“But I do know it’ll be all right, because a seven-year-old told me so when I had a nightmare last night. Have faith, Mercy. I have a feeling things are going to get better very soon.”

GRANITE BAY, CALIFORNIA

SATURDAY, MAY 27, 11:00 A.M.

The man was a motherfucking ghost. DJ had spent most of the morning trying to locate Roland Kowalski, which, of course, was not his real name.

It would be easier to search if he could think. Which would be easier if he didn’t have the fucking hangover from hell.

This was why he didn’t drink often. He’d woken to find he’d thrown up on Smythe’s floor, the empty whiskey bottle next to him in bed. Not a drop remained.

He didn’t remember finishing the bottle, which was alarming. He’d quickly checked all of his devices to be sure he hadn’t e-mailed or texted or posted anything damning, nearly wilting with relief when he saw that he had not.

He was never going to drink again. Which wasn’t going to be a problem if he didn’t figure out a way out of this mess. Right now, he was one guy with a bum arm, a rifle, and a handgun. And a laptop, which wasn’t worth jack shit, because Kowalski didn’t show up in any police reports, and according to the Internet, he owned no land or vehicles. He did, of course. He owned several vehicles, but DJ had never seen a legit license plate on any of them.

Not a surprise. Kowalski had been the one to teach him to use a 3D printer to make fake license plates. None of the addresses DJ had visited with Kowalski were registered to any real people. Like DJ’s house in Yuba City was owned by “John Derby.”

He hit dead end after dead end. None of Kowalski’s associates were traceable, because none of them used real names, either.

The cell phone charging on the nightstand pinged with an incoming text. DJ grabbed it to silence it but stopped when he saw the screen.

This was Nelson Smythe’s cell phone and the man had missed at least five calls and twenty text messages from his wife while DJ slept. This latest one read: Answer me or I’m calling 911. Did you have a stroke? Are you there? ANSWER ME!!!!

“Shit,” DJ muttered. He’d been good about keeping up with the woman’s texts, providing one- or two-word replies, such as Yes, No, Maybe, I’ll check, and Love you. Those were pretty typical of Smythe’s replies over the past six months, so DJ felt pretty confident that the woman hadn’t been suspicious.

Except then he’d drunk an entire bottle of whiskey and missed a whole assload of texts.

Groaning, he descended the stairs to the garage, where he grabbed a hair dryer and lifted the chest freezer’s lid. Ice crystals had formed on Smythe’s face, just like they had every day after he melted them off the day before.