She pouted. Got back. Turned on the engine and started to go where she’d been told.

“Wait,” I called. I walked up to her window.

“You want your phone back?”

“Yes, yes I do.”

“What’s the password?”

“What? No. I can’t.”

“Based on our exchanges to date, I need to know if you’ve done anything more to put me in danger. And yourself, for that matter. You can tell me or you can wait until I get my hacker to do it. Which might take a couple of weeks.”

She wanted that phone back. She told me the password.

I told her to wait where she was. Then I drove up to my house. I went to the rock, lifted it, opened the box, got her phone and its vital parts. I went to the house, hooked it up to my laptop, and did a backup of everything except her music, which was not to my taste. If it left a trace, a blip for the eighty seconds or so that it took, so be it. I’d seen my own phone be confused for longer than that, frequently thinking it was at its ancestral home in Cupertino before it registered it was in the Catskills. When the transfer was done, I took the phone apart, and walked down the hill.

—

After I gave her the phone, she started in about her car. She didn’t blame me. Which was good. But she was intensely distraught. She was parking and even driving so that the bullet hole would be hidden from others, like a girl with a particularly embarrassing stain on her dress trying to face away from the world so that it couldn’t be seen. She didn’t know what to do about it.

“Ask Liz,” I said.

“I did.”

“And?”

“She didn’t have an answer.”

“She’s the one who shot it.”

“She said she’d pay, but how do I explain it?”

“You can either not explain it, like if your car got hit in a parking lot, and you found it.”

“Or?”

“Or you drive somewhere like the South Bronx. Or Newburgh or Albany for that matter. Anyplace with a high crime rate. You go at night, when people can’t see that much, and when you get to a bad area…”

“How do I judge?”

“When you get scared. Then call 911. Say you heard shots fired and you think, ‘oh God, one hit my car. I’m getting out of here.’ Then you report it to your insurance and get it fixed. And have a reason you were in that area, a concert, a women’s march, good cannoli.”

“Thank you, thank you,” she said. “That’s so simple.”

“OK,” I said. I turned to walk away.

“Wait,” she said.

“What?”

“My husband.”