The tanning salon was being cased. Quaid thought Durwood was bonkers, but Durwood knew. His ears felt wrong when he walked the neighborhood. A stiffness in the fine inner hairs. Ever since Molly'd come back from Roche Rivard.

You turned around, something stuck out. Some bystander slid from view. Wrong-colored specks showed in the background. Durwood took care to act natural and not let on.

But he knew.

He lengthened his nightly patrols. He covered more territory. Swept up greater numbers of offenders.

On the eve of the kernel exchange, Durwood struck out at nightfall to find their watchers—once and for all.

He cleaned and holstered his M9, and walked to the tanning salon entrance where Sue-Ann dozed, snores rattling her ribs.

"Well, ole girl." He touched her foreleg with a boot. "Let's see what we see."

With a phlegmy wheeze, Sue-Ann struggled to all fours.

They left by the alley door. Durwood charted an impossibly wide perimeter. A solid mile, from Times Square to the East River. Man and dog walked a steady hour, pausing only to stop large thefts—auto or greater—and free obvious captives.

At the Queensboro Bridge, Durwood pulled microbinoculars from his coat. He started hiking stairs for the upper deck.

Sue-Ann balked.

Durwood stood on the fourth step. "Been taking stairs since you were a pup. Scared?"

Sue-Ann kept her sit. Her shoulder twitched in place.

She wasn't scared.

Any emotion Durwood felt yielded to practicality. The moment you felt sorry and accommodated a dog's condition, he knew, you finished it.

He fished a tab of venison jerky from a pocket. "C'mon already."

Sue-Ann's eyes bulged. She scampered up.

"So you know," he said as the warm tongue scratched his palm, "this isn't turning into a habit."

From the upper deck, through chain link diamonds, Durwood surveyed the tanning salon. Trying on Leathersby's head. He considered angles and lines of sight. Where Rivard might set up. The sun's path through skyscrapers. The effect of low-lurking smog.

He identified five likely spots.

Descending stairs was harder still on Sue, but she managed. The patrol resumed.

The night air invigorated Durwood. They walked progressively tighter circles. Curfew passed. Pedestrian traffic dwindled. The city had no means of enforcing curfew, but the policy's good sense was obvious. Few flaunted it.

Durwood enjoyed the extra room, so strange in the middle of Manhattan. They had cross streets to themselves. Avenues were like dust-whorled streets of the Old West. Violence hummed in every glance and passing.

If you were about now, you meant trouble.

Government had no say here. Nobody'd look askance if Sue-Ann made water, or killed a stray cat as she'd been apt to in younger days

A man could cross a street where he wanted, ignoring prissy beeps and signals. You made your own way. The only judge who could reach you was Christ the Lord.

Durwood received a consistently wide berth from his fellow travelers.

Though he accepted Rivard's role in create the Anarchy, he believed the modern world deserved its share of blame too.

Maybe He doesn't think much of our slick technology and bickering.

Could be the Anarchy was a trial. A lesson. Durwood did not know if the world would be different once order was restored. (It would be restored.) Part of him believed it wouldn't. Funny thing about His lessons, though: they worked on their own schedule. It mattered how people responded.

With care, Durwood approached the first of five possible surveillance spots. A mixed-use building. Thirty-odd stories. He edged along its face. It scanned clean, both thermal and infrared. He left Sue on the street and took the fire escape.

The position was clear.

He identified the window with the best vantage-point and had a look for himself.

Two thousand feet out, the tanning salon looked harmless. Grate down like every other storefront. Windows boarded.

Was there a car too many parked outside? Eh. Could've been.

He descended the fire escape. The coonhound fell in beside him up Sixth Avenue. They cleared two more spots, their circles shrinking, moving ever closer to the salon.

Midnight passed.

They hadn't eaten, dog or master. Durwood stopped in a diner he knew, tucked back from the sideway. Bought a beef sandwich and tore off half for Sue-Ann. She nibbled some but left all the beef.

Durwood wondered at that. Generally dogs ate beef. Something was off—with either the dog or the beef. Neither was good.

After, they cleared the last two spots. No sign of Rivard or anybody engaged in surveillance.

