You would steal her back.

Yeah.

He shakes his head.

I want to.

I would like to see that one, Junior.

Anyway, it isn’t like she was worth all that much, I say, then immediately regret my words.

He looks at me sharply and I face the window again. The apartments move by, some high and modern, though you also get glimpses of the sooty canals and weedy walkways that run between crooked old bungalows hippies lived in during the sixties.

I only meant that I’ve already stolen a lot for you.

He keeps staring coolly forward. We pass an old aqua-green apartment, and beneath its peeling pastel paint you can make out older, darker layers, and sometimes the worn surfaces of molding wood.

Junior, if you don’t stop talking like this I’m gonna wrap a piece of kite string around your neck and pull it tight.

I tighten my lips and pull Greta closer.

After I got back from Oregon, when I still jammed a chair under my doorknob to keep him out at night, he started brooding over how we could steal Buster back from the celebrity. But there was always a maid or gardener or pool man around the house. Plus, the celebrity is too famous for the cops to blow a burglary off. Tomas knows these neighborhoods, places like the Palisades, Beverly Hills, or Bel Air, because many of his dog-owner clients live there. He says most of them leave their side doors open; they tell him to just walk on in. Sometimes he will come upon the kids alone at home smoking pot with their friends.

It kills him that we can’t go after Buster, because in some ways it would be so easy—she knows us, would walk right up to us, and since they now have a guard dog they are probably lax about security. But they know Tomas had not wanted to sell her, and when I brought Buster to them alone—early that morning—they must have known Tomas hadn’t given me permission, especially when I insisted on taking cash. My brother forced me to go over the words I told them. But finally, he decided if we stole her it would be too obvious that we were the ones who did it.