I’D BARELY HAD TIME to investigate when I heard him shout, “Hooper! Get out here!”
I looked up from the newspaper I’d picked off the rack—a paper with the headline, DAYS OF DELICATE TERROR: Disappearances, Weird Weather Rock Nation—and tried to triangulate him.
“Outside the Great Clips! Hurry up!”
I folded the paper and took it with me, exiting the building through the jammed-open front doors, and saw him crouched over the asphalt in the corner of the L-shaped shopping center, beneath the Great Clips’ cornice. “What is it?” I said. “What did you find?”
He stood and indicated the sidewalk.
I stared at the pavement, which was webbed with roots and lichen, and saw a single shoe lying on its side—a Nike Lebron, which had been stained maroon like the surrounding concrete. More, there was
