“He might’ve been afraid it was a trap,” Jeff suggested.
“I doubt it,” Sherry said. “He thought he was being so damn clever about getting the address…”
“That stupid story about being an old school pal,” Pete added.
“He’s real big on stories,” Sherry muttered. Shaking her head, she drank some more Bloody Mary. “You know what? Maybe after he got the address he realized how phoney his story must’ve sounded. That could explain why he decided not to come over.”
“If he decided not to come over,” Pete said.
“Anything’s possible,” Jeff threw in.
“But some things,” said Sherry, “are more likely than others. Now that he knows I’m alive, he has to get his hands on me. Has to finish the job, for one thing.”
“For one thing?” Pete said.
Jeff huffed. “That oughta be enough.”
“Not for Toby. I imagine he has big ideas about what he’d like to do to me. So if he didn’t come over here, he must’ve had an awfully good reason.”
“But maybe he did come.”
Sherry let out a short laugh. “How much have you been drinking?”
“Not as much as you.”
“I have an excuse.”
“Just seems to me,” Pete said, “that we’ve got no way of knowing where he is. He probably isn’t here in the house with us and he probably isn’t next door. But he might be here or there or just about anywhere. We just won’t know till he makes a move. And if he is around here someplace right now, that move’s gonna take us by surprise.”
“You’re right about that,” Sherry said. “If he’s here and we don’t know it, we’re screwed.”
“We oughta be the ones screwing him,” Jeff said.
Pete nodded. “Hit him before he hits us.”
“Fuckin’-A, dude! Preemptive strike!”
“Can’t strike him if we can’t find him,” Sherry said.
“What if we pay a visit to his house?” Pete suggested. “He’s bound to show up there. No matter where he is right now, he’ll go home sooner or later. And we could be waiting for him.”
“And screw his ass.”
“But we don’t know where he lives,” Sherry reminded them. She had a strange, intense look in her eyes.
“I bet we can find out,” Pete said. He shoved his chair away from the table, stood up, and walked around the end of the counter. “I did some checking.” He removed the telephone directory from the drawer. “After we found out Toby’s last name, I looked it up.” He carried the phone book to the table, plopped it down, and opened it to the napkin he’d used as a marker. “There’re only seven listings for people named Bones. No Tobys, but I figure maybe he lives with his parents. All we’ve gotta do is find out which…”
“He lives with his brother,” Sherry explained. “Sid.”
Pete felt a jump of excitement in his chest. “Sid? Oh, man, I think there is a Sid in here.” Bending over the book, he slid his fingertip down the listings. “Bones,” he muttered. “Come on, come on, I know you’re here. Bones!” he hunched lower and studied the first names. “Sidney! Here it is, right here! Bones, Sidney.”
“That’s Toby’s brother,” Sherry said. “That’s where he lives.”
“Only thing is, it doesn’t give an address.”
“They hardly ever do,” Jeff said.
“Not anymore,” added Sherry.
“Too bad we’re not cops,” Pete said. “They have reverse directories. All we’d have to do is look up the phone number…”
Jeff gave him a skeptical glance. “Where’d you get that?”
Reading Ed McBain. But I suppose that stuff’s all computerized by now.”
“You can bet on it.”
“Which means zilch to us,” said Sherry. “Unless one of you just so happens to be some sort of fabulous hacker who can bust into the police computer…”
Pete and Jeff looked at each other and shook their heads.
“Know anybody who can do that?” Sherry asked.
They both shook their heads.
“That mostly just happens in books and shit,” Jeff explained.
“Yeah,” said Pete. “They always know somebody who can hack their way into anything.”
“Convenient,” Jeff said.
Pete nodded. “Hell, I don’t know anybody who can pull that sort of stuff.” He frowned. “Unless maybe Kate. I heard she got into some trouble last year hacking into some sort of computer system. They almost threw her in jail.”
“Yeah, I’d forgotten about Kate.”
“She’s a computer whizz.”
“But what’s her last name?” Jeff asked.
Pete shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you know?”
“No idea. Have you got her phone number?”
Pete shook his head.
“Know where she lives?”
Pete shook it again. “Not really.”
“So how are we supposed to find her?”
“Forget about it,” Sherry said. “Sounds like she’d be harder to dig up than Toby.”