The marshals on the federal witness program had their rules to follow, little bureaucratic games to play. Bubba understood that kind of shit, but still it pissed him off when perfect strangers started playing with his life. The name, for instance. Some geek's little joke at Bubba Cartier's expense. And then there was the job they got him, covering a used-car dealership. He knew damn well that somebody had checked his file and seen the time he did for running chop shops, thinking, Hey! This asshole likes to work with cars, let's fix him up. Like that, the little things that wound up being Sam Francisco's life.

He didn't even want to think about the home away from home they had selected for him, all the way to hell and gone in Michigan. He could imagine Means or Sheppard, one of those guys, staring at a big wall-mounted map of the United States and wondering where they could send him so the bloodhounds wouldn't track him down. That ruled out Dixie and the border states, for starters. He could almost hear them talking: "Here we got ourselves a Southern boy, we better stick his ass up north somewhere. Nobody gonna look for him in Michigan, you think?" So be it.

Even so, he could have been worse off. They could have sent him to Seattle, where it rained nine months a year, or up to Maine, where inbred fishermen ran lobster traps and answered ay-uh every time you asked them something. When Bubba thought about it that way, he believed that things were not the very worst that they could have been. But Cadillac was bad enough.

They had to name it for a car, of course, it being Michigan. Not that he particularly gave a damn. The main thing was that he was living farther north than certain parts of Canada, where it started snowing in November, sometimes in October, and you froze your ass off through the end of March, more likely into April. Living in the bayou country all those years had thinned his blood, and it got damn cold up there, almost two hundred miles above Chicago. There were days the town closed up because the snow plows couldn't run, much less school buses, garbage trucks and squad cars.