Free The Arraignment by Steve Martini Page B

let you borrow it?”
    “Sort of,” I tell her. “Do you know anything about them?”
    “Some of the kids at school have them. Theirs aren’t that nice.” Sarah’s looking over my shoulder, big brown eyes checking out the device. “What do you want to know?”
    “How to change the batteries.”
    “Oh, Dad. Here, give it to me.” She reaches for it, but I hold it away.
    “I can’t take a chance on losing the information stored inside.”
    “Maybe it has a bubble memory,” she says.
    I’ve heard of bubble gum and bubblehead. But bubble memory is a new one.
    “If it does, then everything’s stored inside, on a chip or something. We learned about it in technology. Even if you disconnect the power it stays there.”
    “How do I find out if it has one of these memories?”
    “You could look online. Something that cool must have a site. How much does it cost?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “My birthday’s coming up,” she says.
    “I’m buying you batteries,” I tell her.
    She gives me that look of mock exasperation, something of her mother’s to remember her by.
    “Can I see it? I won’t break it. I promise,” she says. Reluctantly I hand it over.
    “Hey, this little button on top. It’s the cell phone.”
    “I know. Don’t touch it.”
    “Relax,” she says. The same thing Nick told me before they shot him. “Why can’t we just turn it on? See if it works.”
    “Because it may drain the batteries.” I don’t tell her that the cops have probably landed on Nick’s cell phone account by now. If so, the service provider will have a trap on the line so they can isolate the cell by location if any signals go out from the phone, even if it’s just looking to go online.
    “If there’s a site on the Internet, do you think you could find it?” I ask.
    “I don’t know. I could look.”
    It takes her less than five minutes. Sarah works her nimble fingers over the keyboard and rolls the mouse, using Yahoo! to check sites. On the fourth one she hits pay dirt, a logo that matches the one on the device, two curved crossed slashes with a dot between them at the bottom, Handspring.com.
    We scan the page for half a minute or so.
    “I don’t see anything that looks like directions. Do you?” she says.
    “No. So what do we do?”
    “Gimme a second.” She punches the button on the page for customer support. An e-mail message screen pops up.
    Sarah types out a message, telling them that we’ve lost the directions and need to know how to change the batteries. And asks whether we’ll lose any stored data.
    Ten minutes later there’s a reply. Attached are a set of instructions for operation. The e-mail message itself advises us to sync the device to a desktop computer and then change the batteries. It tells us that if we can’t do this, we have only one minute once we start removing the old batteries to replace them with new ones. After that the device will crash and we will lose any data inside.
    “Looks like there’s no memory inside,” she says, “unless there’s batteries.”
    Without the hot-sync cradle to attach to the computer and the software to run it, we can’t back up the device by syncing it to the desktop.
    “You want to do it or do you want me to?” Sarah’s talking about changing the batteries.
    “I’ll do it.”
    Armed with the two new batteries and the printout from the Internet, I lift the battery cover off the back once more with my fingernail. My hands are shaking as if I’m defusing a bomb. I pull one battery and quickly slide a fresh one into the slot. I pull the second. I pop the other one in, then realize I’ve gotten it in backward. I almost drop the device on the floor. Sarah grabs it before it can hit the carpet. She holds it while I turn the battery around and slip it in the right way. Then I look at her. “You think we got it?”
    “I don’t know. Turn it on.”
    I snap the battery cover back in place, flip the device over in my hand, and hit the green button