n Sundays Jim Faber and I usually have our weekly dinner at a Chinese restaurant, although we occasionally go somewhere else. I met him at six-thirty at our regular place, and a few minutes after seven he asked me if I had a train to catch. "Because that's the third time in the past fifteen minutes you looked at your watch."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't realize it."

"You anxious about something?"

"Well, there's something I have to do later," I said, "but there's plenty of time. I don't have to be anywhere until eight-thirty."

"I'll be going to a meeting myself at eight-thirty, but I don't suppose that's what you've got scheduled."

"No. I went to one this afternoon because I knew I wouldn't be able to fit one in tonight."

"This appointment of yours," he said. "You're not nervous because you're gonna be around booze, are you?"

"God, no. There won't be anything stronger than Coca-Cola. Unless somebody picks up some Jolt."

"Is that a new drug I don't know about?"

"It's a cola drink. Like Coke, but twice as much caffeine."

"I don't know if you can handle it."

"I don't know that I'm going to try. You want to know where I'm going after I leave here? I'm going to check into a hotel under a phony name and then I'm going to have three teenage boys up to my room."

"Don't tell me any more."

"I won't, because I wouldn't want you to have foreknowledge of a felony."

"You're planning on committing a felony with these kids?"

"They're the ones who'll be committing a felony. I'm just going to watch."

"Have some more of the sea bass," he said. "It's especially good tonight."

BY nine o'clock all four of us were assembled in a $160-a-night corner room in the Frontenac, a 1,200-room hotel built a few years ago with Japanese money and since sold to a Dutch conglomerate. The hotel was on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third Street, and from our room on the twenty-eighth floor you could get a glimpse of the Hudson. Or you could have, if we hadn't drawn the shades.

There was a spread of snack food laid out on the top of the dresser, including Cheez Doodles but not including Pringles. The little refrigerator held three varieties of cola, a six-pack of each. The telephone had been relocated from the bedside table to the desk, with something called an acoustic coupler attached to its earpiece and something else called a modem plugged into its rear. It shared the desk with the Kongs' laptop computer.

I had signed the register as John J. Gunderman and gave an address on Hillcrest Avenue, in Skokie, Illinois. I paid cash, along with the fifty-dollar deposit required of cash customers who wanted access to the telephone and mini-bar. I didn't care about the mini-bar, but we damn well needed the phone. That was why we were in the room.

Jimmy Hong was seated at the desk, his fingers flashing on the computer's keyboard, then punching numbers on the phone. David King had drawn up another chair but was standing, looking over Jimmy's shoulder at the computer screen. Earlier he had tried to explain to me how the modem allowed the computer to hook into other computers through the telephone lines, but it was a little like trying to explain the fundamentals of non-Euclidean geometry to a field mouse. Even when I understood the words he used, I still didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

The Kongs had worn suits and ties, but only to get through the hotel lobby; their ties and jackets were on the bed now, and they had their sleeves rolled up. TJ was in his usual costume, but they hadn't hassled him at the desk. He'd come lugging two sacks of groceries, disguised as a delivery boy.

Jimmy said, "We're in."

"All right!"

"Well, we're into NYNEX but that's like being inside the hotel lobby when you need to be in a room on the fortieth floor. Okay, let's try something."

His fingers danced and combinations of numbers and letters popped up on the screen. After a while he said, "Bastards keep changing the password. You know the amount of effort they spend just trying to keep people like us out?"

"As if they could."

"If they put the same energy into improving the system—"

"Stupid."

More letters, more numbers. "Damn," Jimmy said, and reached for his can of Coke. "You know what?"

"Time for our people-to-people program," David said.

"That's what I was thinking. You feel like refining your human-contact skills?"

David nodded and took the phone. "Some people call this 'social engineering,' " he told me. "It's hardest with NYNEX because they warn their people about us. Good thing for us that most of the people who work there are morons." He dialed a telephone number, and after a moment he said, "Hi, this is Ralph Wilkes, I'm trouble-shooting your line. You've been having trouble getting into COSMOS, right?"

"They always do," Jimmy Hong murmured. "So it's a safe question."

