And my biggest worry right now, as I sat slumped on the floor in the spare bedroom, in the company of a man I’d just killed, was that I had overtrained. Not so much in the sense of an athlete who leaves his best game on the practice field; but that I had gone overboard, had devised a paranoid’s plan, and not that of a realist. Had I been too elaborate? I couldn’t help feeling like a silly ass, sitting there playing dead, dressed up in somebody else’s clothes, waiting to point my gun and say, “Trick or treat!”

In the late summer and fall afternoons, when I would sit on my porch studying the shimmer of the lake, watching the leaves turn gold, sipping a bottle of soda (I’m not a beer drinker) and daydreaming about my eventual triumph over the killers who would, one day, one night, invade my lakeside sanctuary, my preparations had seemed sane and necessary. Now, in early winter, the day of the first snow, sitting on the cold floor of the spare bedroom, sharing that bedroom with a dead man, wearing his clothes, pretending to be dead myself, I wasn’t sure.

However I figured it, the second guy would be harder to take. He’d be coming into a situation he assumed had gone wrong. That’s what working backup is all about. Your partner’s late getting back, and you figure something must have got fucked up, and you go in to see what.

If I could have counted on him coming in the same way as his partner, through the window just to my left here in the spare bedroom, all I would have had to do was stand to one side and stick a gun in his ribs as he stepped over the sill. No problem. No struggle.

But he wouldn’t come in the same window. He wouldn’t be coming in at all if something hadn’t gone wrong. His partner had, obviously, made at least one mistake. Going in the same way could mean stepping in the same pile of dog shit as his partner. So the window was out. That much I could count on. That, and that he would be coming in. Somehow.