better read those,” Malone replied. “If you have any questions, I’ll try to help you out. Sally’s taken me through them so many times, I think I know the correlations by heart. And frankly, I don’t think she’s in any condition to start over with you.”
Steeling himself, Wiseman began reading the sheets of correlations.
Across the street and a quarter of a block down, two men sat in a gray van. While one of them stared through a pair of binoculars and read off license plate numbers, the other took notes. When he had dictated the letters and numbers of all five cars that were parked in Lucy’s driveway and on the street in front of her house, Ernie Morantz put the glasses away. “I don’t like it.”
“What’s not to like?” Victor Kaplan asked in reply. “It’s just another job.”
“Taking out a nine-year-old kid isn’t what I call just another job,” Morantz said. His face settled into what Kaplan had long ago come to think of as “the mule face,” as in “as stubborn as a …”
“Orders are orders,” he reminded his partner.
“And I’ve never disobeyed one yet,” Morantz snapped. “But terrorists and traitors are one thing. Even picking up illegal aliens. But what’s this kid done? They don’t think he’s going to leave a bomb at Logan Airport, do they? Or is that the new thing? Foreign governments subverting the schoolboys of America? Come off it.”
“But nobody told us we’d be walking into a mob scene. And here come some more.” The two men fell silent as they watched a sixth car pull up in front of Lucy Corliss’s house. Two men and a boy got out, and Morantz, who was once more using his field glasses, spoke quietly. “That’s the kid. Shit, he can’t be more than four-and-a-half feet tall, and he looks just like any other kid. Wonder who the two other guys are?”
Kaplan took the glasses and watched until all three had disappeared into the house. “One’s a cop,” he said softly. “The one who was on the right. The other’s probably the kid’s dad.”
“Yeah,” Morantz grunted. He started the engine, slipped the van into gear, and cruised slowly past the house.
“Where we going?” Kaplan asked.
“Coffee. And you’re going to call Carmody and tell him this job isn’t going to be all that easy. It’s one thing to bust in on a woman, all by herself, and grab her kid. I’m not saying I like it, mind you, but at least it’s possible. This is different, and I want to know what Carmody wants. You see a Ho-Jo on the way in?”
A few minutes later they slid into an orange Naugahyde booth, ordered, then Morantz adjourned to the men’s room while Kaplan made the phone call. When he returned to the table, Morante found himself still alone, so he passed the time fiddling with a puzzle that had apparently been left by the management for just such an occasion. At the next table a little boy, no more than six years old, had solved the puzzle and was gleefully explaining it to his sister. Morante strained to hear what the boy was saying, but by the time Kaplan returned, he still had gotten nowhere. “Well?”
The look on Kaplan’s face told most of the story. “It’s getting worse. Carmody’s running a check on all the cars to find out who’s in the house. Then hell make a decision about beefing up the team. We’re to call him back in fifteen minutes, and hell let us know what’s happening.”
“Shit,” Morante said softly. He picked up the puzzle, which involved some pegs and a triangular board. “Try this,” he said, shoving it across to Kaplan. Kaplan stared at the gadget for a minute, studied the directions, then tentatively began jumping the pegs over each other, removing each one he jumped. When he was done, there were three pegs left, and no legitimate way of getting to them.
“So?” he said.
“So the kid in the next booth just solved it. And I bet that kid we’re supposed to grab could do it too.”
Kaplan frowned. “I don’t get it, Ernie. What’s this puzzle got to do with anything?”
Ernie Morantz stretched, then slouched deep into the booth “I don’t know,” he said. “But it just seems to me that there’s something wrong. Kids these days are brighter than adults. They can do things and understand things that don’t make any sense to us at all. So