“Use this phone for seventy-two hours,” Crow’s voice said in her ear, and she almost wept at the familiar sound. “Then a new one will arrive. That way, even if they put a trace on your known numbers, they can’t track these calls to a cellular tower and figure out where I am. We’re okay. We’re safe. I’ve been trying to persuade Lloyd to come back on his own and cooperate, but he’s just not ready yet. If I bring him back now, I think all he’ll do is run.”

Collins began rapping on the front door. It was a hard yet matter-of-fact knock, dull, steady, and utterly unnerving. Miata barked and snarled, while the usually silent Esskay gave a high yodel, almost as if in pain. Tess shoved the “safe” phone in the laundry hamper, below some truly disgusting workout clothes that should keep anyone but the most determined searcher at bay. It wouldn’t matter if they came back with a warrant, but it was all she could do for now.

21

“When I was growing up, if we wanted a Jacuzzi, we had to fart in the bathtub.”

“Trading Places,” Crow said. “That movie was made before you were born, Lloyd. I’m surprised you know it.”

Lloyd shrugged, leaned back in the small hot tub. “It was on all the time when I was little. It’s still on all the time. There’s, like, a million movies in the world, but on television it’s always Trading Places, Die Hard, and Pretty Woman.”

The two were soothing their sore muscles at the Clarion, a beachfront hotel south of the Delaware-Maryland line. Ed had long ago arranged a swap of sorts with the hotel’s manager, giving him free passes to FunWorld in exchange for offseason privileges at this small exercise room, with its indoor pool, its hot tub, and a few ancient exercise machines. A gym snob such as Tess would have been appalled by the antiqueness of it all, but it was a fine place to soak at day’s end. Ed told the manager that Crow and Lloyd were his workers, and that was the simple truth, after all. They had put in two days of scraping and painting now. When they weren’t painting, they were applying oil to the dried-out hinges on the ten garage doors that ringed the amusement park. The merry-go-round horses were next in line, waiting to be reunited with their poles.

On the first day of April, the pool area was empty, with not even a lifeguard on duty. But then this whole part of the world felt empty this time of the year. It was pleasant, Crow thought. He wouldn’t mind living here, September through May, where the loudest noise was the ocean and there seemed to be more room in the sky for the light, pale and diffuse. But Tess could never leave Baltimore for more than an extended vacation.

Lloyd looked over at the pool, which had a slide at the shallow end. “I knew they had big water slides, but I didn’t know they had little ones.”

“You like to go to water parks?”

He shook his head. “Been to Great America and seen the wave pool, but I got no use for that.”

“Do you know how to swim, Lloyd?”

He gave an elaborate shrug, as if to suggest that swimming was esoteric or exotic. Crow might as well have asked him if he took ballet lessons or made sushi at home.

“You want to learn?”

“Naw.”

“Why not?”

Lloyd shook his head again, as if Crow were being willfully igorant.

“I could teach you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know, that’s a stereotype.”

“What?”

“African-Americans and swimming.”

“Ain’t my fault.” Said quickly, defensively, as if Lloyd were used to being blamed for all sorts of things that weren’t his fault.

“But you could challenge it. Upend it.”

Lloyd continued to shake his head, uninterested.

“What if knowing how to swim could save your life?”

“How that gonna happen? Flood gonna come down Monument Street one day?”

Even here, more than a hundred miles from East Baltimore, Lloyd still couldn’t imagine a life beyond a small nexus of streets.

“You’re not on Monument Street now. You’re sitting a couple hundred yards from an ocean. And it was only a few months ago that an entire ocean rose up and killed almost two hundred thousand people.”

“I don’t remember nothin’ about how the people died because they didn’t know how to swim.”

Crow laughed. “You’ve got me there. There are some situations you can’t prepare for.”

Lloyd nodded wearily, as if Crow had just realized something that Lloyd had been born knowing.

“When we get to go back?”

“You tell me. We can go back anytime you agree to talk to the police.”

“Uh-huh. That’s gonna get me killed.”

“And going back without talking to the police might get you killed, too. So what’s it going to be?”

“I’m so bored.” He tilted his head back against the lip of the Jacuzzi, stared at the ceiling.

“So you want to go back?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. If I could just go to a club or something, get out for a night.”

“No clubs around here, Lloyd. And we can’t go back to Baltimore just to go clubbing. We could go to the movies, though.”

“Seen all that shit at the Sun ’n’ Surf.”

“Maybe we could find some decent paperbacks at the bookstore up in Bethany Beach.”

Lloyd rolled his eyes. “Man, we listen to books all day. Do we have to read ’em at night, too?”

“Ed said he might finish blowing out the bumper-car machines with the air hose today.”

“He saves all the good jobs for himself,” Lloyd grumbled. “He gets to stay inside, out of the wind, tinker with shit, while we just paint and scrape, scrape and paint.”

“You’re missing the bigger picture, Lloyd. Once the bumper cars are up and running, Ed will need to do some test drives.”

“Now, that,” Lloyd said, “is something I could do.”

Given Lloyd’s experience behind the wheel of the Volvo, Crow somehow doubted that. Then again-no stick shifts on bumper cars. Maybe Lloyd would do better.

“Your finances look pretty shaky,” Gabe Dalesio informed Tess an hour later. She was in an office in the federal courthouse, not an official interrogation room, but that didn’t comfort her.

“It’s been a thin few months, but things are turning around. I started an excellent job today-although you guys pretty much ruined it for me. And the Beacon-Light owes me quite a bit of money.”

“They paid for you to turn over that source? I didn’t think legitimate newspapers played that way.”

“I did a seminar on investigative techniques. The two things aren’t related.” Not directly.

“You were asked to teach their reporters how to report? You think they would have picked someone more successful.”

Tess supposed that Gabe thought this would hurt her feelings. She simply looked away, not even bothering to shrug.

“It’s been established,” Tyner said, “that my client doesn’t have a lot of cash in her accounts. Is that a federal crime now? Is federal enforcement going to be part of the overhaul of Social Security, with citizens being rounded up if they’re not putting away enough for retirement?”

“It’s just I don’t get why she’s carrying her boyfriend and all. Why doesn’t he pitch in?”

“He does what he can. The house is in my name, so I pay the mortgage, and that’s how I want it. But we split everything else.”

“That’s big of him, going dutch when he’s sitting on almost a hundred fifty thousand in his checking account.”

Tess didn’t have to fake her laugh at the bluff. “Don’t be ridiculous. Crow doesn’t have that kind of money.”

Jenkins didn’t literally elbow the young prosecutor aside, but he did square his shoulders back, signaling that the interview was now his. “According to bank records, he deposited that amount in his account on Tuesday, right before his…um, road trip. That was what you told us, wasn’t it? That he went out of town for business?”

Again she had to tell the truth without telling too much. “He’s out of town, and I don’t know where he is.”