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“Anytime. I’m happy to give this another go. ”

“Let’s bring, well—what have we got?” He pulled his backpack up onto his knees, and I pulled my own battered leather bag off my shoulder and sat it in front of me. We opened our bags.

“There’s plenty of light out here tonight. Let’s just bring one flashlight, and only use it if we really need to. We’re more likely to be spotted than we are to spot anything if we go bouncing around the battlefield with half a dozen—what’s that?”

Benny held up a camouflage-green light with a right-angle crook at the top. “I got it from an army surplus store. Check it. ” He unscrewed a cap on the light’s bottom, and three circular plastic discs fell out. One was clear but textured, one was blue, and one was red.

“What are those for?”

He unscrewed a ring around the bulb and slipped the red disc over the light source. “The clear one is for floodlight instead of spotlight, the blue one is for…something else, maybe signaling or something, and the red one is for covert operations, such as the one we’ll be undertaking this evening. ”

I took the light when he handed it to me, and I pushed the switch with my thumb.

“From a distance, red light is harder to see than ordinary white light,” he explained. “We won’t be such an obvious target, but we’ll still be able to see the ground in front of us. ”

“Right on. ” I smiled, fiddling with a nubby button beneath the main switch. “What does this do?”

“It’s a pulse button. You use it when you’re signaling. It’s faster than flipping the switch over and over again. ”

“Ah. And you said you had a tape recorder?”

“Yes ma’am. I’m afraid it’s digital, though. ”

“Why do you say that like it’s a b

ad thing?”

Benny popped open the back of the recorder and checked the batteries. “It’s not necessarily bad, but it isn’t ideal. It’s better if you’ve got a regular tape device, because that way if you get anything good, you have something for the authorities to examine. ”

“But we’re not looking to prove anything to the authorities. I’m not, anyway. I just want to find out what’s going on. I want to know why Green Eyes left, and I don’t care if that message comes across on a microchip or a minicassette. ”

“Fair enough. ” He set the recorder down beside his bag, next to the modified flashlight.

I rifled through my own bag and turned up nothing more practical than a tube of lip gloss and a keychain-sized vial of pepper spray. I added the spray to our pile, put my car keys in my pocket, and closed the bag up again.

“Let’s leave it at this, shall we? And we can put the rest of this stuff in my car—unless you want to leave it at the mercy of the bonfire party. ”

“Okay, but I want to bring my knife, too. ”

“No weapons. No way. Seriously. Bad idea. How did you sneak that past me, anyway?”

“We are not going to get caught,” he argued.

“You don’t know that. Look at this party, Benny. There’s a bonfire. In a pseudo-suburban neighborhood. Someone could call the cops at any moment, and if we’re as close to the battlefield as you guys say—”

“It’s right around the corner, over the railroad tracks. ”

“Okay, then if it’s that close, there’s no reason to push our luck. No weaponry. It’s not going to be any good against ghosts, anyway. By definition, they are already dead. They are unimpressed by the stabby. ”

“I’m not worried about the ghosts,” he sulked.

“I already told you Green Eyes isn’t there anymore, so you don’t have to worry about him, either. ”

Jamie came up behind us then, one cheek still bulging from his most recent bite of hot dog. “Oh, but Green Eyes and the ghosts are the least of your worries out there. ” He swallowed the last of it, and the rest of his half-joked warning came out less garbled. “And I’m not talking about catching an accidental ride in a paddy wagon. ”

“He’s right,” Benny agreed. “The real trouble comes from other mortal, human idiots. ”

Jamie bobbed his head and sucked the end of his coat hanger, then dabbed at his lips with a striped paper napkin. “Weekend Satanists. ”