolent government? Every phone in every cheesy little store? Could the Enemy know everything the government did?

I could worry about it or I could get a new phone next week.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hunter slept for twenty hours and awoke around midnight, pale lunar light filtering through drapes. The warm trailer still had a stale smell of roasting meat. Sharp sweat tang.

He had a painful small erection, which he couldn’t see over the mound of his belly. He pulled on it until it emptied, and lay thinking, calculating.

There was enough meat in the freezer for about ten days of his normal diet. Two weeks if he stretched it, but he knew if he got too hungry he might do careless things.

The woman’s purse held enough money for months of food, five or six sides of beef. The idea of nonhuman meat turned his stomach now, but when he was hungry enough he would eat anything. Anything animal. The closest he could come to a vegetarian diet would be eating vegetarians.

Which he had probably done. Not Ms. Cooper. Out of curiosity he had squeezed out the contents of her large intestine, and could see that she had been a meat-eater. Too little fiber in her diet. It would have killed her one day, much more slowly.

What had he lived on before he came to Earth? His dentition was similar to a human’s, though presumably a dentist could tell he was different. He could crack bones with his molars, and his jaws were strong enough to tear apart humans and other animals. Clothing was sometimes too durable; he could break a tooth on a zipper or bra clasp. Though it was peculiarly satisfying to tear into people through their clothing, and it made the remains look more like an animal attack.

But his little talks with them were probably more interesting when they were naked. They were more frightened, which made them taste better. He knew the Chinese would beat dogs before they butchered them, partly to tenderize the muscle, but also for the endocrine tang of fear. When he had taken humans by surprise, killed them without warning, their flesh had been relatively bland. Much better to play with them for a while, and let ductless glands work their magic. The taste of hope, and the loss of hope.

Thinking made him hungry. In the back of the refrigerator he had a pair of hands in a large jar of dill pickle juice. He fished one out and had it with bread and butter, gnawing around the small female bones. Then he threw the bones into the stockpot simmering on the stove.

That pot had enough evidence to hang him four times over, in this state. He would ask that they do it without the hood. He wanted to see their faces when he plunged through the trapdoor and hung there alive, smiling, at the end of the tether.

He grinned and picked bits of Ms. Cooper from between his teeth.

5.

Kit quietly closed the top of the computer. “Maybe let’s not have breakfast.”

“Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.”

“Okay. Just don’t order a hand sandwich.”

“Or finger food?”

“Seriously… don’t tell me that scene’s going to be in the movie.”

“I guess not,” I admitted. “Wrong genre. No chainsaws or goalie masks. But the book has to go a little further than the movie.”

“So what does he eat in the movie?”

“Well… that particular scene isn’t in it. Later on, he ladles a spoonful of broth and sips it.”

She smiled. “That’s a distinction. You’re grosser than Ron Duquest.”

I shrugged. “Different medium. Besides, you want to be over the top on the first draft. Easier to cut stuff than to add it.”

She nodded microscopically, not looking at me. “Yeah, you explained that.”

Storm signals. “It bothers you that I would even think of such horrible things.”

She didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, lower lip between her teeth. “Really, it’s all right. You’ve seen worse, I keep forgetting.”

I tried not to think of yards of intestine unspooled across a dusty road, the owner festering in a ditch, arms wide in dumb supplication. Why was that so close to the surface?

She put her hand over mine. “If you want to talk about it, we could.”

Actually, we couldn’t. There was no vocabulary. Smell, heat, pain, always the edge of nausea. Just the smell of diesel exhaust made me clench my teeth. The somatic memory of it back behind the sinuses, shit burning in diesel, rot, the buzz of fat flies. Mud spatter, blood soaking desert sand. The guy had looked like a Matthew Brady daguerreotype, mouth open in dark bloated features. The second dead man I had seen, but the first had only been a dusty bundle.

“Honey? You want to lie down?”

Actually, I wanted a drink. But maybe I’d better not say that. “Naw. Get some chow.”

She smiled. “Okay, soldier. Make a mile first?”

“Check the map.” I unfolded it and found our motel. There was the Burger King across the way, but nothing else on the map for about twenty miles. “Let’s see what they’ve got across the street.”

“If it’s hands, we go someplace else.”

“Deal.” We rolled up yesterday’s clothes and repacked the bikes in about a minute. The air was cool and clean, and if it had been just me I would have gone on down the road. But if she doesn’t have breakfast she turns into something dangerous, so we crossed to the Monarch of Mediocrity.

In truth, Burger King wasn’t half as bad as McDonald’s. I got three little hamburgers and fries while she had some egg thing. On impulse I asked for a salad. The high-school girl behind the counter acted like I had asked for a human hand. Would you like guts with that? She wrinkled her nose and said it was breakfast time. Hamburgers, sure. Salad, no.

There’s something weirdly satisfying about hamburgers for breakfast. Some would disagree. Kit made a face when I squirted mustard and catsup on them. “Caveman,” she said.

“Og like meat. Meat with blood and the yellow stuff.”

“Your internal clock is off. Hamburgers and fries?”

“I suppose.” Actually, she knew I didn’t like regular breakfasts unless I fixed them myself. Eggs completely dead, no evidence of their actual origin… which isn’t all that appetizing, if you think about it. Og not eat that. It come from bird’s asshole. Cloaca. Same difference. An asshole by any other name, the poet said, would smell just as sweet.

The sun was still low behind us when we took off down the service road that paralleled 90. Not much traffic, no wind or weather. It would be a great vacation if we were on vacation. Riding alongside quiet bayous, wading birds oblivious to us, stalking breakfast.

But I couldn’t not think.

How deep shit were we in, and with whom?

Besides the Enemy, we were in at least shallow shit with the forces for good in the universe, Agent Underwood and her ilk. Presumably they would understand why we had dropped out of sight.

Kit was reading my mind. “Should we let somebody know where we are?”

“Maybe. Who would be safe?”

“God knows. If they’re tapping phones, they probably have our parents covered, and your agent. But you say they can’t tap a random phone from the 7-Eleven?”

“No way. Not unless they had possession of it first, got at its software.”

“So why did you destroy that one this morning?”

“Just caution.” I was on shaky ground—I’d researched it for High Kill, but that was four or five years ago. “They couldn’t tap the phone, but maybe they could track it. Given the information they could pick up from our parents’ phones.”

“Think so?”

“Well… at the very least, they could call us back and as soon as we answer, they know where we are.” Or where the nearest booster antenna is? “Wish I’d taken some engineering courses.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Amazing how little help quantum electrodynamics is in real life.”

We switched places; my turn to lead. I preferred following, since all I had to do then was keep an eye out for her and drop back when she came into view. I was a stronger cyclist, so if I was in front I tended to pull away steadily, especially if there were hills—power up and streak down. On the level like this, I had to keep an eye on the speedometer, keep it below thirteen or fourteen miles per hour.

If it were only about logic, it would be sensible for her to lead all the time. We found out in a couple of hours that that didn’t work; she pushed herself, trying to stay in my comfort range, and was dead tired by noon. Whether that was competitive or accommodating, I wasn’t sure.

It bothered me a little that she was upset by the direction the novel was taking. I wanted to stick to my guns, though. The first stuff I really loved reading was the horror fiction of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century—Stephen King and Peter Straub and those guys. Though it started with Poe, which must often be the case—books your parents let you read because they were in somebody’s canon, even if they were more dire in their own way than horror movies or slasher comix.

When I was in grade school I read to the other kids on weekends and in the summer. There was a construction site at the end of my road; when the workers weren’t there we’d crouch in the shadows with a candle and stolen matches, and I would intone Poe in the spookiest voice my short unformed vocal cords could manage. For the love of God, Montressor! In a squeaky voice.

I hadn’t thought about that in years. How much different is what I do now? The stories aren’t spooky, I suppose, except when they are.

If I’d known then that I was going to be a soldier, killing people and getting shot myself, I would have been thrilled. And then you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a small room pecking away at a keyboard. No, Montressor! For the love of God, no!

One of the guys in our outfit—I don’t remember his real name; his radio handle was Hotshot—he was going into the private sector after he separated, hiring out as a mercenary soldier. They were getting about triple our pay, doing stuff that looked less dangerous.

Still, we all agreed that he was fucking crazy. He laughed and agreed, too. But you could tell he really loved the work. His eyes actually gleamed; he smiled when other people looked grim. Loved guns and grenades—and guys, you had to suppose. In a thoroughly manly way.

Though that must be cyclic. One thing Grand-dude despised about the army in his day was the aggressive locker-room masculinity of it. Brutal hazing for anybody who was quiet or intellectual. I guess we had some of that; I took some ribbing for always carrying a book everywhere in Basic and AIT. But in actual combat all of the men were more quiet. More serious and introspective. Repeated exposure to death and suffering plays hell with your sense of humor. Or tilts it in a gallows direction, anyhow. Like putting a lit cigarette in the ruined face of a napalm victim, between his bright teeth. We laughed so hard we almost shit. But I guess you had to be there. It’s not so funny in the recollection.

Cyclic, cultural. When I taught the short workshop in Iowa, none of the kids had heard of the Grand Guignol. But then when I was their age, the image of an audience laughing at nipples being cut off with lawn shears was pretty extreme. They probably do it on soaps now.

Before I finish the book I should spend a couple of days watching daytime television. Kit is shocked by the things that go through Hunter’s mind, and life. But she’s no more mainstream than I am. Maybe they’re eating babies on prime time now.

To thine own self be true. I’d read Hamlet on my own before we got to it in school, and I Magic Markered that line. Embarrassing to find out that Polonius is a fathead, and the profound observation was a laugh-line to the Elizabethan groundlings. And it must follow, as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. So if you’re a fathead, and are true to yourself, you say fatuous things. Quod erat demonstratum, we may have learned the same day.

“A penny for your thoughts.” Kit had pulled up alongside of me.

“Polonius,” I said.

“I’ve got to pee-lonius. Next billboard?”

No shops or gas stations for miles. “Sure.”

The next billboard was a weathered relic that some anti-abortion group had stopped paying for. A faded fetus claiming that it had a heartbeat at two weeks. Was that true?

The unpainted latticework that formed the base of the sign didn’t really offer more than symbolic privacy. She took the small roll of toilet paper and went behind it. I turned my back to her and watched the road.

A big black SUV slowed as it approached. The passenger window rolled down and a man pointed out a camera with a fat lens. They passed close enough for me to hear the shutter go chop-chop-chop three times, like a newsie covering a game or a speech. “Pervert,” I said.

He lowered the camera and smiled.

It wasn’t a leer. It was a smile of quiet satisfaction. Did I recognize the face? Fat white guy with a dark tan and a shock of white hair. White moustache.

The license plate number was partly hidden behind a crust of mud. But it hadn’t rained in weeks. They rolled to a stop about two hundred yards away.

“Shit,” I said, and unzipped the handlebar bag.

“What’s he doing?” Kit said.

“I don’t know. Get down flat.” I let the bike go, dropped to one knee, and tried to get a sight picture with the stubby revolver. I’d be lucky to hit the car, let alone something the size of a human. I pulled back on the hammer, unnecessarily, and it clicked like a quiet door latch, cocking.

The passenger door opened slightly. I held my breath and squeezed the trigger.

The flat bang was louder than I’d expected. If the bullet hit the car, it wasn’t obvious. The door opened more and then slammed shut, and the tires squealed as the car peeled away. I kept the sight picture but didn’t fire again.

“My god,” she said. “My god.”

I was busy keeping my asshole tight, and didn’t say anything. This was too much like reality. I willed my trigger finger to relax. But I kept the sight picture until the car went over a rise and disappeared.

“Jesus,” she said. “Did you have to do that?”

“I don’t know. If I did have to, it might have saved our lives.” I clicked the cylinder around so the firing pin rested on the empty shell. “If not, I guess we’ll be talking to the cops pretty soon.”

I could hear her pulling up her Lycra shorts. “That’s not something I ever looked forward to before.”

I picked up my bike and put the revolver back in the handlebar bag, but didn’t zip it shut. I studied the map carrier. “Nine or ten miles to the next town. Or should we head back to New Orleans?”

She had picked up her bike and was adjusting her helmet. “Nearest phone. You ought to call Underwood.”

“I guess.” Where had I seen that face behind the lens? Could it have been Springfield? “Did you see the guy?”

“With the camera? Kind of.”

“Look familiar to you?”

She paused. “Just from old movies. A bad guy.”

“Yeah, the enemy spy in James Bond. But somebody real, maybe in New Orleans?”

“I don’t know. I must’ve had ten thousand customers at Mario’s. Maybe a thousand had white hair and tans.”

My ears were still ringing from the gunshot. Hands shook and my chest was so tight I could hardly breathe. “I shouldn’t’ve stomped the phone.”

“As it turns out, no. But how do you think they found us? If it was them.”

“Who else would it be?”

“Ja-ack… I had my bare ass out there in the sunshine. You see it every day, but to some other man it might be worth a picture.”

“All right,” I said lamely, “but someone who had a fancy big-lens DSLR sitting there ready to go? ‘Maybe I’ll see a pretty ass to shoot’? I don’t think so.”

“Okay. But then why didn’t they shoot? I mean with a gun. If they were the bad guys?”

“I don’t think that’s part of the plan. They’ve had all kinds of chances, if they wanted me dead.” I clenched the handlebar to stop my hands from shaking. “Probably didn’t even have a gun in the car, if they were smart.”

