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goes home.
    He drove out of the development—no wrong turns this time, he was getting the hang of it, and beginning to feel as though he lived there himself. He left the car at a strip mall, parked in front of a discount shoe outlet, and returned on foot, with the .22 in a pocket.
    On his way out he’d counted houses, and now he circled halfway around the block, trying to estimate which house backed up on the Hirschhorn property. He narrowed it down to two and settled on the one with no lights burning, walked the length of its driveway, skirted the garage, and stood in the backyard, looking around, trying to get his bearings. The house directly opposite him was one story tall with an attached garage, so it wasn’t Hirschhorn’s, but he knew he wasn’t off by much. He walked through the yards—they didn’t have fences here, thank God for small favors—and he knew when he was in the right place because he could hear the sound of the basketball being dribbled.
    In addition to the big garage door that rose when you triggered the remote, there was a door on the side to let humans in and out. You couldn’t see it from the street, but Keller had watched the boy come out of it with a basketball, so he knew it was there. It was, he now saw, about a third of the way back on the left wall of the garage, facing the house, at the end of an overhang that let you get from the house to the garage without getting rained on.
    Which wasn’t a problem today, because it wasn’t raining. Not that he wouldn’t welcome rain, which would put an end to the basketball game and give him access to the garage.
    He flattened out against the garage wall and moved quickly if stealthily toward the door, staying in the shadows and wishing they were deeper. The boys, dribbling and shooting, moved in and out of his field of vision. If he could see them, they could see him.
    But they didn’t. He reached the door and stood beside it with a hand on the knob until the boys dribbled to a spot where the garage blocked his view of them and theirs of him. He waited until their voices were raised in argument. You never had to wait long for this, they argued as much as they dribbled and far more than they jumped, they’d make better lawyers than NBA all-stars, but the argument never got serious enough to send one of them inside and the other one home for dinner. At last, to the strains of Did not! Did too! Did not! Did too! he opened the door and ducked inside.
    Where, with the door safely shut, it was pitch dark and, aside from the dribbling and bickering, quiet as the tomb. Keller stood perfectly still while his eyes adjusted to the dimness. He got so he could make out shapes and move around without bumping into things. The Jeep Cherokee was there, where Betsy Hirschhorn had parked it, and, he was pleased to note, the Subaru was not. He’d been gone for almost twenty minutes, finding a place to leave the car and coming back on foot, and there was always the chance that Hirschhorn would make it home while he was sneaking into strangers’ backyards. In which case he could either sneak out and go home or curl up on the car seat and wait for morning.
    Which it looked as though he might have to do anyway. Because suppose Hirschhorn came home now, while the basketball players were still at it. The boys would stand aside respectfully, the garage door would pop up like toast in a toaster, the Subaru would slide into its slot next to the Cherokee, and its driver would emerge, striding out to greet his son. The kids would be right there, and Keller wouldn’t be able to do a thing before they were all tucked away for the night.
    And if he did stay cooped up in the garage all night, then what? When Hirschhorn got in the car the next morning, he’d have the goddam kids with him, all set to be driven to school. Why couldn’t the little bastards take the bus? If it was good enough to bring them home from school, why wasn’t it good enough to take them there?
    Not