'No kidding? Did you check it out?'
'Hey, I'd step in the line of fire any day for you, buddy, but I'm not willing to lose my job over this.' Magozzi paused for a meaningful moment and then grinned. 'I did give it to Grace, though.'
Gino's scowl melted faster than his snow cone had. 'You are officially off my shit list, buddy.'
'Glad to hear it.'
'Okay, so spill it-justice awaits.'
'I don't know anything yet. Grace didn't have time to check it out before she left for Green Bay.'
'Damn, I forgot about that. When's she coming back?'
'In a couple days.'
'Oh, man, I can't wait that long.' Gino brooded over his predicament for a few moments, then looked at Magozzi triumphantly. 'Hey, what about Harley and Roadrunner? They can run the number just as easily as Grace can, and I bet they're bored out of their skulls without two high-maintenance women in their hair. We can take them out for beer and burgers later for their trouble.'
'It's Saturday night. Don't you have a hot date with the wife and kids''
'The wife and kids are deserting me for a pizza party for Helen's softball team.'
'You're passing up pizza?'
'It's at one of those hideous theme restaurants where they let toddlers run amok and wallpaper with pepperoni. I have standards, you know. Besides, it's an all-girl thing.'
'What about the Accident? Isn't his manhood going to be adversely affected by going to an all-girls thing?'
'Gender discrimination doesn't start until age five.'
Magozzi shrugged. 'I'll give Harley a call.'
Gino beamed at him. 'You're the man. Hey, buy me a hot dog, I'm starving.'
As Magozzi reached for his wallet, his cell phone chirped. 'Go on,' he said, passing over a twenty. 'Gotta get this.' He was foolishly hoping that perhaps Grace MacBride had been overwhelmed with the sudden need to hear his voice. This had never happened before, but sometimes you just had to hold on to the dream.
He was hanging up as Gino wandered back to the picnic table, loaded with three footlongs, two bags of mini-donuts, and an unidentifiable deep-fried thing on a stick.
Gino handed over two dollars in change.
'That'sit?'
'Hey, it's for a good cause, that's what you kept telling me. Was that Grace?'
'Nope. Our old buddy Mike Halloran.'
It took Gino a couple of seconds to place the name. 'No kidding?Howthe hell's life in the Cheese Belt?'
'Pretty interesting, as of this morning.'
'Yeah? What's up?'
'They pulled three bodies out of a swimming hole this morning, figured them for drownings. But when they laid them out, they saw a whole lot of holes that shouldn't have been there. Somebody took a swipe at them with an automatic, the coroner thought maybe anM16.'
'Now that's something you don't see every day.'
'Not outside a third-world country, anyhow. All the shots lined up, too, execution-style.'
Gino took a monstrous bite out of a mustard-and-onion-slathered dog. 'Jesus. What a way to spend a Saturday. But why did he call you? Does he think there's a Minneapolis connection or what?'
Magozzi shrugged. 'They don't know where to start, because they can't ID the bodies-totally nude, no identifying marks, and no hits on the fingerprints. Halloran was hoping Grace would run the morgue shots through her facial-recognition software, see if anything popped that way.'
'So why didn't he just call Sharon? They're practically driving past his front door.' Gino polished off his first dog and started in on the second one.
'Because Halloran had no clue Sharon was on her way to Green Bay with Grace and Annie.'
Gino's brows lifted. 'I thought those two were a hot item.'
'It's hard to date when you live two hundred miles apart.'
'What's wrong with phone sex?'
'I didn't ask.'
'Christ, I hope she didn't dump him for a suit.'
'We didn't get into particulars.'
'Did you call Grace?'
'No answer on her cell. I left a message.' Magozzi eyed Gino's deep-fried-thing-on-a-stick. 'What the hell is that?'
'Dill pickle.'
'That's disgusting.'
'Like you would know.'
WHEN GRACE FINISHED checking all the phone lines, she walked back to the street in front of the cafe and stood there for a moment, listening. The only sounds she heard were Annie's and Sharon's muffled voices coming from inside, but when she turned to look, the glare of the sun bouncing off the big plate-glass windows nearly blinded her.
They looked up when Grace pushed open the screen door. Annie and Sharon were sitting at the counter, sipping from soda cans taken from the glass-fronted cooler, Annie waving her cell phone, trying to find a signal. 'This piece of crap is hopeless. Doesn't work outside, doesn't work inside. . . . You find anybody, darlin'?' She handed Grace a bottled water and tucked the useless phone back in her purse.
Grace shook her head, opened the bottle, and took a quick drink before she spoke. 'Someone cut all the phone lines.'
'What?'
'Right below the feeder boxes. On the cafe, the gas station, and the house.'
All three were silent for a moment.
Sharon finally said, 'Kids, maybe.'
'Maybe.'
Annie was watching Grace's face. 'What are you thinking, Grace?'
'That we should get out of here.'
Annie sighed, took a last drink from her soda can, and pushed herself up off the stool. She went over to the cooler, grabbed three bottles of water, and set one on the counter in front of Sharon.
'What's this for?'
'Tuck it in your bag, darlin'. It's mighty hot out there, and it appears we're going to be doing a little more walking.'
'You're kidding, right? According to the map in the gas station, it's at least another ten miles to the next town, and that's after we hoof it all the way back to the truck. Can't a couple of techno-whizzes like you fix the phone lines?'
'It's a twenty-five-pair cable,' Grace replied. 'That's a lot of splicing. It might take a couple hours.'
'By which time the people who live here will probably be back from wherever they went and will be happy to give us a ride. In the meantime, we've got food and drink and a place to get out of the sun. . . .'
Annie looked at Sharon as if she'd lost her mind, forgetting for a moment that not everyone in the free world knew that when Grace said 'we should get out of here,' it was like a Seeing Eye dog jerking a blind person out of the way of a runaway bus. 'We should leave now.'
'Okay,' Sharon continued, trying to be reasonable. 'How about this. You and Grace stay here, start working on the phones, and in the meantime, just to cover all our bets, I'll start walking, maybe get lucky and catch a ride. No offense, Annie, but it's over ninety out there, and I'm guessing aerobics isn't your . . .'
'Quiet.' Grace had moved quickly, almost soundlessly, over to the screen door, where she stood with her eyes closed and her concentration focused in a cone of awareness that headed left past the gas station, around the curve that disappeared into the woods. What she'd heard had been nothing specific, nothing immediately identifiable- just a faint, muted roaring sound that didn't belong.
