They watched as the ground crew fueled the King Air and the two pilots did their pre-flight walk-around. Holly dragged out her iPad and began to read （Ralph thought she was moving along pretty speedily herself）。 At quarter to ten, a Subaru Forester pulled into the tiny Regal parking lot and Yune Sablo got out, shrugging a camo knapsack over one shoulder as he talked on his cell phone. He ended his call as he came in.
“Amigos! Cómo están?”
“Fine,” Ralph said, standing. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
“That was Claude Bolton I was talking to. He’s going to meet us at the Plainville airport. It’s about sixty miles from Marysville, where he lives.”
Alec raised his eyebrows. “Why would he do that?”
“He’s worried. Says he didn’t sleep much last night, was up and down half a dozen times, felt like someone was watching the house. He said it reminded him of days in prison when everyone knew something was going to go down, but no one knew exactly what, only that it was going to be bad. Said his mother started to get the willies, too. He asked me exactly what was going on, and I told him we’d fill him in when we got there.”
Ralph turned to Holly. “If this outsider exists, and if he was close to Bolton, could Bolton feel his presence?”
Instead of protesting again about being asked to guess, she answered in a voice that was soft but very firm. “I’m sure of it.”
BIENVENIDOS A TEJAS
July 26th
1
Jack Hoskins crossed into Texas around 2 AM on July 26th, and checked into a fleapit called the Indian Motel just as the day’s first light was showing in the east. He paid the sleepy-eyed clerk for a week, using his MasterCard—the only one that wasn’t maxed out—and asked for a room at the far end of the ramshackle building.
The room smelled of used booze and old cigarette smoke. The coverlet was threadbare, and the case of the pillow on the swaybacked bed was yellow with age, sweat, or both. He sat down in the room’s only chair and ran quickly and without much interest through the text messages and voicemails on his phone （these latter had ceased around 4 AM, when the mailbox reached its capacity）。 All from the station, many from Chief Geller himself. There had been a double murder on the West Side. With both Ralph Anderson and Betsy Riggins out of service, he was the only detective on duty, where was he, he was needed on the scene immediately, blah-blah-blah.
He lay down on the bed, first on his back, but that hurt the sunburn too much. He turned onto his side, the springs squalling a protest under his considerable weight. I’ll weigh less if the cancer takes hold, he thought. Ma was nothing but a skeleton wrapped in skin by the end. A skeleton that screamed.
“Not going to happen,” he told the empty room. “I just need some goddam sleep. This is going to work out.”
Four hours would be enough. Five, if he was lucky. But his brain wouldn’t turn off; it was like an engine racing in neutral. Cody, the little dope-pushing rat at the Hi station, had had the little white pills, all right, and he’d also had a good supply of coke, which he claimed was almost pure. From the way Jack felt now, lying on this crappy excuse for a bed （he didn’t even consider getting into it, God knew what might be crawling around on the sheets）， the claim had been true. A few short snorts were all he’d had, in the hours after midnight when it seemed like the drive would never end, and now he felt like he might never sleep again—felt, in fact, as if he could shingle a roof and then run five miles. Yet eventually sleep did come, although it was thin and haunted by dreams of his mother.
When he woke up it was after noon, and the room was stinking hot in spite of the poor excuse for an air conditioner. He went into the bathroom, peed, and tried to look at the nape of his throbbing neck. He couldn’t, and maybe that was for the best. He went back into the room and sat on the bed to put on his shoes, but he could only find one of them. He groped for the other, and it was pushed into his hand.
“Jack.”
He froze, his arms pebbling with gooseflesh and the short hairs on the back of his neck lifting. The man who had been in his shower back in Flint City was now under his bed, just like the monsters he had feared as a little boy.
“Listen to me, Jack. I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do.”
When the voice finally ceased giving him instructions, Jack realized the pain in his neck （sort of funny, that’s what he’d always called the old ball and chain） was gone. Well . . . almost. And what he was supposed to do seemed straightforward, if kind of drastic. Which was all right, because he was pretty sure he could get away with it, and stopping Anderson’s clock would be an absolute pleasure. Anderson was the chief meddler, after all; old Mr. No Opinion had brought this on himself. It was too bad about the others, but they weren’t on Jack. It was Anderson who had dragged them along.