To be more specific, the breeze from the bay is sultry, moisture laden, smelling faintly of salt and a fecund odor that Shane says comes from the mangroves miles away. Whatever, I’m adjusting to the heat, buying into my new sense of mission. If Edwin Manning and his minions are here, there must be hope.

“That’s him!” I exclaim. “The bald jerk with the pop-out eyes.”

“The guy from the airport?”

“Yes! He’s got his arm in a sling.”

“Got his ass in a sling, more like.”

“He’s pointing his finger at the guy with the drink, telling him something. Doesn’t look like a happy conversation.”

“Lemme see.”

I hand over the binoculars.

Shane studies, nods. “This is good. We’ve got the right address.”

“You already got that from the Internet,” I point out.

“Yeah, but it never hurts to confirm. Back in the day, I was on a stakeout once for a whole week? Two teams, twelve-hour shifts, waiting for the suspect to show his face. Turns out we had the wrong side of the building, the suspect was coming and going the whole time. We were staking out the wrong apartment. My mistake.”

“I prefer to think you never make mistakes.”

He places the binoculars in my hands. “Me? To err is human.”

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“Back to my computer. Just thought of something.”

“What should I do?”

“Keep watching.”

“What am I watching for?”

Shane looks at me. “You’ll know it when you see it. Something out of the ordinary.”

“But everything is out of the ordinary,” I protest. “I’m supposed to be adjusting hemlines, not spying on billionaires.”

“Keep watching,” he insists, heading for his laptop.

I keep watching. He keeps clacking on the keys.

Eyeballing the interior of Manning’s condo gives me a new appreciation for bird-watchers. I had no idea it was so much work, keeping focus. Plus the lens distorts things and it takes concentration to figure out what, exactly, you’re looking at. For instance I keep seeing this flash of white, and assume that someone is darting across the big room, but that doesn’t really make sense—why run?—so I keep looking and eventually figure out it’s a reflection from a TV screen that must be wall mounted, facing the interior of the room, or maybe coming from a corner. Which also explains the dull looks from the heavy guy with his arm in a sling. He and two other burly types just sitting there staring like a row of hypnotized apes. Monkey see, monkey sit. And yes, I do know that apes aren’t monkeys. Having been corrected by Kelly, who as usual was rolling her eyes at my ignorance.

Part of me can’t wait for her to grow up and have kids of her own, so we can commiserate, talk about the bad old days when she was a teenage drama queen. Another part of me wants her to be ten years old again, the year of no hospitals when she was rediscovering the world, seeking approval and encouragement from me. Like I was a person who had valuable insights to share. Like I really and truly mattered. Whereas now I’m this fatally uncool, totally hopeless repository of embarrassment who has nothing to offer, whose role has been reduced to that of a housemaid—except no self-respecting housemaid would tolerate that level of scorn. A scorn that made my precious daughter think it was okay to keep so much of her life from me. Her thrill-seeking, death-defying life. Her own personal flyboy kind of life.

Talk about exciting—fast cars, motorcycles, airplanes, parachutes. An entire life kept secret from the tedious bore who does her laundry.

How could she? How could my little girl do this to me? It’s like all her life I’ve been saying the equivalent of be careful crossing the street and she decides to run out in traffic just to spite me. Sticking out her adolescent, know-it-all tongue as the bus runs her down.

Okay, I’m a thousand miles from home, sick with worry, but I’m also really and truly pissed at my own daughter. This is where I’m at, mentally and emotionally: I want to rescue the little bitch so I can kill her myself.

Which is, of course, insane.

“Anything new?” Shane asks, making me jump.

“I don’t get how a guy your size can sneak up on people,” I say.

“Squeakless sneakers,” he says.

“Squeakless sneakers?”

“Hard to find but worth their weight in gold.”

“I’m really really mad at her,” I confess.

His big hand brushes his bearded chin. “Of course you are. You’ve a right to be. We get her back, you can ground her for a year.”

“Fern says I should chain her to a radiator.”

Shane gives me an odd look, and then it hits me.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe I said that! That’s what kidnappers do, isn’t it? Chain the victims to radiators.”

“We’ll find her,” he assures me. “You have my pledge.”

I believe him. But he doesn’t say whether she’ll be dead or alive. My first impulse is to burst into tears for the twenty-third time, but my tear ducts are empty, and wanting to cry just makes my eyes itch.

“You have your cell phone?” he asks.

I nod.

“I want you to put me on speed dial,” he says. “I’ll set mine to vibrate and if you see any cops or security guards heading my way, you hit the dial.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh,” he says. “Sorry. Forgot you can’t read my mind. Manning has a local motor vehicle registered in his name. A big orange Hummer, which ought to be easy to find. I’ll enter the garage beneath his building, locate his vehicle, and leave him a little surprise.”

“Oh. What kind of surprise?”

He holds up a Baggie with something small and rectangular inside, looks like a black electrical switch.

“Am I supposed to guess?” I ask.

“Sorry. It’s a handy-dandy GPS tracking device.”

“Something you got from the FBI?”

“No, ma’am. This particular model is readily available online. Magnetic mounted, motion activated. So where Manning goes, we can follow.”

“Is that legal?”

“Absolutely not,” Shane says. “That’s why you’re keeping an eye out for the cops.”

10. What Needs To Be Done

Far below, the wet street glistens like black glass. Traffic lights gleam in electric jellybeans colors, cinnamon-red and spearmint-green. Amazing how a little rain can make a city look all shiny and clean, especially at night. Air smells fresher, too, although a faint aroma of tropical funk remains. Eau de rotting vegetation, or maybe it’s something deeper, something more malignant, released from beneath the fragile ground by marauding bulldozers, probing shovels, long-forgotten sins.

Morbid thoughts. I keep waiting for Shane to emerge, figuring he’ll have to cross the street to get to Manning’s condo building, but either the big guy has an invisible cloak or he’s got a different route in mind. Should I call, check that he’s okay? No, his instructions were very specific: buzz if the cops show. Most definitely he did not suggest that I call for a chat, or to make sure his cell is set on vibe rather than “Teen Spirit.”

I’ve seen that movie where the hero gets caught when his phone trills at exactly the wrong moment. Can’t let that happen. Randall Shane must be protected at all costs because he’s all I’ve got. The police in Long Island, the obnoxious FBI agent, they’re all just going through the motions, issuing bulletins and be-on-the-lookouts. The assumption being that yet another wild teenager has run off with her boyfriend. Big whoop, happens every day. Girls eventually come home or they don’t, it’s up to them, no matter what mom has to say on the subject.

And why exactly is this nonsense humming like a bad song in my brain, one of those stupid popzillas you can’t get out of your head? Because some tiny, miserable part of me worries that the worst may have happened. Okay, not quite the worst, not Kelly in a shallow grave, but Kelly involved in some sort of death-defying stunt, helping her flyboy hit up his dad for a few million bucks, just for the thrill of it. I’ll deny it to anyone who asks, Fern included, but the fact is that if circumstances are exactly wrong, if the temptation is too great, even so-called good kids like Kelly can suddenly go off the rails. Like all teenagers, she’s vulnerable to the impulsive, wouldn’t-it-be-cool riff that can lead, when things go bad, to prison or death.