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couldn’t get a fix this time,” he said. He squinted, opened his eyes, and removed the headphones. “He could have been using a Trac-Fone or some other prepaid cell phone that’s not traceable.”
    â€œNo, no, no.” Bobby had the Central High School yearbook open and was furiously turning pages until he found the one he wanted in the seniors’ gallery. “Yes.”
    He stabbed a photo hard with his finger.
    I looked over his shoulder. First photo from the right, third from the top.
    â€œYou got him?” asked Honsa. “You know who he is?”
    â€œScottie Thomforde,” Bobby said. “First we get Victoria back…”
    â€œLater, we’ll kill him,” I said. “Later, we’ll kill them all.”

3
    Agent Honsa pretended he didn’t 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.
    â€œWho is Thomforde?” he said. “What is your relationship?”
    â€œScottie Thomforde is from the neighborhood,” Bobby said. “He grew up six, seven blocks from here. Near Aldine. His mother still lives there.”
    â€œAldine is a city park,” I said. “Sometimes we had ball games up there. Scottie played with us.”
    â€œThat’s how I connected the dots,” Bobby said. “When he said, ‘Let’s have some fun, guys.’ We used to say that just before we went out onto the field. ‘Let’s have some fun out there.’ ”
    â€œI used to say it,” I said.
    â€œWhat happened to him?” Honsa asked.
    â€œHe quit,” I said.
    â€œWe were pretty tight for a while,” said Bobby. “Except he quit playing sports in high school to take up music.”
    â€œHe was a madman on the drums,” I said. “Used to carry sticks with him and beat out a riff on anything, sidewalk, hood of a car, the tables at Burger Chef—drove the manager crazy. We used to call him ‘Sticks’ for a while. Scottie got a kick out of that, but the nickname never took.”
    â€œAfter a while, he just drifted away,” Bobby said. “Without the game, we had nothing to keep us together, nothing to share, nothing to keep the friendship alive. We’d 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€œDrugs?” Honsa asked. I nearly laughed. Despite everything, he was still the Man. ’Course, I had been the Man once, too.
    â€œSome grass, some hash, plenty of beer,” I said. “No more than the rest of us.”
    â€œHey, hey,” said Bobby. “Watch it with that ‘rest of us’ stuff. I have a reputation to protect.”
    â€œIf you can call it that,” 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. “Tell him the rest,” 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 me—it was only a few blocks from here. Along the way he met Scottie and an