I checked my watch again and nodded to Phoebe, who was parked in the entranceway to the abandoned Chiseldon camp three hundred yards off. The clock ticked by until it was eleven, then eleven-fifteen. The traffic died down, as presumably everyone was in place to watch the spectacle, and even the staff in the gas station closed up the shop to go watch. Within a few minutes, I was completely alone.

As I stood there, I noticed a large Pontiac driving along the road in a slower-than-normal fashion. It pulled in to the gas station’s forecourt and stopped, just the other side of the pumps. I walked cautiously toward it and soon noticed that the engine was still running and that the windows were tinted.

I knocked on the window. After a pause the window wound down. There was a tanned man with a military-style haircut sitting in the driving seat, and through the window there came the faint waft of gun oil, coffee and body odor. There were four of them. They were armed, and they were bored.

“Yes?” said the driver.

“You know who I am and why I’m here,” I said softly, “and I want you to turn the car around and leave.”

He looked at me curiously and gave a slight smile. “And why would I do something like that?”

“Because I don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to be dead.”

The smile dropped from his face.

“I don’t respond well to threats,” he said. “There are four of us, Miss Next. How many of us do you think you can take down before you’re dead?”

I stared at him, then at his front-seat passenger, who had his hand beneath a newspaper on his lap, presumably hiding a weapon of some sort.

“I can take two of you down for certain, three possibly. But it needn’t come to that. You’re not Goliath. You’re mercenaries. So aside from the cash, you’ve got no real reason to show any loyalty.”

“We think a lot of you, Miss Next,” replied the driver, “and we don’t actually want to hurt anyone. It’s messy, the paperwork is a headache and the lawsuits frequent, and the clients don’t like it. Our instructions are clear: Hold the righteous man in custody until after midday. But if anyone stands in our way, we are required to take whatever action is deemed appropriate. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly. Now just go home and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

He shook his head, and I heard two faint clicks from the backseat as safeties were released.

“We can’t do that. We have reputations to consider. Do you know how oversubscribed the menacing business is these days? Gigs are hard to come by, and one failure can lose you clients as easy as blinking and, what’s worse, slash the daily rate in half.”