"The speed limit is thirty-five here," Natalie said. "You better slow down."

They had found Lana's name in Amos's papers. Messy and disheveled as he was about his appearance, he had always been meticulous about his affairs. Apparently he kept a folder with all the paperwork pertaining to their brief union. They had stayed friendly, if not friends, because Lana had been gracious enough to claim it was the farm she couldn't live with, not Amos. But even thick-skinned Amos must have known that Lana just couldn't hack sleeping with him. It was one thing to help a guy out in prison, to get so carried away with Zeke and Natalie's romance that she ended up marrying some poor geek so she wouldn't be left behind. Lana was always trying to do what Natalie did, and always getting it a little bit wrong. But it was quite another kettle of fish, as Zeke's father would say, to live with the guy once he got out, especially in godforsaken Grantsville.

Shit, what else was in Amos's papers? Did he keep records of the jobs he did, computer templates for the various things he forged? What if they found copies of the driver's license he had manufactured for Natalie, or the title to this car, or information about the contraband that now sat in a shoe box between Natalie's feet? Even the strictly legal stuff, like the temporary tags, could be a problem if Natalie's real name surfaced anywhere. Then again, it wasn't an open investigation. With Amos dead, there was no real reason to look into his business. That would just be more paperwork for everybody.

Only with Amos gone, who was going to kill Mark? It was another body blow to Zeke's perfect plan. First Natalie shows up, which was bad enough, but with the kids as well, which was a fucking nightmare. Still, Zeke had figured that when Mark was finally killed, he could send Natalie and the kids back with a carefully rehearsed story, one that omitted any mention of him. A runaway wife, even one who claimed to be brutalized in order to get welfare checks, would go home to bury her husband properly. It would have been tricky-the more Natalie had to do, the trickier things got-but it would have worked.

Now Amos was dead, killed just days before he was supposed to kill Mark. Did Boris know anyone that Zeke could use, much less trust? Zeke couldn't risk getting in touch with him, not while he was in prison. Besides, Boris would just want to know when they were going to deposit the money they had been promising him, ever since he threatened to tell Mark about Zeke and Natalie. He couldn't turn to Lana, because she told Natalie everything. The bottom line is that being an outlaw wasn't Lana's gig, despite her association with Boris, her marriage to Amos. She was just a follower. Left to her own devices, Lana would have been content with her dull life, painting fingernails and toes, having a Friday-night splurge at some tacky chain restaurant on Reisterstown Road. Acting as Zeke's intermediary had been the little bit of spice she'd needed. She was the eternal plain girl, the second banana, one of those strange women that always seemed to pop up in the movies, living only to support and bolster the star.

"Do I have to work again today?" Natalie demanded, her voice somehow piercing the fog in his head.

"Got to do your bit at least. We're scraping bottom."

"It's so hard, remembering all those dates. And you know how these women look at you, when you can't say your babies' birthdays bam, bam, bam? Like you're a bad mother, that's how. Last time I forgot, I used the real ones by mistake."

"You have to use the fake ones, Natalie," he said, pretending a patience he didn't feel. "Fake names and fake dates. We've been over this."

"Why? What difference does it make?"

Angry, he began to press on the accelerator, then caught himself. Too late-a motorcycle cop emerged out of the gray, misty morning, red and blue lights flashing. It all came back to Zeke in that moment. He was in New Troy. New Fucking Troy, a speed trap so notorious he had heard about it up in Terre Haute, where an Ohio insurance agent was doing a stretch for his own little money-laundering scheme. The guy was always complaining that what he had done was small-time compared to the shakedown the cops in his hometown had perfected. New Troy, Ohio, an incorporated city that provided no services except a police department that wrote speeding tickets.

"Don't say a word," he told Natalie.

"I told you to slow down-" she began, biting off the rest of her sentence when he glared at her.

He wasn't speeding, not really. But okay, no sweat, he'd take the ticket, no matter how bogus. Pay the fine up front, in good American cash, and thank God they had some. No-thank Amos, wherever his soul was wandering. The car's title was clear, the temporary tags clean, Natalie's bogus license untraceable. Even Zeke's license was legal. He had gotten it fair and almost square his first week, through the state-to-state reciprocity program. After all, his Maryland license had lapsed only five years ago.

"You've got a brake light out," the cop said after looking at the registration and license. "That's a two-hundred-dollar fine."

"Really?" He should let it go at that, he knew he should, but it was so goddamn infuriating to be gouged by a yokel cop, a guy that Zeke could rook in almost any other situation. "The funny thing is, I don't even remember hitting the brakes in the last mile or two. I was just driving at a nice steady"-he glanced at the speed limit sign-"thirty-five."

"Yeah, you kept to the legal limit, but you definitely hit your brakes at one point. Right one's working, left one's out." The guy's voice was dry, robotic. "We collect our fines in cash. Two hundred dollars. If you don't have the money, I'll escort you to our lockup, and you can wait there until someone wires it to you."

The amount of money gave Zeke pause. It was most of what they had left. Even fast-food restaurants and cheap motel rooms added up, and this old clunker drank about thirty dollars of gas per day. And there was no guarantee they'd make a nickel today. Still, easier to pay the fine than prolong the encounter or give out any information.

He couldn't have taken more than fifteen seconds to think the problem through, but those fifteen seconds proved disastrous. Natalie, who had never paid a traffic ticket in her life, leaned across Zeke and smiled at the cop. "The brake light was working yesterday, Officer, so perhaps it just wiggled loose while we were driving. If we promise to get it fixed as soon as we can, could you just let us go this time?"

The young cop was charmed, like almost every man who had ever looked into that face. Which was piss-poor luck in this case, because he said, "Well, let's pop the trunk and see if I can fix it for you right now."

Zeke and Natalie knew better than to look at each other then, not that they needed to. It was easy for Zeke to guess what she was thinking. Her: Isaac is in the trunk. How will we explain that? As for him, he hoped she couldn't decipher his thoughts: Stupid bitch, now he wants to open the trunk. Happy now?

Zeke eased himself out of the car, taking his time, praying that inspiration would strike him as he walked the short distance. He was lucky, he supposed, that it wasn't a newfangled car with a trunk that could be popped with a latch by the driver's seat. But what would he do, once he reached the back of the car? How do you explain a kid sleeping in the trunk? That was probably a five-thousand-dollar fine in New Troy, and a trip to family court. He would lie, that was it, pantomime trying to open the trunk, then say the lock was fussy, they hadn't used it for weeks. That's why the luggage was on the roof. Beautiful. No one ever said he couldn't think on his feet.

And if the cop didn't buy it-God knows what Zeke would do if the guy didn't buy it. Had he called in the plates? Had their presence on this road, in this spot, at this time, already been recorded somewhere? Zeke wasn't sure. He thought every cop called in his traffic stops, but maybe this podunk speed trap didn't bother. He tried to remember if he had seen the cop making the call into the radio unit on his shoulder. Had he or hadn't he? It didn't matter. Zeke was going to talk his way out of this, give him two hundred dollars, and get the hell out of Dodge at a perfectly legal thirty-five mph.