She didn’t say anything. I turned and saw that she was crying silently. Dropped the bike and went to hold her. Awkward, with her bike still leaning against her hip. She let it fall away and wrapped her arms around me. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Nothing to be sorry for.” My mind spun out of control. If I’d only had a camera, instead of a gun. A phone with a camera, like normal people. Or both phone and gun; aim both at the same time? Click, bang, click, bang. How the fuck did they find us on a back road in Mississippi, and was anyplace on the planet safe? Hell, if Iowa isn’t safe, where would be?

“You know what you told me about racing cars?” she murmured into my shoulder.

“Racing cars?”

“You said if you’re in a race and the car in front of you gets into trouble, you aim for him. Because he’s liable to go anyplace but straight ahead.”

“That’s right.”

She rubbed her face against my shirt and I could feel the tears. “So we should just keep on. Go the direction they went.”

“What if they double back?”

She looked up at me with bright eyes. “Then shoot the one with the camera.”

6.

We went eighteen map miles down that little road, peanut farms alternating with acres of weeds and spindly trash trees. The motel that was supposed to be at the eighteen-mile mark was a weedy burned ruin with the words “Ffriendly Ffolkes” fading under broken neon tubes. British orthography or Americans trying to be classy? But it was only another four or five miles to a Comfort Inn.

Traveling by car, you can afford to have contempt for chain motels. But when every mile is forty-eight calories, they look pretty good.

There hadn’t been much traffic, not even one car a minute. No black SUVs with bullet holes.

The next motel was still standing, but ramshackle. “Try this one?”

“Anyplace with a bed,” she said. Her color wasn’t good, cheeks pale and forehead flushed, and she was breathing a little too hard. “Let’s get these bikes out of sight.”

The black woman behind the desk was huge and suspicious-looking. “Where’s y’all’s car?”

“We’re on bikes,” Kit said, convincingly clad in bright Lycra and sweat.

“Sure you are.” When I said we’d pay in cash, she nodded with grim satisfaction and handed me a corroded brass key on a plastic tag that might once have borne a number. “You go to Room 14.”

The room had a single low-watt bulb in the ceiling and a TV set that hissed and had no picture. Lots of roach tabs in the bathroom and closet, but no actual bugs. It smelled stale, but there are worse smells.

The drapes were stuck in blackout position. We got a slight breeze going through, with the front door and bathroom window open. The other windows were glued-shut plastic.

The fat lady directed me up to Bradley Road, where there was a mom-and-pop store and a porch where some old characters sat to drink beer and stare at alien invaders on bicycles. I got us a four-pack of tall cold no-name beers and some cheese crackers and a strip of what claimed to be alligator jerky.

Whatever the jerky was made of, it had a soporific effect. Or maybe it was the beer. Or maybe Jane Austen; the five-and-dime notebook had a few freebie book files, and I read about three pages of Pride and Prejudice. Kit was snoring by then, and I joined her.

I woke up about three, restless, mind racing. The hot water from the tap made something like coffee. Back to Hunter’s world.

CHAPTER TWELVE

He had thought they were closing in on him. Twice yesterday morning he had seen unmarked police cars cruise by with men listening through headphones. A good thing his captive was gagged.

But nothing for more than twenty-four hours now. If they had brought in dogs it would not take very long, with all the buried bones around. Dogs would like that. But they didn’t have them, he supposed. Not a rich county.

If it did come to that, he could move into another level of discourse. He could try to negotiate with them, essentially with a knife to her throat. Inviting a simple head shot from a police sniper.

Or he could cut her up and scatter pieces of her through the woods, hoping to distract them from his avenue of escape by repugnant overkill. Of course that might make it harder on him if they caught him—or maybe not. If you’re brutal enough, they call you insane, and treat you as if you were handicapped. Though it is they who are handicapped, by timidity.

He approached the trailer in a large circle, checking seven suspended threads that crossed every route to the place. He retrieved his shotgun from the bushes and entered the trailer silently without turning on the light. He listened in the darkness to her irregular breathing. Drank in her smell. Then he pulled down the bandana that gagged her.

“Can we talk?” she said to the darkness.

He eased the safety off, and the small click was loud.

“If you’re trying to scare me, you’ve succeeded.” Her tone of voice had told him that. He aimed the shotgun at her voice and touched the light switch.

“So that’s what you look like.” He had grabbed her from her tent in the darkness and tied her up in the trailer without light. “You… you’re even bigger than I thought.”

“Uglier,” he growled, the first word he had spoken in weeks.

“Are you the one they’re looking for?”

He shrugged and stepped closer to her. Her breath was mint-sweet. His made her flinch away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t cook the last thing I ate. It had been on the road for a while.”

She coughed. “I’ll do… whatever you want. Really.” She took a breath and straightened up her well-toned body. “Anything.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you could see into my mind. Do you think there is nothing worse than death?”

She shook her head slowly.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “What do you think you know about me? If I am the beast that has been on the news?” He smiled, showing too many teeth. “I am a beast, as they say. Not human.”

“So they say.” Her breath caught. “Of course we are all animals.”

“Not in the sense that I am one. I really am not human. I don’t even come from Earth.”

After a pause she said, “So what planet are you from?”—as if that were an ordinary question.

“I don’t know. It was a long time ago. I have memory issues.” He studied his long blunt nails as if the answer might be there. “Thousands of years of memory issues.” His eyes came up. “You think I’m crazy.”

Her voice shook a little. “On the news they say you are.” She tried to stare back at him but looked away.

“Now you’re going to tell me that someone is looking for you. If I let you go, they will be easy on me.”

“That could be true,” she said quietly, looking at the floor.

“Not quite lying. I like that.” He went to a window and peeked through the blinds. “Would you like to offer your body to me?”

“It’s yours, of course. But you don’t seem to want it.”

“What if I wanted you from behind? Rough.”

“That would… be all right. I’ve—”

“From the front?” He took a clasp knife from a deep pocket and shook it open with a snap. The blade was a dagger about eight inches long. “I mean the abdomen, as usual. Have you read about that?”

She shook her head in jerks, staring at the blade.

“Most newspapers haven’t printed that. The fact is, not being a man, I have no particular interest in vaginas.” He sat down on a barstool. “They look like a wound to me, even when they’re not bleeding. I prefer to make my own wounds.”

She started to say something, but just swallowed.

“I enjoy it that you’re scared, as you may know. You will live a little longer for that.”

“But not very long?”

“No.” He tested the blade with his thumb. “Would you like for me to be kind, and end it quickly?”

“I want to live.”

He smiled condescendingly. “I have a news flash for you: The universe doesn’t care. Neither do I. But even if you were to survive this… little meeting, you would die very soon. A half century? That’s nothing to me.”

“How… how old are you?”

“I remember Pompeii. And a flood before that. I may be immortal.”

“Or insane,” she whispered.

He nodded. “Or insane. Maybe both.” He picked up a sharpening stone, and drew the blade over it slowly. “Maybe I was sane, a couple of thousand years ago. And it wore off.”

7.

There was a light on in the motel office, so I went in and printed out the chapter while a black kid about high-school age watched me. Making conversation, I explained about what a pain it was to try to do work on this dime store computer, not being able to just push a button and send it to my agent. He understood, and volunteered that they had a scanner, if I’d like to make an electronic copy and send it.

It felt kind of funny, switching between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I sent copies to myself and my agent, as well as Duquest.

Perversely, writing the nightmarish chapter helped me get to sleep. And when dawn showed through the drapes, Kit kissed me awake and slowly had her way with me, a quiet and dreamy kind of sex.

There was a message slipped under the door, evidently printed on the office computer:

We took showers, laughing and chatting over the noise. Celebrate our good fortune and go back up to Bradley Road for breakfast.

But when I braced the door open and started maneuvering the bikes out, a kid, younger than the one who’d helped me, opened the office door and jogged over.

“Mister… guy said not to wake you up, but give this to you ’fore you leave.” He handed me a heavy padded mailing envelope with no address. On the back of it, a crayon scrawl in green block letters: SOMEONE THOT YOU SHD HAVE MORE FUN.

We went back inside and sat on the bed.

I tore open the envelope, causing a blizzard of gray shreds. There was a thick hardcover book inside—Dexter Filkins’s old history of the Gulf War—but most of the text was missing. Someone had hollowed out a large enough volume for two thick packages of hundred-dollar bills, banded $25,000 each, and one big bullet heat-sealed into a plastic bag.

And the key to room 15, next door, and a car key.

We stepped around the bikes and opened the door to 15. On the bed, no surprise, a long rectangular box.

“He was in here,” the boy said from behind us, “the one who give me the envelope. Musta left before the sun come up. Left his car, too.”

“What kind of man was he?”

“Old guy.”

“Old like me?”

“No… way old. Old white guy with a white ’stash.”

I picked up one end of the box and let it fall, heavy. “What exactly did he say?”

“He say give you the thing.”

“Nothing else?”

“Huh–uh. He don’t say nothin’!”

“Come on. What did he say?”

“Nothin’!” The kid bolted. I got to the door just in time to see him run behind the motel.

“Did he threaten you?” Kit called out. “We could help.” We could hear him crashing through the woods in back.

“Sure we could.” I sat back down on the bed and tried to open the tough plastic bag. Finally punched a hole through it with the door key and widened the hole enough to get the bullet out.

“What is it?” It was heavier than a normal cartridge and had a small crystal lens on its tip.

“Smart round,” I said. “Like a little guided missile. You fire it at the target and little fins snap out for steering. Self-propelled, slow.” I pointed at the tip, painted light red. “It’s an incendiary, for good measure. I’m supposed to shoot some poor dick with this and hope the ensuing fire will dispose of the evidence?”

“Or cause confusion,” she said. “Would it be a big fire?”

“Don’t know; I never used one except on the range. It doesn’t look like it could be a big fire, unless you hit a gas tank or something.” I turned it around in my hand, looking for clues. “Of course the red paint doesn’t really mean anything; they could paint it baby blue if they wanted.”

“Does it shoot like a regular bullet?”

“Yes and no.” I opened the end of the cardboard box and slid out yet another M2010. This was a civilian one, the Remington Model 700, with a heavy blond wooden stock sporting expensive grain, and a big heavy finderscope. I eased the bolt back slightly; it wasn’t loaded.

I pushed a tab on the side and a three-by-three-inch screen popped out beside the fat Leupold finderscope. It had a blurry picture with bright crosshairs and a faint bull’s-eye. Hadn’t seen one since the desert.

“Watch this.” I slipped the cartridge into the receiver and pointed the rifle out the door; the picture on the screen snapped into focus, a bright picture inside a dark circle, like looking through a keyhole. The parking lot.

“So it shows where the bullet is going?”

“Exactly.” I set it down and reached inside the carton. Taped into a square of Bubble Wrap, a little box with a joystick. “That’s weird.”

“How so?”

I set it down carefully. “I did spend a week training with things like this. But that was like ten years ago, twelve. They expect me to squeeze the trigger and then guide this thing into a target, with no practice? I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to, not with any certainty.”

She picked it up and studied it. “Maybe they don’t know that? They seem to think you’re one of the people you write about.”

Odd but true. Maybe there were people with the combination of power and ignorance required for that kind of mistaken identity. The only thing I was sure of, though, was the ignorance on our side. “Let’s think. We should just go to the cops. Homeland Security.”

“Where they’d have your file open on the desk before you sit down.”

“Granted. But the Enemy has way upped the ante now. Or again, rather. And I still haven’t broken any law.”

I eased the cartridge out and held it in my hand. “You can’t buy this shit in a store, not anywhere. I don’t think they let hunters take deer with incendiaries—Smokey the Bear and all. It’s a plain terror weapon.” The weight of it was both repellent and fascinating. In training we had fired off a box of these, one for each of us, aiming at old paint cans, each with a spoonful of gasoline inside. Boom, fireball. Better than winning a Kewpie doll.

“Pretty expensive?”

I nodded. “The sergeant made a point of that. The round was worth more to the United States Army than we were. So aim. Or you might have to be the target next week.”

“They wouldn’t do that.” She was serious.

“Not really, no. You weren’t disposable till you were overseas.” I hefted the rifle. “This thing is heavy. I guess it’s a match model, for accuracy. Deepens the mystery.”

“How so?”

“It’s wasted on me, really. I’m a pretty good shot, but I was far from the best in my platoon, even my squad. The army’s full of people who could shoot one round from a sniper rifle like this and shave a hair off a fly’s ass.”

“None of whom wrote a novel about a sniper.”

“More’s the pity.” I aimed it out the door. The scope really was beautiful, a hard bright image with no color fringe. I could spin the power up to 40X, but without support the image danced around like crazy; I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at.

“Can I try it?”

“Sure.” I spun the power all the way down and automatically made sure the safety was locked, not just “on.” Product of a thousand spot inspections.

She put it to her shoulder and pointed into the parking lot, the muzzle waving around in a sloppy orbit. She craned her neck, peering into the scope. “Don’t see anything.”

“Your eye’s too close. Back off to a natural distance.”

“Like this?” She leaned back too far.

“No—” I reached toward her and the room suddenly darkened as a huge form blocked off the light.

“What you all—” the big black woman said, and then screamed, and backed away so fast she tripped into the parking lot and fell hard onto her back.

I ran out to help, and Kit was right behind me, still holding the rifle. The woman’s eyes were open, showing mostly whites. I couldn’t feel a pulse in her neck, but her wrist had a slight one. “She’s alive.”

“Call 9-1-1?”

“No! Jesus!” I looked wildly around; there didn’t seem to be any eyewitnesses. “Leave the bikes. Get in the car and get the fuck out of here.”

“But…” She looked as helpless as I felt.

