The guy watched her go, then he turned slowly and looked around the street as if he suddenly sensed he was being watched. He tossed his cigarette to the sidewalk and climbed in his BMW.

I called Bubba, who was parked over on Newbury in his van. “Change of plans,” I said. “We’re tailing a black Beemer.”

“Whatever.” He hung up. Mr. Hard-to-Impress.

“Why are we following this guy?” Angie said. I let two cars get in between us and the BMW before I pulled away from the curb.

“Because he’s a redhead,” I said. “Because Bourne knew him and acted like she didn’t. Because he looks hinky.”

“Hinky?”

I nodded. “Hinky.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know. I heard it on Mannix once.”

We followed the BMW south out of the city with Bubba’s black van riding our rear bumper straight into the rush-hour crunch. From Albany Street on, we averaged about six miles a decade as we crawled through Southie, Dorchester, Quincy, and Braintree. Twenty miles, and it took us only an hour and fifteen minutes. Welcome to Boston; we just fucking live for traffic.

He got off the expressway in Hingham and led us through another half an hour of bumper-to-bumper down one humid, crabby lane of Route 228. We passed through Hingham-all white colonials and white picket fences and white people-and then wound past a strip of power plants and mammoth gas tanks under high-tension wire before the black Beemer led us into Nantasket.

Once a grungy beach community with a soiled-neon carny atmosphere that attracted lots of bikers and women with flabby, exposed midriffs and stringy hair, Nantasket Beach slipped into a sterile, picture-postcard loveliness when they tore down the amusement park that once fronted its shores. Gone were the cheesy teacup rides and ratty wooden clowns you’d knock down with a softball to win an anemic guppy in a plastic bag. A roller coaster that, in its time, had been acknowledged as the country’s most dangerous had had its twisted dinosaur of a skeleton shattered by wrecking balls and pulled by its roots from the earth so they could build condos overlooking the boardwalk. All that remained of the old days were the ocean itself and a few arcades bathed in sticky orange light along the boardwalk.

Pretty soon they’d replace the arcades with coffee bars, outlaw stringy hair, and as soon as anyone stopped having any fun whatsoever, they could safely call it progress.

It occurred to me, as we wound our way down the beach road past the site of the old amusement park, that if I ever had kids, and I took them to places that had once mattered to me, all there’d be to show for my youth would be the buildings that had replaced it.

The BMW took a quick left just past the end of the boardwalk, then a right, and another left before he pulled into the sandy driveway of a small white Cape with green awnings and trim. We rolled past, and Angie watched in her sideview mirror.

“What the hell is he doing?”

“Who?”

She shook her head, eyes on the mirror. “Bubba.”

I looked in the rearview, saw that Bubba had pulled his black van to a rest on the shoulder about fifty yards before the redhead’s house. As I watched, he hopped out of the van and ran up between two Capes that were near identical to the redhead’s and disappeared somewhere in the backyards.

“This,” I said, “was not part of the plan.”

“Carrottop’s in his house,” Angie said.

I U-turned and drove back down the street, passing the redhead’s house as he closed his front door behind him and continuing past Bubba’s van. I drove another twenty yards and pulled over on the right shoulder in front of a home construction site, the skeleton of another Cape sitting on bare brown land.

Angie and I got out of the car and walked back toward Bubba’s van.

“I hate when he does this,” she said.

I nodded. “Sometimes I forget he has a mind of his own.”

“I know he has a mind of his own,” Angie said. “It’s how he uses it that keeps me up nights.”

We reached the rear of the van just as Bubba came bounding out from between the two houses, pushed us aside, and opened the rear doors.

“Bubba,” Angie said, “what have you done?”

“Sssh. I’m working here.” He tossed a pair of branch cutters into the rear of the van, grabbed a gym bag from the floor, and shut the doors.

“What’re you-”

He put a finger to my lips. “Sssh. Trust me. This is good.”

“Does it involve heavy explosives?” Angie asked.

“You want it to?” Bubba reached for the van door again.

“No, Bubba. Very much no.”

“Oh.” He dropped his hand from the door. “No time. Be right back.”

He jostled us aside and ran in a crouch across the lawns toward the redhead’s house. Even in a crouch, Bubba running across your lawn is about as easy to miss as Sputnik would be. He weighs something less than a piano but something more than a fridge, and he’s got that demented newborn’s face billowing out from under spikes of brown hair and above a neck the circumference of a rhino’s midsection. He kind of moves like a rhino, actually, lumbering and slightly to his right, but oh so quickly.

We watched with mouths slightly ajar as he dropped to his knees by the BMW, slim-jimmed the lock in the time it would take me to do it with a key, and then opened the door.

Angie and I both tensed for the blare of an alarm, but were met with silence as Bubba reached into the car, pulled something out, and slid it in the pocket of his trench coat.

Angie said, “What in the fuck is he doing?”

Bubba reached behind him and unzipped the gym bag by his knees. His hand searched around inside until he found what he was looking for. He removed a small black rectangular object and placed it in the car.

“It’s a bomb,” I said.

“He promised,” Angie said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but he’s, oh, nuts. Remember?”

Bubba used the sleeve of his trench coat to wipe the places he’d touched in and outside the car, then he gently closed the door and scrambled back across the lawn and over to us.

“I,” he said, “am so fucking cool.”

“Agreed,” I said. “What did you do?”

“I mean, I’m the balls, dude. I’m it. I surprise myself sometimes.” He opened the back door of the van, tossed the gym bag on the floor.

“Bubba,” Angie said, “what’s in the bag?”

Bubba was damn near bursting. He threw the folds of the bag wide, waved us to look inside. “Cell phones!” he said with a ten-year-old’s glee.

I looked in the bag. He was right. Ten or twelve of them-Nokias, Ericcsons, Motorolas, most black, a few gray.

“Great,” I said. I looked up into his beaming face. “Actually, why is this great, Bubba?”

“’Cause your idea sucked, and I came up with this one.”

“My idea wasn’t bad.”

“It sucked!” he said happily. “I mean, it blew, dude. Put a bug in a box, have the guy-or wasn’t it some chick at first-take it in the house.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, what if he leaves the box on the dining room table, goes up to the bedrooms to do whatever it is you want to hear?”

“We were kinda hoping he wouldn’t.”

He gave me a thumbs-up. “Fucking great thinking there.”

“So,” Angie said, “what was your idea?”

“Replace his cell phone,” Bubba said. He pointed into the bag. “These all have bugs already inside. All I had to do was match one of mine”-he pulled a charcoal Nokia flip phone from his pocket-“to his.”

“That’s his?”

He nodded.

I nodded with him, let my smile match his own, until I dropped it. “Bubba, no offense, but so what? The guy’s inside his house.”

Bubba rocked back on his heels, raised his eyebrows up and down several times. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So-how do I put this?-why the fuck does he need to use his cell phone when he probably has three or four house phones inside?”

“House phones,” Bubba said slowly, a frown beginning to replace the smile. “Never thought of those. He can just pick one up and call anywhere he wants, huh?”