Okay, stealing from the body was a bad idea. He wouldn’t do that.

If he were a better citizen, he’d have called for help, but in all fairness, he thought he deserved a break there. He’d chosen this spot as his camp precisely because it was in the middle of nowhere, which meant that “calling for help” had to be taken literally-as in, cupping his hands to his mouth and yelling, “Help!” Hardly compatible with his plan to remain invisible.

Bottom line, he was screwed no matter how it turned out, but after all this time, he was by God going to take a peek at the body. He owed himself that much. Hell, the dead guy owed him that much after costing him a whole night’s sleep.

Finally, it was time. Taking care to keep quiet, Harvey crawled out of his last-legs Coleman camping tent and scanned the scenery. It had been a cool night compared to some of the sweltering nightmares of the past couple of weeks, but even now, he could feel the sun doing its duty to deliver a blistering day. It’s the way it was in this part of the world. At least winter was long behind and long ahead.

Winter was the hardest part of being Harvey Rodriguez. People asked why he didn’t spend his summers walking to someplace where they didn’t have winters, but the truth was that he was now a Virginian through and through. In this part of the Commonwealth-along the Northern Neck on the Potomac River-winters were pretty mild. It rarely snowed, and nighttime ice almost always melted by midday. It was the rare day when he couldn’t pull something edible out of the river and rarer still when he couldn’t snare a squirrel or possum.

As he stretched to his full five feet eight inches, Harvey eyed his peeling Adidas but decided to leave them where they were. The rubber sole on the left shoe was about to give way to a hole, and he wanted it to last for at least one more rainy day. His eyes scanned the horizon as he adjusted the pull cord on the swim trunks he wore as shorts, hoping in vain to make them tighter. One thing about the hot weather: it was hard to keep weight on.