Six months before, a drug-money courier had skipped with the cash he had been carrying between New York and Chicago. Dain found him in two days on the Caribbean island of Curacao, and had a lot of sleepless nights over the man’s unknown fate. But it got him a rep. What cemented it was a Mafia don’s private pilot who had testified against his boss and had gone into the federal Witness Relocation Program two years before. In seventeen days, Dain found him on a fishing boat in Alaska. After that he had more of his curiously specialized work than he could handle, and in the intervening months had really become much more the image he projected: harder, colder, more indifferent to the fate of those he found. Still plenty of sleepless nights, but not over them. They were all scum. Just not the scum he was seeking. Then, a year later almost to the day, Dain’s game began—although he didn’t know it at the time. It was 9:01 a.m.
