I was tired too, but the feeling that something was wrong nagged at me. Like I said before, it felt almost too easy. Maybe I was just too wired, but when I was sure she was asleep, I went through Shan’s shoulder bag. I didn’t really know what I was looking for—it was habit, I guess. She had gum, tissues, makeup, a hairbrush, a pen, a chunky paperback called Wild Haven, sunglasses, tampons, headache pills, a newspaper page with a halfdone Sudoku, a phone bill for 26 Yardley Street, Port Hope, ON, a wallet, her passport, the photo album.
Everything matched up. I took ten Canadian dollars from her wallet. She had over a hundred with her, so I figured she wouldn’t notice right away. The bills were all different colors, like Monopoly money. Never pass up a chance. I wanted the birth certificate she’d shown for me at the airport—since Danny was fifteen, they’d said he didn’t need a passport—but I left it for the time being. I stuffed the ten into a pocket of my shorts and turned to the pictures. The photo album was brand new. Shan said she’d put it together just for me. The pictures looked real. Why they would have been fake, I don’t know. I was feeling pretty paranoid right then, and so tired I was getting mixed up.
I looked at Roy, muffin-topped in a golf shirt, arms around giggling kids; Gram and Grampy, perched in lawn chairs outside their RV in Florida. I half-wondered if I’d seen them. Harley and I had spent a month doing a charity-canvassing scam at seniors’ RV parks down there last winter. There was skinny brother Tyson with a beer, a mullet and some bad tattoos. He looked like barbed wire in a T-shirt. Little momma Carleen looked about as huggable as a baseball bat, even in a Santa hat.
Whatever I was looking for, I didn’t find it. Anyway, if Shan was the real deal, I couldn’t see any reason why she’d be stringing me along. I put it all out of my head; I had enough to worry about. The seatback screen was showing a map of where we were in the flight. It wouldn’t be long now—two hours at most. I flipped through the photos and looked into all those eyes. They hadn’t seen Danny in three years. Could I fool them? Any of them? For how long? Long enough to figure out some kind of next move? What if Josh had figured it out and called ahead? What if cops were waiting? Would they check fingerprints? DNA? I closed my eyes. Don’t overthink. What choice did I have? It was this or the Bad Time. Sooner or later, I was going to have to run. I could hit the ground running. Yeah, if it wasn’t snowing up there in Canada, I could always run.