I slid into the passenger seat of Angie’s car and she took my hand. “Don’t wowwy, baby, nothing will happen to your pride and joy. I promise.”

She’s funny enough to shoot sometimes.

I said, “Well, least in this neighborhood, nobody will be suspicious of this thing.”

She said, “Oh, good one. You ever think of going into stand-up?”

It went like that. We sat in the car and passed around a can of Pepsi and waited for our meal ticket to make a guest appearance.

By six o’clock we were cramped and sick of each other and even sicker of looking at 1254 Merrimack Avenue. It was a faded A-frame that might have been pink once. A Puerto Rican family had entered it an hour ago, and we’d watched a light go on in the second-floor apartment a minute or so later. Short of our second can of Pepsi exploding all over the dashboard when I opened it, that was the closest we’d come to excitement in four hours.

I was looking through the tape collection on Angie’s floor, trying to find a group I’d heard of, when she said, “Heads up.”

A black woman rope thin, with a stiff, almost regal bearing was stepping from an ‘81 Honda Civic, her right arm around a bag of groceries, resting them on her hip. She looked like the picture of Jenna, but younger by a good seven or eight years. She also seemed to have too much energy for the tired woman in the photograph. She slammed the car door with her free hip, a hard, swift move that would have left Gretzky on the ice with a wet ass. She marched to the front door of the house, slid her key into the lock, and disappeared inside. A few minutes later, she appeared in silhouette by the window, a telephone receiver to her ear.

Angie said, “How do you want to play it?”

“Wait,” I said.

She shifted in her seat. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She held her chin with her fingers, moved it around in a semicircle for a moment. “You don’t think Jenna’s in there?”

“No. Since she disappeared, she’s played it relatively careful. She has to know her apartment’s been trashed. And the beating the guy in the schoolyard gave me tells me she’s probably into more than the petty theft we’re after her for. With people like that after her maybe this Roland guy too I don’t think she’s going to set herself up in her sister’s place.”

Angie half shrugged, half nodded in that way she has, and lit a cigarette. She hung her arm out the window and the gray smoke pooled by the rearview mirror, then separated into equal strands and floated out the windows. She said, “If we’re smart enough to figure out where she is, wouldn’t someone else be? We can’t be the only ones who know about the sister.”

I thought about it. It made sense. If whoever “they” were had put a tail on me in the hopes of following me to Jenna, then they must have put a tail on Simone. “Shit.”