Swipe

asked.
    “What’s the game?”
    “King’s Punch-Out.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “That’s ’cause we just made it up.”
    Blake sat between them. “How do you play?”
    “You split the deck among the players.” Tyler handed him roughly a third of the deck, and he and Eddie began playing as he explained. “Each round, you flip a card over.”
    Blake followed along.
    “The player with the lowest card gets punched in the face.”
    Blake looked at the cards. Tyler’s was the jack of clubs. Eddie’s, the nine of hearts. Blake saw he was holding a three of spades, and suddenly his nose was bleeding. “Very funny, guys,” he said, and Tyler and Eddie laughed and laughed.
    “So what’s the news?” Eddie asked, as the three of them turned another set of cards.
    “I let him know,” Blake said. Then they all flipped cards and he and Eddie punched Tyler in the face.
    “You got my eye, ya stingy piker!” Tyler said, and he held his face but still managed to squint with his good eye, undistracted, at Blake. “Think he’ll come?”
    “ ’Course he’ll come, tightwad,” Eddie said, and after they turned over the next round of cards, he punched Tyler again. “If Peck says it’s time, then it’s time.”
    They went through half the deck this way, hitting each other and spewing at one another the worst possible slurs that had cropped up over the years to demean the Markless— piker , tightwad , stingy , miser —words that had taken on new and awful meaning since the Mark program began; words that disparaged and mocked the Dust’s own helplessness and lowliness. The boys didn’t care. It was all part of the game.
    Blake snatched up the cards and threw them down the aisle and out of sight.
    “Hey—”
    “That’s enough! Listen. There’s more to it.”
    Eddie stared at him for a moment. “What do you mean? More to what?”
    “He’s onto me.”
    Eddie shrugged. “So what else is new? He’s suspected you for months.”
    “Yeah, but last night he saw me. And today he found the tin can I’d set up.”
    “I told you that wasn’t gonna work,” Eddie said.
    “Eddie. Listen to me. It gets worse. He made a new friend yesterday.”
    Tyler stuck a finger in his mouth. “Good for him,” he said. “I think you knocked my tooth loose.”
    “Whaddaya know about him?” Eddie asked.
    “It’s not a him; it’s a her.”
    “Nice! A lady friend!” Tyler said, lisping over his finger.
    “Shut up.” Blake turned to Eddie. “Only what I could pick up through the girl’s apartment wall.”
    “And?”
    “It’s bad, Eddie. She knows about us. Definitively. Well, not us—Peck.”
    “ What? How?”
    “Not sure.”
    “Well, how much does she know? How much did she tell him?”
    “It was hard to hear anything from the hallway.”
    “Great. Real good detective work there, Sherlock. What else couldn’t you hear?” Tyler spit into his hand and checked it for blood, and Blake already wished he hadn’t thrown the cards, so he’d have an excuse to punch him again.
    But instead he just said, “Look, if all goes well, none of it matters after tonight, anyway.”
    Eddie frowned. “Sounds like this directly affects whether tonight goes well or not.”
    “It won’t,” Blake said. “He’ll show. And if not . . .”
    Tyler stretched his jaw in a circle, rubbing it, assessing the pain but still undistracted by it. “You spent all night listening and didn’t pick up a single other thing, did you?”
    “Hey, lay off, skinflint!”
    “Make me!”
    “Stop it.” Silence. “Does he know?”
    Blake, Tyler, and Eddie froze. Blake spun around, still sitting cross-legged. The other two inched back, trying to look nonchalant about it. Joanne towered above them all. “Hey, Jo,” Blake said, hoping not to escalate anything too quickly. “Where’s Meg?”
    “Tied up. I stuck her on a shelf in the sports section. The racks go higher there.”
    “Think she’ll get down?”
    “Nah. She struggles too much, she’ll fall. It’d be a long drop with her hands tied behind her back.”
    Blake listened to the store for a moment. “You gag her too? I don’t hear anything.”
    “Didn’t need to. Girl’s practically a mute.” Jo sighed and clucked her tongue.
    “What’d she do this time?” Blake asked.
    “Tried to burn the place down,” Eddie said.
    Blake shook his head. “That little miser.”
    “I don’t know why we picked her up,” Tyler said. “I say we leave her up there for the night