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“But that’s pretty much what happened. First thing he did was gun his engine, and then when my guy didn’t respond—”
    “Which he couldn’t, with his skull caved in.”
    “—he went and gunned it again, and then I guess he figured the game was over.”
    “I’ll say.”
    “I was waiting for him to come see what was wrong. He was on the right, so all he had to do was look in through the window on the passenger side, or the windshield in front. And he’d see the guy and figure he passed out or had a stroke or something, and he’d come around the van and try to help him, and I’d have a shot at him.”
    “With your hammer. What’s the saying?”
    “What saying?”
    “‘When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ But you didn’t have to nail him, did you?”
    “No,” he said. “He never got out of his van. He gunned the engine one last time and then backed up and drove away.”
    “And your Marlboro Man was dead as a doornail.”
    Well, was he? He was certainly out cold, but Keller hadn’t bothered to take his pulse. Simpler to swing the hammer a second time, with a blow that left nothing to chance.
    “The job’s done,” he assured her.
    He waited while she switched phones and called the client. “I didn’t tell him much,” she reported. “Just that his problem’s been solved, and where to send the money. I didn’t have a name to give him, because you never told me.”
    “I never knew it myself.”
    “You found him,” she said, “without knowing who you found. Well, that’s a first. I’ll tell you, the client couldn’t believe it happened so fast, and do you want to know something, Pablo? I’m pretty impressed myself.”
    “You are?”
    “I figured a week minimum and probably more like two. Detective work, you know? Sneaking around, lurking in the shadows, snooping around for clues. That’s a good week right there, and then you still need to find an opportunity to close the deal. What time did you get to Chicago? Eight in the morning?”
    “I think it was more like nine.”
    “That’s twelve hours ago.”
    He looked at his watch. “Twelve and a half.”
    “I stand corrected. When’s your train home, first thing tomorrow morning? Or is there one tonight?”
    T HERE WAS, BUT he’d missed it. The City of New Orleans left Chicago every evening at 8:05, arriving fifteen and a half hours later at the Loyola Avenue station. They’d probably been calling All aboard around the time he pulled into the Super 8 lot.
    So he’d made a reservation for the following night, and now he considered his options. There was a Denny’s across the street and a Pizza Hut next door on the right, and he stood outside in the cool of the evening and couldn’t make a choice. It had taken him maybe thirty seconds to pick the Stanley hammer from the wide array of potential murder weapons, but it was taking him forever to choose between a pizza and a patty melt, and the truth of the matter seemed to be that he didn’t want either, or anything else.
    But he knew he had to eat, and wound up in a booth at Denny’s, further confounded by the array of choices. He picked their Hungry Man’s Breakfast, which struck him as curious, given that he didn’t feel hungry and nobody but Denny thought it was time for breakfast. The waitress brought him a huge plate of food, and he surprised himself by eating all of it.
    Back in his room, he did the mental exercises that always followed a job. Pictured the Marlboro Man as he’d last seen him, slumped over the steering wheel. And then went to work on that picture in the Photoshop of his mind, shrinking it, leaching the color out of it, then working on the tiny black-and-white image he’d made of it, fading it all to gray, shrinking it further until it was a dot, a pinpoint.
    He’d taught himself this technique years ago, and for the most part it had proven effective. It wasn’t something you did just once, you had to repeat it, but eventually