The last thing Travis’s eyes picked out was the notebook. It lay on the deep windowsill behind Nora’s chair, a pen stuck into its spiral binding. Its black card-stock cover was already worn by weeks of use, and the word Scalar was just visible at the lower right corner. Travis had all of half a second to stare at it, and then he was past the door frame and moving on.
Now, some twelve hours later, he sat on the bench on the west end of Monument, trying to avoid the increasingly frequent stares. He turned a page of the comic book, for appearances. Star Wars #10: The Behemoth from Below. On the cover, Han and Chewie were blasting away at a giant green lizard. Travis wondered what a mint copy would be worth thirty-four years from now. Probably about five bucks. Not that he could bring it back with him anyway.
Neither could he bring back Ward’s notebook if he got his hands on it. The plan was simply to hole up somewhere and read the damn thing a hundred times. Read it until he could shut his eyes and recite it word for word. Then he’d snap out of the memory and transcribe the whole thing. Paige had already set up a laptop on the dining room table, the cursor ready and blinking in Microsoft Word.
Travis looked up at the hospital again. He watched people come and go from the two exits he could see.
The lack of a shortcut was trouble, but not disaster.
The lack of a stakeout position was.
It was the one problem he and Paige and Bethany hadn’t been able to plan around. No way to know exactly what he’d find on the north side of Monument Street, in terms of hiding places. In his most optimistic scenario there’d been a Dumpster sticking out of an alley, full to the brim with trash he could hide in and stare out through. No luck there—no Dumpsters or alleys along the north side of the street. Nothing but the unbroken row of buildings.
Travis had seen all of that this morning, then spent the day wandering the city trying to think his way through the problem. As an adult he could’ve solved it any number of ways. Buy a cheap harmonica and a little wooden box and stand there on the sidewalk busking. Wouldn’t matter that he sucked at playing harmonica—it would help push attention away from him, in fact. People would consciously not look.
But even the busking would’ve been unnecessary. A grown man could just walk up and down Monument, from the dig site to either intersection, back and forth all night long. Hours and hours, the same circuit, four hundred feet east and four hundred feet west. If anyone noticed the repetition and found it strange, would they even consider asking him about it? Not likely. People tended to see strangeness as trouble, which in turn they tended to avoid.
But none of those options existed for a ten-year-old.
Shit.
He turned another page of the comic book. Let his eyes drift over the images and words without processing them.
A shadow fell across his lap.
“Excuse me.”
Travis looked up and saw a woman in her thirties, a five-year-old girl in tow. The girl stared at Travis with big eyes and tried to hide behind her mother’s leg.
“Do you need help?” the woman said.
Travis offered a quick smile and shook his head. “I’m good. Thanks.”
Another trick—when you weren’t moving with purpose—was to be direct and certain. Let no ambiguity into your words or your tone.
He turned his eyes back to the comic book and ignored the woman.
The shadow stayed put.
“You’ve been alone here the whole time I’ve been waiting for the bus,” the woman said. “If you need to call someone, I have change. And we can wait here with you if you like—”
“Really, I’m fine,” Travis said, looking up at her again. “My dad always meets me here at six-fifteen sharp. He says it’s a safe spot ’cause it’s busy. I’m just early, that’s all.”
The woman frowned. Looked like she wanted to wait anyway, if only to have a word with his father about this arrangement.
“Seriously,” Travis said, “don’t miss your bus. I’d feel terrible.”
Another frown. The woman started to say something else, but didn’t. The little girl tugged on her hand, gesturing with her whole body back toward Broadway.
The woman exhaled deeply. “I don’t like it,” she said, and then she was gone, back to the knot of people at the intersection.
Her bus came two minutes later, and when it’d left, Travis stood and stuffed the comic book into his pocket. He stood there thinking, getting the mental equivalent of a test pattern. It could be nine hours before Ward staggered out of the hospital, and Travis couldn’t imagine how to stand watch for even thirty minutes.