Earlier that day, shortly before six, fugitive Clete Younger Loften stood in line for breakfast at the Blessed Light Mission Center, several blocks north of the MacArthur Causeway.

Groggy, yawning and keeping to themselves, close to a hundred people waited for the doors to open. No one gave Loften a second look.

Immediately after he had escaped, he had tossed his prison scrubs, stripped down to his boxer shorts and turned his orange prison T-shirt inside out so the jail abbreviation didn’t show. He’d pulled down the brim of a soiled ball cap he’d found. With his face unshaven and looking like he could use a shower, he blended in with others at the mission.

Now in the breakfast line, Loften eyed the heavyset haystack of a kid in front of him. The kid was talking softly to himself and, according to the conversation, was counting the money he’d earned from panhandling the previous days.

After he counted the coins, he counted his fistful of bills and folded them tightly together. When he stuffed them back into his pocket, some of the bills fell together to the ground. The kid didn’t see them.

Loften covered them with his stained tennis shoe.

He let a minute pass before he casually crouched down to tie his shoe and collected what turned out to be three ones and a crisp twenty from a generous donor.

Inside, the walls of the shelter were covered with thank-you notes in crayon and finger paint from children, next to passages from Scripture.

The thing about shelters was that nobody asked many questions. Loften liked that. And the thing he knew about being on the run was that no one paid attention to you if you kept to yourself.

You just have to look people in the eye and act naturally.

Carrying his tray of hot food, Loften found a seat at the end of a table in a far corner where he kept his back to the wall and his eyes sharp. As he ate scrambled eggs and toast, he considered the line of prayer from St. Francis posted on the nearest wall.

It is in dying that we are born into eternal life.

Loften liked that one, and he had one of his own.

People who fuck with me will pay a price.

He took stock of the scores he needed to settle with Vida and Jeff and Lisa Taylor.

God, that Taylor woman.

Loften closed his eyes to savor his memory of her, how she felt, how she smelled.

One more time. If I could just have one more time with her.

Something throbbed inside Loften as he ached to go back again and give that woman more—something she would never forget.

“The Lord loves you.”

Snapped from his thoughts, Loften looked at the white-haired woman wearing a cross around her neck who was standing in front of him and holding a carafe.

“More coffee, dear?”

“Sure.”