Abruptly Jeffy remembered that the version of himself native to this world lived alone and evidently had no daughter.
The risk they’d taken by lingering in a strange timeline became manifest. This moment was a trap that one wrong word could spring.
Again, his daughter proved quick and convincingly innocent. “Uncle Frank lived in our block. He’s not my uncle, really, but he’s always been, you know, so sweet to me and my dog, Snowball. I know he did a major bad thing and had to be sent away, but I wonder how he could be so nice and so bad at the same time. I guess the nice part must have been like a trick, and that makes me sad.”
Starkman’s eyes remained as dark with suspicion as with pigment. “What did you mean by saying my boy is your half brother?”
“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.