Chapter 5

Watson Park wasn’t quite a suburb but thanks to the psychiatric hospital, it wasn’t quite a four-way stop on the map, either. It took a little while to navigate through streets that were both familiar and not. The whole town looked like a double exposure. One half was the bare bones he remembered. The other was new and just different enough to mess him up once or twice. The tattoo parlor on the corner of Carpenter was gone, for instance, replaced by a Circle K. Without the familiar landmark, Calvin completely missed turning onto Wheaton.

It took him nearly forty minutes to pull into Krauss’s parking lot. When he coasted to a stop, he sighed when he saw Eli hop out of one of the two pickups parked along the sidewalk. He hadn’t expected Eli to beat him there. Now he might have to actually eat with the man. Maybe he should have suggested finding a bar and drowning in beer as they ate, but that would have turned dinner into an all-night affair.