“I know. Let’s carry her in onto the bed and go!” She put the rifle down and took one arm. I took the other and we dragged the woman in through the door.

No question of lifting her dead weight onto the bed. I scooped up the book with all the hundreds. The loose high-tech round, the joystick. Picked up the rifle off the sidewalk.

“Maybe we should leave all that stuff behind?”

“No, maybe we’ll ditch it someplace else. Let’s just get outta here!”

We threw everything into the car and it started right up. I backed out carefully and turned it around.

In the distance, sirens.

“Fuck it!” I floored it and fishtailed out of the gravel lot onto the two-lane road.

“Don’t!” she said.

“’Course.” I took my foot off the gas and pulled over, reaching for my wallet. “‘I wasn’t running from the body, officer. Just the FBI and DHS.’”

Two Highway Patrol squad cars bore down on us, sirens screaming, blue lights flashing. They went right past the motel without slowing down. I clenched the wheel and watched them close in—and then pass us, engines roaring flat out.

We looked at each other. “So what was that all about?” she said. “We must not be the only criminals in Mississippi.”

“At least they’re not after this car.” I put it in gear but sat for a moment. “We really ought to…”

“Yeah. She could be really hurt.”

“We should check.” Still I hesitated. “Hell. ‘Avoid the appearance of wrongdoing.’” I did a slow U-turn and went back to the motel parking lot. The door to the room was still ajar.

She was still where we had left her, but her eyes were closed now. Still a pulse in her wrist. Her name tag said “Mary Taylor,” and tasked her with Customer Relations. And everything else, I supposed.

“Mary?” I said. “Miz Taylor?”

I put my hand behind her head and raised it slightly. There was a little blood in her hair. Her lids fluttered.

“You fell and hit your head,” I said, which was true.

“I was… you was…”

“You slipped on the gravel,” Kit said.

She stared at Kit. “You had a gun.”

“Hunting rifle,” I said. “She was just checking the sights when… you came to the door.”

“What you suppose to be huntin’, this time of year?”

“Nothing yet. It was a present.”

She rolled over onto an elbow and touched the back of her head gingerly. “Don’t like guns.”

“Me neither,” Kit said emphatically.

The woman fixed me with a baleful stare. “This present. The man give it to you, why he didn’t just knock on your door?”

“My uncle Johnny,” I improvised, “he’s kind of crazy. I mean, he’s always doing stuff like this, elaborate pranks.”

“With a gun? Sure.” She sat up with surprising grace, and a groan. “Your Johnny, he give my boy a twenty-dollar bill to tell you look in that room. That’s some uncle.”

“Yeah. He’s crazy.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I called the police.” She said po-leese, mocking her own accent.

I might have paused too long. “Do what you want.”

“Let me put it some different way. Would it be worth a hundred dollars to you fo’ me not to call the police?”

“I suppose it would.”

“Uh-huh. Then I suppose it might be worth a thousand.”

“No way.”

She rocked a little bit, thinking. “How ’bout for five hundred bucks I let you tear that page out of the logbook, and I never seen you, neither of you.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said to Kit. “Bargaining with a woman we came back to—”

“You best believe it,” the woman said. “I do appreciate you coming back, but get real. You got money and I ain’t. You on the wrong side of the law, and I got a cell phone. You want that page for five hundred dollars?”

“We’re not criminals,” Kit said.

“I know you ain’t that kind. If I thought you’d do me harm I’d be hiding.”

“So you’re just trying to make an honest buck,” I said.

“Dishonest buck,” she conceded. “You got a lot more than five hundred dollars, and I got a lot less.”

“Okay,” I said, “but you have to throw in the cell phone.”

She nodded. “Six hundred, then.” She unclipped the cell phone from her belt holder and handed it to me. Just a symbolic gesture, but I took it.

“Why don’t you put the bikes in the car,” Kit said, turning her back to count out bills from a banded stack. “I’ll take care of the logbook.”

“Okay.” It wasn’t quite that simple. I wheeled the bikes out to the hatchback, but they were too long to just stuff into the back. I had a panic moment—no tools—but Mary told me there was a tool kit under the counter in the office. I removed the front wheels and the bikes stacked into the back easily.

While I had a pair of pliers, I took the precaution of sabotaging this new rifle the same way—take the powder out of a bullet and fire just the primer, to lodge it halfway up the barrel. Useless to an assassin, but that was never really in my job description.

8.

I called Underwood on the lady’s cell as soon as it was 9:00 in Washington but got a recording. I asked her to call this number back and also send an e-mail. Phone trouble.

We decided to stay off the expressway, and just crawl down the two-lane. Might as well make it easy for the Mississippi cops, if Mary Taylor decided not to stay quiet for $600. We had bigger problems.

How had the Enemy caught us? From the billboard encounter we knew that they weren’t following cell phone information; I’d stomped the cell long before that. Maybe, far-fetched as it seems, the mystery did go back to the surgery in the army hospital in Germany—a tracer bug imbedded in muscle mass. What would it use for power? Can a tiny battery or fuel cell work after sitting for ten years? Maybe there was some biological thing, generating electricity from my own body chemistry.

As soon as we could stop for a few hours in a big enough town, I should arrange to have my hand X-rayed. I could complain about phantom pain from the missing finger, and who would refuse to give me a picture? If only to shut me up. A tracer could be tiny, but big enough to see.

I didn’t say anything out loud about that. Of course this car had to have been bugged by whoever left it for us. We could assume they knew exactly where we were at any time, and could overhear us talking. Kit hummed a folk song from a couple of years ago: “Sittin’ in my home alone / Waitin’ for the god-damn phone… .”

She took the paper tablet and marker out of her bag and wrote HAVE TO DUMP CAR—GREYHOUND IN GULFPORT? in big block letters.

I nodded and scrawled CASH TICKETS TO TWO DIFFERENT PLACES? Keeping my eyes on the road.

It made me nervous, the idea of being separated. But we had agreed that it was a necessary step. There would come a future, I supposed, when every little Podunk bus station and train terminal would have spy-cams with face recognition software. For now, though, you might still travel through the country without Big Brother making sure you stay out of trouble. If you’re careful to stay off the grid.

They would have our description, a man and a woman biking together, out in the middle of the country but without any touring gear. We’d be less conspicuous as individuals just taking bus rides to wherever.

(I don’t think I was unduly paranoid about this—and my controlling metaphor wasn’t Big Brother, actually, but Big Mother, the nanny state. If you really want to keep control of your children, you have to keep them on a leash. The image of the cyber-state as a harried young mother with children going every which way, straining at tethers, seemed pretty accurate.)

We turned on the radio and listened to dreadful Southern nova ska for the benefit of our supposed eavesdroppers. After about ten minutes, though, Kit made a face and slapped the search bar until it delivered some funky bayou jazz on NPR.

We did take an hour and a half to indulge my paranoia. We saw a sign and pulled into a small “urgent care facility” in the middle of nowhere, and I complained to the doctor about sharp pains in my hand, by the stump. He had a young man take an X-ray, and brought the film to me with a perplexed look, and put it up on the wall.

“Never seen anything quite like this,” he said, “but then I don’t get a lot of combat amputees.” Where the bone for the little finger was cut off, there was an opaque perfect cube, maybe a third of an inch on a side. “The medics didn’t say anything to you about it?”

“It was a confusing time.”

“At a guess, I’d say it was something to promote healing. Never seen the like. Maybe you were a guinea pig, and they didn’t follow up.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Not allowed to do that, but they do. God… damned… army. You a disabled veteran?”

“Eighty percent,” I said.

“You get home, get the VA on their case. Get a patient advocate and stand your ground. They can call me if you want.” He handed me his business card and a prescription. “This is Tylenol with a little codeine. Don’t drive on it.”

He stood up and shook my hand. “Thank you for your service, son. Wish I could do more.”

“You’ve done plenty.” Kit and I both said good-bye, staring at the little white cube on the film.

We settled the bill in the waiting room and then stood for a minute in the small parking lot before getting in the car. “I don’t feel good about leaving you now,” she said.

“Not that much has changed,” I said. “We figured it was something.” I looked at my hand. “Know any amateur surgeons?”

By the time we got to Gulfport it was dark. The next bus going north didn’t leave till seven in the morning. That didn’t bother either of us; stop at a nice motel and have a decent dinner and a sleep together before we separated.

Not a good decision, it turned out.

The dinner was great, a deep-South crab and shrimp boil with small new potatoes and baby onions cooked in the broth. We tarried over it and had a bottle of wine and a plate of fresh gingersnaps, the house specialty.

Our lives might have been a lot simpler if we’d just picked up some burgers. Driven on.

We got back from the restaurant about eleven and there were no parking spaces in front of our motel room at Traveler’s Rest. I let Kit off to run to the bathroom while I went around back to the auxiliary lot.

We were separated for less than three minutes.

When I opened the door, there was only a line of light coming from under the bathroom door. “Kit?” I called.

She made some noise from the bathroom and I stepped into the darkness. A sharp pain exploded in the back of my head, and I was conscious just long enough to think Stroke?

It had been a stroke, all right; the stroke from a club or a blackjack. At three in the morning, 3:17 by the bedside clock, I sort of woke up, ears ringing, pain radiating in spasms from the base of my skull. A big tender swelling there. No blood. I swallowed back vomit and staggered to the bathroom and drank some water, and managed to keep it down. Splashed cold water on my face and rubbed it with the harsh towel.

There was an insistent buzzing in my ears that I eventually realized was coming from a strange cell phone, centered on the neatly made double bed. I got a tissue from the end table and picked up the phone like a master criminal, or an amateur one.

I pushed the button but didn’t think “hello” would express how I felt. “Fuck you.”

“Now, now,” a familiar female voice said, “what if this was your mother calling?”

“I suppose I would ask her what the fuck was going on. But I guess I’ll have to ask you. Who the fuck are you?”

“We are the people who have your girlfriend. That’s all you need to know.”

“So you’ve upped the stakes to federal crime.”

“Technically, no; I think it was already a federal crime when somebody killed a DHS agent. But yes, the stakes will be higher… for you.”

“How so?”

“It goes like this: we’ll give your girlfriend back. If you cooperate, we’ll give her back all at once. If not, we’ll send you a finger first, and then negotiate the next part.”

I couldn’t speak. It was like my vocal apparatus was glued shut.

“You can reach me at any time by touching the REPLY button. Do not make a recording of the call. If you don’t reply in one hour, or if you call the authorities, we will definitely give you the finger. Registered mail.” She hung up.

I stared dumbly at the phone while it sank in.

They had me pretty well figured out. It might not work with an actual war hero; he would probably make the calculation and, more or less with regret, do what he had to do.

But to me? Killing some stranger, no matter who he might be, was not unthinkable; that had been my business as usual for more than a year, not that long ago. But allowing the woman I love to die—slowly, tortured by amputation? Through my inaction?

The ghost of my missing finger talked quietly all the time, in a language no one else could hear. Now it screamed. You can’t let them do this. Do this to her.

It wasn’t just the pain. The chest pain was worse, when it was bad. But nothing was missing in there.

The muscle below the stump flexed and flexed. The ring finger clawed in sympathy.

As it had done when I woke up in the hospital bed in Germany. The tight swath of bandages that covered the chest was nothing compared to the arm suspended just above eye level, twitching, broadcasting loss more than pain. This will never grow back. Never be better.

I pushed the button. The phone rang once, and the person who picked it up didn’t say anything.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked the silence.

A man’s voice: “Do you feel fit to drive?”

I didn’t, actually. Maybe I could walk to the door. “How far?”

“Some distance. You should sleep first.”

“Sure.”

“There are sleeping pills and aspirin in your shaving kit.”

“I don’t carry sleeping pills.”

“You do now. Take two and I will call you in the morning.” He hung up, a comedian.

My “shaving kit” was a courtesy zip-bag from Harrah’s. It now had an aspirin bottle with eight aspirin and four purple pills.

No way in hell. Even if I knew they looked like sleeping pills, which I didn’t, I wasn’t going to take them on the word of a probably homicidal mystery man. I walked across the street and got an ice-cold quart of beer from a local place called Swamp Hawg Brewery.

It was not as bad as it might have been. I drank the whole quart in about ten minutes, while nibbling on stale cookies for my stomach’s sake. I started to undress, but only got my shirt off. Decided I had to rest a bit before tackling my shoes.

Woke up slowly with shoes still on, eyelids stuck together, clothes twisted and heavy with sweat. The clock said 9:14. Dappled sunlight coming through the window by the bathroom. Funny feeling in my stomach, butterflies rather than nausea, and probably a bad case of Swamp Hawg breath.

Maybe nerves, too.

I set up the coffee machine and slumped to the shower. It had a head more talented than my own; I set it to a complex vibrating mode and let the thrumming hot water try to wake me up. When it turned cold I stepped out carefully, remembering a stupid accident in junior high. Slipped in a strange bathroom and laid open my chin.

No Time for Stitches, a good title for my autobiography.

I got the cardboard box out of the trunk and dumped the rifle out onto the bed. A lot heavier than the one I used in the desert.

I’d only used the sniper-mod M2010 once as a plain rifle, rather than a sniper weapon, and the results were more instructive than impressive. The bolt action that gives it such accuracy is a handicap when you’re not punching somebody a new orifice long-distance.

There were seven or eight of us deploying in a roomy MaxiStryker, crawling up a steep hill with maybe a dozen other vehicles on our way from nowhere to elsewhere, and we ground to a halt when the vehicle either ran over a mine or was hit by an IED. We were all deafened, but otherwise unhurt. Smoke everywhere. There was some small-arms fire whispering from above us, and we all piled out on the downhill side to shoot back.

