As she rides by

each row, and she was three rows down and six boxes in, meanin’ number fifty-six to you.”
    “Why, what a coincidence,” I said. “Guess which number is missing in the following: “Karat, Isobel. P.O.B. something, Atwood, CA, USA. 4/G $1,644.44.CC.”
    “I give up,” Benny said, deftly passing a pickup and swinging neatly back in a few vehicles behind the Joneses. Katy giggled.
    “Three and a half?” she ventured.
    “Not three and a half, dimwit,” I said. “Fifty-six, if you want to know.”
    “What I want to know too is what you wanted me along for,” she said. “Something dangerous, I hope. Maybe I could seduce somebody.”
    “You could seduce me in a couple of years,” I said, “and probably Benny right now. Benny, it’s probably Corona next, according to the map, then it looks like Riverside , Woodcrest, Edgemont, and then the 215 to Perris, least that’s the way I’d go.” I turned my attention back to my seatmate—the human one, that is. “Kids,” I told her. “Who’d be suspicious of kids, except parents maybe and teachers and owners of Five and Dime stores. But not to follow people around into post offices, who’d suspect a kid of that? That’s why I occasionally have to use Sara here, I mean, look at her, who’d suspect her? Now that her punk period is over, anyway. And I would like at least three or four sightings of the Joneses in action before I figure out what to do next. I can’t trail them around, because I am such a splendid figure of a man and also Tex knows me, but you can and Sara can and Benny can twice, easy. That is why, my child.”
    “Oh,” Katy said. “When do we get to eat our picnic? I’m hungry.”
    “Me too,” Sara said.
    “Me three,” Benny chimed in.
    “Me four,” I said, “and King five, but either when they do or after three more stops.”
    Benny, without cap and glasses, went in after Tex in Corona , with equally fortuitous results. Katy nipped in before Tex , in Riverside , and hung about as if waiting for a parent who was inside buying stamps. See, in case there are some few among you who do not know precisely what a post office box is, it is a long, narrow metal box, usually with a glass insert in the front so you can see if there’s anything inside or not without opening it. To get one, you pay the postmaster, if that’s the right title of the guy in charge of a post office, some paltry sum like ten bucks a year, tell him (or her, if it’s a postmistress, which sounds like a lot more fun) what name you want it in, hand over the dough, then he hands you the key, and it’s yours for a year. Post office boxes in larger towns and cities are to be found in small rooms inside the entrance, separated from the post office proper—although obviously connected by things called doors—so they are easy of access. In the sticks, I do not know where they put their post office boxes and neither do I care.
    Anyway, a success for Katy, too, and then a final triumph for Benjamin in cap, glasses, and a natty blue windbreaker borrowed from I, with a frisky King in tow. Then we all watched as the Joneses drove away to pick up the eastbound Riverside freeway again, then we caught the half of the freeway that went in the other direction and shortly thereafter, just outside Woodcrest, stopped at an attractive picnic area in a grove of trees and, finally, had our picnic, which was marred only by Sara’s complaints that I hadn’t brought enough pickles, to which my only response was to outreach her for the last of one of Fred’s chopped liver sandwiches.
    At some stage in the proceedings Benny, I think it was, asked me how Mrs. Jones had set it all up and how had she been able to get away with it for so long. I told him I figured it went something like this:
    Onto the desk of the secretary who opens all the mail there arrives the news that pensioner X, say, has unfortunately expired, whether peacefully at his home in Parched Throat, New Mexico, surrounded by his loved ones, or by drinking himself to death on wood alcohol in a Pittsburgh gutter, it matters not. First, Mary has to check that X fulfills the three requirements of (a) having a large enough pension to make it worthwhile, and (b) said pension or part of not being transferred on his death to a surviving spouse, and (c) obviously X should not be someone who has recently worked at head office or have been a top executive somewhere else, just in case X’s name is familiar to one of the very