The Exterminator

Ray Delgado kills things for a living-roaches, rats, wasps, bedbugs. Ten years, one van, one rule: identify first. You don't spray what you can't see. Then he gets a call about scratching in the walls of a foreclosed house that's been empty for two years, utilities cut, nothing alive inside. The traps come back unsprung with the bait licked clean. The scratching starts answering him back-in his own rhythm. And when the neighboring houses start calling with the same complaint, always on the walls facing the empty house, Ray realizes he's not dealing with pests. He's dealing with something that learns. And it's learning him.