It was an unholy racket, even to the deaf; at least two Strykers blasting away with fifties and the littler machine guns and grenade launchers chattering and booming. I could see by tracers what they were aiming at, a dun-colored lump that was probably a pile of sandbags, and I managed to get two rounds in that general direction while the Strykers pelted it with about a thousand. Finally something hit something and it went up in a big orange-and-grey blossom. Some guys pumped fists and cheered, I guess the way Goliath did until his last engagement.

I remembered taking comfort in the rifle’s weight and balance, back then, and now allowed myself a familiar fantasy: those guys pull up in their SUV and start taking pictures of Kit’s bare ass—but instead of the piddling Dick Tracy toy, I pull out my trusty M2010. Right eye or left? Perhaps a new one, in between?

It occurred to me that this might be the same rifle I’d “modified” by plugging the barrel with a low-powered bullet. I slid the bolt back and looked down the barrel; it was unobstructed.

I could take it to the cops. Tell them my story. Some lunatic assholes gave me this rifle and want me to go to Washington and assassinate someone, and they kidnapped my girlfriend to make sure I do it. Here’s a note that proves it.

Sure, son. Why don’t you just put down the gun and sit over there while we check it out… you don’t mind handcuffs, do you?

For some time I sat there and looked at the weapon. Then I carefully filled its box magazine with five fresh rounds, then pulled the bolt back and slipped a sixth one into the chamber.

Four rounds for the car and driver, and then two for the grinning schmuck with the camera. Chest and head. Take a picture of this, motherfucker.

9.

I was just about done with waiting, quarter to eleven, when the little phone buzzed. I pushed the button and didn’t say anything.

“Do you have a pencil?” the woman said.

“No. Second.” I found a ballpoint in my bag, and a folded-over piece of paper. “Okay.”

“You have to be in Washington, DC, in four days. You have a room reserved under the name ‘Grant Harrison’ from the third of July until the fifth, in the JW Marriott Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest.” She paused. “Do you have that?”

“I have it.” I repeated it back to her.

“Your confirmation for the room, and a wallet with Grant Harrison identification, are in the glove compartment of your car. You will have to drive there, of course, so your luggage won’t be searched.”

I didn’t bother to write that down. “I’m not doing anything for you until I know that Kit is safe.”

There was a long pause. “Nothing?”

“Of course not. If you’ve killed her I have no reason to follow your orders.”

“Oh. She is not dead.” There was some line noise and a beep. “I’ve sent you a photograph of her. The picture includes the first page of this morning’s New York Times.

“She still has all her fingers. But take note of the man standing next to her. If you call the authorities… we will give her to him.

“She will be killed. Repeat that to me.”

“She will be killed.”

“Keep that in mind. She will be killed, slowly, badly, and you will be to blame.” The phone went dead, and then buzzed.

I clicked it for “Recents” and found a call with the current time, supposedly from “411.” I opened it and found a photograph.

It was Kit, seated, gagged, wearing only frilly blue underwear. Which I had never seen.

A white rope thicker than clothesline was wound around her. Shoulders, chest, waist, legs. Her wrists were tied together in her lap, with what looked like telephone cord. Low coffee table in front of her, with a metal ashtray in the shape of a bird, filled to overflowing with cigarette butts. A corner of a window behind her showed a pine forest.

A tall thin man wearing a black mask hooded over his head stood next to her. In one hand he held a newspaper and in the other, a long-bladed fileting knife.

That was theater, of course. She was at the mercy of anyone, dramatic weapon or no. If not this theatrical knife-wielder, then the fat guy with the camera, or his black driver. The woman with the honey voice, the person who killed Blackstone, the man who’d just talked on the phone. And maybe some to whom I had not yet been introduced.

The background of the photo didn’t reveal much. There were probably a million rooms just like it in motels and vacation cabins: fake log paneling, furniture that was worn blond Ikea or the like, many years old. I couldn’t read the date on the Times, but the headline was current, “West Virginia Coal Miners’ Strike Near Resolution.”

I couldn’t read Kit’s expression, either. Wide-eyed, I supposed with fright, looking away from the camera, down at the table. The bandana pulled tight between her teeth, that must hurt. Her mouth would be dry. The dead-tobacco smell from the cigarette butts, rank and penetrating.

The man’s eyes were visible, somewhat shaded by the hood. Windows of the soul, supposedly, though it’s hard to read eyes with no other features. Safe to assume they were cruel. Cruel pulp-fiction eyes under a hangman’s hood.

Would the long slender blade reach his heart if I thrust up under the sternum? That’s what the master sergeant claimed in Basic Training. Maybe I would play it safe and just cut his throat. Shoot him a few times first.

Kit didn’t have any blue underwear. White or nothing, usually nothing. She had been stripped and redressed.

An interesting word, “redress.” Could anything really pay us back for all this?

The phone by the bed rang, and I snatched it up. It was just the office, asking if I planned to stay another day. I said no, and assured her I’d be out by eleven.

“Where you headed?” she chirped. I told her Washington, DC.

“Gonna be a madhouse, Fourth of July coming up.”

I tried to laugh. “Guess I can handle it.”

She might wind up on page three of the Times herself. He seemed like such a nice boy. I saw that long box but didn’t think nothing of it.

That room in the photo could be a block away, or it could be almost anywhere with pine trees. Underneath the note I had copied from them, I did some calculation: They hit me over the head and took Kit around 11:00 last night, 2300. Almost twelve hours later, they sent me the photo.

If they were driving, they might have gone six or seven hundred miles. But they didn’t have to drive if they had access to civil aviation. I called the desk, and the woman said there was a landing strip two miles down the road. Yes, she had heard several planes take off tonight.

In that time, a plane could get them anywhere in the hemisphere. Someplace with a New York Times, but no other constraints.

I went out and opened the glove compartment and took out a cheap plastic wallet. Illinois driver’s license, library card, and Exxon and Visa credit cards for “Grant Harrison,” the names of two presidents. One gave us Black Friday and the other was a nonstop talker who died of pneumonia after a month in office. From eating cherries in cold milk, which I never believed. I wouldn’t have voted for either one of them.

Not much packing up to do. I put our bathroom gear back in her pink suitcase and the rifle back into its box. Went to the office and paid with a C-note, which caused the clerk to purse her lips. I knew there was something fishy when he didn’t use a credit card.

I asked whether I could use her desk computer for a minute, though, and she decided I was probably not that dangerous. She wanted to go off to the little girls’ room anyhow, she said; would I watch things?

Sure. The main thing I wanted to watch was the picture of Kit, bound and gagged. It took me a minute to transfer it to her machine. She didn’t have Photoshop or anything, but I was able to enlarge portions of the picture.

What I mainly wanted to study was a small wall calendar that was nailed to the paneling at the edge of the picture, next to the window.

It was a freebie calendar from an Ace Hardware; I recognized the logo but couldn’t read any of the lettering. Maybe the words under the logo were the name of the town.

I pushed the enlargement in and out. The first line looked like two words: four letter-blobs, an apostrophe, and another blob. Probably an “s.” Then six blobs. The first one narrower; might be an “i.”

The second line was five blobs, slightly larger. The name of a state? I called up a list of states, and there were only three with five letters: Texas, Maine, and Idaho.

A CIA genius or Jeopardy! winner might rattle it off instantly: a place name that was “somebody’s” “something,” in one of those three states. I Googled around and found a gazetteer that would search for place names with missing letters.

Texas and Idaho came up blank, but I scored on Maine: Swan’s Island. It was a little pinpoint in the ocean, south of Mount Desert Island. Population 350.

I wrote all of that, and the latitude and longitude, on the back of a postcard extolling the virtues of Traveler’s Rest.

It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. What were the chances that somebody who didn’t live on that little island would nail up a throwaway calendar from there?

I could hear a despised math professor from my freshman year sneering that the probability was non-zero. Which meant not bloody likely, but the only chance you have.

But wait. There was a retro phone with a rotary dial on the table. I selected it and enlarged it. Someone had carefully printed a number with clear block letters on the white circle in the center of the dial.

I scribbled that down and Googled “phone number” + “land line” + “find address.”

It gave me a service called FindFone. I was never so glad to have my Amex card number memorized. I typed it in and FindFone charged me ninety-seven cents to divulge 127 Ring Road, Swan’s Island, Maine.

The clerk came back and I thanked her and rushed back to the room.

Threw everything in the car and reviewed my options. I could go to an airport and take a chance; try to fly there on my illegal credit card. Airports are a little less forgiving than rustic taxicabs on that, though.

I drove for a couple of hours and then stopped to get a sandwich at a Pilot truck stop. Walked through the big convenience store, looking for inspiration, and possibly found it.

The car was parked behind a Dumpster, not visible from the shop. I got in and almost enjoyed the microwaved cheeseburger and an ice-cold Coors. Not my brand of choice, but there was nothing less American on offer.

I had bought three other items, cash, paying at a register that was not visible from outside: a sling for my left arm, masking tape, and a roll of aluminum foil. I wanted to reconstruct a vaguely remembered Science Fair project from junior high school.

One of the kids had a demonstration of the “Faraday Cage,” basically a box that blocked electromagnetic radiation. He’d built boxes of chicken wire, fine-mesh metal screen, and plain metal. The demonstration involved putting a cell phone into each cage and calling it from different distances.

I couldn’t remember what he had proved with it, but it gave me an obvious idea. Would a container made of aluminum foil block a radio signal?

Maybe you wouldn’t need a whole room with aluminum wallpaper. If I wrapped my hand in aluminum foil, would it block the transmitter buried in the flesh? If I wrapped the arm up past the elbow, would that keep radio waves from leaking out?

Wished I knew more science. The “open” end of the cylinder of foil would be full of muscle and bone. How well would radio waves travel in and out through that?

Car radios work, inside a “box” that’s mostly metal. But I vaguely remember something a teacher said in school about how they got around that. I was probably studying the back of Rosy Bender’s neck, and trying to imagine the rest of her skin, and somehow didn’t quite get what he was saying about radio waves.

Looked around and didn’t see any witnesses, and the car’s windows were tinted anyhow. I tore off a long sheet of foil and wrapped it around my left hand and arm, molding it up past the elbow. Having a right angle in the tunnel of foil might help; there wouldn’t be a straight line from the bug to the outside world.

Good thing I’d gotten a wide roll. It overlapped with plenty of room to spare. I wound masking tape around the whole thing generously, then managed to hide most of it inside the sling.

I would still be able to fire the rifle or the revolver, but probably couldn’t reload either of them without tearing the foil off the left hand. Well, if it came down to shooting, I wouldn’t be worried about radio waves.

I’d worked out a vague plan. Might as well get going.

A county road paralleled the interstate for two dozen miles, so I’d follow that. I put the cell on the passenger seat, in case I had to do dangerous stuff, like driving while talking on the phone, or shooting at people. Started the car and moved out.

The road was almost deserted. After a few miles, the cell buzzed, and I picked it up. “What?”

I resisted the urge to laugh into the awkward pause. “Your… car is moving,” the woman said.

“It’s your car, I think, and it’s headed for Washington,” I said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Why aren’t you on the highway?”

“I have three days. It’s an unfamiliar car, so I’d rather not speed. Why is that a problem?”

“Take your next right. Get back on the highway.”

“Okay.” He didn’t say, We seem to have lost your hand.

Maybe time to confuse things more. Steering with my elbows, I unwrapped the foil from my hand. Then as I drove along, I covered it up for a few seconds at a time. Then I left it uncovered. Let them think that the battery inside my hand was failing.

My half-formed plan was to set them up so they wouldn’t panic if the signal from my hand flickered on and off. Over the next three days, I wouldn’t cover it up for more than a minute. But if I ever did want to drop off their radar screen, I could do it, and the first thing they’d think was battery failure.

Of course they could track me anyhow, as long as I stayed in this car. That was okay for the time being. Since I didn’t know where Kit was, my only hope was that their directions would lead me to where she was being held.

I did take the next right, and obediently got back on I-85. The screen button said I was 980 miles from Washington. What could I do in 980 miles?

Sleep a couple of times. I picked up the phone and thumbed it. “This car doesn’t have Supercruise. How long do you think I can drive before I fall asleep at the wheel?”

“We will tell you when to stop.” The woman again.

“What if I have to pee?”

“Go ahead,” she said, a trace of amusement in her voice. “It’s not your car.”

I drove along eight or ten miles, until the next exit sign. Picked up the phone: “Seriously, I need some coffee if I’m going to stay on the road. There’s a place in two miles.”

“All right,” she said. “Use the facilities. Treat yourself to a candy bar.”

I would, actually; get the blood sugar fired up. I pulled into the rest stop and parked. I watched for a few minutes, and no black SUV followed me in.

Well, if they could assassinate a president, or someone important, they could probably afford a second car.

On impulse, I opened the back door and took the rifle out of its box. I propped it up diagonally across the passenger’s seat, then left the car unlocked and went to get my coffee.

I took my time in the bathroom, then got a coffee and a pastry. I stood and enjoyed the block of crumb cake with apricot filling, watching the car from the rest-stop foyer, in air-conditioned comfort. Just as I finished the crumb cake, a fish took my bait.

A stern-looking state trooper watched me saunter out with my half-finished coffee.

“Is this your car, sir?”

“Yes, it is.”

“You left it unlocked with a weapon in the front seat.”

“Really?” I took out the keychain and pushed the button twice. The car honked. “Good grief. Careless of me.”

