That was sort of interesting, but Keller, stuck in Des Moines, couldn’t bring himself to care about the weather in Cleveland. He hung in there while they talked the subject to death, but hit the Mute button in a hurry when they rang in a Nexium commercial.

At least the remote had a Mute button. You couldn’t fast-forward, you couldn’t pause, and you couldn’t reverse, but the one thing you could do was make the damn thing shut up, and he did.

Should he pack?

He wasn’t going to try leaving Des Moines, not yet. Whether all of this was coincidence or something a good deal more sinister, he’d be safer holed up than running around in the open. He hadn’t done anything, not even what he’d come here to do, but that wouldn’t matter to anybody who picked him up with bogus ID and an unregistered handgun just a matter of miles from where Longford had been shot dead.

By two shots from a handgun — that’s what someone had been saying, just before they got the weather report from Cleveland, and it just now registered. An unknown assailant brandishing a handgun who’d fired twice at point-blank range and escaped — how, for God’s sake? — into the crowd.

A Glock, he thought. A Glock automatic, the gun he’d been offered and turned down. The gun he’d handled.

He could remember the way the grip had fit his hand. And how he’d turned the gun over in his hands, deliberating, before handing it back to the man with the hairy ears. He’d be willing to bet that was the gun they’d used, and that it still had his prints on it. That’s why they’d offered him two guns, and the important gun wasn’t the one he’d chosen, it was the one he’d touched and rejected.