“Well, he wouldn’t be a real brother, just like Uncle Frank wasn’t my real uncle. But like if I join the Wolves, you know, the Justice Wolves, then him and me, we’d be friends, like in the same pack, brother wolf and sister wolf in the same pack.”

Starkman stared at her for a beat, and then he focused once more on Jeffy. “Your father’s an agitator against youth enlistment. He said the state was turning children into robots. He said we were brain-fucking them.”

Jeffy ducked his head and nodded. “My father’s stuck in the past. He hates change, progress. He can make you crazy in just two minutes, the way he rants.”

“You know this girl’s parents well?”

“Very well.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Crowley,” Jeffy said without hesitation.

The Crowley family, with a daughter named Jennifer, lived on his father’s street in Earth Prime, though maybe not here on Earth 1.13.

Nearly forty thousand people lived in Jeffy’s Suavidad Beach. Even if there were only half that many residents in this parallel reality, Dennis Starkman couldn’t know all of them.

However, perhaps in this world Mr. Crowley had been executed or sent off to a prison camp. If his daughter was already a member of the Wolves and was known to Starkman, then Jeffy had just sprung the trap that Amity had avoided triggering.

For the first time since they followed the brick walkway to the front steps, the sound of a vehicle rose in the street. A black van with heavily tinted windows, like the one in which Erasmus Gifford had been taken away, turned the corner and approached.

Starkman glanced at the van and then addressed Jeffy again. “You tell the Crowleys they shouldn’t have let Frank Coltrane spew his hatred to this girl.”

“I will. I’ll tell them.”

“You also tell them to take her into city hall tomorrow and sign her up for the Justice Wolves.”

“If you say they should, they will. They believe in the cause. They’re good people.”

If the van swung to the curb in front of the house, he would have to act. Pull the key to everything from his pocket. Switch it on. That would take two or three seconds. When Snowball had pounced on it, the screen required maybe four seconds to fill with a soft gray light and a few more seconds before the buttons labeled HOME, RETURN, SELECT appeared. A total of ten or eleven seconds. So then he would grab Amity by the hand, press HOME—which might take three more seconds. From the moment he decided to act, they would be gone in perhaps fourteen seconds.

Unless he fumbled with the device.

Unless he dropped it.

Fourteen seconds was an eternity. Supposing when Jeffy drew the device from his jacket, Starkman thought he was going for a weapon, a knife. The sonofabitch wouldn’t need fourteen seconds to draw the pistol and fire. Not a trigger-happy fascist like him. Even if he realized that the device wasn’t a weapon, he would intuit that it must be in some way a threat. He might knock it out of Jeffy’s hand.

The van didn’t pull to the curb, but instead cruised past like a motorized gondola floating along a Styx of blacktop, its occupants barely discernible behind windows as dark as their intentions.

Starkman said, “The recruiter will be waiting for her in city hall at nine tomorrow. He’ll have her name—Amity Crowley.”

“Nine o’clock,” Jeffy said. “Her folks will be there with her.”

“It’s pretty cool being a wolf, I bet,” said Amity. “Rudy’s uniform was totally the thing.”

“I’m sorry if we’ve been any trouble,” Jeffy said. “We didn’t mean to inconvenience anyone.”

He took his daughter by the hand and led her off the porch, down the steps, along the front walk to the street.

As the van motored east, Jeffy and Amity turned west.

When they had gone half a block, he dared to glance back.

Dennis Starkman had descended from the porch. He stood on his front lawn, watching them, talking on a cell phone. Talking to whom? Checking that the Crowley family had a daughter named Amity?

The girl, too, saw what was happening, and she started to walk faster.

Tightening his grip on her hand, Jeffy said, “Slow. Be casual. We don’t want him to think we’re making a break for it.”

That advice made sense only for as long as it took him to give it.

From a distance behind them came the sudden bark of brakes. The sound of the van’s engine changed. Eastbound a moment earlier, it was coming west now, closing on them from behind.

