“Man, I love this. I could do this for a living,” I muttered. I made a U-turn, drove back past a kid in a striped shirt and shorts, who had a bicycle helmet on his head, and who shook a finger at us and then laughed.

“That kid worries me,” LuEllen said, looking back at the kid in the street. “Why’s he walking around in this sun with a helmet on? Why doesn’t he have a bicycle?”

WE ALL went together to the Willowby apartment, a little cluster, a scrum, three sweating, cranky people in clothes that suddenly looked too good, knocked on the door and got nothing. We were standing there, listening for anything inside, and LuEllen said, “Now what?”

“Try again later,” I said, and stepped back. We were headed reluctantly back to the car when a woman pushed open a door on an adjoining apartment, sweeping dust out on the sidewalk. She fussed at it and then called, “You looking for somebody?” She wasn’t actually sweeping anything-the broom was an excuse to see what we were doing.

John stepped toward her and put out his best official vibration. He was wearing slacks and a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and looked like he might just have taken off a sport coat in the heat. He said, “We’re looking for Rachel Willowby.”

“She in trouble again?” The woman’s head was cocked away from us.

“No. Not exactly. But we would like to talk with her. Have you seen her?”

“Playing hooky again,” the woman speculated. Her eyes hit me, then went to LuEllen, and finally back to John. “Takes three of you, now.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re really not allowed to talk about it,” John said. “Do you know where she might be?”

Another long pause, but John’s official stare got on top of her. “She’s home. Probably hidin’ under the bed.”

“Where’s her mother?”

“Her mother took off. Two months ago. I wouldn’t tell you about the girl, ’cept I don’t know what she eats, and she ain’t gonna be let live there much longer. It’s been rented. She sneaks in now.”

“Thank you.” John walked straight back to the door and knocked on it, then tried the knob. The door was locked, but was so loose in its frame that he put a shoe against it, pushed, and it popped open. He called, “Rachel? We know you’re home.” A moment later, “There you are.” He stepped inside, out of sight, then stepped back to the door, looked at the woman, and said, “Thank you,” and to us, “Come on in.”

WE ALL trooped inside and found ourselves looking at a skinny little girl in shorts and a tube top. She wore big unfashionable plastic-rimmed glasses and had a ferociously unhappy look on her face. The house was unlit, with most of the blinds pulled, so she was working in semidarkness. The place smelled of onions and sweat. I could see one piece of furniture in the front two rooms, and that was a kitchen table. A laptop sat on the table, with a wire leading to a telephone. The laptop screen showed three open windows; a digital counter blinked in the lower right corner. She said, “That ol’ bitch gonna get her snoopy nose cut off, one of these days.”

John shook his head and said, “We need to talk.”

“I’m sick.” A sick look slipped onto her face. “I really am.”

Fuck it: she was a hacker. I said, “We’re not from the schools. We’re not from the cops. I’m a hack and I want to know what you have to do with blowing Bobby out of the system.”

That stopped her. She looked at me, forgot the others. “Where’d he go?”

“We don’t know,” I lied. “We’re part of his backup group. He’s not at his house anymore, and something you did caused the trouble.”

“Not me,” she said shrilly. She stepped protectively toward her laptop, eyes wide. “I hardly even know the man.”

“He sent you the laptop,” I said. “You’re the only person who could’ve given anything away.”

“I did not.”

“You did something. You might not even know it.” I bent over the laptop, looking at the screen. “What’re you doing here, running a dictionary? What’re you trying to get into?”

She flinched, put a protective hand out toward her screen. “I didn’t give shit to nobody.” She was loud, defiant, and still pretty small; I loomed over her.

“Then somebody came over and got an address from you. Got it off the FedEx package. Who was that?”

Her tongue curled over her bottom lip and she glanced at LuEllen and John and saw nothing but more adults, all ganged up on her. So she just said it. “That was Jimmy James Carp. He said he was gonna get me a laptop from Bobby and he did.”

“Where does he live?”

She shrugged, and relaxed a notch: she felt the blame shifting. “I don’t know. He used to be a teacher up to Adams and then he moved to Washington, D.C., and I only saw him when he said he came back to visit his momma. He told me to call him if I got the computer. I called him when I got it and he came over.”

“Came over right away?”

“Next day.”

“White man or black man?” John asked.

“White man. Really white.”

“You know his phone number?”

“I got it on my machine. You gonna do something to Jimmy James?”

“Talk to him. We’re trying to find Bobby.”

She went to the machine and her fingers danced across it. She was a hack, all right; the best way to tell is to watch the hands. Hacks are so deep into it that they essentially will a computer to act, their thoughts appearing on the screen as if by magic, the fingers working by reflex and so quickly it’s like watching a spider’s spinners as it weaves a web. In a few seconds, she’d closed down her online connection so we wouldn’t see it, dumped whatever program she was using, called up the Address Book from the Windows accessories program, and located Carp’s number.

As she did it, I said, “If you call this Carp guy and tell him we’re coming over, he’s gonna hide out, and we’re not gonna find out what happened to Bobby. The only reason he got you the computer was so he could find Bobby. Carp might pretend, but he’s no friend of yours.”

“I know,” she said grudgingly. She poked one of the laptop keys and the address program vanished. She looked back up at me; her face was thin, hungry. “He’s a creep. I wondered why he helped me. He didn’t even know me when he worked at Adams and then I see him and he’s all, ‘Hey, Rachel, how are you doin’?’ I thought he wanted to fuck me or something and then he goes on about computing, you know?”

“He’s a hack?”

“He knows some shit,” she admitted.

“Jimmy James is a strange name,” LuEllen ventured. “Is that his real name?”

“That’s what everybody called him,” she said. “I think it’s real.”

“I’LL tell you what,” I said. “If you don’t call Carp and tell him that we’ve been looking for him, then I’ll give you three phone numbers.”

“To what?” She was interested. Good phone numbers, to hacks, are like little diamonds.

“Won’t tell you. And I won’t give them to you until after we talk to Carp. But if you’re any good on that laptop, you’ve been looking for them.”

She considered that for a moment and then said, “What do you know about Wal-Mart?”

“What do you need?”

“I’d like to get good access into their computer system. Just to see how it works.”

“What do you have now?”

“Can’t get further than the front end.”

She had a friend who worked at a Wal-Mart somewhere, I thought. “One of the ways hacks get caught is when they try to use a computer system to deliver inventory to people who’ll steal it. Inventory systems are pretty carefully protected from beginners.”

“I just want to look at the system,” she said sullenly.

“I don’t know about Wal-Mart, but I can suggest a piece of social engineering that’ll get you in.”

“Like what?”

“If I tell you, you’re on your own,” I said. “And you can’t call Carp.”

“Let’s have it,” she said. “And I’ll want those three numbers, too.”