The old man cried a last time, faintly audible against the sound of the rain and wind…

"Please, God help me…"

Good to know he was still alive-the old man would get the full experience.

Moonie stepped through the kitchen door onto the back porch, took out a book of matches, scratched one, used that one to set off the entire book. The book cover caught, and Moonie played with it, enjoying the liquid flow of the flame, getting it right, then threw the book toward the pool of gas in the kitchen, turned, and ran out into the rain.

The fire popped to the top of the pool of gasoline, flickered across it, snaked one way into the living room, under the shambles of the once grand piano, and the other way, like a living thing, down the stairs into the basement.

The fumes in the basement were not quite thick enough for a real explosion. The old man, surrounded by bags of wood shavings, heard a whump and felt the sudden searing heat of a blowtorch that burned away all feeling in an instant, and killed in the next.

That was all for him.

2

Coming Up on Midnight THE RAIN WAS POUNDING down from a wedge of thunderstorms, and Virgil Flowers was running west on I-90, trying to hold the truck against the angling wind. He'd been due in Bluestem before the courthouse closed, but he'd had a deposition with a defense attorney in Mankato. The attorney, a month out of law school with his first criminal case, had left no stone unturned and no verb unconjugated. Not that Virgil blamed him. The guy was trying to do right by his client.

Yes, the gun had been found in that dumpster. The dumpster had not been hauled before Wednesday, June 30, even though it was normally dumped on Tuesday, but everything had been pushed back by Memorial Day. The pizza guy had seen the defendant on the 29th, and not the 28th, because the pizza parlor, as patriotic as any Italian-food outlet anywhere, had been closed on Memorial Day, and the pizza guy hadn't been working.