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eyes on Mick. Waiting for Mick to look back his way.
    â€œFuck ’em,” Mick finally said. “People will say you have todo what’s right but I gave that department my fucking legs and now they tell me they’re going to cut my disability benefits. I have to go to court to fight them for it. You going to tell me that’s right? What good’s it going to do to turn it in? There’s no way to connect it to Parson or anybody else. So keep it. Sell it. It’s the lottery.”
    â€œWho do I sell it to?” Hoffman asked.
    â€œChrissakes,” Mick said. “Who do you think?”

FIVE
    Virgil went home and did the chores that afternoon and afterward he sat on the porch and drank a beer while he tried to make sense of what had happened at the marina. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, given that he’d been left completely in the dark by the cop who had taken his boat. And while it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the cop had really been after the cylinder, the fact remained that he had taken the boat.
    Virgil had picked up the old cedar strip the previous fall, at a run-down farm east of Rhinebeck. Virgil had been in the market for a hay baler and he’d found one advertised on the bulletin board at the local co-op. Virgil’s baler—the one that had belonged to Tom Stempler for decades—was on its last legs, having been welded and straightened and repaired so many times that it was no longer practical to keep fixing it. The old-style balers were cheap nowadays; nearly everybody in the feed business had gone to the large round bales. They required less manual labor, and the bales could remain outside, which meant that it wasn’t necessary to send anyone into a sweltering hay mow in the dog days of summer. Virgil was old-school though; he didn’t mind the time in the hay mow, and besides, he couldn’t afford one of the expensive round balers even if he wanted one.
    The ad on the bulletin board offered, along with the baler, all kinds of other equipment, including a Ferguson tractor, a three-ton grain truck, and an “old Ford car.” It was on a pieceof coffee-stained foolscap, scrawled in pencil, in the handwriting of either a toddler or an unsteady senior citizen. The latter turned out to be true. The farm was on a dead-end road and the owner was as beaten down as the place itself, his years somewhere north of eighty, Virgil guessed, his face puffy, his hair lank and gray under a sweat-stained John Deere cap. The farmhouse was neglected, a stucco two-story now covered by aluminum siding, the siding falling away here and there to reveal the brown pebbly stone beneath. There was a fairly new Chrysler sedan parked beside the house.
    The farmer was a talker, in the manner of a guy who didn’t get much company, and he introduced himself as Montgomery Woodbine. He admitted that he was now a farmer in name only; he’d been born in the house, he told Virgil, and he’d worked the land his entire life. Now he rented the acreage out to a local cash cropper and he was finally pushing sentimentality aside and going through the process of selling off his remaining equipment.
    â€œI don’t know what any of it is worth,” he told Virgil. “These days I don’t know what a hundred dollars is worth. Not much.”
    They were standing in the gravel driveway of the house. Virgil had called earlier to say he was coming and the old man had obviously been watching for him. He was out the front door, pulling on his denim jacket, before Virgil got out of his truck. He came down the steps cautiously, on rickety knees, and met Virgil in the drive.
    The baler was a McCormick Model 45 and it was stored in a dusty and cobwebbed machine shed off to the side of a bank barn. It was at least forty years old, although it looked as if it hadn’t been used for thirty of those years. Montgomery Woodbine opened the sliding doors at both ends of