Just as he made it to the corner of West Oriole and the highway, the streetlights flickered on.

Oh brother, he thought. I'm really late.

Traffic was steady in both directions, creeping through the standing water. Roy waited impatiently. Every car pushed a wake that splashed against his shins. He didn't care. He was already soaked to the bone.

Spying a gap in the traffic, Roy ventured into the road.

"Watch it!" shouted a voice behind him.

Roy jumped back on the curb and spun around. There was Beatrice Leep, sitting on his bicycle.

She said, "What's in the shoe box, cowgirl?"

SEVEN

How it happened was no big mystery.

Like all students, Beatrice the Bear lived in the vicinity of her school bus stop. Roy likely had ridden right past her front door, and when Beatrice had spotted him, she'd simply tailed him to the golf course.

"That's my bike," he said to her.

"Yeah, it is."

"Can I have it back?"

"Maybe later," she said. "Hop on."

"What?"

"The handlebars, you dork. Get on the handlebars. We're goin' for a ride."

Roy did what he was told. He wanted to retrieve his bicycle and go home.

Two years of pushing up and down high hills in Montana's thin air had made Roy a powerful rider, but Beatrice Leep was stronger. Even through deep puddles she pedaled swiftly and effortlessly, as if Roy were weightless. Perched uncomfortably on the handlebars, he clutched the sodden cardboard box.

"Where are we going?" he shouted.

"Hush up," Beatrice said.

She steamed past the fancy brick entrance to the golf course and soon the paved road gave way to a dirt rut, with no curbs or streetlights. Roy braced himself as the bike jounced through muddy potholes. The rain had softened to a mist, and his wet shirt felt cool against his skin.

Beatrice stopped when they came to a tall chain-link fence. Roy observed that a small section had been cut with wire clippers so that it could be pulled back. He got off the handlebars and tugged at his jeans, which had ridden up the crack of his butt.

Beatrice parked the bicycle and motioned for Roy to follow her through the hole in the fence. They entered a junkyard full of wrecked automobiles, acres of them. In the twilight Roy and Beatrice crept along, darting from one rusted hulk to the next. From the way Beatrice was acting, Roy assumed they weren't alone on the property.

Soon they came to an old panel truck propped up on cinderblocks. Roy could barely make out the faded red lettering on its battered awning: JO-JO'S ICE CREAM AND SNO-CONES.

Beatrice Leep stepped up into the cab, pulling Roy behind her. She led him through a narrow doorway into the back, which was cluttered with crates, boxes, and heaps of clothes. Roy noticed a sleeping bag rolled up in a comer.

When Beatrice closed the door, they were in total darkness; Roy couldn't see his own fingers in front of his face.

He heard Beatrice's voice: "Lemme have your box."

"No," Roy said.

"Eberhardt, are you fond of your front teeth?"

"I'm not afraid of you," Roy lied.

It was stuffy and humid inside the old ice-cream truck. Mosquitoes hummed in Roy's ears and he slapped at them blindly. He smelled something that seemed out of place, something oddly familiar-cookies? The truck smelled like freshly baked peanut-butter cookies, the kind Roy's mother made.

The piercing beam of a flashlight caught him squarely in the eyes, and he turned away.

"For the last time," Beatrice said menacingly, "what's in that shoe box?"

"Shoes," said Roy.

"I'm so sure."

"Honest."

She snatched the box from his hands and flipped it open, aiming the flashlight at the contents.

"I told you," Roy said.

Beatrice huffed. "Why are you carryin' around an extra pair of sneakers? That's really weird, cowgirl."

"The shoes aren't for me," Roy said. They were almost brand-new; he'd only worn them a couple of times.

"Then who're they for?"

"Just a kid I met."

"What kid?"

"The one I told you about at school. The one who went running by your bus stop that day."

"Oh," Beatrice said caustically, "the one you went chasing when you shoulda been minding your own business." She turned the flashlight off and everything went black again.

"Well, I finally met him. Sort of," Roy said.

"You don't give up, do you?"

"Look, the kid needs shoes. He could step on broken glass or rusty nails… or even a cottonmouth."

"How do you know he wants to wear shoes, Eberhardt? Maybe he can run faster without 'em."

Roy wasn't sure what Beatrice Leep's problem was, but he knew he was seriously late for dinner and his parents were probably frantic. He planned to make a break as soon as Beatrice turned on the flashlight again. If he could somehow beat her to the bicycle, he might be able to get away.

"Whatever," Roy said. "If he doesn't want the shoes, I'll keep 'em myself. If he does, well, they ought to fit him. He looked about as tall as me."

From the darkness, only silence.

"Beatrice, if you're going to beat me up, could you please hurry up and get it over with? My mom and dad are probably calling the National Guard right now."

More heavy silence.

"Beatrice, you awake?"

"Eberhardt, why do you care about this kid?"

It was a good question, and Roy wasn't certain he could put the answer into words. There was something about the look on the boy's face when he went running past the school bus those days; something urgent and determined and unforgettable.

"I don't know," Roy said to Beatrice Leep. "I don't know why."

The flashlight blinked on. Roy clambered for the door, but Beatrice calmly snatched him by the seat of his jeans and yanked him to the floor beside her.

Roy sat there panting, waiting to get clobbered.

Yet she didn't seem mad. "What size are these?" she asked, holding up the sneakers.

"Nines," said Roy.

"Hmm."

In the cupped glow of light, Beatrice put a finger to her lips and pointed over her shoulder. Then Roy heard the footsteps outside.

Beatrice clicked off the light and they waited. The steps in the gravel sounded heavy and ponderous, like those of a large man. Something jangled as he moved; a set of keys, maybe, or loose coins in a pocket. Roy held his breath.

As the watchman approached the ice-cream truck, he whacked one of the fenders with what sounded like a lead pipe. Roy jumped but made no noise. Luckily, the man kept walking. Every so often he'd bang the pipe loudly on another junker, as if he were trying to scare something out of the shadows.

After the man was gone, Beatrice whispered: "Rent-a-cop."

"What are we doing here?" Roy asked weakly.

In the darkness of the compartment, he could hear Beatrice the Bear standing up. "Tell you what I'm gonna do, cowgirl," she said. "I'll make you a little deal."

"Go on," said Roy.

"I'll see that the barefoot kid gets these shoes, but only if you promise to leave him alone. No more spying."

"So you do know him!"

Beatrice hoisted Roy to his feet.

"Yeah, I know him," she said. "He's my brother."

At four-thirty in the afternoon, when Officer David Delinko normally got off work, his desk was still piled high with paperwork. He had lots of forms to fill out and reports to complete about what had happened to his patrol car. He kept writing until his wrist began to ache, and at six he finally called it quits.

The motor pool was only a few blocks away, but the rain was pouring down when Officer Delinko wearily came out of the headquarters building. He didn't want his uniform to get drenched, so he waited under the eaves, directly beneath the capital P in COCONUT COVE PUBLIC SAFETY DEPARTMENT.