8456893456983

count the Cross girl out completely. She’s just around the corner.” Jimmy Numbers made a swirling
gesture on the touchpad and the three pictures zipped into a row. Written below each in curly script
was MY SCHOOL MEMORIES.
Crow studied them. “Is anyone going to tip to the fact that you’ve been filching pictures of little
girls off of Facebook, or something? Because that sets off all kinds of warning bells in Rubeland.”
Jimmy looked offended. “Facebook, my ass. These came from the Frazier Middle School files,
pipelined direct from their computer to mine.” He made an unlovely sucking sound. “And guess
what, a guy with access to a whole bank of NSA computers couldn’t follow my tracks on this one.
Who rocks?”
“You do,” Crow said. “I guess.”
“Which one do you think it is?”
“If I had to pick . . .” Crow tapped Abra’s picture. “She’s got a certain look in her eyes. A steamy
look.”
Jimmy puzzled over this for a moment, decided it was dirty, and guffawed. “Does it help?”
“Yes. Can you print these pictures and make sure the others have copies? Particularly Barry. He’s
Locator in Chief on this one.”
“I’ll do it right now. I’m packing a Fujitsu ScanSnap. Great little on-the-go machine. I used to
have the S1100, but I swapped it when I read in Computerworld—”
“Just do it, okay?”
“Sure.”
Crow picked up the magazine again and turned to the cartoon on the last page, the one where you
were supposed to fill in the caption. This week’s showed an elderly woman walking into a bar with a
bear on a chain. She had her mouth open, so the caption had to be her dialogue. Crow considered
carefully, then printed: “Okay, which one of you assholes called me a cunt?”
Probably not a winner.
The Winnebago rolled on through the deepening evening. In the cockpit, Nut turned on the
headlights. In one of the bunks, Barry the Chink turned and scratched at his wrist in his sleep. A red
spot had appeared there.
4
The three men sat in silence while Abra went upstairs to get something in her room. Dave thought of
suggesting coffee—they looked tired, and both men needed a shave—but decided he wasn’t going to
offer either of them so much as a dry Saltine until he got an explanation. He and Lucy had discussed
what they were going to do when Abra came home some day in the not-too-distant future and
announced that a boy had asked her out, but these were men, men, and it seemed that the one he didn’t
know had been dating his daughter for quite some time. After a fashion, anyway . . . and wasn’t that
really the question: What sort of fashion?
Before any of them could risk starting a conversation that was bound to be awkward—and perhaps
acrimonious—there came the muted thunder of Abra’s sneakers on the stairs. She came into the room
with a copy of The Anniston Shopper. “Look at the back page.”
Dave turned the newspaper over and grimaced. “What’s this brown dreck?”
“Dried coffee grounds. I threw the newspaper in the trash, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so
I fished it out again. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.” She pointed to the picture of Bradley Trevor
in the bottom row. “And his parents. And his brothers and sisters, if he had them.” Her eyes filled
with tears. “He had freckles, Daddy. He hated them, but his mother said they were good luck.”