But then again, he hadn’t known they could track people through the NYC subway in real time either.

He came farther down his street in the twilight and stopped beside one of the absentee neighbors’ houses and stood looking at his place. At the dark windows. It was a very nice evening. There was a rose-gold quality to the evening light.

There were no vehicles except for his truck. Everything seemed in order.

“Okay,” he said and took a breath and came out of the shadowed brush.

He closed the final couple of hundred feet and hurried across his front yard and keyed open his door. He stood for a moment, looking at the dark inside. He sniffed at the air.

Was there a hint of something? Cologne? Or was he just being paranoid?

He was still standing there, still wondering, when quick as a weasel, a man with a gun popped his head around the side of the house at the carport.

He was a heavily muscled black man in a blue Hawaiian shirt and silver mirrored aviator sunglasses. The gun looked like a .45. The squarish silencer on the business end of it was pointed directly at his face.

“Go on in, friend,” the man said in his American voice.

He smiled, showing very white teeth, as he tilted his head and the gun at the door.

“I insist,” he said.

76

Gannon stood there frozen in the evening twilight as the man in sunglasses stepped up onto his front yard path behind the gun. He was about six foot three, in his early thirties, trim-waisted as an athlete, moving easily.

Through the heavy thumps of his heart in his ears, Gannon turned and looked through the dim doorway.

How stupid could you be? he thought.

The guy stopped three feet away.

“What are you? Hard of hearing?”

Gannon looked at him.

Run? he thought with desperation. Fight?

Gannon looked back at his dark doorway. He definitely did not want to go in there.

Still not moving his feet, he glanced back at Sunglasses, his vision tunneling in on the steel of the .45 in his hand as the guy thumbed back the hammer with a loud click.

“You hear me now? Get in that house or I’ll blow your brains out,” he said.

He had thought he’d been prepared for something like this, but now that it was right here before him, moving too quickly for him to get a handle on it, he realized he had thought 100 percent absolutely wrong.

Gannon finally took a step forward toward the door. As he did it, he suddenly felt exhausted, his body heavy and slow and weak, as if he were slogging through wet mud.

No, it wasn’t mud, he realized from a distant memory.

It was sand, he thought, as he stepped over his threshold into his house.

It was wet sand and then a voice from long ago violently yelled in his head, “Get in the game, puke! You even think about checking out, I will personally drown your damn scrawny ass in this surf!”