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it, but I jumped away.
    “Come on now, Flipper. Give it here!”
    “That ain’t no way to behave. Calm down, Mr. Grabby Hands.”
    I opened my hand and looked at his pill. A dull green thing about the size of an Advil with the number 80 pressed into one side. I cupped both hands around it and shook it like a pair of dice. Hayes’s eyes followed every movement of my hands. He smiled, but it looked like it took a lot of work to get those lip muscles curling. As I was about to sit down on the bed beside him, he grabbed my wrist and tried to pry open my hand.
    “Ow!” I shrieked. “Stop, you asshole. You’re hurting me.” I kicked him on the shin as hard as I could and his grip loosened long enough for me to slip away. I was out the door and into the bathroom in a flash. The lock clicked into place barely a second before his hand shook the knob.
    “Sorry about that, Flipper. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Hayes said through the door crack. “It’s only I need it back. It’s kind of important.”
    The bathroom door had one of those easy-to-pick locks. The kind you can open with a bobby pin. I didn’t have much time before he’d get in.
    “Please, Flipper. Just give me the pill.”
    “You had a whole mess of them the other day. Why you need this one pill so bad?”
    “I told you, I hid the main bunch real good and I seem to of forgot where. Either that or the trash man got it when he carted off the sofa on my lawn. I might could of tucked them there for safekeeping. I don’t know. Anyway, those you saw were set aside forsomething else. Then when I lost the big stash, I had to crush the set-aside ones for the buyer along with a bit of baking soda to fill out the bag some. You know, for it to look like a respectable count. But it weren’t hardly enough pill and too much soda besides. I need more pills. Way it stands now, that shit ain’t fit for nothing. Believe you me, I tried.”
    “
You
tried? You ate some of the dog drugs yourself?”
    “On a dog. He ate it. Didn’t much like it as far I could tell. Barked all night.” Hayes poked at the lock with something metallic.
    “You bust in on me, Hayes, and I’ll flush it. I swear I will.”
    The scratching stopped. Hayes thought so hard, I could hear his last five brain cells overheating on the other side of the door. They made the same sound my mom’s transmission did when it was on the fritz. I rubbed my thumbnail up and down the edge of the jamb.
    “You hear that, Hayes? It’s your pill. It seems to want to take a swim. Tell me the truth now.”
    Hayes took a breath, held it for two or three toe taps, then let it out with a defeated grumble. The pills, according to him, were really to dope the dogs, so they would lose their fights after he bet against them. If he crushed the pills, it made it easier to slip the stuff into a poor dog’s water bowl. Somebody had offered him big bucks for a bunch of these pills.
    “God,” I said, “and you lost them. Maybe it’s for the best. Seems like a low-down business.”
    “Yeah, well. If you ain’t noticed, I’m a little short on folding money these days.” He sighed. “The drugs don’t hurt them none. The dogs, I mean.”
    This story, I figured, was just sleazy enough to be true. I pushed the pill out through the crack under the door. His plan seemed to me a mite too clever to of started its life in Hayes’s itty-bitty brain. The number of normal brains in his circle of pals numberedexactly zero. I hope you know what you’re doing, Mom, I thought. If it
was
you who put this idea in his head.
    “There,” I said, “give this to your dogs with my compliments.”
    “God bless you, Flipper.”

Sweet Talk
    T hat night, we found out Logan was in the Army. And that his name was Logan. (“Logan?” Dani asked me. “Isn’t that a kind of berry?”) He was stationed at Hunter Army Airfield and worked in a huge hangar where they trained him to fix helicopter rotors. That’s what the on-duty comment meant.