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the alarm company’s New Milford office, where they would immediately dispatch a car, and alert Oliver Moody that someone was housebreaking on his turf. Oliver would respond first, armed and dangerous. I ran, tripped on a fallen limb, and fell face down, crunching my knee on a piece of granite ledge.
    I have felt real pain twice in my life, but nothing like what I felt then. It was as if someone had driven a three-eighths drill through my kneecap, backed it out, and hammered in a rusty spike. I went blank for several seconds, dead to the world except for the siren, which grew faint. Then I started to vomit.
    I held it down, ground my teeth, and dragged myself deeper into the shadows. The siren kept shrieking, throwing up walls of sound, and I thought I heard them arguing behind it. He wanted to come looking for me. She was saying no, hide. I worked at getting my breath back. And when I had, and my heart was slowing a little, I tried to bend my knee.
    It moved. Not a lot, and not without considerable pain. But I’d be able to walk to my car—in a half hour or so—if I took it real easy and walked on the level road.
    Inside the studio, Mrs. Long took charge again.
    She strode first to the security keypad and punched in a code that stopped the siren abruptly, leaving an ah-whoo, ah-whoo echoing in my ears. Then she put on her blouse and went to the open window where her boyfriend was peering intently into the dark, and took his arm.
    â€œLock yourself in our room. I’ll deal with the cops.”
    He protested.
    She said, “I’ll be fine. Here they come now. Go!”
    I heard it too, across the hills the urgent scream of a state police siren. And on the low ends of the siren, the spectacular roar of a fullblown Plymouth Fury flat out.
    Even if I ditched the camera and hid the tape, what possible explanation could I offer for trespassing in Mrs. Long’s woods in the middle of the night? And even if Oliver didn’t arrest me—fantasy, because he would find some charge, having waited twenty years for the opportunity—my name would be wrecked once again, and once and for all, in the town, which would put me out of business. You can’t make money selling houses without listings. A number of straitlaced people had been very kind when I came home—kind perhaps to the memory of my father, kind nonetheless to give me their business. But two strikes and I was out. This stupid lark was about to finish me.
    I stood up, took a step and fell down. It hurt like hell, but I knew nothing was broken. I just needed time. Oliver’s siren got loud and his lights came bumping across the Longs’ meadow as he careened into their driveway. I backed up the wooded slope, pulling myself along from tree trunk to tree trunk, getting nowhere fast. A wolf tree loomed, a huge, fat red oak, a sentinel standing alone, older than the second-growth stuff around it. Its lower limbs were dead, but enormous, barely clearing the ground that sloped up behind the tree. I got my hands around one, swung, and tugged myself up onto it. Then, clutching the main trunk, I climbed another and perched precariously on the backside of the tree, fifteen feet above the forest floor, some twenty or thirty feet in from the floodlit lawn. I peered around the trunk.
    Oliver had gone in the front door and now he came out the back, wielding a five-cell Mag light, the brilliant halogen type about two feet long with instructions from the maker that it is not to be used as an “impact” instrument. “Stay inside!” he commanded Mrs. Long.
    He started up the slope. He held the light in his left hand. His right hovered near his holstered gun.

Chapter 4
    Resident state troopers are a special breed, part Lone Ranger, part schoolyard bully. They rule the law-abiding in their vast territory by moral presence, and the lawbreakers by fear. Oliver Moody, who stood six-five and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, came up the