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one I’d tucked behind the hallway flower arrangement worked fine. At half past one on Saturday, three men came down the hallway, their faces nice and clear in the camera, their heights marked by a tick I’d put in a picture frame on the wall. Two of them were clearly muscle, one a boss type. One of the big guys carried a notice board with a tripod, which he set up facing the other way, although I’d seen when he was moving around that it was the sort of corporate intro you’d expect to see when you came toward a public meeting room. The other big guy was carrying a carton, no doubt filled with the kind of meaningless forms and equipment that would reassure a sucker and get him inside the doors.
    That day’s only sucker, it would appear, was Julio. Whose last act on this earth was to send an e-mail at 2:04 to say that he was sorry, he’d changed his mind, maybe in the future  . . .
    At 2:12, the three men came out, looking considerably less friendly than they had going in. One carried the carton, now jammed every which way with stuff. They walked away from my viewpoint, and then the boss man jerked his thumb back and the other big guy whirled around and went back for the tripod sign. If I’d been standing behind the flowers instead of my camera, he’d have smashed the sign over my head.
    At 2:14, the three men came out of the hotel’s side doors, dumped their armloads into the trunk of a shiny black car, and drove away. I hit the send button on the laptop I’d been watching all this on, tossed it onto the passenger seat, and put my own car into gear.
    Interesting fact: Cops pay attention when you send them traceable evidence of what you claim is a crime in progress. Phone calls can be about anything, post office letters can disappear, but when you tell them you’re sending them an electronic file, and then you send it, that makes a trail they hesitate to ignore entirely.
    The e-mail with the video attachment was to Frank, my cop  . . . well, maybe not friend , but we’d worked together a couple times, and drunk together a few more times. I liked Frank fine, and I knew he was honest, but I also wanted a little insurance. No cop wants to go into a courtroom against a lawyer who has evidence of a murder the police could have prevented.
    Mine, for example.
    I followed, keeping well back thanks to the little blip on the GPS screen. While they were waiting for Julio, I’d had plenty of time to press a bug under the fender. Ain’t technology great?
    But not so great when the people you’re following change cars, and leave your clever blip standing at the same point until the transmitter’s battery runs down. Which was what I thought was happening when they went five miles and pulled into a coffee house.
    But I lucked out. The two goons did take their equipment from the trunk and got into a second car, but my shiny black target pulled immediately out of the parking lot, signaled for a right, and in two minutes was on the freeway north.
    After two hours, we’d left the freeway far behind, traffic on the smaller road was so thin I didn’t dare come closer than half a mile, and it looked like the guy was planning to drive up the backside of Nevada without even a coffee break. I, on the other hand, was yawning fit to break my jaw, my bladder had gone past uncomfortable to the brink of needing attention, and the pink blip on my screen had hypnotized me into stupidity.
    I only noticed it had stopped moving when I was already too close to do anything but barrel on by.
    The driver—still wearing both the jacket and tie—was just getting back into the car after unlocking a gate at the side of the road. He glanced at me, seeing only a dusty car whose bored driver was rubbing his eye. In the rearview mirror I saw him pull ahead into the side road, then get out to go back and close the gate. My foot didn’t move on the pedal until he had disappeared around a curve, at which time I swerved to the side and killed the