"I know the feeling," said Step. He carefully refrained from pointing out to her that she had just called the baby Zap. He did that the first time she called Elizabeth Betsy, and she had made it a point never to call her that again, so the poor kid was growing up thinking that she was one person to men and another person to women.
Which might not be that far from reality, of course, given the way society worked. Pretty soon he'd probably give in and stop calling Betsy Betsy, so she'd have the same name to everybody. But he thought Zap was a great name, at least until he was old enough to complain about it, and if he could get DeAnne to slip into using it, too, that would be nice.
Step stayed in the kitchen and looked mindlessly at the newspaper for a moment. Then he realized that they had both lists out on the table-the list of Stevie's friends and the list of people who might hate him enough to send an anonymous threat. He got up and put them in a high cupboard. No matter what Douglas had said, Step wasn't really happy with either list. He'd much rather that everybody on both lists just leave his family alone.
Late that same Sunday night the phone rang. DeAnne woke up and sleepily answered it. She listened for a moment. "It's late," she said. "I think he's asleep. Oh, no, he isn't. He's right here." She held out the phone to Step. "S'for you," she said. She was back to sleep almost before he got the phone out of her hand.
"This is Step Fletcher," he said. "Who am I speaking to?"
"Hey, this is Glass, Step. Remember me? From Eight Bits Inc.?"
"Yeah, of course," said Step. "Isn't this a little late to be calling, though? I mean, it's almost midnight."
"Well, see, this isn't exactly a social call. They only let me make one phone call, and I thought about it for a minute, and you were kind of my best choice. Or at least I sure hope you are."
"Best choice for what?"
"I'm down at the police station. I need a ride home. Can I explain it to you later? I'm not arrested or anything, I just don't want to be driven home in a police car, you know? It looks bad, people ask questions."
"If you're not arrested, then how come you only get one phone call?"
"Oh, like, that was just theatre. You know? Just making it more dramatic than it is. It's really nothing.
Except that I need a friend right now, you know? To pick me up and then not tell anybody where he picked me up."
"I won't lie for you," said Step.
"Oh, right, I knew that," said Glass. "But see, you don't work at Eight Bits Inc. anymore and you haven't exactly been keeping in touch so I figure, who's going to ask you? And you aren't going to go calling people up and telling them, right?"
"I don't know where the police station is," said Step.
"Well it's right downtown. Corner of Center and Church. Big city-county building, you can't miss it. I'll just meet you out front so you don't have to park and come in."
When Step hung up the phone, DeAnne roused enough to murmur, "Who was it?"
"Glass. Roland McIntyre. He's been picked up by the police for questioning and now he wants a ride home."
DeAnne's eyes opened now. "He was on our list."
"Yeah, well, I guess he was on another list, too, eh?"
Step made it to the city-county building in ten minutes, and, as he had promised, Glass was standing out in front. He looked forlorn in his plaid short-sleeve shirt and thick glasses.
"Nice car," said Glass as he slid in.
"It takes a lot of hard work to get the rust holes just right," said Step. "But hey, this one runs and the other one's always in the shop. Where to?"
"Home," said Glass. Then: "Oh, yeah, well, I live in the Oriole Apartments, out west on Shaker Parkway.
Like you were going to the airport."
Step drove off.
"Nice of you to come get me," said Glass. "I didn't know who else to call."
"No problem," said Step. And at the moment he said it, that's how he felt. He hadn't felt that way until then, however.
"We miss you at Eight Bits Inc., man," said Glass.
"Glad to hear you remember me."
"Dicky's got his finger in everything now. He comes in and takes our working disks and fiddles with our code so we come to work in the morning and a program that ran fine the night before now crashes, and we ask him what he did, and he says, 'That was the most inefficient code I ever saw, so I started fixing it.' And when you say, 'Well it didn't crash before, and now it does,' he just looks at you and says, 'Do I have to do everything?"'
Step laughed grimly. Dicky. He didn't like remembering Dicky, even to know that he was still widely hated. Dicky was on his list. So Step changed the subject. "What was all this about tonight?"
Glass was silent for a minute, looking out the window. Then, finally, he settled back into his seat. "Well, it's not like you don't already know."
"If I knew, I wouldn't have asked," said Step, which wasn't true, but he didn't much care. Somehow being honest to Glass didn't seem to have the same kind of urgency as being honest to, say, his children or DeAnne or Mr. Douglas.
"I mean, you know about me." Glass sighed. "I've never actually done anything, you know? I don't even want to, really. But some parents complained because one of their older kids told them some cockamamy story, and so I got hauled in when I was sixteen, and that son-of-a-bitch lawyer my mom got for me told me that it was a real good idea to cop a plea as an adult in exchange for no time, instead of doing time as a juvenile and getting my record wiped. Because that's what the prosecutor really wanted all along- my new lawyer told me that I probably wouldn't have had to do time no matter what, the only evidence was some kid and he could have torn him to shreds in court and now here I am on their list of sex offenders." Step could feel Glass's eyes on him.
"I'm on the pervert list. Anytime somebody anywhere near Steuben looks cross-eyed at a little girl, I get a phone call and they ask me where I was. Well, I'm almost always at Eight Bits Inc. with plenty of witnesses and so they don't actually bring me in very much."
"So why this time?" asked Step, feeling a little sick; he didn't know if he liked having Glass tell him this stuff, especially since he knew that Glass was probably still lying and in fact there was more than the one witness and he had in fact molested little girls, and a lot more than once or twice, too. But he let Glass tell his story without argument because why get him mad?
"It's that serial killer thing, if you can believe it. The SBI is doing a haul of every known sex offender in six counties, and this is when my name came up. It's completely stupid, it's complete bullshit to bring me in." There was real outrage in his voice now. "This serial killer's been doing little boys, for heaven's sake. What do they think I am, a faggot?"
Step said nothing, just drove, gripping the wheel.
After a minute or so of silence, Glass got back to talking about the gossip at Eight Bits Inc., and then they reached the apartment complex and Glass directed him to the building he lived in. Step let him off and then watched him get safely to the front door of the building. Watching him like that reminded Step of all the times he had walked babysitters safely to their parents' door, and then he thought of Glass babysitting for people, and he shivered. But I was a babysitter, too, Step thought. When I was twelve. And how did those people know that I wasn't like Glass? They had to trust me. You've got to trust people even though sometimes they'll betray your trust, because otherwise there's no life at all.
And then he had another thought. Glass had a mother and a father. A father who loathed him-did that start before or after Glass started messing with little girls? But that mother, she still loved him. She had carried him just like DeAnne carried Stevie and Robbie and Betsy and Zap, she had nursed him or given him bottles, she had gotten up in the night with him, she had dreamed of what he might be when he grew up. And he must have been a really bright kid. She must have been proud of him in school, and comforted him when the other kids made fun of him. And then this happened to her-this boy of hers turned out to have a thing for little girls.