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carrying a certified copy of the bench warrant and an
     affidavit describing in detail the Rigby woman’s
     crime. I read it all through again on a bumpy two-hour
     flight.
    Slater had arranged everything. I had a car waiting and
     a room at the Hilton downtown. My plan was short and sweet:
     I would bust the Rigby woman, park her for safekeeping in
     the Seattle jail, cut a swath through the Seattle
     bookstores tomorrow, and deliver her to New Mexico tomorrow
     night. The ghosts of Poe and Baudelaire were my companions,
     but I shook them off. I was not going to get into that, I
     promised myself. Poe sat beside me as the plane circled
     Seattle: the gaunt little son of a bitch just
     wouldn’t go away. The hell with you, I thought:
     I’m taking this woman back to New Mexico. Poe gave a
     crooked little smile and fastened his seat belt, and the
     plane dropped into the dense cloud cover and rumbled its
     way downward.
    My contact was a guy named Ruel Pruitt. Slater had used
     him on several cases with Seattle angles and found him to
     be “a good guy at what he does. He hates the
     world,” Slater said, “but he’s like the
     damn invisible man, and there’s nobody better at this
     cloak-and-dagger shit.” I was to check into my hotel
     and wait in my room until Pruitt called, then go pick up
     the girl. After that I was on my own. I had never done any
     bounty-hunter work, but I knew the routine because I had
     cooperated with enough of them when I was a Denver cop.
     Some were okay, highly professional: then there were the
     goofballs right out of a Chuck Norris movie. All I needed
     for this job, Slater assured me, was a sturdy pair of
     handcuffs, and he had given me a set of good ones from the
     trunk of his car.
    I got into Seattle at three-thirty Pacific time. Of
     course it was raining. Perry Como might think the bluest
     skies you ever saw were in Seattle, but all I’ve ever
     seen there is rain. I almost missed the hotel—the
     Seattle Hilton has its check-in lobby on the ninth floor,
     and only a garage entrance and elevator at street level. By
     four-thirty I was settled in my room, on the seventeenth
     floor with a window into rain-swept Sixth Avenue. At 5:05
     the telephone rang. A velvety voice said,
     “Janeway?” and I said, “Yeah,” and
     he said, “I’m in a bar near the
     Kingdome.” He gave me an address and said he’d
     be outside in a blue Pontiac. He read off his plate number
     and I got it down the first time. “Don’t let
     the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” he said.
     “I got no idea how long this little dyke’s
     gonna sit still.”
    Wonderful, I thought, listening to the dead
     connection—just the kind of charmer I’d expect
     to find working for Slater. I slipped the cuffs into my
     jacket pocket and ten minutes later I pulled up behind the
     Pontiac on First Avenue. The plate matched the number
     he’d given me, and I could see two people sitting
     inside. One of them, I thought, was a woman. The bar
     nestled at the foot of an elevated double-decker viaduct,
     looking like a cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde. It was
     triangular, squeezed in where the street slashed through on
     a kitty-corner layout. The rain was heavy now. I sat
     waiting for a break, but the rain in Seattle isn’t
     like the rain in Denver: a guy could grow a long white
     beard waiting for it to slack off here. At 5:45 by the
     digital in my car, I decided to run for it. I flicked up my
     parking lights, got his attention, hopped out, and ran to
     his car. The doors were locked. Pruitt and his ladyfriend
     sat smoking, chatting as if I weren’t there. I rapped
     on the backseat doorglass and Pruitt looked around,
     annoyed, and pointed to his custom seatcovers. I stood with
     water running down my nose and looked at them through the
     glass, said, “Son of a bitch,” and hoped they
     could read my lips. Eventually he got the message: he
     leaned over the seat, found an old blanket,