On the other side of the restaurant, two very distinctive customers were chatting with a pretty blond waitress. Her electric smile solved to Krome's satisfaction the mystery of why the shitkickers returned night after night with a hot credit card: They were smitten. One of the men was outfitted entirely in camouflage, including a cap. His companion wore a dirty ponytail and a vulcanized patch over one eye. Both men, Krome noted, bore deep cuts on their faces.

"You said one was dressed like a hunter."

JoLayne nodded. "That's right."

"Take a peek."

"I'm frightened."

"It's all right," Krome told her.

She turned just enough to catch a quick look. "Lord," she gasped, and turned back.

Tom Krome patted her hand. "We done good, pardner."

JoLayne's expression was unreadable behind the big sunglasses. "Give me the car keys."

"What for?" Krome asked, knowing the answer. She didn't want to open the car; she wanted to open the trunk.

JoLayne said, "Let's wait till they leave – "

"No, not here."

"Tom, we've got the Remington. What could they do?"

"Forget it."

A waitress came, but JoLayne was unresponsive. Krome ordered hamburgers and Cokes for both of them. When they were alone again, he tried to make the case that a busy restaurant parking lot wasn't the ideal place to pull a shotgun on anybody, especially two drunk white-trash psychopaths.

JoLayne said, "I want my damn lottery ticket."

"And you'll get it. We found the bastards, that's the main thing. They can't get away from us now."

Again she peered over her shoulder, shivering at the sight of the ponytailed robber. "That face I'll never forget. But the eye patch I don't remember."

"Maybe you blinded him," Krome said.

JoLayne Lucks smiled faintly. "Lord, I hope so."

The firebombing of Tom Krome's house was the most serious managerial crisis of Sinclair's career. All afternoon he polished the exculpatory memorandum and awaited a summons from The Register'?,managing editor. Like Krome's, the managing editor's training was in hard news and he viewed the world darkly. He was an angular, intense man in his mid-forties; prematurely gray, allergy prone, gruff, profane. He was famous for his laserlike glare and his lack of patience.

His last communication with Sinclair had come seven weeks earlier in, a terse phone call: No frigging PMS column, you hear me! It had been one of Sinclair's rare brainstorms – a regular feature devoted to coping with PMS. The column would run once a month, of course. The managing editor despised the idea, which Sinclair promptly blamed on one of his subordinates.

Even under the mildest circumstances, direct contact with the M.E. was nerve-racking. So Sinclair whitened when, shortly after six, he was called in to discuss the Tom Krome situation. Upon entering the office, Sinclair was brusquely motioned to a covered armchair. On the other side of a mahogany desk, his boss skimmed a police report, although Sinclair (having never seen one) didn't recognize it as such. What he knew about the burning of Krome's home had come from a gossipy city desk reporter, in a brief conversation at the urinals. Of course Sinclair had been alarmed by the news, but he was more distressed that he hadn't been notified formally, through channels. He was, after all, Krome's immediate supervisor. Didn't anybody believe in E-mail anymore?

With a contemplative snort, the managing editor turned and tossed the police report on a credenza. Sinclair seized the moment to present a crisp copy of the memorandum, which the managing editor crumpled and threw back at him. It landed in Sinclair's lap. The managing editor said: "I already saw it." "But ... when?"

"In all its glorious versions, you schmuck."

"Oh."

Instantly Sinclair realized what had happened. With the touch of a button on his computer terminal, the managing editor could call up any story in the newspaper's vast bank of editing queues. Sinclair had been led to believe his boss paid no attention to what went on in the Features department, but evidently it wasn't true. The managing editor had electronically been tracking the Krome memo from the date of its perfidious inception.

Sinclair felt feverish and short of breath. He plucked the wadded paper from his lap and discreetly shoved it into a pocket.

"What I've found fascinating," the managing editor was saying, "is the creative process – how each new draft painted a blacker picture of Tom's mental state. And the details you added ... well, I had to laugh. Maybe you missed your calling, Sinclair. Maybe you should've been a writer." The managing editor eyed him as if he were a turd on a carpet. "Would you like some water? Coffee?"

Sinclair, in an anemic murmur: "No, thank you."

"May we stipulate that your 'memo' is pure horseshit?"

"Yes."

"OK. Now I have some questions. One: Do you have any idea why Tom Krome's house was torched?"

"No, I don't."

"Do you have a clue why anyone would want to harm him?"

"Not really," Sinclair said.

"Do you know where he is?"

"The rumor is Bermuda."

The managing editor chuckled. "You're not going to Bermuda, Sinclair. You're going to the last place you sent Tom, and you're going to find him. By the way, you look like hell."

"I'm sure I do."

"Another question: Does Tom still work for us?"

"As far as I'm concerned, he does." Sinclair said it with all the conviction he could summon.

The managing editor removed his glasses and began vigorously cleaning me lenses with a tissue. "What about as far as Tomis concerned? Any chance he was serious about quitting?"

"I ... I suppose it's possible."

Woozy with apnea, Sinclair thought he might be on the verge of heart failure. He'd read many articles about critically ill patients who had eerie out-of-body experiences in ambulances and emergency rooms. Sinclair felt that way now – floating above the managing editor's credenza, watching himself being emasculated. The sensation was neither as painless nor as dreamlike as other near-death survivors had described.

"The arson guys are going through the rubble tonight," said the managing editor. "They want to know if the fire could be connected to a story Tom was working on."

"I can't imagine how." Sinclair gulped air like a hippo. Slowly the feeling returned to his fingers and toes.

The managing editor said: "Suppose you tell me exactly what he was writing."

"A quickie feature. Hit and run."

"About what?"

"Just some woman who won the lottery," Sinclair said. Impulsively he added: "A black woman." Just so the boss would know Sinclair was on the lookout for feel-good stories about minorities. Maybe it would help his predicament, maybe not.

The managing editor squinted. "That's it – a lottery feature?"

"That's it," Sinclair asserted.

He didn't want it known that he'd rejected Tom Krome's request to pursue the robbery angle. Sinclair believed the decision would make him appear gutless and shortsighted, particularly if Krome turned up murdered in some ditch.

"Where is this Lotto woman?" asked the managing editor.

"Little town called Grange."

"Straight feature?"

"That's all it was."

The managing editor frowned. "Well, you're lying again, Sinclair. But it's my own damn fault for hiring you." He stood up and removed his suit jacket from the back of his chair. "You'll go to Grange and you won't come back until you've found Tom."

Sinclair nodded. He'd call his sister. She and Roddy would let him stay in the spare room. They could take him around town, hook him up with their sources.

"Next week they're announcing the Amelias," said the managing editor, slipping into his jacket. "I entered Krome."