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than me, but wiry and fit, built like some of the special ops guys I’d known in the military. Deep crow’s feet around his eyes and skin like tanned cowhide spoke to many hours in the sun. I didn’t know him well; he’d bought the store from Pete only a few months earlier. I’d waited while he explained the differences between two brands of in-line skates to a customer and then shown him Celio’s photo.
    “He was looking at the guns,” Colin said, gesturing to the racks of guns—rifles, pistols, shotguns—in locked cabinets behind him.
    “Alone?”
    Colin nodded. “Uh-huh.”
    I wondered where the girl and his buddy had been. “What time?”
    “I don’t know exactly… maybe four thirty?”
    That was considerably later than I’d seen him and proved he’d still been hanging around the mall in the late afternoon. “Anything special about him? Did he say anything?”
    Colin’s eyes narrowed. “He was carrying.”
    “A gun? Are you sure?”
    His thin lips slanted up on one side. “I’m sure. Left-hand pocket of his jacket. He kept both hands dug into his pockets, like he was cold, but I could tell.”
    I believed him. This put a different complexion on things. Maybe Celio had tried to mug someone, someone who also happened to be armed and shot him. That didn’t explain why the someone had bothered to move the body, though. “Do you get a lot of gang types in here wanting guns?” I asked Colin.
    “Not so many,” he said. “They’ve mostly got sheets and aren’t going to pass the background check, or they’re too damn young. I get more hunters, or homeowners looking for a piece for personal protection. I’ve got a nice Beretta here I recommend for women.” He pulled a key from his pocket and made a move toward one of the glass-fronted cabinets, but I stopped him with a smile and a head shake.
    “Thanks anyway.”
    He gave me half a wink that told me he suspected I already had a weapon. I did. I practiced regularly with it at the range, wanting to keep my skills sharp for when I got back on with a police department.
    “What’d you do before becoming ‘Pete’?” I asked.
    “Owned a house-painting company.”
    “Around here?”
    Colin shook his head. “Texas.”
    That explained the complexion like overcooked rawhide, if not his aura of awareness, the feeling he gave off of being half-cocked, ready to explode into action. “What brought you east?”
    “Have you ever tried to use a paint sprayer while swaying atop a twenty-foot ladder in a west Texas wind?”
    I shook my head, mildly amused by his sour expression.
    “Take my advice: don’t. There’s a reason there are more wind farms than ranches in the Lone Star state, most of ’em in the west. Thirty-plus-mile-an-hour winds, six and a half days out of seven. I don’t miss Dumas one little bit.”
    “So, selling guns and basketballs suits you?”
    “It pays the bills,” Colin said somewhat grimly. “It pays the bills.”

Four

    Going store to store like this reminded me of the house-to-house questioning I’d done a few times as a military cop. Then, as now, it was tedious and largely pointless, but I belonged to the “leave no stone unturned” school of investigation, so I got on with it by Segwaying to the stuffed animal store, Make-a-Manatee. Walking under the huge pink whale just inside the entrance, I looked around for the owner. I spotted him midway back, surrounded by kids clamoring to get their animals stuffed. Mike Wachtel was about five-nine, with male-pattern baldness and his left leg in a cast from foot to midthigh.
    “What happened to you?” I asked as he seated himself by the stuffing machine, a huge glass rectangle full of white fluff. A foot treadle pumped the fluff into the limp skins of soon-to-be-stuffed animals. “Skiing accident?”
    “It’s a pain in the butt,” he said, wincing as a careless four-year-old bumped his leg.
    When I asked about Celio, he apologetically said henoticed children more than