Now Beaufort, though he was small, had a way of seeming to get bigger until he filled up the space around him. “Is there any place closer than forty miles?” he asked. He kept his voice soft, but the coffeepot shook a little in the waitress’s hand as if she’d known mean men in her life and he was one of that kind. Some coffee sloshed onto the counter.

“Now look what you did,” Beaufort said, without taking his eyes off her. Watching someone else’s fear made him feel better about his own, the fear he could only admit to himself alone in the middle of the night when it kept him awake.

She apologized as she wiped at the spot with a towel and whispered, “There’s a Super Walmart closer in town.”

His hand shot forward—he was proud of how fast his reflexes still were—and grasped hers, pressed down on the towel underneath. The waitress was too shocked to cry out, and by the time she could have done so he had let go. Then she had no reason to cry out, because he had not hurt her or touched her in an inappropriate spot.

He said, “So I ask you about a Kmart and you don’t have the courtesy to tell me about a Walmart. What’s the difference?”

She appeared greatly chastened now. “No difference, sir. They have everything.”

“Clothes, food, soap.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s better. Okay, where is this Super Walmart and can I walk to it?”

“I don’t think so. Must be a good two miles north of here. On Denny Avenue. Do you know where that is?”

“I know it.” He scraped up the last of the yolk on his plate with a slice of white toast, left enough for the bill and a ten percent tip, and headed out. He left a good tip and he hadn’t hurt the girl. He wasn’t the same man he had been in his youth; he told himself that this proved it.

Three hours later he was cruising the town on a new bicycle, a large backpack strapped to his back, layered with money at the bottom, some clean clothes and basic toiletries over that, and a small knife, the kind you used to gut fish. It would do in the short term until he connected with Yanchak.

Around lunchtime he found a place called Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers that offered a local paper for free in a box out front. The “fingers” he discovered to be strips of chicken. The paper told him there was a room to rent cheap not too far away. The price of the bike had taken his breath away, and told him just how far his money could stretch these days. He would have to make contact sooner than he thought.

This troubled him, as he had intended to stay clean while he took care of business.