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had been dropped. A fish must have jumped completely out of the water and re-entered headfirst. He returned to Carl Sagan’s analysis of the R-complex function of the brain.
    Suddenly, the stern of the boat seemed to sink—gently, just a few inches. Burguis turned, but before his pupils could dilate to adjust to the darkness, a garotte had whipped around his neck and the filament of wire had severed everything but bone.
    Dragged backward overboard, in his last seconds Burguis felt no pain. There was an instant of perplexity, a sense that something had gone wrong, and then nothing.
    The man stood in the cockpit, dripping, listening. He heard snoring. He pulled the curtain back from the doorway.
    Ellen Burguis lay on her back, covered by a sheet, breathing deeply through her nose. A drop of water fell on her face and trickled up a nostril. She stirred.
    “Already?” She snuffled, to clear her nose, and felt a sting of salt water. She smelled something terrible, as if an animal had died in the bilges.
    A figure stood between her bunk and the doorway, blocking the starlight. “Walter?”
    “Ha a prayer, mum?”
    “Walter?”
    She tried to sit up, but the heel of a hand drove her back against the pillow. A shadow flashed by her eyes.
    The figure turned away. Ellen reached for it, and tried to speak, and only then realized that her throat had been cut.
    In the stern, the man held the shotgun and examined it, turning it in his hands, aiming it at the sky. The pump slide was alien to him. He jiggled it and pulled it back, startled when a shell ejected from the chamber and spun out over the water. He peered into the open chamber and counted the shells that remained, then pushed the slide forward.
    Holding the shotgun aloft in his right hand, he slipped over the stern and paddled silently, scissor-kicking with his sodden, hide-wrapped feet, toward Penzance.
    A few moments later, two shots resounded across the still water and echoed off the rock cliffs.

C H A P T E R

4
    “O h-oh!” Justin looked up from his magazine, the latest issue of The American Rifleman. “Mom’s gonna kill me!”
    Beside him, in the aisle seat, Maynard closed the folder in which he carried all the Today clippings. “What’d you do?”
    “My piano lesson. I forgot.”
    “When is it?”
    “Noon. Every Saturday.”
    Maynard looked at his watch. “It’s only nine-forty. We’ll call your teacher from the airport. She’ll be easy.”
    “It’s a him. Mr. Yanovsky. He doesn’t believe excuses.”
    “He’ll believe me. I’ll tell him you have a bad case of sunspots.” Maynard smiled, remembering. “I used that once on the Tribune when I had a God-awful hangover. It worked, too. The city editor thought it was a cancer.”
    Justin was not placated. “She’s still gonna have to pay him.”
    “I’ll pay him, okay? A deal?”
    “I don’t know.” Justin flushed. “Mom says your checks bounce.”
    “Oh she does, does she? One lousy check does not make a habit. I’ll pay your piano teacher and the check’ll be good. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay.” Maynard frowned. “She shouldn’t tell you things like that.”
    “She says a bad example is the best sermon.”
    Maynard laughed aloud. “First of all, it’s ‘a good example is the best sermon.’ It’s Benjamin Franklin.”
    “I know. But it didn’t fit.”
    “Didn’t fit what?”
    “The jingle she was working on.”
    “O that this too, too solid hair would fall and resolve itself unto the drain.” Maynard laughed again.
    “What?”
    “It’s Hamlet. His famous depilatory speech.”
    “What’s Hamlet?”
    “A play. You’ll know it soon enough.”
    Justin returned to The American Rifleman . “Hey, didn’t we used to have one of these?” He pointed to a photograph of a Colt Frontier revolver.
    “Yup. A rare one, too. A .32-20. You remember how the holster used to shine? That leather was a hundred years old.”
    “They say in here that the single-action Colts weren’t