He wondered if fetching a week’s worth of clean shirts might be a bit too optimistic. Where would he be a week from now? What would it mean if the lieutenant could link the bullets in the tree trunk to the one in Nigel Ormsby? Keegan would have to come up with a plausible way to explain it—a way that didn’t put the gun in his own hand. Or in Eve’s.

He’d walked right by the toiletries section like a blind man and had to retrace his steps. It was pure paranoia to let himself get so far ahead of the facts. He’d come down here to the grocery for a reason. There were things he needed. Things he needed today. He had to focus on the immediate. The ballistics report was at least a few days away, even if Moore leaned on the lab to get it done. And how pristine could a bullet be once it had slammed into solid oak at seven hundred feet per second? Maybe he’d get lucky for once. Either way, Keegan had a little time to plan his next move.

It dawned on him that he had been standing in front of the razorblades, staring blankly, looking shell-shocked to anyone who might be paying attention. He grabbed a box of Gillette Double-Edges, dropped it into his basket and glanced around. There was only one other shopper in the place, a stooped old woman with her hair in a scarf all the way over by the detergents. She was too immersed in trying to read her shopping list to have noticed him. He grabbed a toothbrush, some soap and a small bottle of Prell.

The air inside the grocery store was cool, and when he pulled open the glass door in the freezer section, he could feel the icy air pour down from the case and around his shins. He stacked one of each kind of Swanson’s dinner in his basket. Two aisles over, he picked up a couple of boxes of Gravy Train dog food and then got a six-pack of Olympia beer from the back cooler.

The squat, gray-haired man behind the front counter rang up and bagged his purchases. A small black-and-white television was balanced on top of the cigarette rack behind him. It was tuned to the Dodgers game with the sound turned down. The picture was snowy, despite the tinfoil flags on the antenna’s prongs. Cincinnati was leading one to nothing. It was the top of the sixth, with Drysdale on the mound.

While the old man worked, Keegan watched a lazy pop fly end the top half of the inning. The TV cut to a Chevy commercial. Keegan made out a check and gave the old man his driver’s license.