It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being. Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO. The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile. What a scamp.

It's terrible to have to depend on someone else.

Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different story.

I nodded with genuine synthetic sympathy.

Really now: If you can't get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?

And then more quiet, silence so deep it almost drowned out the roar of the night music that pounded away in my secret self.

Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD.