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considered. “Yeah. Worth a try.”
    Wesley took his phone out of his briefcase. Robbie had gone back to the story, using the NEXT PAGE button to access the rest.
    The phone rang twicecthree timescfour.
    Wesley was preparing to deliver his message to voicemail when Ellen answered. “Wesley, I can’t talk to you now. I thought you understood that—”
    “Ellen, listen—”
    “—but if you got my message, you know we’re going to talk.” In the background he could hear raucous, excited girls—Josie would be among them—and lots of loud music.
    “Yes, I did get the message, but we have to talk n—”
    “No!” Ellen said. “We don’t . I’m not going to take your calls this weekend, and I’m not going to listen to your messages.” Her voice softened. “And hon—every one you leave is going to make it harder. For us, I mean.”
    “Ellen, you don’t understa—”
    “Goodbye, Wes. I’ll talk to you next week. Do you wish us luck?”
    “Ellen, please! ”
    “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “And you know what? I guess I still care about you, even though you are a lug.”
    With that she was gone.
    .
     
    He poised his finger over the redial buttoncthen made himself not push it. It wouldn’t help. Ellen was wearing her my-way-or-the-highway hat. It was insane, but there it was.
    “She won’t talk to me except on her schedule. What she doesn’t realize is that after Sunday night she may not have a schedule. You’ll have to call Ms. Quinn.” In his current state, the girl’s first name escaped him.
    “Josie’d think I was prankin’ on her,” Robbie said. “A story like that, any girl’d think I was prankin’ on her.” He was still studying the Kindle’s screen. “Want to know something? The woman who caused the accident—who will cause it—hardly gets hurt at all. I’ll bet you next semester’s tuition she was just as drunk as a goddam skunk.”
    Wesley hardly heard this. “Tell Josie that Ellen has to take my call. Have her say it’s not about us. Tell her to say it’s an emer—”
    “Dude,” Robbie said. “Slow down and listen. Are you listening?”
    Wesley nodded, but what he heard most clearly was his own pounding heart.
    “Point one, Josie would still think I was prankin’ on her. Point two, she might think we both were. Point three, I don’t think she’d go to Coach Silverman anyway, given the mood that Coach has been in latelycand she gets even worse on game trips, Josie says.” Robbie sighed. “You have to understand about Josie. She’s sweet, she’s smart, she’s sexy as hell, but she’s also a timid little mousie. It’s sort of what I like about her.”
    “That probably says heaps of good things about your character, Robbie, but you’ll pardon me if right now I don’t give a tomcat’s ass. You’ve told me what won’t work; do you have any idea what might?”
    “That’s point four. With a little luck, we won’t have to tell anybody about this. Which is good, since they wouldn’t believe it.”
    “Elucidate.”
    “First, we need to use another one of your Echo downloads.” Robbie punched in November 25 th , 2009. Another girl, a cheerleader who had been horribly burned in the explosion, had died, raising the death-toll to eleven. Although the Echo didn’t come right out and say so, more were likely to die before the week was out.
    Robbie only gave this story a quick scan. What he was looking for was a boxed story on the lower half of page one:
    CANDACE RYMER CHARGED WITH MULTIPLE
     
    COUNTS OF VEHICULAR HOMICIDE
     
     
     
    There was a gray square in the middle of the story—her picture, Wesley assumed, only the pink Kindle didn’t seem able to reprint news photographs. But it didn’t matter, because now he got it. It wasn’t the bus they had to stop; it was the woman who was going to hit the bus.
    She was point four.
    VI—Candy Rymer
     
    At five o’clock on a gray Sunday afternoon—as the Lady Meerkats were cutting down basketball nets in a not-too-distant part of the state—Wesley Smith and Robbie Henderson were sitting in Wesley’s modest Chevy Malibu, watching the door of a roadhouse in Eddyville, twenty miles north of Cadiz. The parking lot was oiled dirt and mostly empty.  There was almost certainly a TV inside The Broken Windmill, but Wesley guessed discriminating tipplers would rather do their drinking and NFL-watching at home. You didn’t have to go inside the joint to know it was a hole. Candy Rymer’s