"Yeah, right," David was saying. There was a lot of jargon I couldn't follow, and then he said, "Now how do you log in? What's your access code? No, right, don't tell me, you're not supposed to tell me, it's security." He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I know, they give us grief about the same thing. Look, don't tell me the code, just punch it in on your keyboard." Numbers and letters appeared on our screen and Jimmy's fingers were quick to enter them on our keyboard. "Fine," David said. "Now can you do the same thing with your password for COSMOS? Don't tell me what it is, just enter it. Uh-huh."

"Beautiful," Jimmy said softly as the number came up on our screen. He punched it in.

"That ought to do it," David told whoever he was talking to. "I don't think you should have any problems from here on in." He broke the connection and let out a huge sigh. "I don't think we should have any problems, either. 'Don't tell me the number, just enter it. Don't tell me, darling, just tell my computer.' "

"Hot damn," Jimmy said.

"We're in?"

"We're in."

"Yay!"

"Matt, what's your phone number?"

"Don't call me," I said. "I'm not home."

"I don't want to call you. I want to check your line. What's the number? Never mind, don't tell me, see if I care. 'Scudder, Matthew.' West Fifty-seventh Street, right? That look familiar?"

I looked at the screen. "That's my phone number," I said.

"Uh-huh. You happy with it? You want me to change it, give you something easier to remember?"

"If you call the phone company to get your number changed," David said, "it takes them a week or so to run it through channels. But we can do it on the spot."

"I think I'll keep the number I've got," I said.

"Suit yourself. Uh-huh. You've got pretty basic service, haven't you? No Call Forwarding, no Call Waiting. You're at a hotel, you've got the switchboard backing you up, so maybe you don't need Call Waiting, but you ought to have Call Forwarding anyhow. Suppose you stay over at somebody's house? You could get your calls routed there automatically."

"I don't know if I'd use it enough to make it worthwhile."

"Doesn't cost anything."

"I thought there was a monthly charge for it."

He grinned and his fingers were busy on the keypad. "No charge for you," he said, "because you have influential friends. As of this moment you've got Call Forwarding, compliments of the Kongs. We're in COSMOS now, that's the particular system we invaded, so that's where I'm entering changes in your account. The system that figures your billing won't know about the change, so it won't cost you anything."

"Whatever you say."

"I see you use AT&T for your long-distance calls. You didn't select Sprint or MCI."

"No, I didn't figure I would save that much."

"Well, I'm giving you Sprint," he said. "It's going to save you a fortune."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh, because NYNEX is going to route your long-distance calls to Sprint, but Sprint's not going to know about it."

"So you won't get billed," David said.

"I don't know," I said.

"Trust me."

"Oh, I don't doubt what you said. I just don't know how I feel about it. It's theft of services."

Jimmy looked at me. "We're talking about the phone company," he said.

"I realize that."

"You think they're gonna miss it?"

"No, but—"

"Matt, when you make a call from a pay phone and the call goes through but the quarter comes back anyway, what do you do? Keep it or put it back in the slot?"

"Or send it to them in stamps," David suggested.

"I see your point," I said.

"Because we all know what happens when the phone eats your quarter and doesn't put the call through. Face it, none of us are way out in front of the game when we're dealing with Mother Bell."

"I suppose."

"So you've got free long distance and free Call Forwarding. There's a code you have to enter to forward your calls, but just ring them up and tell them you lost the slip and they'll explain it to you. Nothing to it. TJ, what's your phone number?"

"Ain't got one."

"Well, your favorite pay phone."

"Favorite? I don't know. Don't know the number of any of 'em, anyhow."

"Well, pick one out and give me the location."

"There be a bank of three of 'em in Port Authority that I use some."

"No good. Too many phones there, it's impossible to know if we're talking about the same one. How about one on a street corner?"

He shrugged. "Say Eighth and Forty-third."

"Uptown, downtown?"

"Uptown, east side of the street."

"Okay, let's just… there, got it. You want to write down the number?"

"Just change it," David suggested.

"Good idea. Make it an easy one to remember. How about TJ-5-4321?"

"Like it's my own phone number? Hey, I like that!"

"Let's just see if it's available. Nope, somebody's got it. So why don't we take the other direction? TJ-5-6789. No problem, so let's make it all yours. So ordered."

"You can just do that?" I wondered. "Aren't different three-number prefixes specifically linked to different areas?"

