His stomach rumbles.  He has not eaten.  He will eat afterward because this is North Carolina, land of Waffle Houses that never close.  He’ll consume a stack of pancakes and scrambled eggs and sausage links and torched bacon and grits and he’ll drown it all in maple syrup.  Especially the bacon.

A breeze stirs the branches and the vivid dying leaves sweep down in slowmotion upon the street.  The sky has darkened so that he can no longer see the silhouette of the water tower that moments ago loomed above the rampart of loblollies across the lake.  Only the red light atop the bowl signals its presence.

The October night cools quickly.

It will be warm inside the house he has chosen.

He smiles, closes his eyes, rests his head against the bark.

Just four hours.

The moon will have advanced high above the horizon of calligraphic pines, burnishing the empty street into blue silver.  He sleeps perfectly still upon the limb, the smell of sap engulfing him, sweet and pungent like bourbon.

9

HORACE Boone had used credit card information to track Andrew Thomas to a postal outlet in Haines Junction, Yukon.

But he didn’t leave right away.

He continued working in Anchorage from April to August, saving everything he earned.  In September he quit his job at Murder One Books, put what few possessions he owned into storage, and embarked in his stalwart Land Cruiser for the Yukon with four thousand dollars, a suitcase of clothing, and blind faith that he would find Andrew Thomas.

Upon arriving in Haines Junction, Horace staked out the downtown, studying the village’s sparse foot traffic for his man.

On the fifth morning, while wondering if he’d made a giant mistake, he watched the same long-haired man who’d graced Murder One Books several months back, enter Madley’s Store to retrieve his mail.

Horace was elated.

The next day, his twenty-fourth birthday, Horace rented a rundown trailer on the outskirts of the village and began taking copious notes for the book he wholeheartedly believed was going to make him a rich and famous and oft-laid writer.

His second week in the Yukon he ventured onto Andrew Thomas’s property late one night and spied on the cabin from a distance with binoculars.

The following week he’d crept all the way up to a side window, watched the man wash his supper dishes and write in his loft late into the night.

Now, more than halfway through October, his fourth week in Haines Junction, Horace had decided to take his first real chance.

It was Monday morning and the snow from two days ago still dallied in the shadows of the forest.  A full but feeble moon remained visible in the iris-blue morning—a clouded cataractous eye.

Horace sat behind the wheel of his Land Cruiser in that worn space between the trees where he always parked.  Andrew Thomas’s Jeep passed by right on schedule, village-bound, a dirtcloud rising in its wake.  On this calm morning it would be almost an hour before the dust of its passage had settled.