Over the years, Porter had taken great pains to keep his heavy Mississippi drawl intact. There had been times when his dense accent had actually fed into a mark's southern stereotype and put them at ease. Their mistake.

"White man, five ten, dark hair, fifty-five, thin body, narrow face. Speak up now. I'm losin' my patience, and believe me, you don't want that to happen."

Nothing.

Porter inched ahead, shifting his focus from one side of the tunnel to the other. The eerie, intense silence was broken only by staccato coughing and the clearing of inflamed throats. The killer stopped now and again to kick the soles of tattered shoes to get their owners to look up into the light.

"You there, you seen this man? . . . A hundred bucks is a pile a money."

The gnarled, wizened man, kneeling placidly beside his refrigerator carton home, stared at Porter with vacant, rheumy eyes and shook his head. Then he coughed up a dense wad of phlegm and spit it in Porter's direction.

Without a moment's hesitation, Porter pulled out his pistol and from less than ten feet away shot the old man through the eye.

Silence.

"I'm gonna wait one minute. If I don't hear something, I'm going to pay a visit to another one of you. . . . Last chance."

"He's gone!" someone called out.

Porter whirled to the voice and fixed the intense beam on the man it belonged to. The hobo blocked the brightness with his hands.

"When?" Porter demanded.

"J-just now when you got here. Out—out that way."

"Fuck you, Frank," someone called out. "The doc was good to us."

"Here, Frank," Porter said, throwing a bill at him. "Go nuts."

Porter raced to the end of the tunnel and scanned the area beyond it. Then he put the flash back in his belt and took a device from his jacket pocket—a remote of some kind. He aimed it down the rows of the cardboard village and depressed a button on it several times.

Nothing.

Finally, without a glance back at the old man he had just killed, Carl Eric Porter disappeared up the embankment.

For ten minutes beneath the Levalee overpass the only sounds were the rasping breathing of forty men and women, the clearing of inflamed throats, and the occasional lighting of a cigarette. Then, from deep within a makeshift duct-taped cardboard home at the end of the tunnel farthest from where the killer had left, Jim Ferendelli, physician to the president, worked his way out from where he had been hiding, huddled beneath a damp, mildewed Harry Potter sleeping bag, and crawled to the opening of the box. Drawn and filthy, Ferendelli looked no different from any of the others in the hobo village.

"What do you think, Santiago?" he asked of the cachectic man sitting on the dirt outside the opening.

"I think he is gone," the man said with a heavy Spanish accent, "but I also think he might come back."