"Used to be. And there's still exchanges, but that works for the particular line number, and that has nothing to do with what you dial. See, the number you dial, like the one I just gave TJ, is the same as the PIN code you use to get money out of your ATM at the bank. It's just a recognition code, really."

"Well, it's an access code," David said. "But it accesses the line, and that's what routes the call."

"Let's fix the phone for you, TJ. It's a pay phone, right?"

"Right."

"Wrong. It was a pay phone. Now it's a free phone."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. Some idiot'll probably report it in a week or two, but until then you can save yourself a few quarters. Remember when we played Robin Hood?"

"Oh, that was fun," David said. "We were down at the World Trade Center one night making calls from a pay phone, and of course the first thing we did was convert it, make it free—"

"— or otherwise we'd be dropping quarters in all night long, which is pretty ridiculous—"

"— and Hong here says pay phones should be free for everybody, same as the subways ought to be free, they ought to eliminate the turnstiles—"

"— or make them turn with or without a token, which you could do if they were computerized, but they're mechanical—"

"— which is pretty primitive, when you stop and think about it—"

"— but with pay phones we're in a position to do something, so for I think it was two hours—"

"— more like an hour and a half—"

"— we're hopping through COSMOS, or maybe it was MIZAR—"

"— no, it was COSMOS—"

"— and we're changing one pay phone after another, liberating it, setting it free—"

"— and Hong's really getting into it, like 'Power to the People' and everything—"

"— and I don't know how many phones we switched by the time we were done." He looked up. "You know something? Sometimes I can see why NYNEX wants to nail our hides to the wall. If you look at it in a certain way, we're sort of a major pain in the ass to them."

"So?"

"So you've got to see their point of view, that's all."

"No you don't," David King said. "The last thing you have to do is see their point of view. That's about as smart as playing PacMan and feeling sorry for the blue meanies."

Jimmy Hong argued the point, and while they kicked it back and forth I cracked a fresh Coke. When I got back where the action was Jimmy said, "All right, we're in the Brooklyn circuits. Give me that number again."

I looked it up and read it off and he fed it to the computer. More letters and numbers, meaningless to me, appeared on the screen. His fingers danced on the keys, and my client's name and address showed up.

"That your friend?" Jimmy wanted to know. I said it was. "He's not talking on the phone," he said.

"You can tell that?"

"Sure. We could listen in if he was. You can just drop in and listen to anybody."

"Except it's so boring."

"Yeah, we used to do it sometimes. You think maybe you'll hear something hot, or people talking about a crime or spy stuff. But all you really get to hear is this remarkably tedious crap. 'Pick up a quart of milk on your way home, darling.' Really boring."

"And so many people are so inarticulate. They just stutter and stammer along and you want to tell 'em to spit it out or forget about it."

"Of course there's always phone sex."

"Don't remind me."

"That's King's favorite. Three dollars a minute billed to your home phone, but if you've got a pay phone that you taught not to be a pay phone, then it's free."

"It feels creepy, though. What we did once, though, we just dropped in and listened on some of those lines."

"And then cut in and made comments, which really freaked this one guy. He was paying to talk one-on-one to this woman with this incredible voice—"

"— who probably had a face like Godzilla, but nobody could tell—"

"— and here's King dropping in on him in the middle of a sentence and trashing his fantasy."

"The girl was freaking, too."

"Girl, she was probably a grandmother."

"She's going like, 'Who said that? Where are you? How did you get on this line?' "

Throughout this exchange Jimmy Hong had been participating in another dialogue as well, this one with the computer. Now he held up a hand for silence and hit keys with the other. "Okay," he said. "Gimme the date. It was in March, right?"

"The twenty-eighth."

"Month three, date two-eight. And we want calls to 04-053-904."

"No, his number is—"

"That's his line number, Matt. Remember the difference? Uh, what I figured. Data not available."

"What does that mean?"

"Means we were smart to bring in a lot of food. Could somebody bring me some of those Doritos? We're going to be here awhile, that's all. You interested in calls he made from his phone, while we're in this part of the system? Seems a shame to waste it."

"Might as well."

"See what we get. Look at that, it doesn't want to tell me a thing. Okay, let's try this. Uh-huh. Okay, now—"

Then the system began spitting out a record of calls, reeling them off chronologically starting a few minutes after midnight. There were two calls before one in the morning, then nothing until 8:47, when the system logged a thirty-second call to a 212 number. There was one other call in the morning and several in the early afternoon, and none at all between 2:51 and 5:18, when he had been on the phone for a minute and a half with his brother. I recognized Peter Khoury's number.

