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his boot into her right knee. The leg twisted in a way it wasn’t meant to go, and she felt her ACL pop behind her knee. Anshaw was right behind her by then, and he got a handful of her hair. As she went down, he drove her forward and smashed her head into the side of the dresser.
    A black spoke of pain lanced down into her skull, a nail gun fired straight into the brain. She was down and flailing, and he kicked her in the head. That kick didn’t hurt so much, but it took the life out of her, as if she were no more than an appliance and he had jerked the power cord out of the wall.
    When he rolled her onto her stomach and twisted her arms behind her back, she had no strength in her to resist. He had the heavy-duty plastic ties, the flex cuffs they used on the prisoners in Iraq sometimes. He sat on her ass and squeezed her ankles together and put the flex cuffs on them, too, tightening until it hurt, and then some. Black flashes were still firing behind her eyes, but the fireworks were smaller and exploding less frequently now. She was coming back to herself, slowly. Breathe. Wait.
    When her vision cleared, she found Anshaw sitting above her, on the edge of her father’s bed. He had lost weight, and he hadn’t any to lose. His eyes peeked out, too bright at the bottoms of deep hollows, moonlight reflected in the water at the bottom of a long well. In his lap was a bag, like an old-fashioned doctor’s case, the leather pebbled and handsome.
    â€œI observed you while you were running this morning,” he began, without preamble. Using the word “observed,” like he would in a report on enemy troop movements. “Who were you signaling when you were up on the hill?”
    â€œAnshaw,” Mal said. “What are you talking about, Anshaw? What is this?”
    â€œYou’re staying in shape. You’re still a soldier. I tried to follow you, but you outran me on the hill this morning. When you were on the crest, I saw you flashing a light. Two long flashes, one short, two long. You signaled someone. Tell me who.”
    At first she didn’t know what he was talking about; then she did. Her canteen. Her canteen had flashed in the sunlight when she tipped it up to drink. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, he lowered himself to one knee beside her. Anshaw unbuckled his bag and dumped the contents onto the floor. He had a collection of tools: a pair of heavy-duty shears, a Taser, a hammer, a hacksaw, a portable vise. Mixed in with the tools were five or six human thumbs.
    Some of the thumbs were thick and blunt and male, and some were white and slender and female, and some were too shriveled and darkened with rot to provide much of any clue about the person they had belonged to. Each thumb ended in a lump of bone and sinew. The inside of the bag had a smell, a sickly-sweet, almost floral stink of corruption.
    Anshaw selected the heavy-duty shears.
    â€œYou went up the hill and signaled someone this morning. And tonight you came back with a lot of money. I looked in the envelope while you were in the shower. So you signaled for a meeting, and at the meeting you were paid for intel. Who did you meet? CIA?”
    â€œI went to work. At the bar. You know where I work. You followed me there.”
    â€œFive hundred dollars. Is that supposed to be tips?”
    She didn’t have a reply. She couldn’t think. She was looking at the thumbs mixed in with his mess of tools.
    He followed her gaze, prodded a blackened and shriveled thumb with the blade of the shears. The only identifiable feature remaining on the thumb was a twisted, silvery fishhook scar.
    â€œPlough,” Anshaw said. “He had helicopters doing flyovers of my house. They’d fly over once or twice a day. They used different kinds of helicopters on different days to try and keep me from putting two and two together. But I knew what they were up to. I started watching them from the kitchen with