“Yeah. Makes sense.” He leaned back in his chair and the harsh fluorescents overhead only accentuated how much weight he’d lost since I’d last seen him two months ago. His face looked like a skull.

He leaned forward. “Get me out of here, buddy.”

“I will.”

“Tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll go to the dog races.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I got fifty bucks on a gorgeous greyhound. You know?”

I’m sure I looked confused again, but I said, “Sure.”

He smiled, his lips cracked by the sun. “I’m counting on it. Those nice Matisse prints we saw in Washington that time? They’re not going to last forever.”

It took me thirty seconds of looking into his face before I understood.

“See you soon,” I said.

“Tonight, Patrick.”

Angie drove back over the bridge as I looked through a street map of St. Petersburg we’d bought at a gas station.

“So he doesn’t think his prints will hold up?” Angie said.

“No. He told me once that when he was with the FBI, he made himself up a false identity. I guess it was this David Fischer guy. He has a friend in Latent Prints at Quantico, so his fingerprints are actually on file twice.”

“Twice?”

“Yeah. It’s not a solution, it’s a Band-Aid. The local police send his prints to Quantico, this friend of his has the computer programmed to spit out the Fischer identity. But only for a couple of days. Then the friend, to save his job, will have to call back and say, ‘The computer’s coming up with something odd. These prints also match a Jay Becker, who used to work for us.’ See, Jay always knew if he got in some sort of jam, his only hope was to make bail and skip.”

“So we’re aiding and abetting bail-jumping.”

“Not so as they can prove it in court,” I said.

“Is he worth it?”

I looked at her. “Yeah.”

We crossed into St. Petersburg and I said, “Name some Dylan songs.”

She glanced at the map on my lap. “‘Highway Sixty One Revisited.’”

“Nope.”

“‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.’”

I grimaced at her.

“What?” She scowled. “Okay. Positively Fourth Street.”

I looked down at the map. “You’re a wonder,” I said.

She held up an imaginary tape recorder. “Could you say that into the mike, please?”

Fourth Street in St. Petersburg ran from one end of the city to the other. At least twenty miles. With a lot of lockers in between.

But only one Greyhound station.