They slipped back into the salon the same way they'd left—by the alley. Sue took a noisy slurp of water, then curled against the radiator.

Out for the night.

Durwood stopped at each tanning booth, listening for breaths. Confirmed one breather per booth.

He trusted none of these individuals. No matter what they professed now, they had murdered. A person can say whatever he wants. She wants. What counts is how you've acted.

Placing his ear to Piper Jackson's booth, Durwood heard nothing. He listened harder. Held his own breath—triggering a headache. He tried listening from the hinge side of the door.

There it was. A soft exhalation.

Must be back in that corner.

At three a.m., Durwood bedded down himself. Drank two glasses of water, brushed teeth, kept his bluejeans on. Bone tired, he dropped off the moment his head hit its scrap of dimpled foam.

He didn't sleep long.

The noise came from the storeroom. A crackle, a creak. Might've been the door. Might've been a floorboard.

Durwood bolted awake.

What was in the storeroom? Food. Weapons.

Durwood slipped into boots. He laid them down silently, leaving his booth. He pivoted for the storeroom, noting Sue-Ann asleep at the entrance. She was slipping.

He approached the door to the storeroom. Flush to its jambs.

He didn't draw his M9. The intruder had intelligence value. Captured alive, they might roll over on Rivard. Depended what sort of personnel Leathersby had sent.

No light escaped around the door's edges. The noise inside were furtive. A seal unsticking. Shppt. A pip that could have been a canister top or valve.

Chemical agent? Biological?

Whatever it was, the person doing the opening was keen to keep quiet.

The storeroom had a single window. High, too small for an average male. Meaning this door was the only means of exit.

Durwood considered waiting. Apprehending a suspect leaving a room through a door was dead simple. No question of position. Negligible chance for the suspect to respond.

The tradeoff was time. How long would this storeroom phase of their operation last? What if information was being transmitted back to France? What if Josiah was already blown?

Maybe Rivard hadn't seen Josiah. Maybe their target was Quaid and Durwood.

Maybe it wasn't even Rivard. Maybe this was score-settling by someone else. Another party they'd foiled in the past. The Anarchy was great cover for revenge. Draktor would love a piece of Quaid. The Iraqis, after Tikrit, surely wished a bad end for Durwood.

Durwood expected it was Rivard. And if it was...and if the intruder had a penlight on the file cabinet inside...they'd know about Shop-All. About Molly. All of it.

He decided not to wait.

Durwood staggered his stance and loaded weight to his front shoulder. He said a brief prayer, then barreled through the door.

It pancaked forward. He bulled over the splintered door blind, crouched, like a wrecking ball accelerating toward its trough.

Four chopping steps later, his skull and shoulder connected with a soft abdomen. Durwood plowed the intruder off his feet—it was a he, and big—to the tile.

He pinned his knees onto what felt like shoulders and punched, punished, incapacitated. He couldn't see, but his fists found the large man easily. The skin might've been dark. Leathersby used both Moroccan and Egyptian mercenaries.

The man reached around Durwood's flying fists for his neck. Durwood broke his wrist.

He was trying to speak or beg. "Gorrmmmm...off, dang...ooAAAIY..."

Durwood kept at him, straight rights and straight left in the dark, extinguishing all resistance.

If it moved, he struck it.

If it made noise, he silenced it.

A night's worth of coiled fury poured forth like Heaven's rays breaking the overcast.

Dimly, Durwood heard voices at the door.

The lights came on.

He turned his hands over. His palms belonged to a meat grinder. Warm, gummy red.

The intruder had dark skin, Durwood saw. But not naturally dark. It was mottled intricately, dark green.

Tattoos.

"Get off, d-de!" Hatch slurred, a pencil-width gap in his lip. "I'm g-tting a beer, you w-nna kill me?"

Durwood stood. Quaid and Molly, Piper Jackson, pale Josiah almost seeming to glow—they all stood looking at him in their bedclothes. Looking at him slow.

Durwood dropped to a knee and offered a hand. Hatch flung him off and stayed down, covered his purpling eyes.

Durwood stood again. Alone and Confused. He felt cored out, like a blighted tree beyond fighting.

Sue-Anne came shuffling to his side.