Then nothing else that night.

"Anything you want to copy, Matt?"

"No."

"Okay," he said. "Now for the hard part."

I COULDN'T tell you what it was that they did. A little after eleven they switched and David took over the controls, while Jimmy paced the floor and yawned and stretched and went to the bathroom and came back and polished off a package of Hostess cupcakes. At twelve-thirty they switched again and David went into the bathroom and took a shower. By this time TJ was sound asleep on the bed, lying fully clothed on the bedspread, shoes and all, and clutching one of the pillows as if the world were trying to get it away from him.

At one-thirty Jimmy said, "God damn it, I can't believe there's no way into NPSN."

"Give me the phone," David said. He dialed a number, snarled, broke the connection, dialed again, and on the third try got through to somebody. "Yo," he said. "Who'm I talkin' to? Great. Listen, Rita, this is Taylor Fielding at NICNAC Central an' I got a Code Five emergency coming down. I need your NPSN access code and your password before the whole thing backs up clear to Cleveland. That's Code Five, did you hear me?" He listened intently, then reached out a hand for the computer keyboard. "Rita," he said, "you're beautiful. You saved my life, no joke. Can you believe I had two people in a row didn't know a Code Five takes precedence? Yeah, well, that's 'cause you pay attention. Listen, if you get any static on this, I'll take full responsibility. Yeah, you too. 'Bye."

"You take full responsibility," Jimmy said. "I like that."

"Well, it seemed only right."

"What the hell is a Code Five, will you tell me that?"

"I don't know. What's NICNAC Central? Who's Taylor Feldman?"

"You said Fielding."

"Well, it was Feldman before he changed it. I don't know, man. I just made it all up but it sure impressed Rita."

"You sounded so desperate."

"Well, why shouldn't I be? Half-past one in the morning and we're not even into NPSN yet."

"We are now."

"And how sweet it is. I'll tell you, Hong, you can't beat that Code Five. It really cuts through all the bureaucratic bullshit, you know what I mean. 'I got a Code Five emergency coming down.' Man, that just about blew her doors off."

" 'Rita, you're beautiful.' "

"Man, I was falling in love, I have to say it. And by the time we were through we'd sort of established a relationship, you know?"

"You gonna call her again?"

"I bet I can get a password off her anytime, unless something tips her that she just gave away the store. Otherwise next time I call her we're gonna be old friends."

"Call her sometime," I said, "and don't try to get a password or an access code or anything else."

"You mean just ring her up to chat?"

"That's the idea. Maybe give her some information, but don't try to get anything out of her."

"Far out," David said.

"And then later on—"

"Got it," Jimmy said. "Matt, I don't know if you've got either the digital dexterity or the hand-eye coordination, and you don't really know a thing about the technology, but I have to tell you something. You've got the heart and soul of a hacker."

ACCORDING to the Kongs, the whole process really got interesting after they got into NPSN, whatever that meant. "This is the part that's fascinating from a technical standpoint," David explained, "because here's where we try retrieving information the NYNEX people claimed wasn't available. They'll say that just to brush you off, but some of them were telling the truth, or what they thought was the truth, because the fact of the matter is they wouldn't know how to go about finding it. So it's almost as though we have to invent our own program and feed it into their system so it'll spit out the data we want."

"But," Jimmy said, "if you're not into the technical side of it, there's really nothing there to keep you on the edge of your chair."

TJ, awake now, was standing behind David's chair and watching the computer screen as if hypnotized. Jimmy went over to the refrigerator for a can of Jolt. I dropped into the one easy chair, and David was right, there was nothing to keep me on the edge of it. I sank back into the cushions, and the next thing I knew TJ was shaking me gently by the shoulder, saying my name.

I opened my eyes. "I must have been sleeping."

"Yeah, you sleepin', all right. You was snorin' some earlier."

"What time is it?"

"Almost four. The calls is comin' up now."

"Can they just get a printout?"

TJ turned and relayed the request, and the Kongs started giggling. David got control of himself and reminded me that we didn't have a printer with us. My sponsor was a printer, I almost said. Instead I said, "No, of course not. I'm sorry, I'm still half-asleep."

