Like just about everyone in Alta Vista, Patton had a past she’d like to forget. But most people’s pasts didn’t show up on a Sunday morning and start shooting at their new refrigerator. From where she sat on the floor of the closet, she could see the clock radio on her bedside table. In an era of iPads and cell phones, Patton Harcourt still loved her clock radio. She liked to listen to classical music while falling asleep—or trying to fall asleep—and she preferred the tinny sound of the old radio tuned through the static to NPR to the crisp, clean sound of some streaming service. The clock radio also came in handy when you were holding a pistol in front of yourself and didn’t want to reach into your pocket for a cell phone but did want to know how much time had passed since the last bullet hit your fridge.

She watched the numbers turn over three times and as 10:31 a.m. rolled into 10:32 a.m., she heard the creak of her front door opening. She hadn’t locked it when she got back from her morning run, but she hadn’t sprayed any WD-40 on the hinge either, so the squeak served as an alarm. She decided to wait for a count of ten before yelling at the intruder.

Nemo’s morning was not going the way he expected, he thought as he stepped through a kitchen dusted with flour and noted the bullet hole in the fridge. This whole job wasn’t going the way he expected. It was supposed to be an easy job. Some jobs are complicated. They take months of planning and a deeply laid backstory. They involve extreme risk, great expense, and major resources. Afterward, Nemo can’t work for a few months or even a year—that is, he can’t take a new job. He’s always working. Living in the shadows, leaving no trail, staying invisible—that takes work. It takes work to be Nemo, to be no one. So he likes it when a job like this comes along. A couple of weeks’ surveillance, wide-open target, easy in, easy out. True, it only paid twenty-five grand, but that wasn’t bad for two weeks’ work.