Cal’s fortunetelling was pure fiction, but it got me thinking a certain kind of way. I had plenty of time to follow through with that train of thought when I walked outside and didn’t see Dolores parked—or crashed—along the street. I had to take the bus out of Moire Park and walk the rest of the way to The Cut.

The cartoonish imagery reminded me Ethan was a kid. Before Al’s funeral, I had concerned myself mostly with his career aspirations. Maybe one day, the drive and the relentless competition would consume him, but at his age, it was only a small part of his life.

He spent time schmoozing with talent agents, auditioning, and getting lessons, but most of his day was—by law—spent in school. I had given the administration a call, but the secretary more or less told me to kick rocks. Virginia said there was nothing going on there, and I took her word for it. It allowed me to get lost in the weeds of Al’s world.

I doubt any of the kids in Ethan’s eighth grade class put those bullets in Al’s body, but if Ethan suspected someone out there was going to snatch him, chances were he told his friends about it. Kids weren’t known for their tight lips—especially if spilling the beans would make them look dangerous and earn them social cachet.

I was relieved to find Dolores outside The Cut, then annoyed when I saw a piece of paper flapping under the windshield wiper. The parking enforcers weren’t usually sticklers around The Cut, in case they accidentally put a tag on their buddies’s car. It could have been bad luck that they had noticed Dolores parked up next to the fire hydrant, but I imagine a cop inside had noticed my ride and pointed it out to someone with a citation pad.

I didn’t even look at the fine printed on the ticket. I couldn’t pay it then, probably wouldn’t be able to pay it later either. The ticket could go on the pile of late bills stacking up in my office. One day my ship might come in and I might deign to put out those small fires, but until then, all that paper would make for nice insulation when the city turned off the gas.

I unlocked Dolores’s glove compartment and crammed the ticket in alongside my gun. Dolores gave me less trouble than usual, and the engine turned over after my first nonsensical condemnation of the car’s hypothetical mother’s sexual promiscuity.

While the chunky thrum evened out, I grabbed my notepad and gave the pages a riffle. I had the name of the kid’s school and the phone number, but nothing else. I knew it was somewhere in the Fly Sheet neighborhood, but I’d need to drive around a bit to find it.

Dolores had plenty of gas in her tank, and I had nothing but time. I tossed her into gear, and my feet worked the pedals to get us chugging along toward the city center.

The school was called the Sam Marlowe Academy. Lofty names like that were often misleading—either aspirational, or a cheap way to attract wealthy parents who thought it would look good on a college application. In this case, the school seemed to be the genuine article. Fly Sheet wasn’t the most affluent neighborhood, but it was no Moire Park. Ethan would have needed to take multiple busses to get there every morning, and he was sure to stand out in his thrift store duds.

Sam Marlowe, as an institution, was older than the neighborhood, meaning it had been grandfathered out of the geographic class associations. No one would have signed off on using so much prime real estate for a child’s school campus in the modern era. The structures, a crash of traditional stone and more modern glass, formed a horseshoe around a city block. Several lots of valuable property at the center were filled with grass, woodchips, and metal jungle gyms. There weren’t any basketball hoops, but there was a field marked out in white paint on a flat section of the yard. It could have been a soccer field, but the net was too small—probably meant for lacrosse. Soccer would have been too pedestrian.

I cruised past the school twice. I didn’t expect to see any criminals with eye-masks and striped shirts rubbing their hands greedily from the shadows as they watched the school; I just wanted to get a feel for the place. No other car on the road was as beaten down as Dolores, but there were plenty of average commuters mixed in with the sleek luxury sedans and compensatory SUVs puttering around alongside me.

I tried to think of a compelling reason a woman as down on her luck as Virginia would shell out big bucks on a fancy school when she couldn’t even afford a car to take her to work. Was it an investment in her kid’s future? Or was it an attempt to recapture the feeling of being part of high-society?

A bell rang inside the school as I pulled up to the curb across from the playground’s frontage. Kids ran out from one of the buildings, tumbling toward the climbing structures and play fields like spilled thumbtacks. I watched the kids do what kids did best and tried to picture Ethan in there among them.

To get an acting gig like the one he got, he’d need to be charismatic. Did that make him popular? Or was he one of the obnoxious theater kids no one could stand to be around for more than five minutes at a stretch? Was his parents’ socioeconomic position too much of a barrier to make friends? In most cases, kids didn’t dig too deep into stuff like that, but here the other tykes’ parents might be more diligent about training their young ones to look down on those in hard places.

I could have watched all day and not learned a thing. There was only one way to find out how the kids felt about Ethan and that was to ask them.

I got out and waited for a break in the slow-moving traffic. I darted across when one lane cleared, but had to squeeze in behind a long black Cadillac with blacked-out windows to get through the other side. When I got close, the taillights lit up the splotches of dirt on my coat. Maybe I should have thought to dress up—at least brushed my teeth and run a comb through my fur.

A chintzy iron fence blocked the open end of Sam Marlow’s campus, providing the illusion of security as long as nobody tried to squeeze through the bars. The section bent when I leaned a fraction of my weary weight against it.

I knew how bad this looked from the other side of the fence. Luckily, these kids were too young to have seen the PSAs. This became even more apparent when a young porcupine peeled away from a group of kids loitering near—but not too near—the monkey bars. The kids were too cool to play, and they jumped on the opportunity to prove how tough they were by ignoring all the warnings adults had given them about stranger danger.

These kids were on the cusp of adolescence and would do any stupid thing they thought smelled a bit like rebellion. Was that attitude what had gotten Ethan into the situation he was in?

