“Yeah. So?”

“So they’re dips. Not your kind: pickpockets.”

He lurched forward and I grabbed his arm; his bicep was like a cannonball.

“Wait ’til they clear the crowd,” I said. I hung back a few seconds, then said, “Come on.”

We moved slowly through, as Huey was explaining to the crowd that FDR didn’t scare him (“Never touch a porcupine, less’n you expect to get some quills stuck in your hide”). We excused ourselves; we weren’t moving fast: we had our quarry in our sights.

Out on the midway, where on either side of us in open tents the barkers sang their siren song, the terraced hoopla stands behind them laden with such treasures as stuffed toys, bottles of perfume and pen-and-pencil sets, we trailed behind the pretty girl and the blond boy. We wandered past a brick pavilion as the scent of popcorn mingled with that of disinfectant and manure. We wove through kids with cotton candy and balloons on strings, and circumvented guys arm-in-arm with gals, the former in search of shooting booths where an eagle-eye might attain a prize that might coax an even better reward from the latter.

And we watched as the blond boy in seersucker white sidled up to the pretty girl in the dress with red polka dots; saw him hand her the fat wallet, and her hand him a smile.

He put his hand on her rump and her smile turned dirty. Maybe they weren’t brother and sister. In this part of the country, maybe just cousins.

“You take the boy,” I said.

“You take the girl,” Messina offered shrewdly.

“Nothin’ gets past you, does it, Joe?”

We slipped up beside them, and I took the dish by her soft arm and said, “On you, that dime-store perfume smells good.”

She frowned at me, tried to pull away. “Don’t handle the merchandise, buster!”

Beside her, Messina had halted her fella, too, clutching him roughly by the arm.

“Just dump the goods on the sawdust, sis,” I whispered, “and we’ll leave the coppers out of it.”