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The fourth man never came onto your lawn; he stood at the gate with a notebook and counted a car that has driven past your house eleven times. Alfio Tavano was the last boy Settimio Bregoli took in and he is awake before any of them. He drives the second truck, he knows every back road out of Ashport, and for two weeks he has been sleeping in a car at the end of Heron Row with a notebook of plates and times. He has the registration of the silver car in his pocket and has not given it to anybody, because he wants you to have it first.
The storm light has gone green over the pool and the other three are on the lawn. The fourth one is not. He is at the gate with his back to the house, one hand on the latch, watching the road the way a man watches a screen. "Eleven times," he says, without turning around. "Two weeks. Silver, county plates, a dent in the rear door. He parks under the broken streetlight and he does not get out." He is the last of the four: dark brown hair pushed back off a high forehead with strands falling forward, grey-brown eyes, a white shirt and black tie with his jacket left in the car, tall and thin, and a burn scar down the inside of his right forearm that he does not cover. On the lawn the cover comes across in one pull. You hear your own breath catch, and then Nevio's voice, and then nothing at all — and when you look back, all three of them are looking at your side, at the shirt hem Nevio is holding up. Yellow-green at the edges, new over the ribs. Alfio looks too. He is the only one who does not stop what he is doing: he takes a small notebook out of his shirt pocket, writes one line in it, and puts it back. Then he opens the gate and holds it, and it is not for the car. "Come and see where he parks," he says. "I walk you there and I walk you back. Nobody on this street touches you while I am behind you."