The second: After I got back in the Virtue, I turned onto Crandall. Looking up the street, I noticed the back end of a big black Annihilator SUV. Trolling past my house, slowly, then picking up speed as it headed north.

Chapter 23

23

“Can we watch tv while we eat?” Paul asked, standing next to me in the kitchen.

I was putting linguine on three plates, and had put the salad in a glass bowl with a couple of tongs.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You know how your mother feels about having the TV on during dinner.”

“Yeah, but Mom’s not here. And The Simpsons is on.”

This did raise an interesting question. Did we have to play by Sarah’s rules if Sarah wasn’t home? Especially when The Simpsons was on?

While I made up my mind, I said to Paul, “Call your sister, tell her dinner is ready.”

Without moving an inch away from me, Paul shouted, loud enough to make the wineglasses on the kitchen shelf ring, “Angie! Dinner!”

“Thanks,” I said.

She’d gotten home the same time as I had, headed straight up to her room and closed the door. I’d barely had a chance to ask whether she was dining with us, and she’d had only enough time to grunt “Yes.”

Paul grabbed the TV remote as he took his plate to the table. We have a TV in the kitchen, which we often have tuned to the news. He turned it on, flipped through a few channels until he had the one he wanted.

“Oh!” said Paul. “It’s the one where Homer’s an astronaut.”

That was, I had to admit, a pretty good one. Particularly the part where he eats the potato chips, rotating in zero gravity in a parody of the space station docking maneuver in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Okay,” I said, pulling up a chair.

And besides, I wanted something to take my mind off things, so that I’d stop obsessing about Trevor, Lawrence, what Angie was doing visiting Trixie, and that Annihilator.

It wasn’t like there was only one Annihilator in the city, or even one black one. Lots of people owned them. The sports editor had one, in yellow. There was a guy around the block had one, in green. And I’d seen plenty of black ones since they started coming onto the market a couple of years ago. It was probably the most popular color.

So a black Annihilator driving up my street was not reason to panic. A black Annihilator racing up the driveway, plowing through the front of the house, that would be reason to panic.