“So, note road and direction and pass on by. Don’t even pursue at a distance. You’ve done your job. Last thing we want is a rolling-felony-stop massacre as in Dade County. We can’t catch him, we’ve got to ambush him. We’ve got to be there in force or we’re looking at a shooting event like you wouldn’t believe. Like you wouldn’t survive. If we get the ID, we’ll go to helicopter then, airborne, try and monitor them while we throw together some kind of roadblock, way overgunned for the occasion. I’ve got SWAT people coming in from Lansing and Columbus and Dayton; they’ll do the rough stuff, if it comes to that. They like rough stuff.”

Nick turned to Swagger.

“Can you think of anything?” Nick asked Swagger, standing just off to the side of the lectern. He turned back to the men before Bob could answer and said, “My associate here has been in more gunfights than probably anyone this side of Frank Hamer, and, as you can see, he’s more or less alive.”

There was some laughter.

Bob just said, “As Nick has said, I have been in many shooting events and had to put some folks down. This guy scares the hell out of me. I’m supposed to be brave, but I would run like hell until I had twenty guns backing me up. So bear that in mind if you get bitten by the hero bug. Your widow gets a folded flag, your kids get nothing, and you get dead.”

•   •   •

The accoutrements of the wait: cold, stale coffee made slick by degrading Styrofoam, intense cigarette hunger even for those who shook the monkey years ago, finger-drumming jazz variations, playing games on the iPhone with half an ear toward the cop-talk frags that come over the loudspeaker.

“Hector, this is Lima Five, just swept up through and past Greenville on 127, no contact.”

“Continue your route, Lima Five.”

“Hector, Lima Nineteen, am on binocs at Walmart parking lot, looked at a lot of cars, but no ’13 dark blue Impala.”

Nick said to the supervisor, “You know what, another tell might be a bad spray-paint job. And yet another is a different license plate. He might have changed.”

“Also, one of the guys might have gone flat in the backseat, or been dumped, so there won’t be two profiles,” said Chandler.

“Good on that, Chandler.”

The supervisor put that out, said, “They’ll find him.”

“If he’s there.”