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everything goes smooth, I’ll let you have a few thousand
dollars. Then you scrape the tracker off your car and drive to
Canada.”
    “ What do you mean? What
tracker?”
    “ GPS tracker. There’s one
under the car. Tony put it there, right?”
    “ Are you
kidding?”
    “ What would the joke
be?”
    “ Show me. You have to show
me. This is—”
    “ Slow down. You can’t make
demands, remember.”
    “ You saw a tracker on my
car?”
    “ Yes. Do they always do
that?”
    “ Never. Can you show me? Can
we go back to the lot?”
    Willow didn’t say anything.
    “ Please, if there’s a
tracker on my car, then we have to get rid of it,” Cyril
said.
    “ And then what?”
    “ Then we really have to get
out of here without anyone killing us.”

CHAPTER 10

    Danny let Marcus watch the receiver
for a while. It showed a blip on a screen as it moved across the
map. The screen froze every couple of minutes and it went out
completely a few times, but it always came back and the car never
did anything unexpected during these timeouts.
    “ Inez said the whole thing
costs less than a hundred dollars,” Danny said.
    “ She put it on the
car?”
    “ The girl knows what she’s
doing. Luis showed me a picture of her—she looked like she was
twelve. With the pigtails and everything. But I guess she’s grown
up a lot.”
    “ You met her?”
    “ Of course, I met her. I
mean, I’ve talked to her on the phone. She sent me the receiver in
the mail.”
    “ He gets his daughter to do
this kind of work?”
    “ He doesn’t have anyone else
on the outside. All his old friends have chucked him. It’s really
sad to see.”
    They were still well in front of the
car they were tracking, so they coasted west and enjoyed the
scenery as Pennsylvania gave way to Ohio. Danny stopped at a place
along the highway that sold specialty candy. He bought two bags of
salty licorice and had Marcus try a bite on the way back to the
car.
    “ This is disgusting,” Marcus
said.
    “ Acquired taste.”
    “ How did you even know that
place was there?”
    “ I’ve travelled some.
Seriously, just give it a chance. Keep eating it until it tastes
good. A lot of things that feel wrong at first end up being exactly
what you need.”
    When they got back to the car, Danny
took the wheel again and played R&B ballads on the radio, sweet
songs about breakups and undying love sung by men who claimed to be
irresistible.
    “ You like Usher?” Danny
asked.
    “ Yeah, I guess. I don’t pay
enough attention to music.”
    “ Yeah, that’s a problem. If
you don’t like music, then something is missing.”
    “ Saida tells me that. But I
don’t hate music. It’s just that she plays me something, and I’m
supposed to feel something. And she’s angry because I don’t.”
    “ What do you feel,
nothing?”
    “ Not enough, I
guess.”
    They drove for about a minute in
silence.
    “ I worry that, I don’t know,
she’s going to leave me. I mean—I know that she loves me, but I
feel like she should love me more than she does.”
    “ Yup.” Danny nodded like
he’d spotted the problem. “Here’s the thing: it’s impossible for
two people to love each other exactly the same amount. That’s like
a mathematical impossibility. So, sure, you love her, she loves
you, but you love her more and that is eventually going to tear the
whole thing down. Love is never equal, and it has to be or it gets
rotten. Therefore it always gets rotten. I’m sorry, that’s just the
way it is. So all these people are out chasing love—they’re just
kidding themselves.”
    “ So you should just feel up
women on the train? That’s what you should go for?”
    “ No. Meet women, make love
to women, but you can’t expect to build a real life with them. It
can’t ever work.”
    “ What you should do is have
a column, like a love column, where you give love advice to
people.”
    “ You laugh, but I’ve got a
much clearer view than just about anyone else out there. You