“She know the bill comes to you?” Crow said.
“Who knows what she knows. Bills been coming to me all her life. I doubt that she ever thought about who pays. Hell, she may not even know that somebody has to.”
Crow smiled in the darkness outside the Gray Gull.
“Where’d she get it,” Crow said.
“Place called Images in Marshport, Massachusetts.”
“So she is around here,” Crow said.
“I told you she would be.”
“What kind of TV?” Crow said.
“I wrote it down,” the voice said.
It was a soft voice. But there was tension in it, as if it wanted to yell and was being restrained.
“Mitsubishi 517,” the voice said. “Fifty-five-inch screen.”
“So she didn’t carry it away,” Crow said.
“Not her,” the voice said.
“Maybe they’ll tell me where they sent it,” Crow said.
“Maybe,” the voice said.
The connection broke. Crow folded up his cell phone and put it away. He stood for a moment looking across the parking space toward the harbor.
“When I find her,” he said aloud, “then what?”
13.
The small bus was yellow, with school-bus plates. And the usual signage about stopping when the lights were flashing. The driver was a white-haired Hispanic man who spoke too little English to have a conversation. Jesse stood in the exit well beside the driver. Molly sat in back with Nina Pinero. Both Molly and Jesse were in full uniform. Jesse even had on the town-issued chief’s hat with braid on the front. The children’s clothes were spruced and ironed. The children themselves were very quiet. Jesse could see them swallowing nervously. Several of them kept clearing their throats. And though most of them were dark-skinned, Jesse could see that their faces were pale.
The bus went past Paradise Beach. No one paid any attention. The kids looked at the hot-dog stand. The bus moved out onto the causeway with the crowded harbor to the left and the open Atlantic to the right. The kids stared out the window. The silence in the bus was palpable. Jesse made no attempt to reassure the kids. He knew how useless that was. Across the causeway, the bus went straight ahead on Sea Street. Past the Paradise Yacht Club. The bus stopped in front of a fieldstone wall that separated a rolling lawn from the street. Across the street there was a white van with a big antenna. On the side it said ACTION NEWS 3. At the top of the lawn was a huge weathered-shingle house. A wide, white driveway wound from behind the house down across the big lawn to the opening in the stone wall, where it joined the street. In the opening, on the driveway, there were maybe twenty adults in varying hues of seersucker and flowered hats. Among them in an on-air summer dress and a big glamorous hat was Jenn. With her was a cameraman in a safari vest.
Nina Pinero stood and walked down to the front of the bus. Molly stayed in the rear. She stopped beside Jesse. Jesse nodded at the driver and he opened the bus doors. Jesse stepped out. The gathered adults stared at him. Walter Carr stood with Miriam Fiedler. They both had pamphlets ready. Jesse wondered who they planned to hand them out to.
“Hello,” Jesse said. “I’ve come to protect you from the invaders.”
