Chapter 2

Boatwright noticed the thumb.

He noticed it the way you notice a wasp on a windowsill - a small wrong thing in a room that was supposed to be under control. The old man's hand had moved without his eyes, tracing the same spiral Boatwright was holding up to the light.

"What did you just do?"

Rue lowered his hand. "Nothing."

"Okay." Boatwright dropped the pickup into his pocket. "Store property. You can explain it to the police."

Behind the register, Nico Reyes looked up from a stack of signing posters. He was twenty-four, three months into the job, and he had already learned that Trey Boatwright liked the sound of his own rules.

"Mr. Boatwright-"

"Posters, Nico."

"That's not stock." Nico pointed with his chin. "We don't carry hand-wound anything. Sunny orders Seymour Duncan and Lollar. That thing's got a nickel baseplate and no sticker. It's not ours."

"Then he stole it from somewhere else."

"Nobody steals a pickup, man."

Boatwright's jaw moved. He was thirty-one and he had a bonus riding on this afternoon - district numbers, signing-day sales, the photograph the shop would post with Cade Merrick and the store's logo in frame. He had a tablet with a checklist on it. He had an earpiece. He had forty minutes.

He did not have a plan for a plastic bag.

"You," he said to Rue, "are going to stand right here."

Rue stood right there.

He had a paper bus ticket in his jacket pocket: Austin to Amarillo, 3:40 p.m., one way, forty-one dollars, bought with cash two days ago at the station on Ben White. He had a wristwatch with a cracked crystal. He had no receipt, no name he was willing to give, and nothing in the world that would make a man like Trey Boatwright believe him.

He also had thirty-one years of practice at being quiet.

Boatwright pulled out his phone and dialed. "Yeah, hi - South Congress String and Tube, 1601 South Congress. We've got a male, elderly, refusing to identify, in possession of merchandise he can't account for. Yes. Yes, I'll hold."

Nico watched the old man's hands. The burn scars across the knuckles. The way his thumb and forefinger rubbed together, like they were testing the diameter of a wire.

Nico had seen that motion before. Not on a person.

"Mr. Boatwright," he said slowly, "I think I've seen a pickup like that before."