A pair of high-heeled shoes clicked past, speeding up as they passed him. Sometime later, a taxi braked to a halt a few feet away. The driver got out, unzipped his pants, relieved himself against a tree, got back into his car, and drove away. Then nothing, for several hours.

Closer to dawn than midnight, footsteps approached again. They came at a casual pace, and he waited for them to pass, but they didn’t.

“Hello there,” a voice said.

The detective didn’t say anything. But under the blanket, he put the thermos down and picked up his gun.

“Cold night.”

“Sure is,” the detective said.

The feet moved a few steps to one side, then the knees bent, and then a man was sitting next to him. “What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?” the detective asked.

“Arthur,” the man said. “You can call me Art.”

The detective looked at him. He had a friendly face with great unruly eyebrows, a small mouth, good teeth. Good dentures, more likely. He looked like someone’s grandfather. Was this their killer, this harmless-looking man? The detective stared at him and tried to see in him a serial murderer, a cold-blooded exterminator of the homeless. He couldn’t.

Arthur reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you smoke?”

In wide gold letters, the pack said Chrome Gold.

The detective felt his fingers tense under the blanket, felt the weight of the gun in his hand. What would he do if I said no? Would he find some other way to do it? Or would he just go off and pick someone else to kill?

“Sure,” the detective said. “I smoke.”

Arthur flipped open the top of the pack. There were twenty cigarettes inside, lined up in their perfect rows. Which should have been a tip-off that something was wrong, the detective realized: The pack was already unwrapped, but none of the cigarettes were missing. Why would someone have opened a pack of cigarettes but not have smoked even one of them?