The Stranger(48)
“So is she still where this dot is?”
“I don’t know. It only shows where she was before the battery died.”
“And you can’t see where she is anymore?”
Thomas shook his head. “Not until Mom charges her phone. There’s also no point in texting or calling right now.”
“Because her phone is dead.”
“Right.”
Adam nodded. “But if we keep watching this, we can see when she’s powered back up?”
“Right.”
Pittsburgh. Why on earth would Corinne have gone to Pittsburgh? To his knowledge, she didn’t know anybody there. To his knowledge, she had never been there. He didn’t remember her ever talking about the city or having any friends or relatives who’d moved there.
He zoomed in on the orange dot. The address read South Braddock Avenue. He clicked the button for a satellite photo. She’d been in or near a strip mall of some sort. There was a supermarket, a dollar store, a Foot Locker, a GameStop. Maybe she had stopped there to grab something to eat or get supplies or something.
Or maybe she was meeting the stranger.
“Thomas?”
“Yeah?”
“Is this app on my phone?”
“It has to be. If someone can see you, then you can see them.”
“Can you show me where it is?”
Adam handed him the phone. His son narrowed his eyes and started with the fingers again. Finally, he said, “I found it.”
“How come I never saw it before?”
“It was grouped on the last page with a bunch of other apps you probably never use.”
“So if I sign in right now,” Adam said, “I can keep an eye on Mom’s phone?”
“Like I said, the battery’s dead right now.”
“But if she charges it?”
“Yeah, you’ll be able to tell. You just need the password.”
“What is it?”
Thomas hesitated.
“Thomas?”
“LoveMyFamily,” he said. “All one word. And you need to capitalize the L, M, and F.”
Chapter 21
Oh yeah, hotshot, in your face.
Bob Baime—or, as Adam preferred, Gaston—hit yet another turnaround jumper. Yep, Big Bob was in the zone tonight. He was on fire. En fuego.
This was pickup basketball at Beth Lutheran Church. A rotating group of guys, mostly town fathers, played two nights a week. The players varied in ability. Some guys were great—one guy had even been an all-American at Duke and a first-round draft pick of the Boston Celtics before crapping out with a knee injury—and some guys sucked eggs so badly they could barely walk.
But today, Bob Baime, Big Bob Baime, was the man, the go-to guy, the automatic basket machine. Under the boards, he was a one-man rebounding wrecking crew. He used his two-hundred-seventy-pound frame and moved people out of the way. He knocked over the all-American, Mr. Basketball Superstar. The all-American shot him a look, but Big Bob Baime stared right back at him.
The all-American shook his head and started running downcourt.
Yeah, asshole, keep moving, so you don’t get your ass kicked.
Ladies and gentlemen, Big Bob Baime was back. That all-American with his stupid knee brace usually got the best of him. But not today. Uh-uh, no way. Bob had held his ground. Man, his old man would have been proud. His old man, who’d spent most of Bob’s childhood calling him Betty instead of Bobby, calling him worthless and weak, and worse, a pussy, a faggot, and even a girl. His father, the tough son of a bitch, had been the athletic director at Cedarfield High School for thirty years. Look up old-school in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of Robert Baime Senior. It had been hard growing up with a guy like that, but in the end, no doubt, the hard love had been worth it.
Too bad. Too bad his old man couldn’t see how his only son had become such a big man in this town. Bob no longer lived on the crummy side of town where the teachers and blue-collar guys tried to survive. No, he bought the big manor with the mansard roof in the ritzy “country club” section of town. He and Melanie drove his-and-hers Mercedes. People respected them. Bob had been invited to join the exclusive Cedarfield Golf Club, a place his dad once went as a guest. Bob had three kids, great athletes all of them, even if Pete was having a tough time in lacrosse right now, maybe losing his chance at a scholarship now that Thomas Price was taking his position. But still, it had all been good.
And now it would again.
Too bad his father hadn’t seen this part either. Too bad he hadn’t seen his son lose his job, because then he would have seen exactly what kind of man Bob was—a survivor; a winner; a man who, when faced with adversity, perseveres. He was about to close the page on this awful chapter in his life and become Big Bob the big breadwinner again. Even Melanie would see. Melanie, his wife, the former cheerleading captain. She used to look at him with something close to worship, but since the downturn, she’d been in full nag mode, riding him for being so generous in the past, being a show-off with the money, leaving them with no savings when he lost his job. Yep, the vultures had been circling. The bank was ready to foreclose on the house. The repo man had been talking smack about the two Mercedes S coupes.