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had a hunting knife with a razor-sharp blade. In the opposite pocket: another. He reached both hands into their respective compartments and ran his fingers down the knives’ rubber grips. They were identical weapons, or nearly so, and although it wasn’t exactly a gun at each hip, Dave couldn’t help but compare himself to an old western cowboy.
    The second knife was just a backup, something he had no intention of using or needing, but Dave liked knowing it was there. He’d never been a boy scout, never had that “be prepared” jargon brainwashed into him, but he’d never been a moron either and he never did anything half-assed.
    He watched and chewed.
    The boy’s mother had gone inside the house almost half an hour earlier, left her son to play. The kid had spent ten of those thirty minutes bouncing a ratty old tennis ball off the side of the house, and then he’d ventured across the back yard to the edge of the property (near Dave’s hiding spot, this was), where a tree house sat high in the branches of a fork-trunked oak. The fort looked so weathered and cracked that it must have been older than the boy himself.
    Dave had noticed it before. He’d come here many times.
    Weathered or not, the wooden rungs nailed to the tree’s trunk had held for the kid when he scurried up them and onto the main platform, which had itself now withstood almost twenty minutes of jumps, half-hearted karate moves, and the various re-positionings of a ten- or eleven-year-old boy who didn’t seem to know whether he wanted to sit, lie, or stand. The old platform hadn’t so much as creaked.
    Dave grinned. Over the last six months he’d visited a lot of houses, and he’d watched a lot of boys, but he always came back here. The boy’s real name, he knew, was Zachary, but he never thought of him that way. Usually it was just the boy or the kid ; occasionally, it was Georgie.
    Now the boy moved again. Dave left the weapons in his pockets but removed his hands. He needed to focus on the kid.
    From his place behind the thick tree trunk deeper in the woods, Dave watched the child back off the platform on his stomach and kick blindly for a rung nailed to the trunk about two feet down.
    It wasn’t just the kid’s looks. Even his movements reminded Dave of Georgie. And on several occasions, Dave had noticed the double knots on the laces of the kid’s sneakers. Georgie (the original Georgie) had known how to tie a pair of sneaks so well you could only get them off with a pair of scissors.
    The boy descended the irregularly spaced rungs with almost superhuman agility and pushed away from the trunk still five feet shy of the ground. When he landed, his knees bent and his arms flung out to his sides in a way that made him look like an alighting bird. He straightened himself up and headed back to the house.
    Dave smiled and walked around his hiding tree. Today wasn’t just another day. It was time to stop watching. He moved, and the knives slapped against his thighs.

THREE
    THE PICKUP MOVED around the mountain roads like a sickly horse out for one last lap around the racetrack. It leaned around the corners, shuddered more than once to an almost complete standstill, jerked, bounced, and wobbled its way forward.
    Mike Pullman rode it out of the Rockies the best he could, relying heavily on the brakes, cursing himself for continuing to put his life in the hands (or wheels) of such an untrustworthy hunk of junk. He’d realized only recently that the truck was on its last metaphorical leg, and he’d soon have to trade it in for something a little more surefooted, an SUV or a jeep. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple. He’d paid the truck off several years ago but hadn’t yet figured out how to bend his budget around the purchase of a new (or even a reliable used) vehicle. 
    Still, he had to get one, one way or another. A good set of snow tires and extremely careful driving had gotten him through one winter in the mountains, but they would