“Who the fuck are you?” The kid’s curse didn’t flow quite right. The way he jittered and rushed to get it out belied the excitement of one testing boundaries.

His friends, a pigeon and a salamander, encouraged the porcupine with their eyes while they tried to work up the gall to come over themselves. Their indecision manifested in a slow shuffle back and forth, trending toward the fence.

“I’m a friend of Ethan Calhoun,” I said. “You know him?”

The kid grunted, rolled his eyes, and shrugged. Maybe he wasn’t the greatest at swearing yet, but when it came to shows of insouciance, this kid was competing at a high school level.

Before I pressed further, the pigeon and salamander caught up. The pigeon let out a little coo when he saw me up close.

“Hey, I know you,” he said. “I saw you on a videotape my dad recorded.”

“Oh yeah? What was I doing?”

The kid thought for a second while the other two looked at each other, excited about the prospect of talking to a TV star.

“I don’t know. Telling kids not to do drugs, I guess.”

“I say anything about talking to strangers?”

The salamander lost his defiant edge. Flop sweat compounded his skin’s preexisting moisture as he looked around. The other kids deflated, more as a response to finding out I wasn’t a big-shot than as a reaction to the subtle dig at their carelessness.

Kids tended to trust me for some reason. I didn’t care much for people, but if I had to deal with them, I preferred kids over adults. There were less pretenses with the youth and far fewer lies. Even when kids mouths tried to mislead, the truth was always painted on their faces.

“Ethan,” I said to the newcomers. “You know him?”

The porcupine looked around the schoolyard, making sure no other kids were watching. It wouldn’t be cool for someone like him to admit association with the school’s resident charity case.

“Saw him around, I guess,” the salamander said.

“Was he acting strange before he got…” Call me a softie, but I couldn’t use the word I was thinking—not with kids his own age. “…before he disappeared?”

The porcupine picked up on my off-kilter verbiage and squinted at me. “I guess. He was always acting: telling weird jokes, being loud, doing voices.”

“He liked to make people laugh,” the pigeon said. “Teachers hated him.”

If the teachers really hated him, I might have just expanded my suspect pool. I knew how kids exaggerated, though. “How about you? Were you friends with him?”

The kids checked again to make sure nobody would overhear. They weren’t eating lunch together every day, but my bet was they talked—just maybe not in public.

“Saw him around,” was the porcupine’s final answer.

“See him outside of school?”

“Never.” The kid answered fast. Too fast. He tried to cover it up with more details. “Ethan lives across town. Didn’t hang out in the same places we did.”

“And where was that? The mall? The arcade?”

I wanted to pull my notepad out, but the kids would have been more reticent if they knew their words were being recorded. Sometimes the pad could work as a prop to get people to talk. Other times, it was as much a deterrent as the physical fence between me and the kids now.

“How old are you?” the porcupine asked.

“Forget it. What about the other kids? Ethan have enemies?”

“I don’t think so. He got in a few fights, but—”

A shrill whistle cut across the playground before the pint-sized pincushion justified Ethan’s brawling.

The kids scattered, scared worse by the sound than they were of me, the grizzled old bloodhound leering at them through the fence. I saw why they were spooked when I looked toward the sound and saw an overweight rhinoceros lumbering over.

His tee shirt was tucked into a pair of white gym shorts with blue stripes, and he wore matching socks that went almost to his knee. He should have looked ridiculous, but his size and the fervor with which he blew into the small orange whistle canceled out the comedic effect of his wardrobe. If I was a child, I would have been scared too, but in this civilized world, physical superiority wasn’t the be all end all. I got the sense this coach was the type who took umbrage with that assertion, tried to prove the big man always came out on top.

“What the hell are you doing?” he bellowed as he stomped up to the fence. Flecks of his saliva hit my face from five yards away. The sky was cold and clear, but with the rain of spit and the gust of hot wind escaping from under the aged rhino’s horn, I was on a tropical island with a summer storm bearing down.

“I’m Jonathan O’Howell, private investigator. I’m here about Ethan Calhoun.”

“God damn it. Another one?” the coach said under his breath. “What the fuck do you want?”

I raised an eyebrow at his initial question, but played along with the second. “I want to find out what happened to him. Think there might be more going on here than meets the eye.”

“As long as these kids are at school, they’re under my protection. Can’t have people harassing them through the fence.”

He liked playing the hero, but probably didn’t know half the kids’ names. He called them some variety of sport or champ or slugger, all in a flat grumble to convey a deep sarcasm.

“Your house, your rules, boss,” I said, putting my hands up in surrender. He gave a smug twitch of his mouth, smooshing his lips and crumpling the cracked-clay skin around his nose.

“Good thing I’ve got nothing else today,” I continued. “I’ll just go back to my car over there and wait until the kids get out. I’m sure some of them won’t mind hopping in and giving me a lesson. And if they need a little coaxing, I’ve got candy.”

“You can’t—” he blustered. “I won’t let—”

He stared at me and growled. The sound from deep in the barrel of his chest would have scared off most, but I was used to standing up to bullies. It had been years since I’d done it properly, and it gave me a rush.

I tried to hide my giddiness and maintain the facade of indifference as I shrugged. “Or you could let me talk to someone who knows something, and I’ll be out of your…” I stopped before saying “hair” and looked at his sweaty bald pate. “… Out of your way.”

He snarled again as he turned to march down the fence toward the gate. “Fine. I’ll take you to Tabitha, but then you’d better get lost.”