“Well, be more careful, sir.” He walked away, without asking for my license and registration. What kind of a police state is this? How do you know I’m not headed to Washington to shoot the god-damned president?

I hoped he at least had written down the license plate number or taken a picture. Maybe he had one of those microcameras in his hat.

But I put the ignition key in and turned it, and nothing happened. Took it out and tried it again. Then a big dark shape pulled up behind me and stopped.

A state police tow truck.

The cop came back with a friend, a very stern-looking woman with a Smokey-the-Bear hat and her left hand on the butt of the automatic pistol that rode too high on her hip. The other hand hovered over a spray can on the right side.

Her voice was a staccato chirp: “Sir, we have to ask you to come out of the car and keep your hands visible please.”

“Sure.” I opened the door slowly and eased my tired bones out. “What else can I help you with?”

“Are there any other weapons in the car?” he asked.

“No—yes! I mean, not in the car. In a suitcase in the trunk, there’s a gun.”

“Would you please open the suitcase and show us? We won’t confiscate it without reason.”

Even with reason, I wondered whether they were on shaky legal ground. Could they make you open a suitcase without a warrant? The rent-a-cops at airport security did it routinely, so maybe they were covered.

I opened up the suitcase and stepped away before she could order me to. “Take a look.”

The snub-nosed revolver was in sight on top of the clothes. She searched through them anyhow, and didn’t find anything else interesting.

“Have I broken a law here?” My half-formed plan was to get the police suspicious enough to follow me. Hopefully without throwing me in the slammer.

The male officer took off his sunglasses, revealing soft features in a big round face. “There is a law against creating an ‘attractive nuisance,’ sir. A nice rifle begging to be stolen qualifies, I think.”

“So I could be arrested for somebody else’s theoretical lack of moral fiber.”

“You’re not being arrested, sir,” the woman said. “Though I will issue a warning to you.” She reached for a notebook very slowly, I guess so as not to spook me in case I had yet another gun squirreled away. She asked the other officer what the code was for “attractive nuisance,” and he didn’t know either, so they settled on 999. They gave me the warning and abjured me to have a good day, and please put the weapons where they weren’t in plain sight.

The warning wasn’t a citation. It was somebody’s brilliant PR idea—a smiley face with “Friendly Warning” printed across the top. No name or license number involved, how friendly. I probably wasn’t in any state police computer for it.

The tow-truck door slammed and then there was a solenoid click down by my starter switch. So they could turn off this car’s engine by remote control, which I’d known was true in a couple of states. Another reason to stick to bicycles.

I did put the rifle in the trunk but also, perhaps unwisely, took the .38 from the suitcase and slipped it into the front door pocket, tucking a map over it for camouflage. Not that I was going to quick-draw it from the driver’s seat, with my left arm incapacitated.

It was right next to the plastic wallet with Grant Harrison’s identification. Maybe I should have used it. Remember this name, officers. It will be in the papers soon.

My fingers tingled and so did my toes, a not-completely-unpleasant feeling I remembered from combat. Like feeling a change in the weather: a shitstorm may be gathering, but at least it won’t take me by surprise.

I studied the parking lot, feeling a little sheepish, and didn’t spot any tanks or snipers. I touched the EST. TIME button on the map, and numbers appeared under route lines. I was five hours from Huntsville. Figure on stopping there for dinner and a rest.

As I pulled out of the parking area, I told the phone to recharge itself from the car’s system while I drove. It had one message, which had come in while I was being interrogated by the Smokies.

We will call you with instructions this evening at eight o’clock your time. You have to be checked into a motel or hotel by then. You might want to get some rest.

That was thoughtful of them. It would put me on the other side of Huntsville, but 8:00 was late to be looking for a room. I’d start looking well south of the city.

The phone buzzed, and I picked it up wearily. So soon. “Yeah?”

“Hey, babe. What’s up?”

The voice was only vaguely familiar. “I don’t know. What is up? Who are you?”

“Break my heart, babe—this is Ron! Ron Duquest, the only guy between you and a million bucks.”

“Jesus! How on Earth did you get this number? I just got this phone.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “You e-mailed me the number this morning from… Missi-fucking-sippi? What the hell are you doin’ down south?”

What should I or could I tell him? Of course we were being overheard, at least my side of the conversation. I chose my words carefully. “Unlikely as it sounds,” I said, “I’m doing a little thing for the army. Secret.”

“The army? I thought you hated them.”

“What can I say, Ron? Their money spends.”

“That’s great, babe. But what about me? And my money? The army takes precedence over my monster?”

Jesus. “Didn’t I just send you a chapter?”

“Jack, yeah, you sent me a chapter, like a week ago.”

“Couple of days,” I said.

“The monster’s got the bikin’ guy,” he said. “He’s about to fuckin’ eat him, and the cops are closing in while he sharpens the fuckin’ knife, and you have to do a job for the fuckin’ army? One of us is crazy, man, and I’m sure as hell it’s not fuckin’ me!”

I had to smile in spite of everything. “It’s me, Ron. I am totally fuckin’ bug-fuck.” I checked my watch. “Look, I’m about to knock off driving for the night. I’ll stop at a place with Wi-Fi and do you a couple of pages.”

“You got to, man! I gotta know, does he eat the guy—no, don’t tell me! I wanna agonize!”

“Okay, Ron. I’ll do as much as I can.”

“Do more! I wanna know what happens to this fuckin’ freak!”

“Do what I can,” I repeated. “Talk to you tomorrow.” I clicked it off and tossed it on the seat. A big sigh surprised me, and then I had to laugh.

If you only knew, Ronald. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Using the term loosely.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Hunter removed the tape from his victim’s mouth slowly but gently. This one was also athletic, but not as skinny as the girl last month, good.

Hunter had duct-taped his wrists and ankles. He pushed the bandana that had been covering his eyes up onto his forehead. “If you make any noise, I will blind and gag you again. But I will hurt you first.”

“Okay,” he said hoarsely. “I understand.”

“I do want you to understand,” Hunter said. “I want you to know that what’s happening to you is special.”

“Thank you.” His eyes tracked all around the trailer. A library of science fiction and popular science paperbacks in floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Large old medical books, anatomy and physiology. A too-large billiard table took up half the floor space.

Hunter crouched and lifted the table’s false top of green felt, not straining. Underneath, a metal surface with blood gutters. Its white enamel had been scrubbed, but stains persisted.

“This will not be an autopsy, despite appearances.” He opened a drawer and took out a plastic case of glittering scalpels and a pair of surgical saws. “Autopsies are for dead people. This will be more like a very thorough physical examination.”

“At the end of which I’ll be dead?” His voice quavered.

“We shall see.” He took large shears out of the drawer and advanced on his prisoner.

“What are you doing?”

“Preparation.” He started with the left arm of Steve’s T-shirt, scissoring it open to the neck. Then he did the other side, slowly, shearing it all the way to the waist. The ruined garment fell to the floor. Then he snipped open his biking shorts, leaving him clad only in a jock strap and incongruous running shoes.

He looked up defiantly. “Does that do it for you? A helpless victim gives you a hard-on?”

With a thumb Hunter pulled down the front of his own shorts, exposing nothing. “Not really.”

He stared. “You’re not… aren’t you…”

“There’s something there. Not what you might expect, and small.”

“What… are you?”

“Not human. You will have to die for knowing that. But you would die anyhow.”

Steve’s body was pale as wax under black hair. “What… what will you do?”

“Eat you, ultimately,” he said in a playful tone. “You are prey, after all, and I caught you, fair and square.”

“No.”

“It’s not a movie, though, so you won’t have to watch as I consume the minor pieces. I will kill you more or less quickly, and feed on you for several days. As you would a cow or a pig.”

“No,” he said, lying inanely. “I’m a vegetarian.”

“Another one. Do you think carrots feel no pain? You tear their skin off and chop them up into—”

Someone pounded on the door. “Open up in there!”

Hunter picked up the shotgun in the corner, smiling calmly. “A friend of yours?”

The rapping resumed and he stepped toward the door. As Steve shouted, “He has a gun!” he pointed the shotgun at about chest level and fired one deafening blast, and then two more, blowing the flimsy trailer door to pieces.

The gunstock had an elastic band that held ten or a dozen shells. He reloaded three and then kicked out what was left of the door, and stepped through blasting.

Steve could hear rifle shots and then a burst from a submachine gun. He saw Hunter jump from the top step.

For a couple of minutes there were more shots, and the sound of men shouting. Then it was quiet, and a short man wearing SWAT armor lumbered through the door with an assault rifle. “You all right, sir?”

“I’ve been better.” His voice was somehow flat and calm. “Thank you for coming.” He looked out the door. “You killed it?”

“Oh, yeah. I hit him twice myself, and he walked straight into a shotgun blast right after.”

“So it’s dead?”

“Gotta be.”

From farther away, a short spat of automatic-weapon fire. Then a shotgun barked twice, and a third time.

“Hope so.”

EPILOGUE

The coroner of Ilsworth County, Georgia, has done hundreds of autopsies, but never one of such a huge person, and he’s not looking forward to it. Mountains of messy fat to slice through before you get to the organs. But he prepares the body and makes his first incision. Then he staggers back, dropping the scalpel.

Inside, there’s no fat, and not a single organ he can identify. Some of them are shiny metal.

Its eyes snap open.

10.

Never thought I’d be homesick for a Holiday Inn. This rustic-looking place was Mom’s Home Away from Home, which brought to mind Nelson Algren’s three rules of life: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”

Never sleep at a place called Mom’s. And, I guess, never play cards with a man whose troubles are worse than your own, and for god’s sake, never eat with a woman called Doc. Unless you’re going to be sick, I suppose.

I couldn’t sleep anywhere, anyhow. Worrying about Kit.

At least you could write at a place called Mom’s, if you’re writing a cheesy monster novel. I finished lucky chapter thirteen. Hunter joins the ranks of the Undead.

I’d started out writing with the .38 sitting on the desk in front of me, but it was too distracting. I’d just look at it and worry. I started to put it under the pillow, but didn’t want to smell the gun oil all night, and try to sleep with the lump. Finally, I put it on the floor, slightly hidden behind the bedspread. I could still snatch it in a second.

Eight o’clock came and went with no call. I supposed they actually gained more by not calling; keep me in suspense. And for all they knew, I might be sitting in a police station or FBI office somewhere, waiting for the phone to buzz so the authorities could trace the call and rain cowboys all over their ass.

I hoped that the night’s distracted writing would satisfy Duquest. Would it be gory enough? I was more into disgust than horror.

I tried to ignore the feelings left over from trying to sleep while worrying about murderers and listening to bugs scuttle in the night. I did finally get a few hours’ sleep, but woke up feeling crawly. Crawled upon.

Quick shower and hit the road. When I turned on the shower and a thin stream of brown water came out, I was almost able to laugh. Instead I called the office, and a yawning old man came down with a key to another room, with a shower that worked. Beige water, tepid.

He acted miffed. Who would want a shower with clean water?

Turned out the place didn’t have Wi-Fi, though the sign said it did—the same sign that promised clean, comfortable rooms. I’d get back on 85 and use the first rest stop. Maybe it would even have a shower, dream on.

The main reason for stopping at a little place was to be able to check the parking lot at a glance. No big black SUV with a bullet hole.

If it had been there, though, what would I have done? Call the cops? Take out the rifle and wait for a target of opportunity?

That’s what we called it in the desert. Though that sounded inappropriately cheerful. It was rather the opposite of “opportunity” for the guy on the other end. No more opportunities.

I remembered a poem, “Dealing in Futures,” written by a soldier friend, about all the futures he had destroyed. Maybe somebody he killed would have found a cure for cancer, a car that runs without gasoline, an end to war. I read that before I was drafted, but even then, my reaction was “but maybe the soldier you decided not to kill has the bullet with your name on it.”

That was always on the top of my mind in the desert. I didn’t hate the enemy; in fact, I sort of admired them. But they can’t know that, and any one you spare might be the instrument of your own doom. “Kill ’em all,” said a slogan on my grandfather’s helmet cover in his war; “and let God sort ’em out.” He didn’t believe in God any more than I do, but he did believe in the power of statistics. The Law of Large Numbers was a phrase I remembered him using. If there’s a large number of soldiers out there absorbing bullets, maybe you’ll be the one who gets missed. Or something.

This enemy now, perhaps I should hate. They’re probably after me just for profit, hired by someone who has political motivations. Of course they’re not killing me, to be precise; just putting me in a position where somebody else can. As Uncle Sam did as my graduation present, all those ten years ago. Perfectly legal.

Maybe I should just walk out to the highway and stick my thumb out. Take me anywhere, as long as it’s out of this bizarre life. But for Kit.

Went back to my own room and turned on the television, but the only channel that worked was Random Colors & Static. Turned it off and jerked open the end table drawer. It had an old King James Bible. I opened it and flipped through to Matthew, which had pretty good poetry. But I came to a verse that stopped me in my tracks—

“And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Good grief. I was glad it didn’t say left hand.

There was a polite knock on the door. I went to open it, and as I pulled on the knob, thought of the .38 sitting on the floor ten feet away.

An older man in a coat and tie and an attractive woman, maybe thirty, wearing a tailored white outfit. A nurse’s uniform?

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Out,” the man said. “You’re going out.” He stepped aside, and as I leaned to close the door, the woman kicked it open and shot me in the chest.

I staggered back and looked at my chest. There was a dart there with bright red feathers.

“Damn it,” the man said. “I said not the chest!”

I took one very shallow breath and collapsed.

