picture. I got some looks from the men on the job—but as I said before, I’m used to that kind of thing.
It took me only a couple of minutes to find the spot Buzz had used—a shadowed area of weeds and scrub brush behind the pile of felled trees. It was obscured enough to offer a good hiding spot, if no one was looking particularly hard, but far enough away that he had to have used a zoom lens of some kind to get those pictures. I had heard that digital cameras could zoom in to truly ridiculous levels these days.
I found footprints.
Don’t read too much into that. I’m not Ranger Rick or anything, but I had a teacher who made sure I spent my share of time hiking and camping in the rugged country of the Ozarks, and he taught me the basics—where to look, and what to look for. The showers last night had wiped away any subtle signs, but I wouldn’t have trusted my own interpretation of them in any case. I did find one clear footprint, of a man’s left boot, fairly deep, and half a dozen partials and a few broken branches in a line leading away. He’d come here, hung around for a while, then left.
Which just about anyone could have deduced from the photo, even if he hadn’t seen any tracks.
I had this guy practically captured already.
There weren’t any bubble-gum wrappers, discarded cigarettes, or fortuitously misplaced business cards that would reveal Buzz’s identity. I hadn’t really thought there would be, but you always look.
I slogged across the muddy ground back toward the truck, when the door of one of the contractors’ vans opened, and a prematurely balding thin guy with a tool belt and a two-foot reel of electrician’s wire staggered out. He had a shirt with a name tag that read CHUCK. Chuck wobbled to one side, dragging the handles of some tools along the side panel of Michael’s truck, leaving some marks.
I glanced into the van. There was an empty bottle of Jim Beam inside, with a little still dribbling out the mouth.
“Hey, Chuck,” I said. “Give you a hand with that?”
He gave me a bleary glance that didn’t seem to pick up on anything out of the ordinary about me or the big old sword hanging over my shoulder. “Nah. I got it.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “I’m going that way anyhow. And those things are heavy.” I went over to him and seized one end of the reel, taking some of the weight.
The electrician’s breath was practically explosive. He nodded a couple of times and shifted his grip on the reel. “Okay, buddy. Thanks.”
We carried the heavy reel of wire over to the house. I had to adjust my steps several times, to keep up with the occasional drunken lurch from Chuck. We took the wire to the poured-concrete slab that was going to be the garage at some point, it looked like, and dropped it off.
“Thanks, man,” Chuck said, his sibilants all mushy.
“Sure,” I said. “Look, uh. Do you really think you should be working with electricity right now, Chuck?”
He gave me an indignant, drunken glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you just, uh, look a little sick, that’s all.”
“I’m just fine,” Chuck slurred, scowling. “I got a job to do.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of a dangerous job. In a big pile of kindling.”
He peered at me. “What?” It came out more like “Wha?”
“I’ve been in some burning buildings, man, and take it from me, this place . . .” I looked around at the wooden framework. “Fwoosh. I’m just saying. Fwoosh.”
He worked on that one for a moment, and then his face darkened into a scowl again. He turned and picked up a wrench from a nearby toolbox. “Buzz off, freak. Before I get upset.”
I wasn’t going to do anyone any favors by getting into half of a drunken brawl with one of Michael’s subcontractors. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but they were all at other parts of the house, I guessed. So I just held up one hand in front of me and said, mildly, “Okay. I’m going.”
Chuck watched me as I walked out of the garage. I looked around until I spotted the power lines running into the house, and then I followed the trench they were buried in back to the street until I got to the transformer. I looked up at it, glanced around a little guiltily, and sighed. Then