Now, you need to know something here: Mr. Moore and me, we are both betting men. I ran my first faro racket when I was eight, for other kids in my neighborhood, and Mr. Moore’s always been one to take a flutter on just about any interesting game of chance. Why, it was gambling that formed the first basis of our friendship: the man taught me everything I know about the ponies, and I’ll acknowledge as much, even with all his patronizing. So when he makes that last challenge, I don’t laugh; I don’t shrug it off; I don’t do anything but stare him in the eye and say: “Done.”

And we spit on the wager, which I taught him, and we shake on the wager, which he taught me. And we both know that’s that. He stands, takes a last drag off his butt, and says, “Good night, Stevie,” pretty near pleasantly, like none of our earlier conversation ever happened. The whole thing’s moved to another level: it’s not what he’d call an intellectual exercise anymore, it’s a wager, and further talk would only desecrate it. From this point on there’ll just be the playing out of the game, the run to the wire, with one of us ending up a winner and the other a loser; and likely I won’t see him much or at all ’til we know which of us is going to be what.

Which leaves me alone for tonight (and, I’m guessing, for many nights to come) with my memories of the Hatch case: of the people what gave us a hand and what got in our way, of the friends (and more than friends) what were lost to us during the pursuit, of the peculiar places we were led to-and of Libby Hatch herself. And I don’t mind saying, now that Mr. Moore’s gone and I’ve had a chance to think it over some, that most of his statements were square on the mark: in many ways, the tale of Libby Hatch was more frightening and disturbing than anything we ran across in our hunt for the butcher John Beecham. Under ordinary circumstances, in fact, the bumps on my skin and the shivers in my soul that are right now multiplying with my memories might even tempt me to concede the wager.