"Stay where you are. We'll copy it all down for you."

"I'll get you some Jolt," TJ offered. I told him not to bother but he brought me a can of it anyway. I took a sip of it but it really wasn't what I wanted, nor was I entirely certain what I did want. I got to my feet and tried to stretch some of the stiffness out of my back and shoulders, then walked over to the desk where David King was working the computer while Jimmy Hong copied down the information on the screen.

"There they are," I said.

They were coming right up on the screen, starting with the first call at 3:38 to tell Kenan Khoury his wife was missing. Then three calls at roughly twenty-minute intervals, the last one logged at 4:54. Kenan had called his brother at 5:18, and the next call he'd received came in at 6:04, which must have been just before Peter got to the Colonial Road house.

Then there was a sixth call at 8:01. That would have been the one ordering them to Farragut Road, where they received the call that sent them chasing out to Veterans Avenue. And then they'd come home, having been assured that Francine would be delivered there, and then they waited in an empty house until 10:04, when the last call came, the one that sent them around the corner to the Ford Tempo with the parcels in its trunk.

"Wow," David was saying. "This has been, like, the most amazing education. Because we had to keep at it, you know? There was data you needed, so we couldn't quit. When you're just hacking you can only take so much boredom before you go and do something else, but we had to stay with it until we crashed through the boredom and got to what was on the other side of it."

"Which was more boredom," Jimmy said.

"But you learn a lot, you really do. If we had to do this same operation again—"

"God forbid."

"Yeah, but if we did, we could do it in half the time. Less, because the whole speed-search option gets double-timed when you cut back into the—"

What he said after that was even less comprehensible to me, and I'd stopped listening anyway because Jimmy Hong was handing me a sheet of all calls into the Khoury house on the twenty-eighth of March. "I should have told you," I said. "The early ones don't matter, just the seven starting at three-thirty-eight." I studied the list. He'd copied everything: time of the call, the line number of the caller, the phone number you'd dial in order to reach that phone, and the duration of the call. That, too, was more than I needed, but there was no reason to tell him that.

"Seven calls, each from a different phone," I said. "No, I'm wrong. They used one phone twice, for calls two and seven."

"Is it what you wanted?"

I nodded. "How much it gives me is something else again. It could be a lot or a little. I won't know until I get hold of a reverse directory and find out who those phones belong to."

They stared at me. I still didn't get it until Jimmy Hong took off his glasses and blinked at me. "A reverse directory? You've got the two of us here, with everything buried in the deep inner recesses of NPSN, and you think you need a reverse directory?"

"Because we're talking child's play here," David King said. He sat down at the keyboard again. "Okay," he said. "Give me the first number."

THEY were all pay phones.

I'd been afraid of that. They had been professionally cautious throughout, and there was no reason to suppose that they wouldn't have taken care to use phones that couldn't be linked to them.

But a different pay phone each time? That was harder to figure, but one of the Kongs came up with a theory that made sense. They were guarding against the possibility that Kenan Khoury had alerted someone who was in a position to tap in on the line and identify the phone at the other end. By keeping the calls short they could be sure of being away from the scene before anyone who traced the call could get there; by never returning to the same phone, they were covered even if Khoury had the call traced and the telephone staked out.

"Because tracing a call is instantaneous now," Jimmy told me. "You don't really trace it, not if you're hooked into it with a setup like this. You just look on the screen and read it off."

Why the lapse in security on the last call? By then they'd obviously known there was no need for it. Khoury had done everything the way he was supposed to, had made no attempt to interfere with the ransom pickup, and was no longer worth such elaborate precautions. That was the time they could have felt safe enough to use a phone in their own house or apartment, and if only they'd done so I would have had the bastards. If it had started raining, if there'd been some compelling reason to stay inside. If nobody had wanted to leave the other two with the ransom money.

It was too bad. It would have been nice to get lucky for a change.

On the other hand, the night's work and the seventeen hundred and change it was costing me were by no means wasted. I had learned something, and not just that the three men I was after were very careful planners for a trio of psychopathic sex killers.

