"Carrottop's in his house," Angie said.

I U-turned and drove back down the street, pa.s.sing the redhead's house as he closed his front door behind him and continuing past Bubba's van. I drove another twenty yards and pulled over on the right shoulder in front of a home construction site, the skeleton of another Cape sitting on bare brown land.

Angie and I got out of the car and walked back toward Bubba's van.

"I hate when he does this," she said.

I nodded. "Sometimes I forget he has a mind of his own."

"I know he has a mind of his own," Angie said. "It's how he uses it that keeps me up nights."

We reached the rear of the van just as Bubba came bounding out from between the two houses, pushed us aside, and opened the rear doors.

"Bubba," Angie said, "what have you done?"

"Sssh. I'm working here." He tossed a pair of branch cutters into the rear of the van, grabbed a gym bag from the floor, and shut the doors.

"What're you-"

He put a finger to my lips. "Sssh. Trust me. This is good."

"Does it involve heavy explosives?" Angie asked.

"You want it to?" Bubba reached for the van door again.

"No, Bubba. Very much no."

"Oh." He dropped his hand from the door. "No time. Be right back."

He jostled us aside and ran in a crouch across the lawns toward the redhead's house. Even in a crouch, Bubba running across your lawn is about as easy to miss as Sputnik would be. He weighs something less than a piano but something more than a fridge, and he's got that demented newborn's face billowing out from under spikes of brown hair and above a neck the circ.u.mference of a rhino's midsection. He kind of moves like a rhino, actually, lumbering and slightly to his right, but oh so quickly.

We watched with mouths slightly ajar as he dropped to his knees by the BMW, slim-jimmed the lock in the time it would take me to do it with a key, and then opened the door.

Angie and I both tensed for the blare of an alarm, but were met with silence as Bubba reached into the car, pulled something out, and slid it in the pocket of his trench coat.

Angie said, "What in the f.u.c.k is he doing?"

Bubba reached behind him and unzipped the gym bag by his knees. His hand searched around inside until he found what he was looking for. He removed a small black rectangular object and placed it in the car.

"It's a bomb," I said.

"He promised," Angie said.

"Yeah," I said, "but he's, oh, nuts. Remember?"

Bubba used the sleeve of his trench coat to wipe the places he'd touched in and outside the car, then he gently closed the door and scrambled back across the lawn and over to us.

"I," he said, "am so f.u.c.king cool."

"Agreed," I said. "What did you do?"

"I mean, I'm the b.a.l.l.s, dude. I'm it. I surprise myself sometimes." He opened the back door of the van, tossed the gym bag on the floor.

"Bubba," Angie said, "what's in the bag?"

Bubba was d.a.m.n near bursting. He threw the folds of the bag wide, waved us to look inside. "Cell phones!" he said with a ten-year-old's glee.

I looked in the bag. He was right. Ten or twelve of them-Nokias, Ericcsons, Motorolas, most black, a few gray.

"Great," I said. I looked up into his beaming face. "Actually, why is this great, Bubba?"

"'Cause your idea sucked sucked, and I came up with this one."

"My idea wasn't bad."

"It sucked!" he said happily. "I mean, it blew, dude. Put a bug in a box, have the guy-or wasn't it some chick at first-take it in the house."

"Yeah, so?"

"So, what if he leaves the box on the dining room table, goes up to the bedrooms to do whatever it is you want to hear?"

"We were kinda hoping he wouldn't."

He gave me a thumbs-up. "f.u.c.king great thinking there."

"So," Angie said, "what was your idea?"

"Replace his cell phone," Bubba said. He pointed into the bag. "These all have bugs already inside. All I had to do was match one of mine"-he pulled a charcoal Nokia flip phone from his pocket-"to his."

"That's his?"

He nodded.

I nodded with him, let my smile match his own, until I dropped it. "Bubba, no offense, but so what? The guy's inside his house."

Bubba rocked back on his heels, raised his eyebrows up and down several times. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," I said. "So-how do I put this?-why the f.u.c.k does he need to use his cell phone when he probably has three or four house phones inside?"

"House phones," Bubba said slowly, a frown beginning to replace the smile. "Never thought of those. He can just pick one up and call anywhere he wants, huh?"

"Yeah, Bubba. That's sort of their point. He's probably doing it right now."

"s.h.i.t," Bubba said. "Too bad I cut the phone lines out back, huh?"

Angie laughed. She clapped his cherub's face between her hands and kissed his nose.

Bubba blushed and then looked at me, that smile beginning to grow again.