“There’s two of us, Patrick. We’re both armed.”

I could see he was trying to talk himself into it, to suck up the courage necessary to go through that door. But he was still a long way from doing it.

“It’s the tension,” I said. “The waiting.”

“What about it?”

“Sometimes it seems a lot worse than any confrontation could be, like if you could just do something, you’d stop feeling like you need to climb out of your skin.”

He nodded. “That’s the feeling, yeah.”

“Problem is, Phil, if Gerry’s the guy we think he is, the confrontation will be a lot worse than the wait. He’ll kill us, guns or no guns.”

He swallowed once, then nodded.

For a full minute I stared hard at the door to the Emerald. In the time we’d been here, I’d seen no one enter or exit, and that was more than a little odd just after midnight at a bar in this neighborhood. A solid sheet of water the size of a building swept along the avenue, its edges curling, and the wind howled distantly.

“How many people?” Phil said.

“What?”

Phil tilted his head in the direction of the Emerald. “If he is the guy, how many people you think he’s killed? Over his entire lifetime? I mean, taking into consideration that maybe he killed all those runaways over the years, and maybe a shitload of people no one even knows about and—”

“Phil.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m nervous enough. There are some things I don’t want to think about just now.”

“Oh.” He rubbed the stubble under his chin. “Right.”

I stared at the bar, counted off another full minute. Still no one went in or out.

My cell phone rang and both Phil and I jerked so hard our heads hit the roof.

“Jesus,” Phil said. “Jesus Christ.”

I flipped it open. “Hello.”

“Patrick, it’s Devin. Where are you?”

“In my car. What’s up?”

“I just talked to Erdham with the FBI. He pulled a partial print from under the floorboard in your house where one of the bugs was placed.”

“And?” The oxygen circulating through my body slowed to a crawl.

“It’s Glynn, Patrick. Gerry Glynn.”

I looked through my steamed windows and could just make out the shape of the bar, and I felt unequivocal terror like I’d never felt in my life.

“Patrick? You there?”

“Yeah. Look, Devin, I’m outside Gerry’s place now.”

“You’re what?”

“You heard me. I came to the same conclusion an hour ago.”

“Jesus, Patrick. Get out of there. Now. Don’t fuck around. Go. Go.”

I wanted to. Christ, I wanted to.

But if he was in there now, packing a bag with ice picks and straight razors, preparing to head out to pick up another victim…

“I can’t, Dev. If he’s here and he moves, I’m following him wherever he goes.”

“No, no, no. No, Patrick. You hear me? Get the fuck out of there.”

“Can’t do it, Dev.”

“Fuck!” I heard him bang something hard. “All right. I’m on my way over there now with an army. You got it? You sit tight, and we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. He moves, you call this number.”