Cover

Other Titles

ALSO BY LARRY BEINHART

FICTION

Zombie Pharm

Salvation Boulevard

The Librarian

Wag the Dog

(originally published as American Hero)

THE CASSELLA BOOKS

Foreign Exchange

You Get What You Pay For

No One Rides for Free

WITH AND AS GILLIAN FARRELL

Murder and a Muse

Alibi for an Actress

Seven Stages of Deception

NONFICTION

Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin

Dedication

Some show up in this book, real people strolling through fiction, as we all like to do. They’re not in the list below, not even the two who just lent their names to a pair of cats.

So, to Julie Beesmer, who runs Bread Alone the way a coffee shop should be run. Joe & Denise Clark at Bearsville Garage. Mikhail Slobodynak with the banya & frozen pond. Gioia Timpanelli, Sicilian-American storyteller & Ken Barricklo, architect. Graham Blackburn, expert in antique woodworking tools.

Dean Schambach, actor, bohemian, ski jumper; Rocky Rosario, person of interest; and Richard Segalman, artist; representing the deceased. But there are videos of them on YouTube, Dean’s under his own name, Rocky’s is Rocky Lama, and Richard’s simply and mysteriously called Winter.

Plus apologies to the rest of the people I play poker with, play tennis with, ski with, and otherwise know about town, who are not mentioned. How damn long can I make a list like this. All of us with our aspirations & disappointments, achievements & frustrations, what the ancient Greeks called the agon.

CHAPTER ONE

WOMAN ON A TRAIN

THE WOMAN ON THE TRAIN asked me to kill someone.

I liked the train. I didn’t especially like the woman. It was a real train, an Amtrak, not one of the commuter trains like Metro-North, which are more like buses that happen to be stuck on rails. We both got on at Rhinecliff.

The line is called Empire Service. It runs along the east bank of the Hudson River from Albany to New York City. There are about thirteen trains a day, weekdays. Each one has a cafe car. They’re the old types with tables that are simple rectangles with badly cushioned bench seats on both sides. You can really sit there and enjoy the ride. The new ones, like they have on the Acela Express, have uncomfortable stools at a counter too skinny for you to even read a newspaper with your coffee, making it clear that what they really want is for you not to be there. Take your sandwich, snack, and whatever you’re slurping on, and go back to your seat.

These sit four. Comfortably. In this case it was just the two of us. Me facing south, the direction we were headed, and her facing north, the places we were leaving behind. Our table was on the west side, our windows facing the marvelous and great river that looks different every season, every day, every time, no matter how many times you’ve seen it.