11.

It was not unpleasant as long as I didn’t wake up. People moved me here and there, I knew, and I seemed to always wind up in the same places. A quiet hospital bed in a dark room. A huge warehouse where invisible people walked around me. Sometimes a railroad car that I think came from some movie. It rocked along uneven rails and I knew that there were Indians riding alongside, but I would be okay as long as I didn’t open the curtains. For the longest time I was up in some future, lying forever in a bed, I think waiting for immortality.

I could almost remember an ambulance ride, but that kept turning into a familiar helicopter, some bastard medic pounding my chest, Stay with me Stay with me when all I wanted was to leave. Leave behind the mutilated hand, the blood in my eyes, the punched-out chest. And now a dart, too.

Then it became a nurse whose huge face shrank back to normal size. My hand came up and touched a plastic thing over my mouth.

“Let’s try breathing without this,” she said, and there were some clicks as she unhooked something behind my head. The plastic went away, and with it the cold breeze that had been whispering into my nose. “They gave you a shot to wake you up. Do you know your name?”

“Jack Daley not John,” I said automatically. “Specialist First Class, US3482179813. You are not allowed to ask me for more than this.”

“Doctor Lu?” she said. “He’s responding now.”

A slender Asian guy, probably Vietnamese, wearing surgical greens and a stethoscope. He checked my pulse and listened to my heart. “You are so in the wrong war,” I said diplomatically. “My grandfather would kill your ass.”

“I was born in Cleveland,” he said. “I’m just as American as your grandfather, maybe more.” He unbuttoned my hospital shirt and looked at the skin there. He touched it gently with his fingertip. “Does that hurt?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Funny. How do you feel?”

“Okay. Woozy, I guess.”

A deep voice behind him said, “He’s talking?”

“Yes, lieutenant. But I think he should—”

“I’m a lieutenant colonel, doctor. It’s like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Wow, I rated a bird colonel. What kind of shit was I in now? They went out into the hall and conferred, and then walked away talking softly, I think arguing.

I had the room to myself. Three other beds, empty. What did that mean?

I napped and woke up what seemed like seconds later, refreshed. “Nurse?” I said quietly.

She looked up from her charts, smiling. “You’re awake, sir? Let me go get the—”

“No! No, wait. Before I talk to any officers… could you tell me where I am and what I’m doing here?”

She put a cool hand on my forehead. “You’ve been in this bed several days. Your chart says you’re under observation pursuant to a drug reaction. What drug did you take?”

“Didn’t take. It was a dart.”

She touched the gauze in the center of my chest. “It was your heart?”

“No, not ‘heart.’ A dart. Look. Where am I?”

“It’s a military hospital, Keesler Air Force Base. You got a dart in your heart?” She smiled. “Like Cupid?”

“No, not Cupid!” Better not say a beautiful mystery woman shot me with a mysterious dart gun for mysterious reasons. “I guess it was kind of an accident?”

“That was clumsy,” she said, her pleasant expression unreadable. “You shot yourself in the chest with a riot control gun?”

“Is that what it was?”

“Well, they don’t say you did it yourself.” She reached down and rattled the handcuff that attached my ankle to the bed frame. “They seem to think you were resisting arrest.”

“Holy shit. That’s not it, not at all.” I sat up in bed, shaking off dizziness, and looked at the handcuff, ankle restraint, whatever. It looked pretty serious. “Nobody arrested me.”

She looked out down the hall. “Yeah, the guys who dumped you here weren’t MPs, despite their uniforms. I work with MPs all the time. What did you really do?”

“Truth is, I’m not really sure. But I didn’t break any law.”

“For what it’s worth, I believe you. Those guys are creeps. They don’t work here.”

“So let me out of here.”

“Oh, yeah, and get them on my ass.” She shook her head. “Even if I could”—she rattled the handcuffs—“I don’t have the key. Oh yeah, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in federal prison.”

“They’re not real officers. And I’m not a criminal. I think my life’s in danger.”

She canted her head and smiled again. “Spy stuff, eh?”

“Kind of. More like criminal stuff. On their part.”

She stepped to the door and looked out again. “Them? I think they’re too dumb to be criminals.”

“Why’s that?”

“Don’t know shit. They didn’t treat me like a nurse, just another dumb black bitch—and those scrubs they’re wearing, they don’t think I know whose monograms they are? Like I’ve worked here so long they oughta name a disease after me.” She turned to rummage through a drawer. “Not even clean. They stole them scrubs from a laundry basket.”

“You’ve got to help me.”

“No, I don’t got to. I don’t have to do nothing not in my orders.”

She looked out the door again, and shook her head, then picked up a big towel. “Don’t you go noplace.” She hustled out and was back in about two minutes.

“Got my boyfriend’s pickup.” She unwrapped the towel, exposing a big greasy pair of bolt cutters.

Rather than cut the chain, she snipped through the cuff itself, and then cut it off at my ankle, too. “You take that and get rid of it somewhere. Outside.”

She pulled open a drawer and lifted out my clothes and shoes, wrapped in tissue paper. “Move fast. I’m not here.” She put the bolt cutters into a low cabinet, stepped into the hall, looked up and down, and walked away unhurriedly.

There was a heat-sealed plastic sack with my bag in it. No cash in the wallet, though; just a receipt for $4,109. A brown envelope had the stuff from my pockets, about thirty bucks in small bills and change, and keys to the car that was parked back at Mom’s Home Away from Home, and the room key. Not too useful. Credit cards that I might be able to use in off-the-grid places. A dime store cell phone.

I dressed quickly and stuffed the blue hospital pajamas into a HAZARDOUS BIOWASTE trash can and stepped out briskly, trying to look as if I knew what I was doing.

No way I was going to get that $4,109 out of the hospital safe. But I wasn’t going anywhere without money.

The fifty grand inside the book, that was just gone. If the guy with the white moustache showed up, I’d just have to tell him that the other bad guys, Boris and Natasha, had beat him to it. Take it up with your god-damned supervisor.

I had to assume that they searched through the motel room after they darted me. But if they didn’t know about the money… I’d closed the hollowed-out book and left it on the floor by the bed. Maybe some maid got a tip big enough to retire on.

I sure was worth a lot of money for a guy who barely had cab fare. Even in mundane reality. I had plenty of credit cards in my wallet; that was a couple of grand that I could tap at usurious rates, if I were standing in a bank in Iowa City. But between me and MidWestOne were plenty of search engines where my name would ring a bell. Or start up a siren.

I sat down in the hospital lobby for a minute, trying to come up with a plan. Went through everything in my wallet.

At the bottom of the stack of credit cards was a Visa I’d never used. It was from a dumb promotion thing where I’d get $10 of free merchandise at a Hy-Vee in Coralville—but that store was just a hole in the ground now; they’d closed it last year.

I’d never used the card because it had the wrong middle initial: “John B.” All my other cards were for “C. Jack.” When it came, I hung onto it with a vague idea of doing an experiment; see what happened if I tried it in a cash machine when I was broke.

Might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat, though I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Might as well be hung for a John as a Jack.

I used the pen at the sign-in desk and scrawled “John B. Daley” on the card’s signature block. Then I went outside and got in the next cab. “Bus station, please.” The driver was a girl who looked about twelve.

“You want the one at the Amtrak station?”

“Yeah, sure.” The cab had a beat-up card reading machine. I handed her the new one. She slid it through without bells or sirens.

“You got ID?” I showed her my driver’s license and she scrutinized the picture and then studied my face. “You look better with the beard,” she said, and handed it back. I guess Visa-Jack would pass for Visa-John if there were no computers involved, or sufficiently old ones.

She dropped me at the bus station annex. I watched her pick up a fare and drive away, then made a snap decision and crossed over to the train station.

I used the same Visa in a ticket machine, ready to run if it started beeping, but it obediently booked me to Washington. From there I could book to New York, and then up to Maine. The last Maine bit on the bus. How to get from Bangor to Swan’s Island without any money was a problem I’d have to deal with when I got there.

It wouldn’t be smart to push my luck charging a restaurant meal. With cash, I got a handful of power bars and a hot dog. Still a few hours before the train. I picked up a discarded Times-Picayune and sat on a bench outside, reading with one eye and watching with the other.

I didn’t suppose a police car would pull up with lights flashing. If a cop car did come up, I could slip off in a cab to nowhere and start over.

The breeze died and I realized I smelled too strong to sit next to anyone who didn’t have a real bad cold. What performers call “flop sweat,” I supposed. A difficult role, pretending to be an innocent writer from Iowa City who had no connection with murderous assholes or people with good plain haircuts from three-initialed agencies.

The men’s room had a cologne dispenser that took a dollar coin. So I could at least disguise myself as a weary traveler who knew how bad he smelled.

The crossword puzzle in the paper was too easy. I did about half of it and quit out of nervous boredom. Then I picked it back up and filled in all the blanks with random words. That was a little more challenging. I got to cross AXOLOTL with LYNX, a biology experiment that would probably never actually happen.

It was three and a half hours till the train. I got up to look at the map on the wall and with a shock realized I was only twenty miles from the motel where I’d been kidnapped.

I hurried outside and went to the first cab in line. He looked like a cliché New York cabbie, fat and grizzled and unfriendly, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip. In actual New York, I realized, he’d be from the Indian subcontinent or Northern Africa. Maybe that’s why he moved to Mississippi. I tapped on the window.

“Yeah?”

“Could you take me to a motel in Quigman and back in two hours? Mom’s Home Away from Home, off 85?”

“Twenty-some miles? Sure. Cost ya.”

“How much, about?”

He tapped the dash map a couple of times and entered some number into his meter box. “Fifty-mile round trip… call it $250 plus waiting time?”

I handed him the card. “Give you three hundred if you can get me there and back in an hour, and you never saw me?”

He took the card and the back door sprang open. “Never saw who? I been off duty since ten seconds ago. Gonna drive the long way home.”

I was sure the meter box would keep a record, but hell. The back of the cab smelled of stale cigarette smoke, which made me think of Kit, trapped somewhere with her face down by that overflowing ashtray.

My eyes stung and I closed them during the drive, just to rest them, but was sound asleep when he pulled up at Mom’s Home Away from Home. “Here you go, buddy.”

“Thanks. Back in a minute.” I got out and stretched. Against all odds, the hatchback was still in front of number 15.

I went into the office and the querulous old man looked up. “Well, finally,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”

“In the hospital in Biloxi. Not sure how I wound up there.”

“Oh. You okay now?”

“Still sore from where someone hit me over the head. Look, I left a suitcase and stuff in that room.”

He stared at me with a mixture of confusion and suspicion. “Maid cleaned up. Guess you can take a look. You got your key?”

I took it out of the plastic bag and jiggled it. He decided to follow me to the room, putting a BACK IN FIVE sign on his door. The cabbie joined us, I guess to protect his investment.

The door to room 15 was locked, which gave me a moment of optimism. But the pink suitcase wasn’t anywhere to be seen, nor the dime store computer. The Dexter Filkins book was on the floor, open, its hollowed-out pages empty.

“What happened to that book?” the old man asked.

“I don’t know. Someone got mad at it.”

I knelt down to pick up the book and yes, the .38 was still down there, not visible behind the bedspread. I swept it out and into my pocket as I stood. The old man hadn’t been looking at me, and the cabbie developed a sudden interest in the ceiling.

Checked the bathroom and retrieved the shaving kit I’d gotten from the casino.

Nothing in the car but some road maps and a box of stale cookies. Aluminum foil and masking tape. A coffee cup with dried-up mold in it.

“You gonna take the car? This ain’t no parkin’ lot.”

“Somebody’ll be by for it tomorrow.” State police or Homeland Security, but maybe not tomorrow. I wasn’t going to take it and drive to Maine with a beacon: Come shoot me again; maybe a bullet this time.

On the cab ride back to Biloxi, the cabdriver and I listened to music on a country station. We didn’t talk until we got to the train station and he opened the door. The cab machine took my card with no protest, and I tipped him up to three hundred.

“It’s none of my business,” he said, “but you better watch your ass. Listen to a fellow vet. Guns are never nothin’ but trouble. Haven’t we had enough trouble?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We shouldn’t go looking for it.” He nodded and drove off shaking his head.

When trouble comes looking for you, though, best to be ready. A little revolver with five shells is five shots better than a pocket full of nothing. On cue, a train whistled in the distance. The train to Maine, soon enough.

I’ll come to thee by moonlight, the poet said, though hell should bar the way.

12.

I probably could have upgraded my ticket to a sleeper compartment, but didn’t want to push the one credit card too high. I did nurse a couple of glasses of wine, watching TV movies in the bar car.

The revolver seemed heavy and obvious in my Amtrak bag, and perhaps the idea of a gun clashed with its cheerful logo, but it would be more conspicuous in my pocket. I decided to use my layover in Washington to buy a shoulder holster. And a double-breasted dark jacket, with padded shoulders, to go with it. Mirror shades and a rent-a-girl to hang on my arm. Or maybe I should stick with the Amtrak bag.

Actually, an inconspicuous light jacket and a shoulder holster would be a good idea. I checked the web on the bar-car computer, and was amazed to find out (admittedly in an ad for shoulder holsters) how risky it was to simply carry a pistol in your pocket—at any second, the trigger could snag the pocket lining and blow your dick off! Buy a shoulder holster for the sake of your theoretical progeny! I’d gone all my life without worrying about that.

Actually, I’d be more concerned about a policeman saying, “Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just… wait! That is a pistol in your pocket! Hands up!”

