Was it a setup?

That would explain the delays. His purported quarry, the short fat white guy who was manifestly not the governor of Ohio or anyplace else, was not a terribly difficult target. An hour or so after Keller’s plane had landed, the man who’d met it was driving Keller through a tree-lined neighborhood in West Des Moines, near Holiday Park. The driver, a big man with large facial features and a lot of hair growing out of his ears, eased up on the accelerator as they passed a ranch house with compulsively symmetrical shrubbery in front of it. A man in Bermuda shorts and a baggy T-shirt stood on the flawless front lawn, watering it with a hose.

“Everybody else on earth,” he said, “sets up a sprinkler and leaves it the hell alone. That jerkoff has to stand there and hold it. I guess he’s the kind’s got to be in charge.”

“Well,” Keller said.

“Don’t he look just like his picture? That’s your guy. Okay, now you know where he lives. Next thing we’ll do is drive past his office.”

And, in downtown Des Moines, the driver pointed out a ten-story office building, on the sixth floor of which Gregory Dowling had an office. “Except you’d have to be nuts to hit him down here,” he told Keller, “with all the people around, and they even got a security staff in the building, and there’s traffic to make it tough to get away when the job’s finished. You go to his house, catch him watering his lawn, just cram the nozzle down his throat till it comes out of his ass.”

“Slick,” Keller said.

“Just a manner of speaking. You know where he lives, you know where he works, now it’s time to take you home.”

Home?

“We’re putting you up at this place, the Laurel Inn. Nothing fancy but not too shabby, either, you know? Nice pool, decent coffee shop, plus you got a Denny’s right across the road. You’re right at an interstate exit, so you’re on and off in a hurry. And it’s all taken care of, so you got no bill to pay. Charge anything you want to the room, it’s on the boss.”