The simple fact of the matter is that claw machines can be rigged. The owner is able to alter the power of both the grip and the lift, but that’s a blade that cuts both ways. It’s possible the owner of this particular Denny’s was feeling generous, or that the claw machine had just been filled, or that a magical alien race had come down and souped up the machine for their own intergalactic reasons, but regardless of why, it was paying out big-time. The three teenage girls who were playing the machine when Bob and Laura walked over were giddy with success, despite the fact that they’d each won a toy none of them would have taken for free, had someone offered it to them. The first girl had a sort-of unicorn (the horn pointed backward; possibly the manufacturer had only heard unicorns described), the second had a stuffed rabbit that could have spawned a horror franchise, and the last one was clutching a stuffed mushroom that might have been video game inspired, but ended up looking like an inappropriate drug reference.

As Bob and Laura walked up, the girls stepped back.

“We won,” said the first one, looking up at the very cute guy who had just shown up. He was too old to be genuinely appealing, obviously, but still worth talking to. She was wearing a T-shirt for a band that had broken up seven years before she was born, a fact she was completely unaware of.

“I see that,” said Bob. “Do you think you used up all the luck?”

The second girl shook her head. A small cloud of glitter settled on her shoulders. “It’s not luck, it’s skill.” She was the one with the mushroom.

“My point exactly,” said Bob, pulling a pair of quarters from his pocket.

“It’s completely rigged,” argued another of the girls, the one with the unicorn. Now that she’d had a chance to look at it properly, she was uneasy . . . the backward horn made it look bad-tempered, and she wondered how her other stuffed toys were going to respond to it. Then she remembered she was sixteen and shouldn’t even have stuffed toys, then she felt guilty about the ones she did have, and then her brain short-circuited in a soup of hormones and neurochemicals and she went silent. Fortunately for her, nobody noticed any of this at all.

Bob stepped up to the machine and put in his money. The timer started to count down, and he moved the claw back and forth a few times.

Laura laughed at him. “What, feeling it out?”

Bob was unconcerned. “Yes. I am getting a sense of the mechanism, the timing, the power.”

Laura snorted. “Please.”

Bob took his hands off the controls and circled the game cabinet. He crouched and evaluated; he rubbed his chin and raised his eyebrows at Laura.

“Stuffed cat in the corner pocket,” he said.