Angie and I got out of the car and walked back toward Bubba’s van.
“I hate when he does this,” she said.
I nodded. “Sometimes I forget he has a mind of his own.”
“I know he has a mind of his own,” Angie said. “It’s how he uses it that keeps me up nights.”
We reached the rear of the van just as Bubba came bounding out from between the two houses, pushed us aside, and opened the rear doors.
“Bubba,” Angie said, “what have you done?”
“Sssh. I’m working here.” He tossed a pair of branch cutters into the rear of the van, grabbed a gym bag from the floor, and shut the doors.
“What’re you-”
He put a finger to my lips. “Sssh. Trust me. This is good.”
“Does it involve heavy explosives?” Angie asked.
“You want it to?” Bubba reached for the van door again.
“No, Bubba. Very much no.”
“Oh.” He dropped his hand from the door. “No time. Be right back.”
He jostled us aside and ran in a crouch across the lawns toward the redhead’s house. Even in a crouch, Bubba running across your lawn is about as easy to miss as Sputnik would be. He weighs something less than a piano but something more than a fridge, and he’s got that demented newborn’s face billowing out from under spikes of brown hair and above a neck the circumference of a rhino’s midsection. He kind of moves like a rhino, actually, lumbering and slightly to his right, but oh so quickly.
We watched with mouths slightly ajar as he dropped to his knees by the BMW, slim-jimmed the lock in the time it would take me to do it with a key, and then opened the door.
Angie and I both tensed for the blare of an alarm, but were met with silence as Bubba reached into the car, pulled something out, and slid it in the pocket of his trench coat.
Angie said, “What in the fuck is he doing?”
Bubba reached behind him and unzipped the gym bag by his knees. His hand searched around inside until he found what he was looking for. He removed a small black rectangular object and placed it in the car.
“It’s a bomb,” I said.
“He promised,” Angie said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but he’s, oh, nuts. Remember?”
Bubba used the sleeve of his trench coat to wipe the places he’d touched in and outside the car, then he gently closed the door and scrambled back across the lawn and over to us.
“I,” he said, “am so fucking cool.”
“Agreed,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I mean, I’m the balls, dude. I’m it. I surprise myself sometimes.” He opened the back door of the van, tossed the gym bag on the floor.
“Bubba,” Angie said, “what’s in the bag?”
Bubba was damn near bursting. He threw the folds of the bag wide, waved us to look inside. “Cell phones!” he said with a ten-year-old’s glee.
I looked in the bag. He was right. Ten or twelve of them-Nokias, Ericcsons, Motorolas, most black, a few gray.
“Great,” I said. I looked up into his beaming face. “Actually, why is this great, Bubba?”
“’Cause your idea sucked, and I came up with this one.”
“My idea wasn’t bad.”
“It sucked!” he said happily. “I mean, it blew, dude. Put a bug in a box, have the guy-or wasn’t it some chick at first-take it in the house.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, what if he leaves the box on the dining room table, goes up to the bedrooms to do whatever it is you want to hear?”
“We were kinda hoping he wouldn’t.”
He gave me a thumbs-up. “Fucking great thinking there.”
“So,” Angie said, “what was your idea?”
“Replace his cell phone,” Bubba said. He pointed into the bag. “These all have bugs already inside. All I had to do was match one of mine”-he pulled a charcoal Nokia flip phone from his pocket-“to his.”
“That’s his?”
He nodded.
I nodded with him, let my smile match his own, until I dropped it. “Bubba, no offense, but so what? The guy’s inside his house.”
Bubba rocked back on his heels, raised his eyebrows up and down several times. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So-how do I put this?-why the fuck does he need to use his cell phone when he probably has three or four house phones inside?”
“House phones,” Bubba said slowly, a frown beginning to replace the smile. “Never thought of those. He can just pick one up and call anywhere he wants, huh?”
“Yeah, Bubba. That’s sort of their point. He’s probably doing it right now.”
“Shit,” Bubba said. “Too bad I cut the phone lines out back, huh?”
Angie laughed. She clapped his cherub’s face between her hands and kissed his nose.
Bubba blushed and then looked at me, that smile beginning to grow again.
“Ahm…”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“For?”
“Doubting you. Okay? Happy?”
“And talking down to me.”
“And talking down to you, yes.”
“And speaking in a derisive tone of voice,” Angie said.
I glared at her.
“What she said.” Bubba jerked a thumb at Angie.
Angie looked over her shoulder. “He’s coming back out.”
We all climbed into the van, and Bubba shut the door behind us, and we looked out through mirrored glass at the redhead as he kicked his front tire, opened his car door, and reached across the seat, pulled his cellular from the console.
“Why didn’t he call people during the ride back?” Angie asked. “If the calls were important…”
“Roaming,” Bubba said. “Someone’s moving, it’s way easier to tap into their conversation-listen in or clone the phone, whatever.”
“But stationary?” I said.
He screwed his face up. “What, you mean like writing something down? What’s that got to-”
“Not the paper. Stationary,” I said, “as in standing still.”
“Oh.” He rolled his eyes at Angie. “Showing off the college again.” He glanced back at me. “Okay, Joe Word of the Day, yeah, if he’s ‘stationary’ it’s way harder to cut into his transmission. Gotta go through land lines and tin roofs and antennas and satellite dishes, microwaves, the whole fucking nine if you know what I mean.”