Not that it would be easy, or perhaps even soon – I knew I might have to wait for years, and that someone else might get Dolan in the meantime. He was an evil man, and evil men live dangerous lives. Four loosely related vectors would have to come together, like a rare conjunction of the planets: travel for Dolan, vacation time for me, a national holiday, and a three-day weekend.

Years, maybe. Or maybe never. But I felt a kind of serenity – a surety that it would happen, and that when it did I would be prepared. And eventually it did happen. Not that summer, not that fall, and not the following spring. But in June of last year, I opened Nevada Road Signs and saw this in The Calendar:

JULY 1–JULY 22 (tent.):

US 71 MI 440–472 (WESTBND) RPAV

Hands shaking, I paged through my desk calendar to July and saw that July 4th fell on a Monday.

So here were three of the four vectors, for surely there would be a detour somewhere in the middle of such an extensive repaving job.

But Dolan... what about Dolan? What about the fourth vector?

Three times before I could remember him going to LA during the week of the Fourth of July – a week which is one of the few slow ones in Las Vegas. I could remember three other times when he had gone somewhere else – once to New York, once to Miami, once all the way to London – and a fourth time when he had simply stayed put in Vegas.

If he went...

Was there a way I could find out?

I thought on this long and hard, but two visions kept intruding. In the first I saw Dolan’s Cadillac speeding west toward LA along US 71 at dusk, casting a long shadow behind it. I saw it passing DETOUR AHEAD signs, the last of them warning CB owners to turn off their sets. I saw the Cadillac passing abandoned road equipment – bulldozers, graders, front-end loaders. Abandoned not just because it was after knocking-off time but because it was a weekend, a three-day weekend.