The Amtrak bag seemed effective and inconspicuous, and the price was right. But I wondered whether I might be going into a situation where I would want a concealed weapon and both hands free. That might be worth the hundred bucks or so. Though I wouldn’t put it on unless I was walking into an actual “situation.”

I did get a solid six hours of sleep on the train, even getting up a couple of times to take the foil off for random intervals, to confuse things. As we approached Washington, I left it off for the last hour or so. The people who were renting the room in the Marriott would no doubt be listening.

I’d want it covered up all the time when I headed north, but also, naturally, I’d want it to be “not working” for hours at a time before I left.

Of course I had no idea where the listeners were located. Maybe they were in Maine, in the same room as Kit, which they implied. I must be ready to surprise them there, at least approaching with the hand quiet, wrapped up.

But first there was Washington to worry about. In all likelihood, they would expect to meet, or at least contact, me when I arrived in Washington. Perhaps I should do that, reassuring them just before I headed north, with my foil-silenced hand. If I checked into the hotel on schedule and then turned around, wrapped up the hand, and went straight to the train station, I could be halfway to Maine before they missed me.

By now, I hoped, they should be used to the intermittent signal from the hand.

When I got off the train in Union Station, I looked around, checking the time, as if I were expecting someone to meet me. Kept looking as I walked from the track through the huge station, but nobody contacted or, apparently, followed me.

I got to the taxicab rank and then doubled back to the ticket machine. Quickly bought a ticket up to Maine via Penn Station. There were lots of trains from Washington to Boston, but not so many from Boston to Maine. Two leaving in the morning, two in the afternoon, and a red-eye just before midnight.

I did toy with the idea of chancing a plane north. Of course the pistol was the obstacle. I could just ditch it and improvise when I got to Maine, a state with a lot of hunters. How hard could it be to buy a pistol in Portland?

Actually, I had no idea. But a gun in the hand is worth two in the bush, or something, conjuring the pubic ultimate in concealed weapons.

And I would actually only save about two hours, flying. There weren’t that many flights to Maine from New York. I guess people in Maine took the train or stayed home.

The only legal gun store in the District of Columbia, according to the computer, was one operating inside the main police station—how handy for them. I’m sure there was a fascinating story behind that. But I just needed a holster, and Googling, found a list of sporting goods stores that sold them, one right in Union Station.

I got a hot dog and a Coke from a vendor and asked her where the sporting goods store was. She pointed down a long corridor of shopfronts. I sat and finished my lunch contemplating the question, “How do you look innocent while asking to see concealed-weapon accessories?” Then I went off to try it.

I walked through a huge assortment of balls and bats and gloves and hats, until I got to the very rear of the store, where behind a forest of rifle barrels pointing skyward and a veritable clothing store of desert- and jungle-colored garments, there was a glass case with dozens of bright new airguns. A few aisles down, I found stacks of various holsters.

The shoulder holsters looked a little too gangster-ish. But I guess gangsters preferred them for a reason.

“Can I help you decide?” asked a little round man with a nametag.

“Looking for a holster for a snub-nosed Taurus.”

“Would that be a 605? An 85?” He looked left and right. “You don’t have it with you?”

“No. No, it’s for a friend.” Wouldn’t be smart to pull it out, I presumed.

“Good. Do you know if it’s a .38 Special or a .357 Magnum?”

“Either, I think. I was told.” By a highly trustworthy arms merchant in a smoky New Orleans dive.

“Will you be wearing it under your clothing or outside?”

“Under.” He nodded and didn’t ask to see my permit.

He picked up two cardboard cartons. “Under the arm or on the belt?”

“Belt, I suppose.”

He handed me one. “This is best, I think, for men who aren’t, well, very fat. Some policemen are.”

“I’ve noticed.” I took it from him. The belt clip seemed to be on the wrong side.

“It’s not for cross-draw,” he said. “Strong side.”

I clipped it on my belt on the right hip. “You don’t recommend cross-draw?”

“Your choice.” He shrugged, I think meaning not for the likes of you. “You might want to wear it with a roomy jacket. Sports coat.” I bought it and went to look for something inconspicuous to put over it.

There was a clothing store called Next2New less than a mile’s walk away. Plenty of time before the train, so I strolled there, through a part of Washington the guidebooks probably didn’t mention. I got a shabby tweed jacket for less than a hamburger on the train, and a well-worn beige shirt with the monogram MPX on the breast pocket. Michael P. Xavier, if anyone asks.

I changed clothes in a grubby men’s-room stall at Union Station, throwing away the old shirt. My heart jumped when I did that: before the next time you change clothes, you’ll face down the Enemy. Don’t sweat, now.

Clipped the holster onto my belt and slid the Taurus into place. In the mirror I looked innocent enough. Would it fool a trained policeman? An untrained one? I put the gun back in the Amtrak bag.

On the way to the waiting room I passed the sporting goods store and hesitated. I’d reloaded the pistol after the billboard confrontation, but no longer had that box of cartridges. So should I face the bad guys with only five rounds, or go in and buy a new box?

I didn’t know enough. Could you buy a carton of bullets as casually as a carton of milk here? Or would your face automatically appear on a Homeland Security computer screen with the notation “armed and presumed dangerous”? Escaped from a military hospital where he was being held under armed guard.

Here’s your change, sir. You might want to run for the door.

Well, the depressing truth was that one box of cartridges more or less was not going to profoundly affect my fate. If five rounds didn’t do the job, then thirty wouldn’t either. Factor in the time it would take me to shuck out the used shells and reload, cowering behind that Ikea coffee table. Five would have to do.

If it came down to a firefight, my trusty snub-nose against however many serious weapons they had, I was going to come in second anyway. That didn’t worry me as much as it should have, though; give a man a weapon and he starts to think with his balls.

Maybe when I get to Maine I can pick up a flamethrower or a machine gun. Or maybe when I pull the snub-nose out of its policeman holster, they’ll all throw up their hands and surrender.

There were three computers in an alcove off the Union Station waiting room. Pretty shabby ones, keys yellowed with age and the grunge from thousands of random grimy fingers. I made a mental note to autoclave my hands when I was done, and used the Visa card as a key to the wonderful world of global communication.

Google Earth took ten seconds to show me an aerial view of a cottage with the address on Ring Road. At greatest magnification, the roof of the A-frame was a stark grey rectangle at the end of a brown dirt driveway off the “ring road” that circled the small island’s perimeter. I bought a print of that view and also a map of the island; folded them up and put them in the bag with the other incriminating stuff—carefully saved the foil and rolled it up inside the sling that hid it.

This part had to be done quickly: I took a cab to the JW Marriott Hotel and waited in line for two minutes. No one sidled up to me. I showed the clerk the reservation receipt from the glove compartment of the car, and he gave me the key to 1138. I declined help with my bag.

No one else in the elevator. I went up one floor and got out, re-wrapped my hand with the foil, then walked back down to the lobby and went outside to the taxi rank and said “Union Station.”

If they were able to follow me, well, we’d have our confrontation in a very public place. Not in room 1138.

Back at the station I found a place to sit with my back to a wall, and tried not to look too furtive while I killed a half hour with the Washington Post and watery coffee. When it was ten minutes to boarding time, I went toward the train. On the way, I stopped at the bookstore and looked for something that might keep me occupied for some hours. Thrillers were a little too close to real life, so I picked up a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land, which I’d read when I was too young. Maybe it would give me some tips for dealing with aliens. Assuming the bad guys were not citizens of the United States.

My seat was half occupied by a black gentleman who was sound asleep in the window seat, so I went on to the bar car, or “lounge,” where I would have wound up anyhow.

I got a beer and sat down at a table not too close or too far away from the security guard, a serious-looking woman in a grey uniform with a Glock in a fast-draw holster clamped to her thigh. Had she been trained to detect nervous amateur spies carrying little holsters clipped to their belts? Evidently not.

I studied the Post editorials long enough to be able to discuss global ocean trash issues or the current revolution in Somalia with her, but she didn’t come over.

The train was underground for some time, and then spent a few minutes speeding over the suburbs in elevated mode, and then slowed down to connect with the twentieth-century rails that served Amtrak through most of the northeastern corridor. Slowed down regularly for nineteenth-century curves.

After the Baltimore stop, I checked back in the coach and the black guy was gone; both those seats were empty. Clipped my ticket to the back of the seat in front of me and cranked back the seat; the train wouldn’t reach Boston for another seven hours.

A conductor woke me up when the train was approaching Boston, about ten at night. I got off and South Station was a huge quiet cavern full of places to eat, all closed.

A sleepwalking rent-a-cop directed me to a twenty-four-hour place a couple of blocks away, the South Side Diner, which was full of interesting people. I probably was not the only one carrying a gun, but nevertheless felt somewhat out of place, neither intoxicated nor obviously unwashed. Though I wanted a shower so much I might have used the gun to force my way into one.

I’m sure there were fine restaurants still open in some other part of town, but I only had an hour. I nibbled on a fried-egg sandwich, which seemed safe in all respects other than cardiac, and went back to the station to wait for the late train north.

I felt like a time traveler marooned in the twentieth century, or the nineteenth.

The small crowd waiting for the train was mostly old black or Hispanic people. The few who were white or prosperous-looking were absorbed in their readers or papers. How many of them had sought out this slow venue because they were also carrying guns? How many were not? We were a fairly desperate-looking crowd, myself definitely included.

The gun was chafing my side, so I went into a men’s-room stall and returned it to the Amtrak bag. I doubted there would be a quick-draw situation on the Portland train.

A good thing, too. I was exhausted from travel, and once I got to Portland it would still be at least four hours to Bangor on the bus.

When I got to Bangor, what then? Daniel Craig and Sean Connery would always appear all fresh in their tuxedos, with plenty of weaponry and ammo tucked away somehow. I couldn’t visualize either with dark shadows under his eyes and his gun in an Amtrak bag.

At least I wouldn’t look dangerous. And I could put it back in the holster before I confidently kicked down the door.

13.

It was not quite six in the morning when the squeal of the bus brakes woke me up at the bus station in Bangor. There wasn’t an actual station; it was just a Greyhound sign outside a coffee shop. It said 24 HOUR SERVICE, but didn’t look open; to be on the safe side I went to the back of the bus and used the noisome toilet there.

Good thing. The diner was locked, but when a church bell started tolling at six, a cab pulled up. He had a card on his dash that said BAR HARBOR AIRPORT $25. The window went down as another man and I approached.

It didn’t look like an actual cab. It didn’t have a meter that I could see.

“How much to Bass Harbor?” I said. That was where the ferry left for Swan’s Island. The other man said he had to be at the Bar Harbor airport right now and would pay fifty bucks.

The cabdriver, who looked like a sleepy high-school boy with a fake beard, said to the other guy, “Get in.” He checked a laminated card and said if I went along, he could drive me from the airport to the Bass Harbor ferry for $100.

I decided not to tell him that I’d have to pay with a dodgy credit card. We could work that out later. He read the other man’s credit card with an iPod attachment.

The ride alternated between quaint New England hamlets and beautiful dense pine forest, with some neatly planted potato fields and a few random acres of inexplicable desolation. Like a war had happened, but only went for a block or two.

I tried to ignore how my left hand felt. It was throbbing, baking under the foil cover—closer to braising, I suppose, than actual baking. Cooking with moisture. But I was too close to Kit and her captors to take it off and broadcast my presence.

The last record they would have of my little beeper would be when I had checked into the Washington Marriott. Of course, by now they might assume I was on the run and could be anywhere.

We got to the airport, a low brick building with a pretty tall hotel, in about twenty minutes. I got out and stretched while the other passenger collected his bags and ran for the plane.

“Mind if I sit up front?” I asked. “I’m about to die back there.” The backseat was broken and came forward at a little more than a right angle. That gave me an excuse.

“Come on up,” he said, and took my card as I got in.

The iPod read it and beeped. He frowned and tried it again, and it beeped again. “Mister…”

“Be calm,” I said, the .38 pointed at his midsection. “This is serious business. Government business.”

“I won’t… look… don’t…”

“I won’t pull the trigger unless you make me do it. I’ll give you a thousand dollars to take me to Bass Harbor, and across to Swan’s Island. A thousand dollars in cash, but I can’t pay you until tomorrow.”

“What… government business?”

“Homeland Security,” I improvised.

“Do you have… let me see an ID?”

“Not undercover.”

He looked at me, and then out the windshield, and then back and forth again. “This is crazy.”

“Just drive,” I said. “I’ll tell you the whole story. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“Okay,” he said slowly, and pulled away from the airport loading zone.

By the time we were back in the potato fields I had told him all about what I’d done to the Polish embassy and about the international espionage ring that had sent a hit man after me when they couldn’t get to me “through channels” in Washington and Krakow. I said I’d give him the whole story once it all came down, in maybe a week. The poop was going to hit the pulverizer, I told him, using authentic spy euphemisms.

It was forty-six miles from the airport to the ferry boat. I wrote him an IOU for a thousand dollars and signed it, and used a felt-tip marker to put a thumbprint next to the signature. I gave him my Iowa phone number and e-mail address.

I actually did plan to pay him. And even tell him the real story, eventually. But when he pleaded, “Do y’have to keep pointin’ that gun at me?” I said that in fact I did. Just accept it as a condition of employment.

We were pretty much in the middle of nowhere when we saw a sign that said five miles to the ferry. Just beyond the sign was a dirt road to the right; I told him to turn down it.

It was a forest fire road, arrow-straight most of the way. No sign of habitation; a state or federal forest reserve, perhaps. We went a couple of miles and then the road just stopped. Ran out of funds or hit a county line or something. “Back up and turn around,” I said.