20

Neither a siren nor a blaring horn commanded them to halt, and they turned left from Bastoncherry onto another residential street. The instant they were out of sight of Starkman, they broke into a run, Amity still holding her father’s hand, Jeffy seeking somewhere that they could get out of sight. The van was maybe five seconds behind them, not fourteen, so there was no time to stop and use the key to everything. Houses stood to the left and right. No one in view. Then a police car turned the corner less than one block ahead of them, coming this way, its lightbar displaying like a vintage jukebox waiting for someone to drop a nickel.

He pulled Amity off the sidewalk, and they raced across a front yard to a gate at the side of the house. He fumbled with a gravity latch, and the gate opened. As they hurried toward the back of the house, a loudspeaker—on the patrol car or the black van—boomed like the voice of a forty-foot giant who had come down a beanstalk.

“POLICE PURSUIT! ENEMIES OF THE STATE ON FOOT! LOCK YOUR DOORS! ENEMIES OF THE STATE ON FOOT!”

The grass in the backyard needed mowing, the swimming pool contained no water, and one of the seats on a child’s swing set dangled uselessly on a single chain. The house seemed to be without a tenant until the kitchen door opened and a man charged onto the covered patio.

He was all jowls and wattle and belly, barefoot, with a fringe of Friar Tuck hair and an insane gleam in his eyes, wearing gray sweatpants and a soiled white T-shirt. He carried what might have been a croquet mallet, with no intention of offering to play a game, either an obedient citizen and true believer in the police state, or a guy who saw a chance to ingratiate himself with the authorities by bashing a little girl and her father.

Jeffy put the empty swimming pool between them and their would-be attacker, though they were all heading toward the same end of it, where they would inevitably meet.

To Amity, he said, “Over the wall,” by which he meant the wall between this property and the next.

That barrier stood between seven and eight feet tall. She might have found it insurmountable if it hadn’t been festooned with a decades-old, espaliered jasmine vine with gnarled woody runners two and three inches thick, offering plenty of footholds and handholds.

As Amity sprinted to the wall and began to claw her way up through the foliage, as Friar Tuck angled toward her with the mallet raised, Jeffy picked up a terra-cotta pot from the patio deck. The vessel was maybe two feet in diameter, and though the withered red-flowering vine geranium in it was suffering a near-death experience, the pot was full of dirt. It was too heavy to be snatched up on the run, and yet he snatched it up; too heavy to be lifted over his head, and yet he lifted it over his head; too damn cumbersome to be thrown like a basketball, and yet he threw it. The thought of that mallet coming down on the back of Amity’s head instantly turned his brain into an adrenaline factory and set his heart to pounding as if he had reached the last mile marker of a marathon.

Like a boulder launched from a catapult, the pot crashed into the would-be child basher before he reached his victim, staggering him. He went to his knees on the decking. The mallet clattered out of his hand, almost tumbled into the drained pool, and came to rest on the concrete coping. Spewing four-letter words in a deranged but colorful rant that suggested a deep though not broad vocabulary, the demonic croqueteur scrambled to his feet and lunged to recover his weapon.

Jeffy reached it first. He lacked the homicidal passion to swing for his adversary’s head, went low instead, and kneecapped the guy’s left leg. Shouted obscenities thinned into a high-pitched squeal of pain. The man collapsed, clutching his cracked knee with both hands. Any further threat he might have posed was eliminated when, having fallen at the edge of the empty pool, he rolled onto his back and lost his balance and did another half turn and slid down the sloped wall, howling as if under the misapprehension that he was gliding down a chute to Hell.

Throwing away the mallet, Jeffy turned to the property wall in time to see Amity disappear over the top. As he went after her, the police loudspeaker rocked the day with a call to arms.

“CITIZENS RESPOND! ENEMIES OF THE STATE ON FOOT! HALT AND DETAIN! CITIZENS RESPOND!”