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sir. Or he wouldn’t have any cash to bring back with him.”
    Presser laughed his approval. “Come in a little before noon tomorrow.”
    He bought the three-hundred-dollar Dodge off a Tampa lot late on Monday afternoon, the thirteenth day of April. He didn’t want to arrive in Ramona after dark, so that evening he drove down as far as Sarasota and found a second-class motel south of the city on the Tamiami Trail. Ever since he left Washington he had been trying to fit himself into the part he would play.
    That night, when he was ready for bed, he carefully inspected the stranger in the bathroom mirror. The sandy hair had been cropped short and the gray at the temples was now practically invisible. The eyes were a pale gray-blue. It was a long face, subtly stamped with the melancholy of lonely tasks. A big nose and a stubborn shelving of jaw. A sallow facial texture that took a deep tan and kept it. Twisty scar at the left corner of the broad mouth. A flat, hard, rangy body, with big feet and knobbed wrists and big freckled hands.
    He studied the stranger and said quite softly, “Bangedaround here and there. Have driven shovels and Euclids and cats. And some deep-well work.”
    The face looked back at him, passive, somewhat secretive, with a hidden pride and hint of wildness.
    He stretched out in the dark and listened to the trucks go by just beyond his window. There was a band of moonlight in the room. And air scented with diesel fuel and jasmine. This was home land. And different. Sarasota had turned from sleepy village to busy tourist center. Ramona would be changed too. But not as much. It was miles off the Tamiami Trail.
    Tomorrow he would drive into town, right down Bay Street. His hands were sweaty. He could hear the knocking of his heart. And he was a kid in a cell in Davis, wondering what they were going to do to him.
    At ten o’clock on Tuesday morning he turned off Route 41 onto State Road 978, moving slowly through the bright hot morning, through soaring throngs of mosquito hawks, through flat scrub land with occasional oak hammocks and some tall stands of slash pine. The last time he had come over this road he had been going the other way, fast, in a back seat between two deputies, dog-sick and trying not to sniffle. They had stopped to let him be sick at the side of the road while the deputies talked in soft slow voices about the hunting season. He remembered wondering if they were wishing he’d try to run.
    About four miles from town he came upon the first change. A huge tract had been cleared and shell roads had been put in, but now the scrub was growing up again. A big faded sign said that it was
Ramona Heights. Florida Living at a Reasonable Price. Big Quarter-Acre Lots at $300. Ten Dollars Down. Title Insurance. See Your Broker
. The roads were named after the states of the union, and the road signs were so faded as to be almost illegible. He could see a few scattered houses,small cinder-block structures painted in brave bright colors.
    Farther on he came on new houses where it had all been pasture land, and then some drive-ins and motels and a small shopping section. More houses, and a new school of blond stone and glass, with the yellow buses ranked outside it. And then, ahead of him, he could see where the trees started, the big live oaks, bearded with Spanish moss, that shaded the east end of Bay Street. They were the memorial oaks, planted right after the first World War, and to him they had always marked the edge of town.
    He drove along the shade of Bay Street, past the old frame houses and the old stucco houses of the boom of long ago, and he read the forgotten names of the side streets. And then he was back in sunlight again, where the street widened, looking along the three blocks of the business center toward the blue water of Ramona Bay, bisected by the causeway and old wooden bridge that, as a continuation of Bay Street, provided access to Ramona Key and Ramona Beach.
    The old hotel was