Crashed

right?”

I said, “Yeah.”

Doc stuck a hand through the window. “Shake,” he said. “I’m also not going to let Thistle make this movie. Now why don’t you park that thing and let’s see whether we can’t find out where she is.”

“She hasn’t called,” he said as I followed him along a cracked-concrete driveway past a dilapidated little frame house, its windows thankfully dark, heading for what had originally been a garage. The driveway was an example of the old design made up of two narrow, parallel strips of concrete, one for each tire, created for much better drivers than I. Grass had probably been planted between the concrete tracks several neighborhood demographic changes ago, but it had long since given way to hip-high weeds, which I was knocking down with a certain amount of negligent brio as we went. “Of course,” he added, “she hasn’t got a phone.”

“What’s here?” I asked.

“Friends.”

“Didn’t know she had any.”

“Counting you and me, I can think of four,” Doc said. “The other two live here.”

He led me around to the right of the garage. In the center of the wall was a crappy-looking door, warped, blistered wood and four panes of glass, which had been painted an opaque color that looked like Wedgewood blue, with a lot of gray in it. Doc waved me to the left-hand side of the door, put a finger to his lips, and knocked.

No answer.

He knocked again, in a pattern this time: three fast, two slow, then two fast. A moment later, a high female voice said, “Who?”

Doc said, “Doc.”

“Hold on,” said the female voice, and in a few seconds the door opened. “I brought a friend,” Doc said, and I came around the edge of the door, just in time to see it start to slam closed. I got a foot wedged in there, and looked down at the eight- or nine-year-old whom I’d chased out of the Camelot Arms that afternoon.

Up close, she was even smaller than I’d thought. She had fine, flyaway blond hair that had been chopped into some semblance of an intentional haircut, a high, narrow nose, and wide, very startled blue eyes, which were staring up at me as though Charles the Child-Eater had just materialized in front of her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m a friend of Thistle’s.”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “You liar. You’re working for that, that-”

“No,” I said. “I was, but now I’m not. Look, do you think Doc would bring me here if I wasn’t Thistle’s friend?”

“If you told him a bunch of lies,” she said.

“Who is it?” another voice said from inside.

“The big bad guy,” the little one said. “He’s with Doc.”

“Well,” said the other voice, “there’s no way to keep him out. If he leans on the door it’ll probably fall over.”

The little one’s face twisted as she pulled her mouth to one side, as though it was chasing her left ear. “I don’t like it, though,” she said for the record. She stepped back and let Doc push the door open.

“Junior,” Doc said, “this is Wendy.” He knelt down so they were eye to eye. We hadn’t yet taken a step over the threshold. “Wendy, this big clown is named Junior, and he’s not as dumb as he looks.”

Wendy said, “He couldn’t be.”

“May we come in?” Doc asked.

“Jennie said it was okay,” Wendy said.

“Is it okay with you?”

The mouth twisted again as she considered the question. “I guess,” she finally said.

“Wait,” Doc said. “Have you girls eaten?”

Wendy didn’t say anything, but her tongue flicked her upper lip. I could have counted to ten by the time the other one, Jennie, said from wherever she was, “No.”

“Come on, then,” Doc said, standing up. “We’ll let the big ugly guy buy.”

Jennie came around from behind the door with a cast-iron frying pan in both hands, gave me a quick but thorough look, and said, “This was for hitting, not cooking.”

Five minutes later, we were sitting in the nearest McDonald’s, which had come in first, second, and third on the list of places the girls wanted to go. Before we left I’d seen the inside of the garage apartment, a single room of absolutely astonishing messiness: clothes, shoes, boxes, and cooking implements everywhere, whole odd lots of stuff piled in corners. The basic organizational principle seemed to be, if this won’t tip the stack over, put it on top.

“Where’s your mom?” I asked as Jennie bit into the first of the two quarter-pounders in front of her.

Jennie was chewing, so Wendy said, “She went shopping.”

“When?” I asked.

Wendy said, “February.”

Doc kicked me under the table, but I asked anyway. “So you’re all alone?”

“Not zhe firsht time,” Jennie said around three or four ounces of meat.

“Mommy likes boys,” Wendy said.

“Men,” Jennie corrected her. She considered the burger, looking for the next point of attack.

“And we don’t like the men Mommy likes,” Wendy said. She picked up a fry and nibbled the tip. “So Mommy takes them someplace.”

“They’re doing fine,” Doc said, giving me a Meaningful Look. “A lot better than they’d be doing if those pinheads in Child Protective Services got involved.” He pushed Wendy’s burger a tactful half an inch toward her. “They’re together, for one thing.”

“I’ll eat it later,” Wendy said, looking at the burger.

“No, you won’t,” Doc said. “You’ll eat it now, and later you can eat the one we’ll buy to go.”

Wendy said, “A whole nother one?”

“Or two,” Doc said. “Maybe two for each of you. Junior’s got lots of money, don’t you, Junior?”

“I can hardly walk, my pockets are so full.”

Wendy said, “Maybe your pants will fall down,” and laughed, and Jennie joined in, sneaking one of her sister’s fries during the general merriment.

“Where do you get all your money?” Jennie said once sobriety had been restored. “We can hardly get enough for macaroni and cheese.”

Wendy said, “And we don’t even like macaroni and cheese.”

“I steal it,” I said. “I’m a burglar.”

“Nuh-uh,” Wendy said. Then she said, “Are you?”

“How old are you?” I asked Jennie.

“Fifteen.” Wendy’s head came around, and Jennie said, “Almost.”

“I started when I was your age,” I said. “I broke into my first house when I was fourteen.”

Wendy was looking at me uneasily. “What did you steal?”

“Nothing. I did it to get even with the guy next door. You know anybody who’s only happy when somebody else is miserable?”

“Come on,” Jennie said. “We live in Hollywood.”

“Right. Well, Mr. Potts was like that. And the summer I was fourteen, Mr. Potts made himself happy by opening the gate to our back yard and letting my dog out, and then calling animal control. The fifth or sixth time he did it, I decided to send him a message. I put a set of tools together and then waited one morning until he’d left for work. Then I let myself in through a back window-”

“Weren’t you scared?” Wendy asked.

“Are you guys scared living alone?”

“No.”

“Okay. You’re good at living on your own. I’m good-I was good even then-at breaking into houses.”