And then I had another idea. I slipped the phone out of my jacket and left it in plain view on the plywood floor, and scurried backward, crablike, into the darker recesses of the house. There was a stack of four-by-eight sheets of drywall, about two feet high, back around where the kitchen was going to be, and I slithered in behind it as the three men walked across the dirt toward the house. Now I could only hear what they had to say, not see them.

“It was right around here,” Greenway said.

“Yeah, over this way,” Rick said.

I heard feet stepping up into the house, then Carpington’s voice. “Look, right here.”

Then Greenway: “Must belong to one of the guys working on the site. Fell out of his pocket or something.”

Yes, I thought. Keep thinking that way. It’s just a cell phone. Not my cell phone.

“Prob’ly his mom calling to see why he isn’t home yet,” Rick cracked.

Greenway: “I’ll take it back to the office, whoever belongs to it can claim it there. Maybe we should leave a note or something.”

I heard the click of a ballpoint pen. “I’ll leave a note right on this stud here,” Rick said. “‘Lost a phone? Check at office.’ That should do it.”

“There’s two ‘f’s in ‘office,’” Greenway said.

Rick said nothing. I heard them step off the plywood, head back toward their cars. I felt it was safe enough to peek above the top of the drywall. They were huddled together by Carpington’s Caddy, saying a few last words before they went their separate ways. And then, once again, the sound of a cell phone.

“I think it’s mine,” Greenway said. He reached into his jacket, opened a small flap, said, “Hello?”

But there was another ring.

“Not mine,” said Greenway. Carpington reached into his own jacket, looked at his phone, shook his head.

Now Greenway reached down into his pants pocket, where evidently he had slipped my phone. As he pulled it out, the ringing became louder. He pressed a button.

“Yeah?”

I could hear my heart pounding in my chest.

“Who?”

The pounding got a little louder.

“No, I’m afraid this isn’t Zack Walker. He’s not available at the moment. Who’s calling? Uh-huh. Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to try again later.” He ended the call, and as he slipped the phone back into his pants, all eyes were focused again on the house.

I ran.

I’d been out here so long, my eyes were well adjusted to the night light. I weaved my way through a couple of uncompleted walls and leapt out of the house on the back side. Somewhere behind me, I heard Rick shout, “I see him!”

As I’d learned on my way to my hiding spot, a construction site is not the ideal place to conduct a hundred-yard dash. The various stacks of building materials are bad enough, but the real problem is the ground surface. Sod is months away. I was dashing over mounds of dirt, rocks, and pebbles, a lunar landscape. It hadn’t rained in a week or more, so the deep tracks left by trucks and digging equipment had hardened, creating a crisscross network of ruts of varying depths. Every time a foot landed, it hit the ground at a different angle, sending jolts of pain to my ankles and knees.

I ran between two houses, cut right, then down between another two, but given their skeletal nature, they didn’t provide much cover. I didn’t dare look back to see whether Rick was gaining on me, or whether he was there at all. Given the condition of the ground, and the limited light, taking my eyes off the path ahead of me for even a fraction of a second ran the risk of sending me flying.

But I couldn’t hear him. The sound of my own panting, the hammering of my own heart in my chest, and my feet hitting the ground drowned out most other noises.

I’d cut back and forth between so many houses I’d lost my bearings. I wasn’t sure which direction my car was in. So I leapt up into another house, aiming to cut through it on the diagonal, and once my feet were firmly planted on the plywood I took a moment to look back and could just make out a shadowy figure running across the site, about two houses back. He was slowing down, his head darting from side to side. Rick had momentarily lost me.

“Greenway!” he shouted. “I need some help out here!”

The house I’d slipped into was further along. Three of the outside walls had been packed with insulation, with clear plastic sheeting affixed over that. I crept from one room to another on the first floor, spotted a ladder up to the second, and scaled it as noiselessly as possible. The upstairs was still a see-through affair, at least between the rooms, and there was an opening in the ceiling where a skylight was planned. There was a plaster- and paint-stained stepladder up there, and I quietly moved it close to the opening, mounted the steps high enough that my shoulders were above the roofline, and hauled myself up.

Even in the night, it was dizzying up there. I moved a couple of feet away from the skylight opening and took a seat near the peak. The slope on the skylight side was gradual, but at the peak, the other half of the roof dropped away sharply, the slope so steep you couldn’t walk on it. I looked out on the sea of roofs bathed in soft moonlight. When I was a kid and played hide-and-seek with my buddies, I always went up trees, scaling as far as I could. It was my experience that people weren’t inclined to look up. They’d stand right under you, looking left and right, forward and backward, but they’d never bother to crane their necks skyward. I was hoping things hadn’t changed that much since I was ten.

From the roof I had a chance to get my bearings. I could see the three cars to the north, which meant that my own car was over to the west, not that far from where I was now. And now that I wasn’t on the run, I could listen more carefully for my hunters. Not that Rick was that hard to hear.

“That fucker! We’re gonna find you, you fucker!”

Greenway and Carpington were navigating their way across the terrain with a lot more care. They were, after all, wearing expensive suits and didn’t want to stumble. “Rick! Where are you?”

“Over here!” he shouted. He was in front of the house next to the one I was perched atop.

Greenway and Carpington caught up to him. The councilman said, “We should just get out of here. Even if you could find him, what are you gonna do? You can’t deal with everyone the way you did with Spender.”

Neither Rick nor Greenway answered. But after a moment, I did hear Rick say, “I lost him right around here. Let’s check in here.”

As they approached the house under me, they slipped from my range of vision. They were down on the first floor, shuffling about. They’d become very quiet, as though one of them had put his index finger to his lips. I peered into the skylight hole, but there wasn’t enough light down there to make anything out. But I thought I could hear someone scaling the ladder to the second floor. If it was anyone, it would be Rick.

I moved away from the opening, trying to will myself to become weightless. The roof hadn’t been shingled yet, so my knees and feet didn’t make scuffing noises against the surface. Inside, it sounded as though Rick had made it to the second floor.

He would see the stepladder under the opening. Would he think it had been left that way by the workers? I didn’t think he would.

I slipped one leg over the peak, down the steep side. I was straddled across it now, like I was riding a horse. Carefully, I pulled the other leg over, gripping the peak with my hands. Slowly I let my body slide down the steep slope, an inch at a time.

Inside, I heard Rick mount the stepladder. Once he was to the second step from the top, his head would be above the surface of the roofline. I hoped the moonlight wasn’t bright enough for him to see my eight fingers that gripped the peak and kept me from plummeting down the other side, past the edge of the roof, and then two stories to the dirt below.