The addresses were all in Brooklyn. And they were all in a far more compact area than the whole Khoury case covered. The kidnap and ransom delivery had begun in Bay Ridge, moved to Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill, ranged to Flatbush and Farragut and then way over to Veterans Avenue, and then swung back to the drop-off of the remains in Bay Ridge again. That covered a fair chunk of the borough, while their previous activities were spread all over Brooklyn and Queens. Their home base could be anywhere.

But the pay phones weren't that far apart. I would have to sit down with the list and a map to plot their positions precisely, but I could tell already that they were all in the same general area, on the west side of Brooklyn, north of Khoury's house in Bay Ridge and south of Green-Wood Cemetery.

Where they'd dumped Leila Alvarez.

One phone was on Sixtieth Street, another on New Utrecht at Forty-first, so it's not as though they were within walking distance of each other. They had left the house and driven around to make those calls. But it stood to reason that home base was somewhere in that neighborhood, and probably not too far from the one phone they'd used a second time. It was all over, they were all done, all that remained was to rub salt in Kenan Khoury's wounds, so why drive ten blocks out of the way if you didn't have to? Why not use the handiest pay phone of the lot?

Which happened to be on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets.

oOo

I DIDN'T go into all of that with the boys, and indeed a lot of my own ruminations had to wait until later on. I gave the Kongs five hundred dollars each and told them how much I appreciated what they'd done. They insisted it was fun, even the boring part. Jimmy said he had a headache and a bad case of hacker's wrist, but that it was worth it.

"You two go down first," I said. "Put your ties and jackets on and just nonchalant your way out the front door. I'll want to make sure there's nothing traceable in the room, and I guess I'll have to stop at the desk and settle up what I owe for the phone. I left a fifty-dollar deposit but we were hooked into it for over seven hours, and I don't have any idea what the charges are going to be."

"Oh, my," David said. "He just doesn't get it."

"It's amazing," Jimmy said.

"Huh? What don't I get?"

"You don't get to pay any phone charges," Jimmy said. "First thing I did once we were hooked up was bypass the desk. We could have called Shanghai and there wouldn't be any record of it at the desk." He grinned. "You might as well let them keep the deposit, though. Because King had about thirty dollars' worth of macadamia nuts from the mini-bar."

"Which means thirty macadamia nuts at a dollar each," David said.

"But if I were you," Jimmy said, "I'd just go home."

AFTER they left I paid TJ. He fanned the sheaf of bills I handed him, looked at me, looked at them again, at me again, and said, "This here for me?"

"Would have been no game without you. You brought the bat and the ball."

"I figured a hundred," he said. "I didn't do much, just sat around, but you was payin' out a lot of bread and I figured you wasn't about to leave me out. How much I got here?"

"Five," I said.

"I knew this'd pay off," he said. "Me an' you. I like this detectin' business. I be resourceful, I good at it, and I like it."

"It doesn't usually pay this well."

"Don't make no difference. Man, what other line of work I gone find lets me use all the shit I know?"

"So you want to be a detective when you grow up, TJ?"

"Ain't gonna wait that long," he said. "Gonna be one now. And that's where it's at, Matt."

I told him his first assignment was to get out of the hotel without drawing the wrong kind of attention from the hotel staff. "It would be easier if you were dressed like the Kongs," I said, "but we work with what we've got. I think you and I should walk out together."

"White guy your age and a black teenager? You know what they be thinking."

"Uh-huh, and they can shake their heads over it all they want. But if you walk out by yourself they'll think you've been burgling the rooms, and they might not let you walk."

"Yeah, you right," he said, "but you not lookin' at all the possibilities. Room's all paid for, right? Checkout time's like noon. An' I see where you live, man, and I don't mean to be dissin' you, but your room ain't this nice."

"No, it's not. It doesn't cost me a hundred and sixty dollars a night, either."

"Well, this room ain't gonna cost me a dime, Simon, an' I gonna take me a hot shower an' dry myself on three towels an' get in that bed an' sleep six or seven hours. 'Cause this room ain't just better than where you live, it's like ten times better than where I live."

"Oh."

"So I gone hang the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the knob and kick back an' be undisturbed, like. Then noon comes an' I walk outta here an' nobody look at me twice, nice young man like me, musta just come an' delivered somebody's lunch. Hey, Matt? You think I can call downstairs an' they'll gimme a wake-up call at half-past eleven?"

"I think you can count on it," I said.