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The spokesman of the group is a redhaired, freckled boy with his lime green skateboard propped beside him against the picnic table bench. “Okay, whatever, but we don’t snitch.”

“Snitches are bitches,” says the clown. He’s got shoulder-length black hair that needed to be washed two weeks ago.

“Snitches get stitches,” says the one with the glasses and the hightop fade.

“Snitches end up in ditches,” says the fourth. He has a cataclysmic case of acne.

Having completed this roundelay, they look at her, waiting for whatever comes next. Holly is relieved to discover her fear has left. These are just boys not long out of middle school (maybe still in it), and there’s no harm in them, no matter what silly rhymes they know from the hip-hop videos.

“Cool deck,” Jerome says to the leader. “Baker? Tony Hawk?”

Leader Boy grins. “Do I look like money, honey? Just a Metroller, but it does me.” He switches his attention to Holly. “Private eye like Veronica Mars?”

“I don’t have as many adventures as she does,” Holly says… although she’s had a few, oh yes indeed. “And I don’t want you to snitch about anything. I’m looking for a missing woman. Her bike was found about a quarter of a mile up the street—” She points. “—at a deserted building that used to be a car repair shop. Do any of you recognize either her or the bike?”

She calls up the picture of Bonnie on her bike. The boys pass her phone around.

“I think I seen her once or twice,” the longhair says, and the boy sitting next to him nods. “Just buzzing down Red Bank on her bike. Not lately, though.”

“Wearing a helmet?”

“Well duh,” the longhair says. “It’s the law. The cops can give you a ticket.”

“How long since you’ve seen her?” Jerome asks.

Longhair and his buddy consider. The buddy says, “Not this summer. Spring, maybe.”

Jerome: “You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure,” the longhair says. “Good-looking chick. You gotta notice those. It’s the law.”

They all laugh, Jerome included.

The leader says, “You think she took off on her own or somebody grabbed her?”

“We don’t know,” Holly says. Her fingers steal to the outside of the pocket of her pants and touch the triangular shape of the earring.

“Come on,” says the boy with the spectacles and the hightop fade. “Be real. She’s good-looking but no teenager. If she just took off, you wouldn’t be looking for her.”

“Her mother is very worried,” Holly says.

That they understand.

“Thanks,” Jerome says.

“Yes,” Holly says. “Thank you.”

They start to turn away, but the redhead with the freckles—Leader Boy—stops them. “You want to know whose mother is worried? Stinky’s. She’s half-crazy and the cops don’t do anything because she’s a juicer.”

Holly turns back. “Who’s Stinky?”

November 27, 2018

It will be a cold winter in this city by the lake, lots of snow, but on this night the temperature is an unseasonable sixty-five degrees. Mist is rising from the seal-slick surface of Red Bank Avenue. The streetlights illuminate a dense cloud cover less than a hundred feet up.

Peter “Stinky” Steinman rides his Alameda deck down the empty sidewalk at quarter to seven, giving it an occasional lazy push to keep it rolling. He’s bound for the Dairy Whip. Ahead is the giant lighted sof’ serve cone, haloed in mist. He’s looking at that and doesn’t notice the van parked on the tarmac of the deserted Exxon station, between the office and the islands where the pumps used to be.

Once upon a time, long long ago (well, three years, which seems like long long ago when you’re eleven), young Steinman was known to his peers as Pete rather than Stinky. He was a boy of average intelligence who had nevertheless been gifted with a vivid imagination. On that long-ago day as he walked toward Neil Armstrong Elementary School (where he was currently enrolled in Mrs. Stark’s third grade class), he was pretending he was Jackie Chan, fighting a host of enemies in an empty warehouse with his excellent kung fu skills. He had already laid a dozen low, but more were coming at him. So absorbed was he (“Hah!” and “Yugh!” and “Hiyah!”) that he did not notice an extremely large pile of sidewalk excrement left by an extremely large Great Dane. He walked through it and entered Neil Armstrong Elementary in an odiferous state. Mrs. Stark insisted he take off his sneakers—one of them shit-stained all the way up to the Converse logo—and leave them in the hall until it was time to go home. His mother made him hose them off and then she threw them in the washing machine. They came out good as new, but by then it was too late. On that day, and forever after, Pete Steinman became Stinky Steinman.