“The offer stands.”

Barbour says, “I’ll be there.”

Simet looks to the rest of the council. “How about it, folks? At least we could end in agreement.”

There is talk of this being highly irregular, but in fairly short order agreement is reached. If Chris Coughlin can outlast Mike Barbour in the water, the members of the swim team get their letters.

Back in Simet’s office, I congratulate him on his abilities as a thespian. This is a better deal than the original. Chris Coughlin has been in the water every day for three months. He was a pretty good little swimmer before he started; it was Chris who gave me the idea for all this in the first place. I don’t care what kind of athlete Barbour is, he won’t last. If you’re going to be a swimmer, you gotta swim.

While we were at State, Rich Marshall turned up the heat, calling the house from pay phones all over town and slamming down the phone when he heard a voice that wasn’t Alicia’s. Alicia agreed not to answer under any circumstances, and she was holding to her word, though she said the rings themselves were starting to sound threatening, as if he were able to turn the bell inside the phone malicious. So this afternoon Mom is at work and Dad is in the garage working on some bikes, she picks it up on the first ring, and lo and behold, guess who. He says if she’ll meet him with the kids just once more, he’ll leave her alone for good. He’s in his contrite mode, begging that a man should be allowed to see his sons. They argue about whether she’ll bring Heidi, but in the end she has to, or Heidi will tell my parents they’re gone. She hollers to Dad out in the garage that she’s going to take the kids up into the trees in the large vacant lot behind the house to make a snowman, and loads them up.

By the time Dad figures out they’re not in the vacant lot, there’s no way to track them down, so he calls the cops and waits. It’s after dinner when they come home. Alicia lies and says she decided to take the kids to buy some toys at a little secondhand toy store about three miles from the house. When Mom asks her to produce the toys, she can’t, and Thing Two says, “We saw Daddy!” Heidi sits in the wooden rocker over by the fireplace, thumb crammed into her mouth to the hilt, staring at the fire.

Dad tells Alicia she’d better pack her stuff, because when he reports to her caseworker in the morning, she’ll surely have to move out, and Alicia goes into meltdown, sobbing and begging for another chance. Thing One and Thing Two gather around her and kind of pet her head; Heidi never gets out of the chair.

And then the phone rings.

Dad picks it up to the click of the handset being slammed down. When Rich started calling over the weekend, Dad researched the locations of the phone booths through the phone company as the numbers popped up on Caller ID. Tonight he puts a piece of paper by the phone and traces Rich’s movements. By the tenth or eleventh call, a pattern appears.

Dad gets the video camera out of the closet and picks up his cell phone. “Plug a phone and a Caller ID gadget into the computer line,” he tells me. “When you see my cell phone number, pick up. It should come right on the heels of a pay phone call on the other line.”

My mom asks what he’s doing.

“I’m gonna get him on this no-contact order,” he says. “It’s not valid for Alicia now, because she was the one who broke it, but it’s good for us. The camera records the time of the shot, and Caller ID does the same. I’ll zoom in on him and take it to the cops. Let him cool his heels in the slammer for a few more weekends.”

Mom says, “John Paul, why don’t you just call the police and let them do this?”

“Because they don’t do it. It’s low priority until after he hurts someone, and truthfully, Rich Marshall has too many friends on the force. He’s been getting away with crap for years.” He moves toward the door with determination. “We should have hit him with everything we had back when he shot the deer out from under T. J.”

Mom tells him to be careful as Heidi comes through the kitchen door, one hand dripping soapsuds, the other dripping blood. Mom rushes to her. “Heidi, what happened?”

“It works!” Heidi says, touching her raw forearm.

Mom takes a Brillo pad from her other hand.

I close my eyes. “She found something to take the brown off. Goddamn it!”

“Who told you to do this?” Dad says.

Heidi doesn’t look up, runs her fingers over her forearm. “Daddy Rich.”

Dad’s out the door.

Mom and Alicia take Heidi to clean up her arm, while Mom tells Alicia this is her doing. I haven’t seen my mother this pissed since I peed on the hot steam radiator when I was five.

As if the minor gods in charge of jerks are doing their job, the telephone starts ringing from phone booths at about ten-minute intervals, which means Rich has gone into dumb-shit mode, driving directly from one to the next. I call Dad on the cell phone and we follow him. “Just look for that stupid red dually,” I tell him. “Very photogenic automobile.”

He says, “How’s Heidi?”

“Georgia’s on her way over. She’s okay, I think. I mean, shit, it’s hard to tell. Mom and Alicia are fixing her arm.”

The line goes dead.

There is a certain way my dad gets that makes you nervous; kind of the opposite of his Zen, let-it-be self, and this cold, get-the-job done countenance is a good indicator.

The main-line phone rings three more times without a follow-up call from Dad, then on the fourth they ring almost simultaneously. “Hey,” I say.

“Is the phone ringing?”

“Yup.”

“Got him,” Dad says. “I’ll get him on tape a couple more times. Be sure the Caller ID registers time and date.”

I check it. “It is. Dad?”

“What?”

“Then what?”

“Then I’m going to have a little talk with Rich Marshall about how to treat kids.”

“Where are you?”

“Never mind, T. J. He’s already got the racial thing going with you. I don’t want you anywhere near this.”

“Okay,” I say. “But tell me where you are anyway, just in case something happens, and I need to call the cops.”

Dad knows me too well. “I’ve got my cell phone right here. If I need cops, I’ll call cops.”

Shit.

“You wait there and make sure the technology is working.”

We have Call Waiting on both lines, so I can use the phone while I’m waiting for Dad to call again, and I do that to call AT &T to track down the pay phone locations, but those guys are nine-to-fivers and I would have to “push 1, 2, or 3” a whole bunch of times just to find out they will be with me tomorrow.

The next call comes from Rich, followed quickly by Dad.

“He’s calling,” I say. “Turn on that camera and make him famous.”

“No sooner said than done,” Dad says. “One more for safety’s sake.” And the line goes dead.

But my daddy’s not so smart as him thinks, as Chris Coughlin might say, because I recognize the next number that comes up from having given it to Carly’s dad about ten times one night when I wanted her to call me back at Wolfy’s. I don’t know what’ll go down when Dad and Rich Marshall come face-to-face, but if it’s at Wolfy’s, Dad could easily be outnumbered by a whole lot of folks with Rich’s sensibilities, so I’m moving down the road in my speedy Corvair in the time it takes me to tell Mom to watch the phones. She wants to call the cops, but I convince her not to crank this up bigger than it needs to be as I’m walking out the door. The look in my father’s eyes when he saw Heidi’s arm keeps my foot heavy on the pedal.

Wolfy’s is less than a mile from the house, and Dad is putting the camera away as I pull into the lot, gets almost to the door before he sees me.

“Goddamn it, T. J., I told you to stay there.”

I look through the front window at Rich talking to Mike Barbour and a couple of his friends. I tell him I’m just here for crowd control.