She was rapidly closing the distance between her and the man. The man heard her footsteps, then nearly tripped as he turned his head over his shoulder to look at her. She came closer, smiling warmly, all teeth. “Can I help you find your car, sir? Here, let me see your key tag.”

He let her take the key with the plastic tag on it. “Row R, Number 18. “Right this way.”

She led him to a gray Chevrolet Malibu, handed him the keys, and turned to go. As he opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat, she used that moment to bend down as though checking the odometer. She put another transponder under the rocker panel of the car, bobbed up, and left. In a moment she was in her own rental car, driving forward to skirt the various entrances to the rental returns and continuing on and out.

Lee Wolf was driving. He was always careful to take a turn at whatever chores other people were expected to do. If it seemed wise to have one person go into a diner and buy four sandwiches while the others stayed out of sight, then the first to offer to fetch the sandwiches was Lee Wolf.

He drove along Interstate 20 shopping for the right kind of town. Shreveport had been too big, too urban, and too busy. Alexandria was too close to Shreveport, as were Bossier and Haughton. Sibley and Vienna were a bit too small. He liked West Monroe and Monroe for this kind of robbery, but he kept going past them, examining a few other towns for most of the day, before he returned to West Monroe.

He turned off the interstate and onto the bridge over the Ouachita River. This was a wide, navigable river, and the bridge was a long, low span rising to a swing bridge at the center made of steel grating with a superstructure of steel girders. After that the bridge continued as a long, low span of pavement into what Wolf thought of as Monroe proper.

He had come through the town years ago, and it was almost as he remembered it. The city was not ugly, but not beautiful either. It was more poor than rich, but it had a few good-size office buildings. There was a University of Louisiana campus, but Wolf never sought it out. As he told the others, “We’re not here for their diplomas. Their money will be enough.” The police station was on Grand Street, so he made a mental note to keep Grand Street at a distance. When they had been through town several different ways, he stopped outside town on a lonely road.

“What do you think?” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked Dave Sherman.

“That was it,” Wolf said. “We’ve been there.”