She counted to sixty without hearing another bullet. That meant one of three things. He might know he had missed and be waiting for her to reappear. He might think she was hit, in which case, given that no one was around to see him, he would probably come to check that it had been a kill shot. Or . . . She pushed the third possibility out of her mind. This was no time for wishful thinking. Wishful thinking led to laziness and laziness got people killed.

She rolled back onto her stomach and shimmied across the floor and into the corridor that led to her bedroom. Luckily, she had not opened the blinds that morning, but she still kept low. She didn’t want to cast any shadows. She opened the closet door slowly, so the movement didn’t register through the translucent blinds. She was glad she had opted for a floor safe instead of one mounted on a shelf. That meant she could stay prone while she twirled the dial. She lifted out her passport and her Beretta M9, slipping the former into her jeans pocket and clicking a magazine into the latter. She turned over, slid up against the closet wall to a sitting position, lifted the gun steadily in front of her, flipped off the safety, and pointed it out the open door. She regulated her breathing, taking exactly fifteen breaths in the time it took her to count to sixty again. She heard nothing but the whirring of the mixer and the song of a towhee chirping in the edge of the woods out back. She knew better than to allow herself to become impatient, but honestly, she wished the guy would just show up in her bedroom so she could get this over with.

The one-stoplight town of Alta Vista is tucked into the mountainous folds of the northwest corner of North Carolina. But for the rugged ridges that rise behind three sides of the town, one could stroll into Virginia or Tennessee. Because no roads cross those ridges, Alta Vista is on the way to precisely nowhere. Too deep in the hills to attract many tourists, the economy depends on Christmas trees and a small community of retirees of modest wealth. Main Street is a mixture of deserted storefronts and art galleries interspersed with a café, an outfitter, and an organic grocery, all of which are, to their owners, hobbies rather than profitable businesses. Practical shopping happens at the Walmart twenty miles away in Greenfield. Most of the population ended up here because they couldn’t go any farther—the few old-timers left might call them hippies, but the truth is the majority of the people in Alta Vista are running from something, hiding from something, or trying to forget something. Patton was doing all three.