Neal nodded. A few weeks after he’d gone underground, a package arrived at the door with a complete set of ID for a young man named Thomas Heskins. A few days after that, the checks started to come in an amount roughly equal to Neal’s monthly salary as an operative for Friends of the Family.

Karen frowned at the mention of the checks, which were a touchy subject in the house. Neal made more money sitting around the house working on “Tobias Smollett: The Image of the Outsider in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel” than Karen made working fifty-plus hours each week teaching elementary school. In typical Neal Carey fashion, he had decided to write his master’s thesis before enrolling in a graduate program.

Karen Hawley loved Neal Carey deeply, but he did have a horse-and-cart problem. And now that she had a sabbatical semester, it was starting to become her horse-and-cart problem.

“The checks,” Graham said, “were not meant to be a pension. They were sort of disability payments while you had to hide out.”

Were? Neal thought. This didn’t sound good.

“What are you saying, Dad?” Neal asked.

“I’m saying you can be Neal Carey again if you want.”

Why would I want to do something like that? Neal thought.

“Who did you pay off?” Neal asked.

The “you” in this case being Kitteredge’s bank in Providence, Rhode Island.

“The usual,” Graham said. Washington politicians were about as hard to purchase as magazine subscriptions, although you did have to renew them more often. Besides, the feds didn’t have much of a hard-on for this case. If someone did them a favor by disposing of a dirtbag neo-Nazi like Strekker, well, it was one less dirtbag they had to worry about. Graham couldn’t prove that Neal had performed this particular service and they had never talked about it, but the last time Joe Graham had seen Neal Carey, he had been trotting out into the sagebrush with a rifle in his hands.