glowed against a black background. It looked like something from an old spy movie.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, leaning in.
“It’s called a command prompt. Don’t distract me.”
He typed in a line of code, hit Enter, and got a screen full of gobbledegook in return. He read the string of symbols, then clicked back to Google Maps.
“Hmm,” he said. “He probably uses it for cars.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because he owns five vehicles registered in Nevada, all to this address. It’s possible he parks them somewhere else, but why would he?”
I wanted to ask about a hundred questions, not the least of which was how he got Devereaux’s car registration information, but there were more important things at hand.
I chewed my lip. “You’re probably right. That garage doesn’t look tall enough for rehearsing the really big stuff. He’s got to have a warehouse or something. Can you do a search for that?”
Ripley clicked back to LotZilla. After five minutes, he sighed in frustration and sat back in the chair.
“If Devereaux owns other property in Nevada, it’s under some kind of corporate entity. An LLC or something.” He rubbed his eyes. “Oh. We could go to the hall of records and poke around.” He surfed to the county website. “Buuut they’re closed till Monday.”
“We can’t wait that long.” I was starting to feel edgy, the sides of my vision twitching as if distorted by waves of heat. Hypomania had its upsides—it was almost certainly responsible for the all-night session that produced my Truck Drop breakthrough—but it could turn bad quickly. Excitement could morph into anxiety. Enthusiasm into anger. I could feel the tide rising, and I wasn’t sure I could stay above water long enough for the drugs to kick in.
Ripley played with the tab on his Coke can. “What was your plan? You know, before I took over your laptop and started hacking?”
“Magic is a small world,” I said. “I was just going to Google around, see if I could make a connection through one of Dad’s old friends in the business. Go from there.”
“Six degrees of Daniel Devereaux,” Ripley said.
“Pretty much.”
“Where do we start?”
Ripley handed back the laptop. I set my fingers on the keyboard, stared at the screen, and tried to think.
Devereaux was an institution in Las Vegas. Over the years, he’d employed dozens of magicians, consultants, and assistants; it was highly likely that Dad had worked with some of them. I hoped to find this kind of connection and use it to gain some bit of insider knowledge that might help me. But now that I’d said it out loud to Ripley, it seemed like the weakest plan ever. The half-baked invention of a manic mind.
It was exhausting, not knowing which thoughts were real and which were figments of my defective brain. I tugged at my hair, chugged the rest of my Coke, and forced myself to concentrate.
My first thought was Rico. He would know someone, I was sure. The problem was that Rico knew how desperate we were. He knew we resorted to stealing diesel from time to time, and he knew I had picked pockets. If I asked him about Devereaux directly, he’d know something was up. He might even feel obligated to tip off Devereaux’s people. I couldn’t risk it.
Ripley decided we needed more caffeine and snacks, so he wandered off in search of a 7-Eleven while I kept working. I scrolled through my contacts, then my Facebook friends, noting names of people who might help. But everyone on the list had the same downside as Rico: they might help, or they might give us away.
Ripley returned with a bag of powdered donuts and a two-liter of Mountain Dew. We ate and tried to brainstorm but came up with nothing. When Ripley started yawning in the middle of words, I told him to go up to the room and sleep.
“Go to bed,” I said. “I’ll text you if I find something.” But he insisted on staying with me—so he wrapped himself in his hoodie, reclined the lounge chair, and fell asleep.
My mind was still crackling, now with anxiety instead of optimism. Four days left, and I was no closer to having the props. I started Googling aimlessly, looking for anything that might help.
It was almost five a.m. when I found what I was looking for.
The blog was a blinking, pastel nightmare called The-Magic-Ring.com, a hideous relic of the early World Wide Web. The article’s date stamp read November 2, 2002, two years after Devereaux’s