LITMIR.BIZ

      One

      He was closing in. So close he could almost smell blood. Lifting one hand from the steering wheel, Joe Dana pinched the place between his eyes where it throbbed. It was just past ten on a steamy July morning, and he’d pulled over onto the side of the road. Briefly, he’d considered checking into a hotel, catching a shower and a few hours’ sleep first, but he was too close. After going flat out for the past five weeks—the last twenty-two hours of it without sleep—he wanted only to wind things up and go home.

      Wherever home was. At the moment, it was a storage unit in Fort Worth. That and some unfinished plans.

      For the time being, he’d seen enough sheriffs and small-town cops to last him a while. As for women hanging all over him, soaking his shirt with their tears, he could do without those, too.

      He yawned again, inhaling the stale aroma of his own sweat and too many fast-food containers. Once this gig was finished, he was going to the best hotel in town to soak his carcass in hot water for a few hours, send his boots out to be polished, his laundry out to be finished, order in a slab of beef, cooked just the way he liked it, with a basket of fries, a gallon of milk and half-a-gallon of ice cream....

      And then he was going to sleep for a week.

      The slip of paper with instructions to the Bayard woman’s house said turn right off Highway 158 onto the first dirt road past Frenchman’s Creek; pass a mobile home on the left, a log tobacco barn on the right, go a mile farther and look for a mailbox mounted on a busted hay-rake.

      “Can’t miss it,” the deputy had said. “Last place on the road. County don’t gravel past there. She wanted for something? Heard she worked in a bank in town till she moved to Davie County a few months back. I went and got a raccoon out of her attic, first week she moved in. Seemed like a real nice woman, but these days you never know, do you?”

      No, thought Joe, you never know. He didn’t know if she was the brains of the organization—if there even was an organization, instead of just a one-man scam—or one more in a long line of tearful victims.

      He did know that the eighteenth-century jade vase she’d described in The Antique and Artifact Trader was a part of the collection he’d been tracking all the way from Dallas. He’d picked up the trail in Amarillo, lost it in Guymon, found it again in Tulsa and chased it all the way to North Carolina. Along the way, he’d checked out every pawn shop, every law enforcement office and heard more sob stories than any broken-down ex-cop needed to hear when he was officially retired.

      He had a hunch about this one, though. A strong feeling that he was finally closing in.

      Then again, the feeling could be just the result of too many chili dogs. As for his headache, that was a result of too many hours behind the wheel. His knee was killing him—also the result of driving too long without a break.

      On the other hand, it was usually at a time like this, when he was scraping the bottom of the barrel, that his luck suddenly took a turn for the

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