the morning, that would be suspicious. If one of them was carrying what looked like a body, that would be very suspicious.
But Wildersmoot Drive—named after some long-gone Twin Cities bigwig—was fast asleep. Robin opened the SUV’s curbside back door, got in, and held out her arms. Denny handed the boy in and she pulled Luke against her, his head lolling on her shoulder. She fumbled for her seatbelt.
“Uck, he’s drooling,” she said.
“Yes, unconscious people do that,” Michelle said, and closed the rear door. She got in the shotgun seat and Denny slid back behind the wheel. Michelle stowed the guns and the aerosol as Denny cruised slowly away from the Ellis house. As they approached the first intersection, Denny put the headlights back on.
“Make the call,” he said.
Michelle punched in the same number. “This is Ruby Red. We have the package, Jerry. Airport ETA in twenty-five minutes. Wake up the system.”
In the Ellis home, the alarms came back on. When the police finally arrived, they would find two dead, one gone, the kid the most logical suspect. He was said to be brilliant, after all, and those were the ones that tended to be a little wonky, weren’t they? A little unstable? They’d ask him when they found him, and finding him was only a matter of time. Kids could run, but even the brilliant ones couldn’t hide.
Not for long.
7
Luke woke up remembering a dream he’d had—not exactly a nightmare, but definitely of the not-so-nice variety. Some strange woman in his room, leaning over his bed with her blond hair hanging around the sides of her face. Sure, whatever you want, she’d said. Like a chick in one of the porno clips he and Rolf sometimes watched.
He sat up, looked around, and at first thought this was another dream. It was his room—same blue wallpaper, same posters, same bureau with his Little League trophy on it—but where was the window? His window looking out at Rolf’s house was gone.
He shut his eyes tight, then sprang them open. No change; the windowless room remained windowless. He considered pinching himself, but that was such a cliché. He popped his fingers against his cheek instead. Everything stayed the same.
Luke got out of bed. His clothes were on the chair, where his mom had put them the night before—underwear, socks, and tee-shirt on the seat, jeans folded over the back. He put them on slowly, looking at where the window should have been, then sat down to put on his sneakers. His initials were on the sides, LE, and that was right, but the middle horizontal stroke of the E was too long, he was sure of it.
He turned them over, looking for street grit, and saw none. Now he was completely sure. These were not his sneaks. The laces were wrong, too. They were too clean. Nevertheless, they fit perfectly.
He went to the wall and laid his hands against it, pressing, feeling for the window underneath the wallpaper. It wasn’t there.
He asked himself if maybe he’d gone crazy, just snapped, like a kid in a scary movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Weren’t kids with high-functioning minds supposed to be prone to breakdowns? But he wasn’t crazy. He was as sane as he’d been last night when he went to sleep. In a movie, the crazy kid would think he was sane—that would be the Shyamalan twist—but according to the psychology books Luke had read, most crazy people understood they were crazy. He wasn’t.
As a little kid (five as opposed to twelve), he’d gone through a craze of collecting political buttons. His dad had been happy to help him build his collection, because most of the buttons were really cheap on eBay. Luke had been especially fascinated (for reasons he could not explain, even to himself) with the buttons of presidential candidates who had lost. The fever had eventually passed, and most of the buttons were probably stored in the attic crawlspace or in the cellar, but he had saved one as a kind of good-luck talisman. It had a blue plane on it, surrounded by the words WINGS FOR WILLKIE. Wendell Willkie ran for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 but lost badly, winning only ten states for a total of eighty-two electoral votes.
Luke had put the button in the cup of his Little League trophy. He fished for it now and came up with nothing.
Next, he went to the poster showing Tony Hawk on his Birdhouse deck. It looked