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appeared outside the fence, walking along the street in the general direction of Newark.
    He found her escape hatch. She had cut a piece out of the wire fence, just big enough to let her through. He wiggled through and into a ditch. When he stood, he saw her about a hundred yards ahead, getting into an old car that was parked under a streetlight—a Ford of some late 1950s vintage, green he thought, with a white strip around the middle. As he hurried toward it, the car started in a puff of blue smoke. It eased into the street and pulled away, but he got close enough to get the license number.
    In the morning he called Donovan.
    “I saw your splash last night,” Donovan said. “Same old Walker. Once you get something, you never let up.”
    “That sounds like my description of you.”
    “Maybe so, twenty years ago. Little too old, too slow now. I can’t keep up with you young guys.”
    “I didn’t know you read the Trib way over in Brooklyn.”
    “You’d be surprised at what we read,” Donovan said. “What’s on your mind?”
    “Hell, Al, you called me, remember? I’m returning your call of yesterday.”
    “See how you get in old age? Completely slipped my mind. I wanted you to come by my place, say a week from tonight, for a bit of beef and booze. You’ve never met my wife. We can sit around and talk old times. You can tell her how great I was before I went over the hill.”
    “What time?”
    “Around seven. Bring somebody if you want to.”
    Walker thought of the Yoder girl, and what a strange group they would make sitting in Al Donovan’s backyard. But he said, “There’s nobody to bring, Al. But I’ll be glad to come solo, if that’s okay. And listen, while I’ve got you, you could do me a big favor.”
    “Shoot.”
    Walker fed him the license number. “Could you find out whose car that is?”
    “Is it hot?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “Sure, Walker, I’ll help you out. Same rules as before, right?”
    “You scratch my back…”
    “And you scratch mine. If and when the time ever comes.”
    Donovan called back about ten minutes later. The car was registered to a Hal Gunther, whose street address lay in a quiet little community halfway between Orange and Union. Walker checked it against his list of little girls, but there was no one named Gunther and no one of that address. He drove there in just over half an hour, not bothering to wear his tie or check in with the office first. The street was narrow and tree-lined, and at midmorning nearly empty of cars. It was strictly residential, some four blocks west of Sanford Avenue. The kind of neighborhood where he had played stickball as a kid. Raced through backyards in bursts of fantasy and sheer joy. Played circus in a neighbor kid’s yard, swallowed by time, yet in actual distance not far from here. If it still existed at all.
    Walker never went back to his old neighborhood anymore, except in his mind. It was always too painful. There was always some motel, or a new Piggly Wiggly, or worst of all a vacant lot, where people had lived in the old days. But Hal Gunther’s neighborhood had escaped the ravages of time. The houses, built in the late 1920s or early 1930s, had held up well. Most were newly painted. What grass there was had been watered and cut, and some of the yards had hedges and gardens. Walker drove past the Gunther house without stopping. The car wasn’t there, but Walker could see a big black oil spot on the driveway where it was usually parked. The garage was closed. Probably full of crap. In Walker’s youth, people had used their garages for their cars. Today they used them for their crap. Junk they wouldn’t ever use again, or think about, or want. It piled up and up until the car couldn’t get in the garage anymore and had to be left on the street or in the driveway.
    He went around the corner, parked and locked his car, and started back on foot. He walked lazily up the street, to the casual eye a stroller who had nowhere