And then the fight didn’t happen. It was a windy, blast-furnace day. First Cancer was there, waiting for Hosea. When he left, Hosea showed up. Then they were both there, and ready, but Sidney called out from inside with some work: a U had stopped breathing on the kitchen floor. He had to be taken out. He was all quaky and blue. You did not have people dying in the house. It was best to save their lives, or have them die somewhere else. Either way, you took them out. Cancer and Hosea were both called into that, and they helped carry the U out and put him in a car. In the car, the U went ahead and died, so the event became less a drop-off and more a dropping-the-body. You could not just drop a body anywhere or at any time. Bodies were complicated. And the dead body dissipated the charge between Cancer and Hosea.
But not the other boys. That tension had not been released. And the rest of the day, East had to settle them, to separate them, to keep the electricity that had stabbed the air like a knife from cutting into them, from sending them honed at each other. No matter that Hosea and Cancer stood together and let it drop; no matter that a dead man lay in temporary storage, waiting to be cast aside when darkness came. A knife had been thrown up into the air, and the boys would not settle to their work until they saw it land.
There was a gas station. The lights in the cold made the cars gleam like licked suckers. East pumped and paid, and Walter tried calling the number again. Nothing. Nothing had changed. Nobody knew anything more.
They bought hot dogs out of a steamer and drove off.
It seemed they were reaching the end of the world of people. No towns on this road to speak of, only points where the trees peeled away, the road bent, and suddenly there’d be a house on the land, a single light atop a garage; it blazed, filled the yard as they passed, then the trees snapped shut like a curtain behind them. Roads as dark as rivers, absorbent of everything, only the reflectors in their measured rhythm, here, here, here, on posts, and here, here, down the center stripe.
Scuttling eyes disappeared along the edges of the road.
But Walter, having warned East not to ask, was now conversing on how you tracked a man through his credit cards. “Ain’t hard to get someone’s number,” he rambled. “Any waiter can do it, any cashier at a store. If you don’t mess with it, if you aren’t trying to steal, then no one knows you’re watching.”
“So you doing this?” Ty put in. “On the judge?”
The judge. His name lay low in East’s memory.
“I set the account up. I maintained it. Some people never check their shit online. Sometimes you gotta work at it. Sometimes you set it up once, and it works forever.”
“How you learn?”
“Just learned,” said Walter. “Kids at school.”
East watched the inscrutable dark outside. Had to take this break, he reassured himself. It was necessary. Everyone needed to warm up. The night was even colder than the night before at the gun house, when it had snowed. This cold would freeze you. Everyone needed the heat. Everyone needed the food.
They ate the watery hot dogs and wadded the cartons up. No finding the trash bag anymore. East stuffed his into the crack of the seat.
Ty put his feet up on the back of Walter’s chair. “So you’re following the guy’s cards. How come the dude don’t know?”
“Know what?” said Walter.
“Somebody’s watching him.”
“How come he don’t know? Everybody suspects. Nowadays everybody thinks somebody’s on to their shit. But if you ain’t losing money,” he said, “if your money is still, you don’t do anything about it. And we ain’t taking his money.”
Ty said, “If we got a computer, say at a library, could you see him?”
“No.”
“I thought that was the point,” said Ty acidly.
“I know,” said Walter. “It’s complicated, man. We were tracking more than one guy. It ain’t like I had just one password. I don’t know what his was. I ain’t got these all memorized. And we was faking IP addresses, everything. We had a whole setup.”
“What computer did you use?” said Ty.
“At school.”
“No wonder you still in school,” laughed Ty. “Tell me how come Fin ever had you standing yard. You a smart boy.”
East opened his mouth, shut it again. It was more questions than he’d heard Ty ask in years.
Walter replied, “I stood yard so I’d know the job.”
He coasted to a stop. The highway ended at a stop sign. Ahead, a maze of road signs peppered a luminous guardrail that kept cars from hurtling into the woods. Walter had been running squares, East knew from watching the roof compass switching N, E, S, W. Just going around the block, keeping the lake in the middle. And they’d been riding almost two hours.
“We can decide whatever we want,” Walter said.
It was East they were waiting on.
He stirred. It had been easy to say go in the light of the pay phone, tethered some way, however, to LA, to The Boxes. But here in the dark, the van filled with the things he didn’t know.
Something about talking again seemed difficult. “Should we call them again and see what they know?”
Walter shook his head. “Maybe. But not till morning at best. School’s closed. And I don’t even know who’s watching things. I don’t know who’s in jail and who isn’t.”
The turn signal pulsed in the ditch, shotgun side.
“If we went back,” said Walter, “we could see if anything is going on.”
“Back in them pine trees,” East said hopelessly. “With nobody there.”
“Maybe we’d find something,” Walter said. “Maybe if we broke in. Something that would tell us.”