BARRY SLAMMED a fist onto the computer station, making the librarian at the information desk look over.
“Sorry,” Barry muttered, and ducked his head.
“You shouldn’t have guessed three,” Clyde said. He sat back in the chair next to him, swiveling the seat from side to side.
“You told me three,” Barry said through gritted teeth.
Clyde shrugged. “What do I know?”
After they’d found the Book Scavenger website on Monday, they’d switched gears from staking out the area around the BART station to spending the rest of the week staking out this website. Or at least staking it out as much as they could manage, seeing that Barry didn’t have a computer at home and worked at a liquor store in the evenings, and Clyde … Barry had no idea what Clyde did when they weren’t around each other.
In any case, it had taken them five whole days of checking in on a computer either at the hotel where his friend worked or here at the main city library when his friend wasn’t working.
The green light next to Surly Wombat’s name switched to gray and read “unavailable” instead of “online.”
“Of course,” Barry said. “We scared her off.”
Barry dropped his head into his hands. Man, was he screwed. It was bad enough he’d thrown that book away in the first place. But Barry had neglected to tell his boss about the kids. He’d led him to believe they had a better handle on the book situation than they actually did. Although their boss had already threatened to take matters into his own hands if they didn’t hurry up, so maybe Barry hadn’t done such a good job of convincing him he had a handle on things.
Barry clicked on the name “Surly Wombat,” and the page jumped to the girl’s profile. At least he assumed this was that girl—she was the one Clyde had seen leaving the card in the first place. This profile gave very little personal information and no photo. Barry forced his eyes to scan the whole page this time instead of glazing over a couple of lines in. At the bottom of the page there was one important detail Barry had missed before.
He leaned close to the screen and blinked his eyes to make sure he was seeing straight.
“There we go.” He stabbed the words. “‘School: Booker Middle.’ We can go there.”
“Field trip,” Clyde said.