She let him help her to her feet. "Jesus," she said, putting a hand to her ears. They rang like she'd been at a rave all night. "What the hell?" "Anti-personnel sonic device," Lester said. She realized that he was shouting, but she could barely hear it. "It doesn't do any permanent damage, but it'll scare off most anyone. Those kids probably live in the shantytown we passed this morning. More and more of them are joining gangs. They're our neighbors, so we don't want to shoot them or anything." She nodded. The ringing in her ears was subsiding a little. Lester steadied her. She leaned on him. He was big and solid. He wore the same cologne as her father had, she realized. She moved away from him and smoothed out her shorts, dusting off her knees. "Did you invent that?" "Made it using a HOWTO I found online," he said. "Lot of kids around here up to no good. It's pretty much a homebrew civil defense siren -- rugged and cheap." She put a finger in each ear and scratched at the itchy buzzing. When she removed them, her hearing was almost back to normal. "I once had an upstairs neighbor in Cambridge who had a stereo system that loud -- never thought I'd hear it again." Perry came and joined them. "I followed them a bit, they're way gone now. I think I recognized one of them from the campsite. I'll talk to Francis about it and see if he can set them right." "Have you been broken into before?" "A few times. Mostly what we worry about is someone trashing the printers. Everything else is easy to replace, but when Lester's old employer went bust we bought up about fifty of these things at the auction and I don't know where we'd lay hands on them again. Computers are cheap and it's not like anyone could really *steal* all this junk." He flashed her his good-looking, confident smile again. "What time do the movies start?" Lester checked his watch. "About an hour after sunset. If we leave now we can get a real dinner at a Haitian place I know and then head over to the Thunderbird. I'll hide under a blanket in the back seat so that we can save on admission!" She'd done that many times as a kid, her father shushing her and her brother as they giggled beneath the blankets. The thought of giant Lester doing it made her chuckle. "I think we can afford to pay for you," she said. The dinner was good -- fiery spicy fish and good music in an old tiki bar with peeling grass wallpaper that managed to look vaguely Haitian. The waiters spoke Spanish, not French, though. She let herself be talked into two bottles of beer -- about one and a half more than she would normally take -- but she didn't get light-headed. The heat and humidity seemed to rinse the alcohol right out of her bloodstream.