It was nearly two hours, and Tom had almost finished the book—it wasn’t going to be a happy ending, he could see it coming—when at last the conductor’s voice came over the sound system, crying out, “Rhinecliff! Rhinecliff!”

Good. Tom put his book away, shut his bag—two straps and buckles, no zippers—and got to his feet. The schmuck across the aisle gave him a half salute and said, “Have a nice day.”

“Yeah, I will.”

Tom started away, but a devilish urge made him turn back and say, “You, too.” The kid’s fatuous grin was still all over his face as the train stopped and Tom found his exit.

“My Mom knows what you look like,” Stan Murch had assured him back in New York. “Besides, she’s probably the only lady cabdriver there, and the only one all the way from Dudson Center.”

“I’m not worried,” Tom had said, and there she was, no doubt about it, short and chunky, in a cloth cap and zipper jacket and corduroy pants, leaning with arms folded against a green and white car with its name on the door: TOWN TAXI.

She was shaking her head when Tom saw her, apparently arguing with another detrainer who’d wanted to hire her cab. As Tom approached, the frustrated customer raised his voice to say, “For Christ’s sake, aren’t you a taxi?”

“No,” Murch’s Mom told him. “I’m a Duane Hansen statue.”

Tom interposed himself between the statue and the detrainer, saying quietly, “Here I am.”

Murch’s Mom, as promised, did recognize him. “Fine,” she said. “Get in.” And she turned to open the driver’s door.

“Hey!” cried the non-customer as Tom opened the rear door. “I was here first!”

“Pay no attention to him,” Murch’s Mom said.

Of course not. Tom shrugged and started to get into the cab, but the non-customer crowded forward, pushing an attaché case ahead of himself into the space of the open door, blocking Tom’s way, continuing to yell and carry on. So Tom looked at him.

He wasn’t sure what it was exactly about this face of his, but usually when there was some sort of unnecessary trouble, if he just looked at the person making the disturbance, that was almost always enough to take care of the problem. What might be in his eyes or the set of his features to make it work that way Tom didn’t really know, nor did he really care; it did the job, that’s all.

And it did the job this time, too. Tom looked at the non-customer and the man stopped yelling. Then he blinked. Then he looked worried. Then he kind of pulled his jaw back in, trying to hide it behind his Adam’s apple. Then he got the attaché case out of Tom’s way. Then Tom got into the cab.

They were on the wrong side of the Hudson River here, the train tracks running up along its eastern bank, giving occasional beautiful views and vistas that could just as well be from before the European incursion into this continent, not that Tom had noticed, or cared. The Thruway, and the Vilburgtown Reservoir, and drowned Putkin’s Corners, and all the Dudsons living and dead, were over across the river in the main part of New York State.

It happens there’s a bridge across the Hudson right there at Rhinecliff. Steering across it, Murch’s Mom glanced in the rearview mirror at Tom, who had removed his book from his bag and was reading it. “Have a good ride up?” she asked.

Tom looked up from his book, catching Mom’s eye in the mirror. Marking his place in the book with his finger, he said, “Yeah, I did. And the weather’s nice this time of year. And I’m not hungry yet, thanks. And I haven’t been keeping up with the sports teams much lately. And I have no political opinions at all.” Lowering his eyes, he opened his book and went back to reading.

Murch’s Mom took a deep breath, but then held it awhile. With little white spots on her cheeks, she concentrated on the road ahead, looking for somebody to try to cut her off.

Nobody did, though, and Mom fumed in frustration for several minutes until, across the river and onto the Thruway, she saw out ahead of herself a car from Brooklyn, and all her rage transferred itself to that innocent vehicle. Why would anybody come here from Brooklyn, from home, if they didn’t have to?

The reason Mom knew that maroon 1975 Ford LTD was from Brooklyn was the license plate: 271 KVQ. The first letter in New York plates gives the county: Kings, in this case, which is Brooklyn. (Queens is Queens, and there’s no Jacks.)

The driver of the offending vehicle, a curly-haired young guy, was going along minding his own business when all of a sudden this Town Taxi came swooping out of nowhere, cut him off with micromillimeters to spare, and fishtailed away as though giving him the finger with its tailpipe. Apart from slamming on his brakes, clutching the wheel hard with both hands, and staring wide-eyed, he made no satisfactory reply to this opening remark, so Mom dawdled in the left lane until the other car had nearly caught up, then shot across the lanes again, shaving the distance from the Ford’s front bumper even closer than before. There! That’s for nothing! Now do something!

That was when the cold unemotional voice came from the cab’s backseat: “If that guy’s bothering you, I could take him out.”

Which brought Mom to her senses. “What guy?” she demanded, and floored the accelerator, taking everybody out of danger. Half an hour later, with no further incidents, she steered the cab up onto the driveway beside her new home and braked to a stop just shy of the chain-link fence. “This is it,” she announced.

Tom had finished Dark Hazard about eight miles back, and had spent the time since just sitting there, looking at the back of Mom’s head. (He knew this area, knew what it looked like, wasn’t curious about any changes that might have taken place around here of late, and sure wasn’t likely to be keeping an eye out for old friends.) Now he looked out at the house and said, “Fine. Looks pretty big.”

“It is.”

The cuteness that had bothered Dortmunder didn’t bother Tom because he didn’t notice it. Picking up his leather bag, he climbed out onto the gravel and shut the cab door.

Mom, giving him a sour look out the window (which he also didn’t notice), said, without joy, “See you at dinner.” And she backed out of the driveway, spraying gravel, and drove off to become a profit-making industry again.

Tom crossed to the porch, went up the stoop, and May opened the front door for him, saying, “Have a nice trip?” (She was determined to be pleasant, to behave as though Tom were a normal human being.)

“Yes,” Tom said. Then he grinned at May and said, “You got Al on the hop, all right.”

May’s face closed right up. “John doesn’t think of it that way,” she said.

“Good,” Tom told her, and looked around this little hallway. “Where do I bunk?”

“Top of the stairs, second door on your left. Your bathroom is right across the hall.”

“Okay.”

Tom went up and found a small neat sunny room with a view through two windows of the fenced-in back yard and the rears of the houses on Myrtle Street. The bed had been made (May, downstairs, regretted now having done that), with a set of fluffy pale blue towels folded atop it. The drawers in the tall old dresser were all empty, and were still nearly empty when Tom was done unpacking. Once his few clothes were put away, he placed his shaving and toilet gear atop the dresser and hung his old suit jacket in lonely splendor in the closet.

Finally, he salted the place. While certain other armaments remained in the false bottom of the leather bag, the others were distributed in his usual manner:.45 automatic duct-taped to the underside of the box spring, handy when lying in bed; spring knife rolled into a windowshade, so it would drop into his hand when he pulled the shade all the way down; tiny snub-barreled.22 duct-taped to the underside of the water closet lid in the neat old-fashioned bathroom.