Page 37

CHAPTER 37

WHEN ARTHUR OPENED THE door to Baby, he was wearing a chocolate-brown suit with a navy-blue tie, a huge Windsor knot riding below his Adam’s apple. It was clear to Baby that he’d lost a lot of weight since the last time he’d worn the suit; he looked like a shriveled tortoise in its shell. But his eyes held the kind of veiled vulnerability Baby had seen on Earl a hundred times, as he went out to meet a lady dressed in his ill-fitting best. So she told Arthur the same thing she’d always told her dad.

“You look like George Clooney.”

Arthur straightened slightly, popped his cuffs.

“Thanks, sugarplum,” he said. He sucked air down the sides of his dentures. “I feel like an idiot without a hat, though.”

“It’s eight o’clock at night.” Baby took his arm. “What do you need a hat for?”

They walked to the ancient station wagon he’d cajoled out of his garage that afternoon. Baby had left George and Troy and Rhonda and all that business behind, literally showering the day off, then putting her makeup on, trying to get into a whole other frame of mind. There was a man to protect here too and evildoers to stave off.

Arthur looked at her high heels and pencil skirt and whistled. “We’re gonna be the talk of the town.”

“You betcha.”

When they arrived at the restaurant, Baby wondered how long it had been since Arthur had gone out for dinner. He had a sparkly gaze, but the menu and ordering system had him flummoxed. He let her handle everything, just nodded along and pretended to understand as she explained to him what a QR code was. Within an hour, though, with two drinks under his belt, he was downing dumplings like an expert and doing George Clooney impressions.

“The electrician came today, fixed everything. He said I was lucky that I’d called him — not sure how he meant it,” Arthur said. He nodded at Baby’s phone on the edge of the table and asked, “Any nibbles?”

Baby picked up her phone and opened the app that let her check on the four cameras she’d installed at Arthur’s house. They were all blacked out. She smiled.

“Not just a nibble,” she said. “Got ’em hook, line, and sinker.”

She stood, went around the table, and slid into the booth next to the old man so she could show him the phone. Baby wasn’t oblivious to the stares of other diners — the tall Black teenage girl and the elderly white dude were a combination as perplexing to onlookers as the concept of PayPal was to Arthur. She ignored the looks and rolled the video back until she had the footage she wanted:

Baby and Arthur leaving, locking the door behind them, and walking arm in arm down the porch steps. The evening breeze made the long grass at the front of the property shiver. Not long after, a figure in a hoodie approached from the end of the street, walking swiftly, head down.

Baby and Arthur watched the figure on the video march quickly up the porch steps, hop up onto the rail, and pull a can of spray paint from his pocket. The image darkened. They watched more footage of the guy in the hoodie traversing the porch, again hopping the rail, and jogging down the side of the house to hit camera number two.

“See how he jumped down from the rail like that?” Arthur sipped his whiskey. “I used to be able to do that.”

They watched as the hoodie guy blacked out all four cameras. Baby noted the time stamp. “Eight oh seven p.m.,” she said. About an hour and a half ago.

She opened a second app on her phone, the one for the hidden cameras, and scrolled the tape to 8:07 p.m. Just as Baby had expected, as soon as the man in the hoodie finished blacking out the fourth and final decoy camera, he raked back his hood, giving the hidden camera a full view.

She snapped a screenshot of his lean, bearded face.

“Gotcha.” She smiled.

“So now what do we do?” Arthur asked.

“We take our orders to go,” Baby said. “You’re gonna want something to nosh on in the car. We’re going for a world record in intergenerational learning here tonight, Arthur. My job is to explain facial-recognition software to you. Your job is not to have a stroke while you’re trying to grasp it.”

“You saw what kind of trouble I got into trying to use the microwave, right?” Arthur sighed.

“I believe in you, man.”

“Can’t I do my learning here? I’m comfy.”

“No,” Baby said. “We’ve got one more stop tonight.”