Free Pretty Girl Gone by David Housewright Page A

voice asked.
    “There’s nowhere I can run that you can’t follow, there’s nowhere I can hide that you can’t find me. Anything else?”
    The voice hesitated as if it was unsure of itself. “John Barrett must not be allowed to run for the Senate,” it replied in a rush.
    “Okay. Thanks for sharing.”
    A moment later, the connection was severed, leaving me staring at the silent receiver.
    This is what happens when you agree to do favors for old friends.

4
    The difference between five below zero and five above is mostly in the mind. The odds that your car won’t start are just as slim at either temperature; the likelihood that your water pipes might burst is just as high; the danger of frostbite, of numbing death from exposure, is just as real. Yet there was something joyous in the fact that the Twin Cities had finally crept into positive digits. I could see it in the robust gait of pedestrians who no longer felt as anxious over the climate as they had the day before and I could hear it in the voices of the customers at the Dunn Brothers coffeehouse where I had stopped for a mocha. It made me glad to be about with a job to do and
a heart for any fate,
as the poet once wrote. I didn’t even mind that the early morning rush hour traffic had forced me to rein in the 225 horses beneath the hood of my Audi as I made my way to Merriam Park. For once the prevailing traffic laws seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
    I had moved to the suburbs. It was an accident. I thought I was buying a home in the St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul, but aftermaking an offer I discovered I was on the wrong side of the street, that I had actually moved to Falcon Heights, though I won’t admit it to anyone but my closest friends. Bobby Dunston, you couldn’t get out of the city, not with a crowbar. He purchased his parents’ home after they retired and was now raising his children in the house where he was raised directly across the street from Merriam Park, where he and I played baseball and hockey and discovered girls.
    I parked on Wilder in front of his house. It took me a few moments to wrestle the popcorn machine out of the passenger seat. If I hadn’t fumbled my car keys in the process and had to pick them out of the snow, I might not have looked up and seen the white Ford Escort parked about a block behind me, its exhaust fumes plainly visible in the cold air.
    I carried the machine up the sidewalk, across Bobby’s porch, and knocked on the door. While I waited, I directed my eyes across the street as if there was something in the park that interested me. It wasn’t an abrupt gesture, but casual—for the benefit of my tail. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, or rather I watched the car. I couldn’t see who was in it.
    Shelby opened the door with a smile that could guide ships at night. Which in turn made me smile. I tried to picture her at sunrise, telling myself that in the morning’s first light she would look as attractive as a wrinkled grocery bag, but failed. I had known her since college, known her, in fact, for three minutes and fifty seconds longer than her husband—the exact length of Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” the song they were playing when we met—and she always looked good to me.
    “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the box.
    “A 2554 Macho Pop popcorn popper.”
    “Of course it is. Do you need help carrying it in?”
    “I’ve got it. Can you get the door?”
    I muscled the machine into her house and set it on her living room carpet.
    “What’s that?” Bobby asked.
    He had come from the kitchen, a newspaper in his hand.
    “Popcorn machine,” Shelby told him.
    “How did the Wild do last night?” I asked him.
    “Lost 2–1.”
    “Nuts.”
    When I went back outside, he followed me. Bobby and I had started together at the very beginning and watched the world evolve in fits and starts, in disappointments and small victories. He was me and I was him and we felt exactly the