There’s a Red Cross blood donor card, his Social Security card, and Dalton’s membership in an Apple User Group. No dumb self here; Dalton Curtis Smith is a freelance computer tech with a fairly lucrative sideline that allows him to go wherever the wind blows him. Also in the wallet are pictures of Dalton with his wife （they were divorced six years ago）， Dalton with his parents （killed in the ever-popular car crash when Dalton was a teenager）， Dalton with his estranged brother （they don’t talk since Dalton found out his brother voted for Nader in the 2000 election）。
Dalton’s birth certificate is in the etui, and references. Some are from individuals and small businesses whose computers Dalton has fixed, others from people who have rented to him in Portsmouth, Chicago, and Irvine. His go-to guy in New York, Bucky Hanson, has created some of these references; Bucky is the only person Billy trusts completely. Others Billy created himself. Dalton Smith never stays long in one place, a tumbling tumbleweed is he, but when he’s in situ, he’s a very good tenant: neat and quiet, always pays the rent on time.
To Billy, Dalton Smith with his low-key but impeccable bona fides is as beautiful as a snowfield without a single track on it. He hates the idea of defacing that beauty by putting Dalton to work, but isn’t this exactly what Dalton Curtis Smith was created for? It is. One last job, the ever-popular last job, and Billy can disappear into a new identity. Probably not live the rest of his life in it, but even that’s possible, assuming he can get out of this town without being burned; the five hundred thousand down payment has already made the rounds and finished up at Dalton’s bank account in Nevis, and half a mil’s the biggest sign that Nick isn’t playing this funny. When the work is done, the rest will follow.
Dalton’s DL headshot shows a man of about Billy’s age, maybe a year or two younger, but he’s blond instead of dark. And he has a mustache.
4
The next morning, Billy parks on the fourth level of the garage near the Gerard Tower. After making certain adjustments to his appearance, he walks in the opposite direction. This is Dalton Smith’s maiden voyage.
When the city is small, small distances can make a big difference. Pearson Street is only nine blocks from the Main Street parking garage, a brisk fifteen-minute walk （Gerard Tower still looms close enough to be clearly seen）， but this is a different world from the one where guys in ties and gals in click-clack shoes man and woman their posts and lunch in the kind of restaurants where the waiter hands you a wine list along with the menu.
There’s a corner grocery, but it’s closed up. Like many declining neighborhoods, this one is a food desert. There are two barrooms, one closed and the other looking like it’s just hanging on. A pawn-shop that doubles as a check-cashing and small-loans business. A sad little strip mall a bit further on. And a line of homes that are trying to look middle class and not getting there.
Billy guesses the reason for the area’s decline is the vacant lot right across the street from his target house. It’s a big expanse of rubbly, trash-strewn ground. Cutting through it are rusting railroad tracks barely visible in high weeds and summer goldenrod. Signs posted at fifty-foot intervals read CITY PROPERTY and NO TRESPASSING and DANGER KEEP OUT. He notes the jagged remains of a brick building that once must have been a train station. Maybe it served bus lines as well – Greyhound, Trailways, Southern. Now the city’s land-based transportation has moved elsewhere, and this neighborhood, which might have been busy in the closing decades of the last century, is suffering from a kind of municipal COPD. A rusty shopping cart lies overturned on the sidewalk across the way. A tattered pair of men’s undershorts flap from one of its wheels in a hot wind that tousles the hair of Billy’s blond Dalton Smith wig and flutters his shirt collar against his neck.
Most of the houses need paint. Some have FOR SALE signs in front of them. 658 also needs paint, but the sign in front reads FURNISHED APARTMENTS FOR RENT. There’s a real estate agent’s number to call. Billy notes it down, then goes up the cracked cement walk and looks at the line of doorbells. Although it’s just a three-story, there are four bells. Only one of them, second from the top, has a name: JENSEN. He rings it. At this time of day there’s probably nobody home, but his luck is in.
Footsteps descend the stairs. A youngish woman peers through the dirty glass of the door. What she sees is a white man in a nice open-collared shirt and dress pants. His blond hair is short. His mustache is neatly trimmed. He wears glasses. He’s quite fat, not to the point of obesity but getting there. He doesn’t look like a bad person, he looks like a good person who could stand to drop twenty or thirty pounds, so she opens the door, but not all the way.