He wasn’t an experienced driver. It took him six or seven sloppy tries. “Okay, stop. Give me the keys. And your cell phone.”

He looked at me on the verge of tears, mouth trembling. I gave him my water bottle. “Don’t drink this all at once. It will take you a while to get back to the road. I’ll leave the car at the ferry station with the keys and the cell under the floor mat.”

“What?”

“Even if you don’t get a ride, you should reach the ferry before dark. That thousand bucks is yours, plus another thousand, if you don’t say anything to anybody. Did you ever make two thousand dollars in a day before?”

“I don’t, but I don’t get it.”

“Spy stuff, man. Don’t try to make any sense of it.” I motioned with the gun and he got out. I slid over, and he handed me the cell phone. Gave him a little wave as I drove off and, in the rearview mirror, he waved back weakly.

How many state and federal laws had I just broken? Steal a car at gunpoint, kidnap the poor schlub who owned it, and abandon him in the woods after threatening murder? Maybe I could write it up as a TV show and use the royalties to hire the best lawyer on the planet.

The clock was ticking, but I had no faintest idea of how long I had. How likely was it that the kid would take me at my word and become my accomplice? More likely that some forest ranger or farmer would find him out there on that dirt road and he’d spill everything.

Which might not be bad if the timing was just right. Have a boatload or chopper full of cops coming to back me up at the cabin. But not so soon that they would arrest me instead.

I got to the main road and pulled over to the shoulder to think. I looked at the boy’s cell phone. Damn, the battery light was blinking yellow. Kids nowadays.

Why not just call the cops?

Well, they might arrest the wrong person. Me. Yes, I took the kid’s cell phone at gunpoint and stole his cab, but you have to understand—

Even if they did go along with it, a large force converging on that cabin might endanger Kit.

Or no. If the Enemy hurt her, they would have nothing to bargain with.

Which presupposed the Enemy would think rationally under stress.

What about me? Could I think straight? Was I?

My plan: go to Swan’s Island and sneak up on these desperados with five rounds in a .38 Special peashooter. Brandish the gun and snatch Kit and take her back to safety?

If that’s the question, the answer is “You and what army?”

I didn’t have an army, but I did have certain resources, chief among them the ironic one of being a fugitive. And thus perhaps a lure. But again, who would I be luring?

What I really needed was a pissed-off Sara Underwood, mad enough to rain some serious shit on me, focusing on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. Unfortunately, the phone with her number in its memory was in shards in a dumpster in Louisiana. That had been a smart move.

I didn’t even know what state her office was in.

But I did have one name and one place. I started driving and, throwing caution to the winds, picked up the phone and punched 4-1-1. I asked some guy with an Indian accent to put me through to an operator in Springfield, Missouri.

“That will not be necessary, sir. I have all those numbers right here.”

“I don’t need a number. I need a human being on the line.”

“I am a human being, sir.” He did not sound like a friendly one.

“I need one in Springfield, Missouri.”

“That will not be possible, sir. If you give me a name in Springfield, Missouri, I will connect you to his phone.”

“Okay. James Blackstone. Homeland Security. Springfield, Missouri.”

“Thank you, sir. One moment.” After about a hundred moments he came back. “Sir, the operator says that party is deceased.”

A sign said one mile to the ferry.

“Call them back and ask them if they want to know how he died.”

“Sir, I am not allowed to elicit or transmit information to or from a third party. And it is not yet eight o’clock in the morning in the state of Missouri.”

“I’m calling from the state of Maine. Listen to me. It’s a murder. James Blackstone was killed.”

“Yes, sir.” The phone went dead. Perhaps life is cheap in New Delhi.

No, it was probably the battery. The light on the top of the phone had stopped blinking yellow; it turned red and dimmed.

I went over a hill and there was the sea, or at least the bay. I parked the boy’s car by the ferry office and put the key under the mat. Kept the cell phone. Maybe if I didn’t use it, the battery would come back for one bleat.

The ferry was approaching. I bought a twenty-dollar ticket and watched the heavy craft ease into its berth, escorted by a cloud of seagulls. Did they think it was a fishing boat? Maybe there was nothing else for a bird to do.

The weather was about to change, and not for the better. A band of golden light to the east was fading as charcoal clouds boiled in from the west. I went back into the ticket office and bought a two-dollar plastic slicker from a box by the cash register.

The first drops began to fall as I walked down the ramp to the Captain Henry Lee, which smelled of new paint and old fish.

There was an enclosed waiting room that added the smell of diesel exhaust and a whiff from the head. I stood outside after a couple of minutes and enjoyed the rain after I struggled into the slicker.

That would make a fast draw even more problematical. Would you mind putting that gun away while I untangle mine?

This would be one time in my life, however much of it was left, when I could justify smoking a cigarette. Looking for a machine gave me something to do for a few minutes. But the boat was disgustingly healthy in that regard. I was sure that I could bum one off some old Mainer standing in the rain puffing away, but he must have had an oncology appointment.

Would the Enemy be waiting for me? Could be. They had shown me the picture of Kit, but would they suspect that I could deduce from that where they were?

It was placid and pretty, the light rain sprinkling down on the green islands that bulked out of the mist. Then a sudden stab of lightning and thunder blast, just to keep me from getting too relaxed.

The ferry backed and filled into its place at the dock, and I followed the one car out onto the road that sloped up into the woods. No passengers waiting, which I supposed was good.

I checked the map. Go to the left and walk about a mile and a half down Ring Road. The cabin was at the end of the fourth dirt driveway.

The rain made a constant rattle on the plastic as I walked along. Feeling conspicuous as a bug on a plate.

But none of the cabins were visible from the road. And the bad guys wouldn’t be looking for me yet, I hoped.

They might be. Presumably they knew I’d made it to Washington, but wasn’t in the hotel room. Maybe they’d figured out that I could turn the signal generator in my hand on and off. They probably had seen the sling by now, and might deduce that it was hiding something.

They knew I was armed, assuming the guy with the camera in the cowfield had been one of them. That might not be an advantage; not if it made them nervous.

With the revolver in its holster, there was nothing I really needed in the Amtrak bag. Two candy bars that I transferred to jacket pockets. The Heinlein book and a litter of receipts. All tax-deductible if I wrote it into a book.

A lot of good books had been written in prison; I could become the Camus of my generation. If I could learn to like cheap red wine and boys.

I decided Heinlein could wait, and stuffed the bag with his book into an RFD box, which surely broke another federal law. Perhaps they would put me in a cell with other hardened postal offenders.

The house before the turn-off looked deserted, storm shutters over the windows and no cars. So I walked down the dirt road as if I belonged, and passed behind the house to the rocky beach. The rain started coming down in buckets, for which I should have been grateful. Surely they couldn’t expect anyone to come sneaking up through this weather.

Unless they actually were experienced criminals, with criminal minds. I’ve had two bikes stolen in my life, both of them in weather like this. Criminals assuming that nice people would not go out into the driving rain.

I struggled to keep my footing on the slippery rocks. Slick seaweed brought me down twice, hard enough the second time to cut my knee.

The leg stiffened up. I studied the terrain and picked my way carefully but clumsily from rock to rock. Clattering.

I had almost made it to the grass when a yellow light gleamed. The cabin’s back door.

A man came out with a rifle or shotgun. I stumbled the last few yards with my hands up.

He waited for me, the weapon pointed in my general direction. It was a large double-barreled shotgun. So if I untangled myself and drew on him, he would only have two tries to blow me in half. And then reload.

He yelled over his shoulder, “It’s the guy!” A woman came running out, pulling on a raincoat. She and the man approached me together.

“Watch out,” she said. “He’s got to have a gun.” So much for surprise.

“It is him, ain’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. To me: “Out for a walk?”

I shrugged, an odd gesture with your hands up. She frisked me and took the pistol. “Nice holster,” she said, and wagged the pistol in the direction of the cottage.

I recognized her voice from the phone. The man had been the driver of the car in the cowfield, I thought.

They walked me up a gravel path to the back door, and then through a rustic kitchen. “Company coming,” she called out.

It was the living room in the photograph. Kit was bound in the same chair, but was wearing different clothes, jeans and a man’s work shirt. She didn’t seem harmed, but had a bandana tight over her mouth. I tried to smile and she tried to smile back.

Seated next to her on a couch, similarly bound, was Ron Duquest, wearing a white silk suit, all California. It had probably looked pretty sharp a couple of days ago. He was pale and shaken.

Standing by the fireplace, the man who’d had the camera in the car. Whom I had last seen over the sights of the snub-nosed revolver. He had a broad grin and a Glock in an army-issue shoulder holster. He looked drunk.

“The writer,” he said. “Marksman.” I couldn’t think of anything to say that might improve the situation, so just nodded.

I catalogued the weapons. Shotgun and pistol, mine, behind me, and who knew what else. Another handgun in front of me and, leaning up against the fireplace, a pump shotgun. On the coffee table, the sniper rifle with the fancy grain, with the futuristic Leupold flip-out scope.

Perhaps with a bullet still jamming the barrel.

They had more weapons than people. Pretty grim. The woman nudged me in the small of the back with my own snub-nose.

“There are too many variables in this equation,” she said. “You know what I say.”

“Kill ’em and dump the bodies,” said the man next to her, and looked at his shotgun. “That may be good for you, but I personally have never killed anybody. I don’t want to hang for your scheme.”

“There’s no death penalty in Maine, chickenshit,” said the man by the fireplace. “Remember?” He picked up the sniper rifle.

“Careful,” the woman said.

“You be careful,” he said. “This asshole never shot at you.” He cocked the bolt up and down and took aim. “Just nick the ear.”

My only chance. “Big man,” I said. “You don’t have the balls to pull the trigger.”

“No!” she said, and then a wave of concussion smacked me.

The man’s face became a splash of crimson as the jammed receiver exploded just below his eye.

I half turned and kicked out at the woman. If the snub-nose went off, I didn’t hear it. My kick caught her between the legs and she folded—and then my bad leg gave out and dropped me on top of her. The pistol skittered away and I snatched it up. The double-barreled shotgun went off like a sledgehammer, searing the side of my face, as I fired the snub-nose into its owner over and over.

I levered myself up, pulling on the arm of the couch, and aimed wildly left and right, not sure whether the revolver had any shots left. The air was grey with gun smoke and there was a lot of blood.

Some of it was mine. It dripped off my chin when I looked down.

The woman was very dead. The double blast that had singed me had excavated her chest.

The man who’d done it was bent double on the floor, twitching, clutching his abdomen, the emptied shotgun under him. I put the muzzle of the revolver behind his ear and happened to look up.

Kit was shaking her head frantically, weeping, no.

A strange calmness came over me.

She would never understand.

The dead people, this dying one, and me. All of us were Hunter. And all of us were prey.

I set the pistol down and watched him die.

Epilogue

I had gone into the kitchen to find a knife to cut Kit’s ropes when I heard a helicopter laboring through the storm outside. I had her hands free and was working on the tight-knotted bandana gag when someone kicked open the front door and four men charged in, wearing black body armor with “FBI” in white letters, front and back.

I put my hands up. “What took you?” I think I said.

In fact, it was amazing that they had gotten there so fast, or at all. Reconstructing, I found out it started with fast action on the part of that annoying operator in New Delhi. He was on the line long enough to hear me say I was in Maine and “It’s a murder. James Blackstone was killed.” That operator queried a stateside operator, playing back the recording, and within a minute or two an FBI analyst was listening to it. Agent Blackstone’s name was still hot enough to trigger a response.

A helicopter with a SWAT squad took off from Boston while FBI computers chased my credit card trail down to the Swan’s Island ferry. The black helicopter was already over Cape May, speeding north by northeast, when the FBI verified the location of the cabin and sent them a satellite photo and a map.

I have to wonder, as fast as they responded, what might have happened if they’d showed up a few minutes earlier. What would the bad guys have done if they’d heard a helicopter coming? It might have prevented a bloodbath. Or precipitated a different one.

The whole bizarre story came out in Ron Duquest’s trial. I had just missed my big chance at fame and fortune.

Duquest had concocted a scheme for a kind of cross between an action feature and reality TV. He hired a couple of lowlifes in Los Angeles and had them drive out to the Midwest, then Louisiana, then Mississippi, to put Kit and me through what he conceived as a fantastic paranoiac chase scene: Who is after us? Why does the sniper weapon from my past keep cropping up? Who’s on first? It would be a post-postmodern version of classic old television serials like The Fugitive and Lost, with the delicious variation that the star didn’t know he was on camera.

He testified that he knew me well enough to trust that I wouldn’t commit any serious crime, and the men he hired were under orders to just harass us; not break any laws themselves. But that all went out the window when I actually shot at them.

They had guns, too, it turned out, and an attitude problem that escalated into a runaway kidnapping scheme. Duquest lost control of them and was afraid to call in the police.

I’ve told the rest of the story here. Except for the happy ending.

The slight scar on my cheek from the shotgun just makes me look “interesting,” Kit says, and together with the missing finger they mark the beginning and end of my decade of violence.

This decade will be parenting, we just found out last week. Starting lives rather than ending them.

We’re even getting married, continuing a family tradition that started with old Grand-dude, back in the sixties: pregnancy, then marriage.

When the other hippies asked why they bothered, he said that one thing the world didn’t need was yet another bastard.

Oh, and the cube in my finger? Nothing to do with anything. The army won’t even tell me what it was. That probably means it never worked. Typical. All that aluminum foil wasted—and I’d been so proud of myself. Our tax dollars at work.