He didn’t get up until almost noon. He went to the Mexican place and ordered huevos rancheros and put a lot of hot sauce on them. He watched the waitress’s hands as she served the food and again when she took his empty plate away. Light glinted off the little diamond. Maybe she and her husband would wind up in Cowslip Lane, he thought. Not right away, of course; they’d have to start out in the duplex, but that’s what they could aspire to, a Dutch Colonial with that odd kind of pitched roof. What did they call it, anyway? Was that a mansard roof, or did that word describe something else? Was it a gambrel, maybe?

He thought he ought to learn these things. You saw the words and didn’t know what they meant, saw the houses and couldn’t describe them properly.

He had bought a paper on his way into the café, and now he turned to the classified ads and read through the real estate listings. Houses seemed very inexpensive. You could actually buy a low-priced home here for twice what he would be paid for the week’s work.

There was a safe deposit box no one knew about, rented under a name he’d never used for another purpose, and in it he had enough currency to buy a nice home here outright for cash.

Assuming you could still do that. People were funny about cash these days, leery of letting themselves be used to launder drug money.

Anyway, what difference did it make? He wasn’t going to live here. The waitress could live here, in a nice little house with mansards and gambrels.

Engleman was leaning over his wife’s desk when Keller walked into Quik Print. “Why, hello,” he said. “Have you had any luck finding Soldier?”

He remembered the name, Keller noticed.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “the dog came back on his own. I guess he wanted the reward.” Betty Engleman laughed.

“You see how fast your flyers worked,” he went on. “They brought the dog back before I even got the chance to post them. I’ll get some use out of them eventually, though. Old Soldier’s got itchy feet, he’ll take off again one of these days.”