“You know it’s still winter up there. I’ve heard they have snow in May.”

Carl stared at the angle of bones in Bill Hutchinson’s face, the creases cut into the corners of his eyes. Marshals had told Carl he reminded them some of Bill Hutchinson, that same look, only without the old-time mustache the marshal from Arkansas favored.

“I’m going after the Krauts,” Carl told him. “You can send me or I’ll take a leave of absence and do it without pay. If you want to send me, let me have the Pontiac and enough gas stamps. It’s the car I was using before I spent the past five and a half months sitting here with my feet on the desk.”

“What else you want?”

“Expense money.”

“You know those officers up north are different’n us, their manner of doing things, the way they dress up.”

“The agent I’m seeing is from Bixby, Oklahoma, if you know where Bixby’s at. Directly across the river.”

“I imagine you’ll observe the thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit,” Bill Hutchinson said. “It shouldn’t take you more’n two, three days. Can you tell me where you’ll be staying?”

Not till Kevin Dean found him a place.

A thousand miles to Detroit from Tulsa through St. Louis, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, head for Toledo following cars on the two-lane highways moping along at thirty-five, Carl wearing himself out looking to pass, not able to bear down until it was dark and he took the Pontiac up to seventy through Indiana farmland, a five-gallon can of gas in the trunk just in case. Carl left Tulsa at 6:40 a.m. hoping to make the trip in twenty-four hours, but it was eight the next morning before he was approaching Detroit from the southwest and going on nine by the time he was downtown looking for West Lafayette. Carl had a map in his head that showed him the general layout of Detroit’s downtown streets with marks indicating the buildings where the federal courts were located and a few hotels, in case Kevin Dean from Bixby hadn’t yet learned his way around. Carl turned onto Lafayette and came to the Federal Building, right where it was supposed to be, waiting for him.