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tracks.”
    “It won’t take all night, Tommy.” Walt pointed down a slope to where a stream of white light ran steadily along the tops of trees. A car or truck. The sound of the chains clapping against the pavement, a half mile away.
    “That’s Highway Seventy-five,” he said. “Ten bucks, that’s where they’re going to lead us.”

5
    HIS SELECTION OF A STOOL NEAR THE END OF THE BAR WAS no accident, for it was at the end of the bar where the waitresses refueled their trays. It required patience to wait for the seat right next to the waitress station. Halloween brought out the crazies, and the place was packed. There were two kinds of people who sat at a bar: those waiting for a table or in a hurry; and those with their elbows shellacked to the surface. Thankfully, the two stools to his right were not the thrones of legitimate barflies but only rest stops. Fifteen minutes after he took his place on the third stool, he had migrated to his right and the seat adjacent to the brass bar that segregated the drunken masses from the waitresses.
    Reconnaissance had told him that the girl, underage as she most definitely was, was drinking a kir royale—champagne dyed red with crème de cassis. Easy to spot among the beer and vodka of her peers that filled out the tray as the empties returned. Easy to identify, as the bartender placed a fresh one on the bar before turning his skills to the vodka mixes. The decent-looking waitress busied herself with garnishes of lemon and lime; she stabbed a line of three olives onto a yellow plastic stick, dressing the vodka glasses as they surfaced.
    The man now sitting on the stool next to her waited for the right moment. The bartender’s head came up. The waitress slipped a wedge of lime on the highball’s rim. The man pointed to a bottle of single malt, his right arm impolitely extended between the two of them. He asked about the cost and quality of the scotch. As they directed their attention to the bottle, his left hand waved over the top of the kir like a magician’s. For anyone looking closely, the champagne briefly fizzed a little more than it had before. A few grains of sediment sank to the bottom of the glass and then vanished.
    He was told the scotch was excellent, and cost as much as a tank of gas. He ordered a draft beer, and stayed on the stool long enough to watch the tray make its way through the crowded room, carried high on the end of the waitress’s steepled fingers. Waited through half the beer, knowing that a young woman would go to the washroom when her head began spinning. She wouldn’t tell her older friends anything was wrong. Might not even ask a friend to join her in the washroom. First, she would try to deal with this herself.
    That was when he’d strike.
    He finished the beer, placed a modest tip on the bar—neither too small nor too large to be remembered—and freed the stool to one of the many waiting behind him. Working through the busy bar took some time. Given his size and the power of his body, he could have made quick work of it, but invisibility mattered more than efficiency. He took his time, finding openings, and squeezing between the crowded tables, reaching the rough-wood-paneled back hallway. The two rest-rooms shared a wall across from a gallery of tintypes of mining camps from more than a century ago. An exit at the end led to the back parking lot. It helped that it was snowing heavily, helped that his pickup was parked less than twenty feet from the door.
    He saw it clearly unfold in his mind, like watching a film but with him in it. If there was one thing he knew, it was how to hunt, to stalk, to kill. He celebrated his own brilliance, reveled in the warmth that anticipation raised in his bloodstream. Got high on it. To everything . . . a time for every purpose, under Heaven.
    He admired the tintypes, or at least pretended to: scraggly-looking guys from the 1800s, showing off rows of enormous brook and rainbow trout hanging from laundry