“What else are we going to do with our time?”

“I don’t know. Watch TV and shit. Anything but this.”

“What would you be doing back home, a day like today?”

“Find some action. Hang.” Lloyd made a few desultory passes with the paintbrush. “Why can’t we use a roller at least? Go a lot faster.”

“Roller won’t cover shingles. We’ll be able to use it on the concrete, though, on the other side. And when we get to that part, it will seem so easy it won’t be like work at all.”

“Were you a teacher?”

Crow was flattered. “No, but it interests me. I think sometimes of going back to school, getting a certificate.” Only how would I explain to Tess that I could afford it?

“Yeah, that sounds like teacher shit.” Lloyd pitched his voice high and took on a bright, prissy tone. “‘Really, it’s not that hard, boys and girls, if you just try.’ That kind of thing. They was always saying shit like that.”

“Was there anything you liked about school?”

“It was warm,” Lloyd said pointedly. “They didn’t make us stand outside in the cold, painting shit.”

“Look, if we talk, pass the time, this will go a lot faster.”

“I got nothing to talk about with you. Seems to me talking is what got me here.”

“Here” was actually beautiful in its way, a short, old-fashioned stretch of boardwalk in the town of Fenwick, just above the state line and Maryland ’s far-busier resort, Ocean City. The early-spring light, the empty beach, the careworn buildings-they made Crow’s fingers itch with the desire to paint again, although not in this way, applying coats of latex to the battered surfaces of Frank’s FunWorld.

“World” was a little grandiose for this bunkerlike rectangle that contained one bank of Skee-Ball machines, several video machines, a single Whac-A-Mole, and a couple of booths for the hand-eye coordination games that spit out tickets good for schlocky items at the so-called Redemption Center. The rides were geared toward small fry for the most part-little motorcycles that went ’round and ’round, little boats that went ’round and ’round (although their basin was dry), and a ringless, currently horseless merry-go-round. The only concession to anyone above age ten was a bumper-car ride, with the obligatory You Must Be This Tall sign. They would have to paint that, too, Mr. Keyes had said. That and the clown’s face. Well, Crow had just complained to Kitty that he never got to paint anymore.

“No, I mean we could just talk talk. About life. Or movies and books. What do you like?”

“I like them dinosaur books and movies,” Lloyd said. “ Jurassic Park .”

“Michael Crichton. So you like futuristic plots, science fiction.”

Lloyd made a face, but Crow decided it was the word “science” that was putting him off.

“You liked Minority Report, right?”

“The one with the Top Gun dude?”

“Yeah, sure. Anyway, the guy who wrote that also wrote this one called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which they made into a Harrison Ford movie. Bladerunner.”

“Bladerunner’s a better title.”

“Maybe.” Crow began with bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his mood organ, his argument with his wife, Iran, whose name confused Lloyd no end. Crow’s memory was shaky at first, and he sometimes conflated film and book, but slowly the beloved story came back to him in detail, almost every sentence intact.

Once the mix-up over Iran ’s name was cleared up, it wasn’t apparent if Lloyd was listening. Then he asked a question about midway through, a clarification of some plot point. Other than that, he was quiet and thoughtful. The wind seemed to settle down and the sun grew stronger, so the work wasn’t quite as hard on their exposed hands. Before they knew it, they had finished scraping and painting most of the shingles.

“That guy write any other stories?”

“A few,” Crow said.

When the wind kicked up as predicted and they had to suspend painting for the day, Crow prevailed on Edward to come to the library with them. He was paranoid enough to want to avoid using his own card to check out materials, even if it turned out that Delaware and Maryland had some sort of reciprocity agreement between their library systems. A silver-haired volunteer with an accent that reminded Crow of his Virginia roots showed them the library’s books-on-tape, which included several unabridged editions. With the tapes running up to twelve hours, they couldn’t get through more than two in a week of work, and it was hard for Crow to imagine they would be in this limbo much longer than that. He encouraged Lloyd to make one of the selections. Lloyd picked Stephen King’s The Stand, despite Crow’s subtle lobbying for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. “No girls,” Lloyd had said. Crow chose Robert Parker’s Early Autumn, then picked up several books as well-Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which Lloyd seemed to find mildly intriguing after being assured it was the basis for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown.

“That was kind of conspicuous,” Edward Keyes said when they were back in Fenwick, sitting down to a lunch of warm soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, made on the hot plate in Frank’s office. Crow had considered his own appetite remarkable until he watched Lloyd consume four sandwiches, three glasses of sweet tea, and most of the Utz chips in under ten minutes.

“What? Choosing Stephen King and Robert Parker? Or buying a boom box with a tape deck to play them?”

“The three of us going up to the South Coastal Library. Me getting a library card after living here almost twenty years without needing one, then helping some white kid and some black kid check out books on tape. They’ll be talking about that for months, up to the library.”

In Baltimore fashion he pronounced it “lie-berry.” The very sound of Edward’s vowels made Crow a little homesick.

“It’s not as if anyone is looking for us,” Crow said. “Not in this, um, configuration. True, the authorities are keen to find Lloyd. Maybe,” he added hurriedly, noting Lloyd’s panicky look. “But as far as everyone else is concerned, I’m down south, looking for bands to book at the Point.”

“I told Spike I’d take you in, no questions asked, and I’m not asking any. I’m just making a few commonsense observations. You’re supposed to be laying low. What you did today-that was about as laying low as a mallard tap-dancing at the edge of a duck blind.”

“Okay, so we won’t go to the library again. We probably won’t need to. I’m sure we’ll have this sorted out in less than a week.”

“No hurry,” Edward said. “It’s not like I’m going to run out of work for you two to do. You might not be able to paint in this breeze, but there’s plenty of other stuff to do around here.”

Crow had been afraid of that.

Jenkins decided to take Gabe to a restaurant where he still had some residual drag, dating back to his first tour of duty in Baltimore. McCafferty’s was a Mount Washington steak house, sort of the Palm Lite, with caricatures of Baltimore celebrities hanging on its walls. “ Baltimore celebrities”-now, there was a phrase that could never be used without invoking in-the-air quotation marks. But the steaks were excellent and the location obscure, so the likelihood of being overseen or overheard was practically nil.

“What do you think?” Jenkins asked Gabe, who was studying the caricatures with what appeared to be a mix of yearning and contempt. He was a New Yorker. Well, a New Jersey kid, but the biggest snobs often came from across the river. He probably wanted to be up on that wall, but felt sheepish about it, as if he were aiming too low.

“It’s a good New York strip, although a little pinker than I normally like. Restaurants just don’t believe you when you ask for medium, but it’s what I prefer.”