Hard Way spent the next hour finishing the puzzle (with some help from Google) and then worked his way through his monthly bills. As usual, more was going out than coming in. No amount of cooking the books was going to save this balance sheet.

At 6:30 p.m., Hard Way turned off the green neon OPEN sign in the shack's window and then fired up the ancient John Deere tractor equipped with an even older range ball picker. Gathering up three buckets of balls—that was the extent of the day's business—would take five minutes, tops.

Hard Way immediately spotted what he assumed to be the elderly couple's shots, most of them well short of the 100-yard marker. The picker scooped up the black-striped yellow balls in no time at all. Next, he weaved back and forth to pick up the professor's drives, some of which had almost reached the 225-yard sign. Hard Way had worked with him on his swing that morning. The professor was getting better.

But where were the other balls? He was still missing a large bucket's worth.

Hard Way steered the Deere toward the right edge of the range to check for banana slices, and then to the left edge to look for snap hooks. Nothing.

He put the tractor in neutral and scanned the acreage with his range finder. That's when he saw something in the distance.

"Nah," he said as he jammed the shifter into gear. "Can't be."

Hard Way drove past the 250-yard sign and then the 275-yard marker. When he bought the place, he had added a 300-yard sign that read HIT IT HERE, GET A FREE BUCKET. Nobody ever came close. And just for fun, he had erected a 400-yard marker with a painted bull's-eye and message on it: HIT IT HERE, GET A MASTERS INVITATION. You needed binoculars to read it from the range mats.

But there, at the 400-yard sign, were what looked to be seventy-five or so golf balls: the approximate number that fit into a large bucket. Hard Way turned off the engine, opened the pockmarked metal mesh door to the tractor cage, and walked toward the marker.

The balls were in three areas, as if they were separate herds grazing on the weeds and grass of the range. There were about twenty-five balls just beyond and to the left of the marker. Hard Way walked it off: 413 yards. Another twenty-five or so balls were a yard or two in front and slightly to the left of the sign. The remaining balls were gathered to the right and just past the sign—404 yards, in this case. If Hard Way hadn't known better, he'd have sworn someone had been working on their draw, baby draw, and power fade. The last time he'd seen a player do something like this, it was Tiger Woods. Nobody shaped shots like he did. But this was farther than Tiger ever hit his driver. It looked like a precision bombing exercise. Rory McIlroy and Ludvig Åberg could bomb it. So could Bryson DeChambeau, especially during his distended-stomach experiment phase, when he treated every day as if he were Joey Chestnut at Nathan's, but not like this. This was supernatural.

Hard Way checked the trees lining the right side of the fairway. The branches were barely stirring, and what wind there was had a hurty feel to it. As for roll, forget it; it had rained a day earlier. The ground was soft, the grass high and unmowed.

This was impossible. Nobody could hit a ball this far, especially not one of Hard Way's battered one-piece, rubber-core, Surlyn-covered range balls bought thirdhand. It was like hitting a walnut shell.

Hard Way made another sweep of the rear of the range. Maybe some of his buddies were having a laugh at his expense. But no, nothing. Then Hard Way remembered.

"Far and Sure, my ass," he muttered. "Who the hell was that guy?"

CHAPTER TWO

THREE MONTHS EARLIER, ON A FRIDAY...

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, not another garage sale, Mom."

Laurel Riley spun around from the worn bucket seat of her very used white Odyssey minivan and glared at her eight-year-old son, who glared defiantly back from his perch on his plastic booster seat in the second row. As an elementary school teacher, she was accustomed to precocious kids. But her younger son was in a class by himself.

"Chet, if I could sell you at a garage sale, I'd do it," she said. "But nobody would want you."

"Maybe we can try this morning," Chet said, now staring down at his iPad. "Mrs. Sievers says my diagnostic testing puts me in the top 1 percent. I'd make someone very happy."