He could feel the humidity building even as the breeze from the Gulf brought the cooler air in over the city. He knew that if Mother had been awake and aware that he was going out, she would have told him not to, and she would have been right, of course. The July rains could be torrential sometimes, and a man walking around in it was asking for attention. Weiss would stay out tonight at least until things got definitely wet. It was the only time he could go out for a walk. During the day, people were always watching and staring at everyone on the street. Walking around was risky.

He had excellent fake identification in the name of Michael Hooper, but if somebody recognized his face, having identification in another name was not enough to protect him. The cards he had for the purpose were more than two years old now, so he couldn’t be sure they were so excellent anymore anyway. False identity cards should not be too fresh and unworn, bearing new starting dates and expirations far in the future. But they shouldn’t be too old either. States changed the formats of their licenses, and credit companies modernized their logos, their safety features, and their designs. The photographs of the supposed driver that had been taken three or four years ago and had seemed fine two years ago could suddenly look ancient. Worst of all, the debit card accounts that had started with big deposits a couple of years ago could die from starvation. It didn’t matter that the card was genuine if the genuine account was empty.

The reason Weiss had gone to a federal prison was that members of his crew had botched a kidnapping. He had already executed two perfect kidnappings and collected the ransoms, but the third had netted him nothing, and defending himself in court had cost a large portion of the money from the first two.

Weiss had begun to think about working again. He didn’t have an immediate, desperate need for money, but the way money had been drained away from his savings in the past two years had alarmed him. He had been living almost entirely from his mother’s accounts for a while, and that could not go on forever.

His walk wasn’t one of the most scenic. He couldn’t openly stroll along Fifth Avenue in Naples, a street filled with shops, restaurants, and bars. There was too much light, and too much life. He was hoping to go down to walk along the beach for a distance, as he sometimes had, but there had often been drunks and street people lurking down there, and he didn’t want to have to stab a couple of them to get home. He also didn’t want to be on the sand in the open when the ocean breeze brought the rain.