Kohl’s handwriting was neat. The two cartons were filled with her notes. They were comprehensive. They were meticulous. They broke my heart. I found the California address in an eight-page bio she had prepared. It was a five-digit house number on a road that came under the Eureka post office. Probably a lonely place, far out of town. I went to my company clerk’s desk and signed a stack of travel warrants for myself. Put my service Beretta and the silenced Ruger in a canvas bag and drove to the airport. They gave me papers to sign before they let me carry loaded firearms inside the cabin. I wasn’t about to check them. I figured there was a good chance Quinn might take the same flight. I figured if I saw him at the gate or on the plane I would waste him right there and then.

But I didn’t see him. I got on a plane for Sacramento and walked the aisle after takeoff and scanned every face and he wasn’t there. So I sat tight for the duration of the flight. Just stared into space. The stewardesses stayed well away from me.

I rented a car at the Sacramento airport. Drove it north on I-5 and then northwest on Route 299. It was a designated scenic road. It wound through the mountains. I looked at nothing except the yellow line ahead of me. I had picked up three hours because of flying across three time zones but even so it was gathering dark when I hit the Eureka limit. I found Quinn’s road. It was a meandering strip that ran north-south high in the hills above U.S. 101. The highway was laid out far below me. I could see headlights streaming north. Taillights heading south. I guessed there was a rail line down there somewhere. Maybe a station or a depot nearby, convenient for Quinn’s old man back when he was working.

I found the house. Drove past it without slowing. It was a rough one-story cabin. It used an old milk churn instead of a mailbox post. The front yard had gone to seed a decade ago. I K-turned five hundred yards south of it and drove two hundred yards back toward it with my lights off. Parked behind an abandoned diner with a caved-in roof. Got out and climbed a hundred feet into the hills. Walked north three hundred yards and came on his place from the rear.

In the dusk I could see a narrow back porch and a scuffed area next to it where cars could be parked. Clearly it was the sort of place where you use the back door, not the front. There were no lights on inside. I could see dusty sun-faded drapes half-closed in the windows. The whole place looked empty and unused. I could see a couple of miles north and south and there were no cars on the road.

I came down the hill slowly on foot. Circled the house. Listened at every window. There was nobody inside. I figured Quinn would park in back and come in through the rear, so I broke in through the front. The door was thin and old and I just pushed hard on it until the inner jamb started to give and then I smacked it once above the lock with the heel of my hand. Wood splintered and the door swung open and I stepped inside and closed it again and wedged it shut with a chair. It would look OK from the outside.

It was musty inside and easily ten degrees colder than outside. It was dark and dim. I could hear a refrigerator running in the kitchen, so I knew there was electricity. The walls were covered in ancient wallpaper. It was faded and yellow. There were only four rooms. There was an eat-in kitchen, and a living room. There were two bedrooms. One was small and the other was smaller. I figured the smaller one had been Quinn’s, as a kid. There was a lone bathroom between the bedrooms. White fixtures, stained with rust.

Four rooms plus a bath is an easier search than most. I found what I was looking for almost immediately. I lifted a rag rug off of the living room floor and found a square hatch let into the boards. If it had been in the hallway I would have figured it for an inspection cover above the crawl space. But it was in the living room. I took a fork from the kitchen and levered it open. Under it was a shallow wooden tray built between the floor joists. On the tray was a shoe box wrapped in milky plastic sheeting. Inside the shoe box were three thousand dollars and two keys. I figured the keys were for safety-deposit boxes or left-luggage lockers. I took the cash and left the keys where they were. Then I put the hatch lid back and replaced the rug and chose a chair and sat down to wait with my Beretta in my pocket and the Ruger laid across my lap.

“Take care,” Duffy said.

I nodded. “Sure.”

Villanueva said nothing. I slid out of the Taurus with the Beretta in my pocket and the Persuaders held one in each hand. Crossed straight to the shoulder of the road and got as far down on the rocks as I could and started picking my way east. There was still daylight behind the clouds but I was dressed in black and I was carrying black guns and I wasn’t exactly on the road itself and I thought I might have a chance. The wind was blowing hard toward me and there was water in the air. I could see the ocean ahead. It was raging. The tide was on the way out. I could hear the distant waves pounding and the long suck of the undertow ripping through sand and gravel.

I came around a shallow curve and saw that the wall lights were on. They blazed blue-white against the dim sky. The contrast between the electric light and the late-afternoon darkness beyond it would mean they would see me less and less well the closer I got. So I climbed back onto the roadway and started to jog. I got as close as I dared and then slipped back down the rocks and hugged the shore. The ocean was right at my feet. I could smell salt and seaweed. The rocks were slippery. Waves pounded and spray burst up at me and the water swirled angrily.

I stood still. Took a breath. Realized I couldn’t swim around the wall. Not this time. It would be madness. The sea was way too rough. I would have no chance. No chance at all. I would be tossed around like a cork and smashed against the rocks and battered to death. Unless the undertow got me first and pulled me out and swallowed me into the depths and drowned me.

Can’t go around it, can’t go over it. Got to go through it.

I climbed up the rocks again and stepped into the bar of light as far from the gate as I could get. I was all the way over where the foundations canted down toward the water. Then I kept very close to the wall and walked along its length. I was bathed in light. But nobody east of the wall could see me because it was between me and the house and it was taller than me. And anybody west of me was a friend. All I had to worry about was tripping the sensors buried in the ground. I stepped as lightly as I could and hoped they hadn’t buried any this close in.

And I guess they hadn’t, because I made it to the gatehouse OK. I risked a glance inside through the gap in the drapes in the front window and saw the brightly-lit living room and Paulie’s replacement busy relaxing on the collapsed sofa. He was a guy I hadn’t seen before. He was about Duke’s age and size. Maybe approaching forty, maybe a little slighter than me. I spent some time figuring his exact height. That was going to be important. He was possibly two inches shorter than me. He was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt and a denim jacket. Clearly he wasn’t going to the ball. He was Cinderella, tasked to watch the gate while the others partied. I hoped he was the only one. I hoped they were working a skeleton crew. But I wasn’t about to bet on it. Any kind of minimal caution would put a second guy on the front door of the house, and maybe a third up there in Duke’s window. Because they knew Paulie hadn’t gotten the job done. They knew I was still out there somewhere.

I couldn’t afford the noise involved in shooting the new guy. The waves were loud and the wind was howling but neither sound would mask the Beretta. And nothing on earth would mask a Persuader firing a Brenneke Magnum. So I retreated a couple of yards and put the Persuaders down on the ground and took my coat and my jacket off. Then I took my shirt off and wrapped it tight around my left fist. Put my bare back against the wall and sidestepped my way to the edge of the window. Used the nails on my right hand to tap softly on the bottom corner of the glass, where it was draped, on and off, faint little paradiddles like a mouse makes when he runs across above a ceiling. I did it four times and was about to try a fifth when I saw in the corner of my eye the light in the window suddenly go dim. That meant the new guy had gotten off his sofa and pressed his face up against the glass to try to see what kind of little creature was out there bothering him. So I concentrated on getting the height exactly right and spun one-eighty and threw a huge roundhouse left with my padded fist and bust the window first and the new guy’s nose a millisecond later. He went down in a heap below the inside sill and I reached in through the hole I had made and unlatched the casement and swung it open and climbed inside. The guy was sitting on his butt on the floor. He was bleeding from his nose and the glass cuts in his face. He was groggy. There was a handgun on the sofa. He was eight feet away from it. He was twelve feet from the phones. He shook his head to clear it and looked up at me.