Then they’d live happily ever after, Stiles grimaced, embarrassed at the sophomorism of his own mental fantasies. Jeez, grow up! You’re starting to sound like those damn Harlequins! He picked an open paperback from the dash, bent down the page, and tossed it to the back of the van. Too dark to read anyway. Tomorrow, old son, you change your reading tastes for awhile. Maybe something a bit more fitting—a little Bram Stoker perhaps. That should put you in the mood.

He looked into the night around him and shivered. Yeah, tell me about it.

He fished a handful of pretzel sticks from the bag on the console and grumbled under his breath. The fantasy may have been strained, he granted, but there was always a remote possibility that it might have happened. If he’d really gone to the movies, that is. But what was he doing instead? Sitting in his van, in the cold, in the dark, watching and waiting and cursing his brother for getting him into this in the first place. “I hope you’re happy, Alex,” he said aloud, not really expecting a response. He didn’t get one.

Billie’s voice still lingered along the edges of his mind. Even through the muffled phone line he’d had no trouble picking up on the disappointment in her voice. But hell, what else could he do—tell her where he was really going? Oh well. There was always tomorrow night . . . that is, if something would just happen tonight.

C’mon, dammit! Let’s get this over with!

He reached for more pretzels and grumbled again and wished for a cigarette to soothe his jangled nerves. There was no need for impatience; it wouldn’t get him anywhere. It never did. But he just couldn’t seem to beat it this time out. Too much time between stakeouts, he supposed, but that focused, waiting state of mind he’d developed in ’Nam and honed over the years seemed for some reason just beyond his grasp tonight. You’re concentrating too hard. Just relax. Let it happen.

He exhaled slowly three times. Cleared his mind. Then he raised the pistol-gripped Starlight scope and peered through the trees that concealed him. His view of the culvert was unfettered.

The night vision system captured the moonlight and magnified it to a field of green, robbing the shadows of their substance, nullifying them. He sought his visual marker and found it. The hand still hung from the mouth of the culvert, blooming from the darkness like a pale and rigored lily, its petals curled and frozen. He watched it for several minutes, waiting for it to move and dreading it, but praying for it as well. It did not.