“As soon as we take possession of the runaways, your agreement will be formally set, and we will come by and pick up you and your dependent,” she’d said.

“And you’re going to get them for sure, right?” Adelaide was nervous about this part. What if Purdue was uncooperative? What if they refused to make a deal?

There was a short laugh on the other end of the phone. “Oh, we will get them. For sure.”

Adelaide had laughed, too, not sure if it was just nerves. She wasn’t used to being nervous. She was used to taking charge and moving forward with her back straight. And that was just what she did now, closing the bedroom doors, throwing a few granola bars into her purse, and returning to the front door.

“Any time now, Jimmy. Any time. And we’ll be on our way to the promised land.”

After an hour, she went outside and sat on the front stoop. The wind had picked up, and she crisscrossed the sides of her sweater over her chest, glancing at her watch.

“Any moment now…” she whispered to herself. Behind the screen door, Jimmy slept through it all, his blank dreamscape as empty as their driveway.

CHAPTER 37

HERD

French

ZHEEGWON HAD REMEMBERED THAT HIS BIKE LOCK had almost been opened when they’d come for Miig. In the turmoil that had followed, none of us had given it a second thought. “She got the first three numbers, right?”

I nodded. “I watched. There’s two left.”

“So, I mean, eventually we’ll get the right ones, right? It’s only two, and there are only ten possibilities each.”

“Ten for the first number—you knock one possibility off the second digit from the first combo on digit one if you’re looking for a specific order. That means there’s a hundred possibilities,” Slopper answered. We all turned to look at him.

“What? I’m little, not stupid,” he answered.

“Good boy, Slop.” Chi Boy beamed at him.

“I mean, that’s assuming she got the first three numbers right. She was pretty wasted.”

“Well, it’s worth a shot.” I shuffled as far to my right as I could get. “Let’s give’r.”

Taking turns, Tree and I reached and flicked the two remaining knobs one at a time, panting from the stretch as much as the moments when we held our breath, waiting for Zheegwon to try to pull his hands apart.

“Nope.”

Another try.

“Nope.”

And another.

Miig had gotten new dressings and taken a bunch of pills, some of them vitamins that had been helpfully slipped into the tote bag. Whether or not one-a-day vitamins were really going to help a man who had been deboned like a smallmouth bass was questionable, but Rania added them to the aspirin and ibuprofen anyway. “Couldn’t hurt,” she’d said, shrugging.

Now he was able to talk a bit and drink some water. The rest of us ate slices of buttered bread off our knees and drank Gatorade out of squeeze bottles held by the person beside us behind their back. Wab was the only one who could eat normal because her hands were free, but her bread had to be folded up to fit into the cage.