couldnât get a fix this time,â he said. He squinted, opened his eyes, and removed the headphones. âHe could have been using a Trac-Fone or some other prepaid cell phone thatâs not traceable.â
âNo, no, no.â Bobby had the Central High School yearbook open and was furiously turning pages until he found the one he wanted in the seniorsâ gallery. âYes.â
He stabbed a photo hard with his finger.
I looked over his shoulder. First photo from the right, third from the top.
âYou got him?â asked Honsa. âYou know who he is?â
âScottie Thomforde,â Bobby said. âFirst we get Victoria backâ¦â
âLater, weâll kill him,â I said. âLater, weâll kill them all.â
3
Agent Honsa pretended he didnât hear the threat. Instead, he propped his forearms on the back of a chair and leaned toward us, studying first me and then Bobby with cool professionalism. I guessed that he had heard threats like mine before and was deciding how seriously to take it.
âWho is Thomforde?â he said. âWhat is your relationship?â
âScottie Thomforde is from the neighborhood,â Bobby said. âHe grew up six, seven blocks from here. Near Aldine. His mother still lives there.â
âAldine is a city park,â I said. âSometimes we had ball games up there. Scottie played with us.â
âThatâs how I connected the dots,â Bobby said. âWhen he said, âLetâs have some fun, guys.â We used to say that just before we went out onto the field. âLetâs have some fun out there.â â
âI used to say it,â I said.
âWhat happened to him?â Honsa asked.
âHe quit,â I said.
âWe were pretty tight for a while,â said Bobby. âExcept he quit playing sports in high school to take up music.â
âHe was a madman on the drums,â I said. âUsed to carry sticks with him and beat out a riff on anything, sidewalk, hood of a car, the tables at Burger Chefâdrove the manager crazy. We used to call him âSticksâ for a while. Scottie got a kick out of that, but the nickname never took.â
âAfter a while, he just drifted away,â Bobby said. âWithout the game, we had nothing to keep us together, nothing to share, nothing to keep the friendship alive. Weâd see him around; we were still friendly, only Scottie began spending most of his time with his musician friends. Some of them formed a band and played small gigs. High school dances. Played across the street once at Merriam Park. They were pretty good. Covered the Stones, Bob Seger, Journey, Elvis Costello.â
âDrugs?â Honsa asked. I nearly laughed. Despite everything, he was still the Man. âCourse, I had been the Man once, too.
âSome grass, some hash, plenty of beer,â I said. âNo more than the rest of us.â
âHey, hey,â said Bobby. âWatch it with that ârest of usâ stuff. I have a reputation to protect.â
âIf you can call it that,â I said, and we both smiled.
For a moment he had forgotten about Victoria. For a moment he was the old Bobby. Only for a moment. His heart wrenched him back into the present, and he turned away from us, a pained expression on his face. The family photograph I had nudged off the wall earlier was still resting against the baseboard. He bent to retrieve it. âTell him the rest,â he said and returned the photograph to its hook, making sure it was perfectly straight.
I told Honsa and the other agents that we used to hang out at the Burger Chef on Marshall and Cleveland when we were kids. After we all started driving, it became less of a hangout than a gathering place. One day, during the summer before we started college, Bobby walked to Burger Chef to meet meâit was only a few blocks from here. Along the way he met Scottie and an