2

            Outside the SUV, the air around Anthony had turned as thick as syrup.  It jelled in his lungs, made it difficult to breathe.  He examined the letter again.  Who had left this for him?  Was this for real?

            He looked back and forth across the parking lot, and to the street beyond, and saw nothing of interest.  People were going about their business.  No one paid attention to him.

            And how had the letter-writer gotten into his truck?  He always locked the doors.

            He looked inside the truck again.  An object dangled from the short beam that supported the rearview mirror: a canary-yellow fishing lure, crafted in the shape of a minnow. 

            It was the exact same kind that he and his father had used on their last fishing trip. 

            His knees turned rubbery.  He slumped onto the driver’s seat, dragged the door shut.

            The heat inside was smothering.  He inserted the key in the ignition—his hand trembled so badly it took four tries to fit it into the slot—and twisted.  The engine rumbled, the air conditioner blasting into life. 

            He fumbled open the glove box and withdrew the Beretta M9 stored inside, and a magazine of ammo.  He slammed the magazine into the pistol—it took an uncharacteristic two taps to get it into the well—racked the slide, and gripped the gun in his lap with both hands.

            Better, that was better.

            Angling the muzzle toward the floor, he surveyed the parking lot again.  But again, no one was watching him.  The messenger, whoever it was, was gone.

            His galloping heartbeat finally slowed.  He placed the gun in close reach on the passenger seat. 

            In his haste to arm himself, the letter had slid onto the floor.  He picked it up.

Read Psalm 37:32.

            Up until the time he was fifteen, his family had used to attend church every Sunday.  He hadn’t cracked open a Bible since those days, so not surprisingly, didn’t have one on hand.  But he had his iPhone.  He unclipped the handheld from his belt holster and keyed in commands with his thumbs to access the Web browser.

            He found a Web site that housed the entire text of the Old and New Testaments.  He pulled up the book of Psalm, thirty-seventh chapter, and read the thirty-second verse on the small color display.

The wicked watcheth the righteous, and seeketh to slay him.

            Something that felt like an electrical charge leaped through his heart.

            “What the hell is this?” he said.

The wicked watcheth the righteous . . .

            According to the cops, the high-velocity bullet that had torn into his father’s heart, killing him in less than a minute, had been due to a hunting accident.  Some Einstein stalking deer or quail had erroneously loosed a shot across the lake that happened to smack into his father’s chest.  No one had ever stepped forward to claim responsibility, and the case was summarily closed.

            Anthony thought the hunting accident story was about as plausible as the idea that Tupac Shakur was still alive. 

            He remembered what he had seen: the shadowy figure running through the trees, like someone fleeing the scene of a crime.  It hadn’t been a hunter.

            It had been a sniper.

            Old grief surfaced in his throat like stomach acid, stung the back of his mouth.  He swallowed thickly, wiped cold sweat away from his brow.  

            The police had dismissed his eyewitness account as the overheated imaginings of a shell-shocked kid; his testimony wasn’t even included in the official record of the case.  The investigation was concluded so quickly it was as if someone behind the scenes with a helluva lot of pull had engineered a swift resolution.

The wicked watcheth . . .

            As farfetched as it seemed when remembering the ordinary, family-oriented man his father had been, Anthony believed that his dad was murdered because of something he knew, or had done.  His dad had acted so damn strangely that morning, had been ruminating on some troubling matter that he wouldn’t talk about, and Anthony clearly recalled his father’s puzzling statement that, “they’re serious about keeping their promise to make things tough for you if you cross the line . . .”

            Who had Dad been talking about?  What line had he crossed?

            Questioning his mom about what Dad might have meant hadn’t helped at all.  Blitzed with grief, she’d forever refused to talk about Dad’s death. 

            He read the note again.  As much as he wanted to believe that this person could lead him to the truth, experience suggested that this letter could be a hoax.

            That past March, Anthony had been featured in a piece in The New York Times about bestselling crime novelists.  The writer of the article had dug into Anthony’s background, learned of his father’s death, and asked him about it.  Anthony had unloaded on him, frankly expressing his doubts in the hunting accident story and declaring that, some day, he would see to it that the guilty party would be brought to justice.

            In the days after the story ran, he was deluged him with dozens of e-mails from people claiming to have knowledge of the case.  A couple of crackpots even confessed to the killing and begged for his forgiveness. 

            On the advice of his attorney, he forwarded the messages to a private investigator.  The investigator conducted research, and discovered that none of the claims and tips was valid.  Not one.

            This letter might be just another waste of time.  The initial flood of messages had stopped a week or so after the news story’s publication, but every now and then, some nut case stumbled across the article online and sent him a rambling, ridiculous message.     

            But two things about this one were different.  For one, none of the bogus people had ever been bold enough to break into his car and leave a letter. 

            He plucked the fishing lure off the rearview mirror.

            And how could they know about the lure?  How could they have known this was the same kind they’d been using that morning when he’d landed that prize bass?  That detail wasn’t in the news stories that reported the “accident,” wasn’t in the official police records.

            “Just another crackpot, Tony,” he said, in a shaky voice. 

            Hope was dangerous.  Hope led to disillusionment, crushed dreams.  He had a great life with Lisa, an island of quiet happiness they’d built for themselves, and if he started nurturing hope on this thing, he was setting himself up for heartache, he was going to reopen some painful old wounds, and he didn’t know if he could handle any more.

            He weighed the letter and the lure in his hands.  There was a trash can on the other side of the parking lot. 

            On impulse, he got out of the truck and marched to the garbage can.  Poised at the edge of the basket, he hesitated.  Read the letter again.

            To learn the truth, be online today @ 18:00. 

            It was as if the messenger realized the depths of his cynicism and doubt, and understood the only way to reel him in deeper was to tempt him with another clue. 

            In spite of himself, it was working.

            “Man, you’re a sucker, you know that?” he muttered.

            He turned away from the trash and got in his truck.

            He was probably going to regret falling for what was almost certainly a cruel prank.  But the thing about hope was that it never quite faded away.