“What are you working on?” Maggie said.

Toby smiled. “I can’t talk about it. You could be a corporate spy from MIT.”

Maggie punched him in the arm.

“Ow,” he said, rubbing the red spot on his bony upper arm. He stared at her for several seconds. “Are you, like, okay?”

Why would he ask her that? Because she hadn’t been to the Batcave in so long? Or had he heard gossip about the party?

“I mean, on Snapchat some kids were saying—”

“I’m fine,” Maggie said, not making eye contact. She composed herself, forced her eyes to look up at his. “I need your help with something.”

“I figured,” he said, collapsing into a worn couch that was pushed against the garage wall.

“It may require you talking to some of your sketchy web friends,” Maggie said.

“Hey, they’re not sketchy. Unkempt. And weird. But not sketchy.”

“Whatever you say.”

He shrugged. “What do you need?”

“I need to know how to track someone through their cell phone.”

Toby kicked his feet up on the coffee table, which was just some boards on top of cinder blocks. “Easy, get the phone and download a tracking app. Don’t you watch TV?”

“But I don’t know whose phone it is. All I have is the number.”

Toby scratched his chin, then stood and moved to the computer workstation. He put on a headset mic. Maggie tried not to smirk. He started typing, then said something into the mic. He laughed, pecked at the keys some more. Then: “Thanks, bro.”

Unlike when she’d see him in the hallway at school—stoop-shouldered, fast-walking, eyes on the floor—here Toby was the most confident man alive.

He yanked off the headset. “Well, that was easy.”

“What do you mean?”

“You got two hundred bucks?”

Maggie narrowed her eyes. “What for?”

“You want the location of the phone or not?”

“You want me to send someone two hundred bucks? Is he a Nigerian prince?”

“You want to track the phone? Then yeah. Two hundred and they can give you the coordinates for any phone for the past month. My friend said it’s legit. Bounty hunters use this service all the time.”

“It doesn’t sound legit.”

Toby threw up his hands.

Maggie thought about her options. Two hundred dollars was a lot of money. She’d been tutoring and babysitting like crazy to earn enough for a new laptop for college. But she didn’t want to disappoint her father. “You sure?”

“He sent me a brochure. It’s, like, a real company.”