Flo’s Cabins.
The driver’s door of the truck opened and a kid got out. Didn’t look old enough to drive, Daggert thought.
The kid glanced over at Daggert briefly. Daggert had to admit to himself that he must have looked out of place. The boy hopped into the cargo bed and began upending the cans to let the trash spill out. When he spotted the well-dressed Bailey and Crawford wandering through the mounds of garbage, he did a double take.
Daggert could remember back to when he was a kid himself. He and his friends would go to a local dump to shoot rats. Sometimes they’d even find the odd treasure. Stuff that was perfectly good that people didn’t need any more and couldn’t be bothered to try to sell. A bicycle one time, a boxful of old Playboy magazines another.
When Daggert thought the kid had been scoping out his associates for a few seconds too long, he called over to him and said, “You got a problem?”
The boy’s head turned. “Excuse me?”
“I said, you got a problem?”
“No, sir,” he said. “I just... I was just looking at those people. Are they with you?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll mind my own business.” The boy went back to emptying trash barrels.
“Good idea,” Daggert said. “You even old enough to drive?”
The kid banged the can on the edge of the tailgate in a bid to free some stubborn trash stuck to the bottom. He turned to Daggert and said, “I guess. I mean, I drove here.”
“Oh, so you’re a smartass. You got a driver’s license?”
The kid held the man’s gaze. “No, sir, I do not. I’m just trying to help my aunt run her business as best I can. If you want to arrest me, you won’t be hurting me. You’ll be hurting her.”
“I’m not going to arrest you. Do I look like a cop to you?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Cops around here have big SUVs like this?” Daggert tucked his thumbs under his lapels. “They dress like this?”
“I guess not.”
Bailey, unaware that her boss was in the middle of a conversation, shouted, “Still no dog!”
“Same here!” said Crawford.
The boy blinked a couple of times. He swallowed, hard, and then asked, “You lose your dog?”
“Yeah,” Daggert said slowly. “You seen a dog on the loose around here?”
The boy shook his head from side to side quickly. “No,” he said immediately.
“What, you’ve never seen a single dog running around here?” Daggert said. “Would seem to me that a dog running around a place like this would be a pretty common occurrence.”
“I thought you meant, like, lately,” the boy said. “I haven’t seen any dog running around here lately.” He paused, then added, “My aunt hates dogs. She won’t let me have one.”
“She sounds like a nice lady,” Daggert said. He nodded at the words stenciled on the truck door. “So, Flo is your aunt?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said.
Daggert focused on the truck a moment longer. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” the boy replied.
“On the side of your truck. Looks like blood.”
The boy craned his neck over the side. “Oh, yeah. Uh, I think some raccoons got into a fight in the truck the other night and one of them got hurt pretty bad.”
“Huh,” said Daggert.
The kid had one can left to go. He tossed an empty one back towards the cab window, grabbed the last can and hurriedly balanced it on the top of the tailgate and tipped. Even before all the trash had slid out, he put the can back into position, jumped out of the bed, and got back behind the wheel.
He didn’t look at Daggert as he turned the ignition and drove away.
“Stupid kid,” Daggert said under his breath.
Bailey and Crawford trudged back to the SUV. Bailey said, “Check with them again, see if they’ve got another fix on the dog. He’s not in there. And even if he is, he’s hid himself so well we’ll never find him. At least not without help from the office. They’ve got to try and reconnect again.” She looked down at her feet. “And I’d just like to say, I have ruined a three-hundred-dollar pair of shoes.”
“I’m gonna have to burn my suit,” Crawford said.
“Ah, that’s sad,” Daggert said. “Anyway, I’m inclined to agree with Bailey. We’re not getting anywhere here. Let me make a call and—”
His hand was six inches from the phone when it started to buzz. Daggert snatched it off the dash and put it to his ear.
“I was just going to get in touch. We need you to—”
“Daggert, shut up.”
It was the voice of Madam Director. Daggert shut up.
“We may have something,” she said. “I’m going to send you a picture. It’s not a very good one, but I want you to look at it anyway.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m sending it to your car screen,” she said.
“One second,” Daggert said. He got behind the wheel and tapped a couple of buttons, bringing to life a tablet-size screen embedded in the dash. “Ready.”
Madam Director could be heard talking to someone else. “He’s ready. Send it.”
Daggert kept his eyes on the screen. Suddenly, an image appeared.
“What the... ?” said Daggert. “It’s an eye. Why are you sending me a picture of an eye?”
“Take a closer look,” Madam Director said.
“Okay, it’s more than just an eye. There’s an ear and part of a nose and an eyebrow. So it’s not just an eye, it’s part of a face. Where did this come from?”
“From the dog,” Madam Director said.
Daggert immediately understood. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got a picture of somebody looking into the dog’s face. How is that supposed to help me? I can’t see any surroundings, anything that would tell me where this was taken.”
“I can tell you when it was taken. It was in the last hour.”
“I can’t tell for sure,” Daggert said, “but it doesn’t look like an adult. That looks like a kid.”
“I agree,” Madam Director said. “I think it looks like a boy.”
“Yeah, I think maybe—”
Daggert stopped himself in mid-sentence. He studied the image more closely.
“Daggert, are you there?”
He kept staring at the screen, even reached out and touched it with the tips of his fingers.
“Daggert!”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to see if Flo has any cabins available to rent.”
“What are you talking about? Who’s Flo? Why do you want to rent a—”
But Daggert had already ended the call.
Twenty-Five
Emily was attempting to establish a link between Chipper and her phone so that the laptop would no longer be needed when having conversations. Chipper watched her intently, wagging his tail encouragingly. He wondered whether she was going to figure this out. She was very smart, no doubt about it, and if she were older, she had the brains to work at The Institute. They could use more nice people like her, he thought.
But if she was going to figure out how to talk with him using her phone, she needed to hurry up. Who knew how much time they had before the White Coats found him?
As Emily struggled with the laptop, words suddenly appeared on the screen.
Need help?
Emily looked at Chipper, and said, “Seriously? You know how to synch a phone to your little computer brain?”
I know lots of things. Ask me anything.