“There’s a man, Pompelli. You know him?”

And watched Shelton’s face change to a set of composure, a long-practiced face laid over him, his problem-facing face.

“I don’t know him,” Shelton said. “I’d of thought you would though.”

“Why’d you of thought that, Harold?”

“Well.” Shelton looked away from Jamie toward the nightblank windows. “You’re all in the same business.”

“I’ve not laid eyes on him.”

“Is that right?”

“What is it, Harold?”

“I thought you two were doing business together.”

“What gave you that idea?”

Shelton shook his head. “What I heard.”

“Where’d you hear it?”

Again Shelton shook his head. Paused. And Jamie felt it before the older man even spoke: betrayal, not in the room but flooding over him like an electric current. Shelton said, “Now I can’t say that I did. Just, how things go around.”

Jamie breathed out. A useless question but he asked it. “You know where he is?”

“No idea. You know I’m not even in that end of the business anymore anyway. It’s other fellows now. But they, men that work for him, it’s hard to miss them. That’s maybe why I thought you’d know him.” Now also an alertness lay alongside those fear pinpricks, the globes of his eyes bright, the lids lowered by half.

Jamie sat silent a time, twisting his drink. Sat long enough for the silence to communicate fully to the man across from him. Then quietly, looking off as if addressing himself or some other presence altogether, said, “These days it seems a man can’t know what direction a thing’s coming from.”

Shelton nodded. Said, “It was me, wanting to find someone like the man you’re looking for, I’d start in my own backyard.”

Half a mile south of the Carrick farm in the Easton valley there was a pull-off in the woods with a trailhead for hiking paths up into the Kinsman range. Far enough from the farm so he could drive another mile, turn around and come back quiet with his headlamps off and coast into the pull-off and sit and no one at the farm would know he was there. The first night he drove there at half-past two from the Forest Hills and sat until just before dawn when a cold fog rose off the Gale and spread over the valley floor. From a bend in the river or a pond nearby he heard the cry of a loon. The farm silent, sleeping all night as he sat. With the fog the dawn chill went through him and he started the Chrysler and drove past the farm where the cows were lined up at the gate from the nightpasture waiting for the barn. Drove through Franconia and on to Littleton where he ate breakfast at the diner. Washed his face with hot water in the restroom. At nine o’clock he went down the street to Stodd Nichols and bought one of the little flat automatic pistols and a box of .32 caliber cartridges for it and was patient and quiet while the clerk demonstrated loading the clip. Paid cash and drove home, the gun loaded, slid up into the springs under the seat where he could reach down while driving and find it behind his feet.