"I can call you a taxi," the kid said. "It's not safe to hang around here." "That's really nice of you," Perry said. "Thanks." The kid took out a little phone and prodded it for a minute. "On the way," he said. "The guns aren't loaded." "Oh, well," Perry said. "Good to know." An awkward silence spread between them. "Look, I'm really sorry," the kid said. "We don't really do this. It's our first night. My brother would really kill me." "I won't tell him," Perry said. His heart was beating again, not thundering or keeping ominously still. "But you know, this isn't smart. You're going to stick someone up who has bullets and he's gonna shoot you." "We'll get ammo," the kid said. "And shoot him? That's only a little better, you know." "What do you want me to say?" the kid said, looking young and petulant. "I apologized." "Come by tomorrow with the car and let's talk, all right?" Lester didn't even notice that his car was missing until the kid drove up with it, and when he asked about it, Perry just raised his funny eyebrow at him. That funny eyebrow, it had the power to cloud men's minds. "What's your name?" Perry asked the kid, giving him the spare stool by the ticket-window. It was after lunch time, when the punishing heat slowed everyone to a sticky crawl, and the crowd was thin -- one or two customers every half hour. "Glenn," the kid said. In full daylight, he looked older. Perry had noticed that the shantytowners never stopped dressing like teenagers, wearing the fashions of their youths forever, so that a walk through the market was like a tour through the teen fashions of the last thirty years. "Glenn, you did me a real solid last night." Glenn squirmed on his stool. "I'm sorry about that --" "Me too," Perry said. "But not as sorry as I might have been. You said it was your first night. Is that true?" "Car-jacking, sure," the kid said. "But you get into other shit, don't you? Mugging? Selling a little dope? Something like that?" "Everyone does that," Glenn said. He looked sullen. "Maybe," Perry said. "And then a lot of them end up doing a stretch in a work-camp. Sometimes they get bit by water-moccasins and don't come out. Sometimes, one of the other prisoners hits them over the head with a shovel. Sometimes you just lose three to five years of your life to digging ditches." Glenn said nothing. "I'm not trying to tell you how to run your life," Perry said. "But you seem like a decent kid, so I figure there's more in store for you than getting killed or locked up. I know that's pretty normal around here, but you don't have to go that way. Your brother didn't." "What the fuck do you know about it, anyway?" The kid was up now, body language saying he wanted to get far away, fast. "I could ask around the market," Perry said, as though the kid hadn't spoken. "Someone here has got to be looking for someone to help out. You could open your own stall."