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wondered. Mr. D had called in earlier and said something about a team outing somewhere. He couldn’t remember where.
    He felt himself drifting off. He had crazy thoughts, or were they dreams? He was failing at school and couldn’t do a test; he was trying to skate but had no skates on, and no one else could see he was struggling in his boots, unable to keep up with the others; he was Spider-Man, and Nish really was the Iceman, and they were rounding up bad guys to turn them over to the police to be put in jail.
    He heard voices. Voices inside his head? From somewhere else? Men talking. Men arguing. Getting louder and louder and louder, until Travis thought his head was going to split.
    He needed a drink of water. He was getting delirious. He was maybe going to be sick again.
    Travis struggled out of bed and eased himself to his feet. He began moving very slowly toward the bathroom.
    There were the voices again. Louder now.
    “
Sunday morning!
” one yelled.
    “
I say tonight!
” another shouted back.
    “
It’s all set up for Sunday morning!
”
    Travis stopped, listening. These weren’t voices in his head. They were real. Real voices coming from the room next door.
    There was a doorway between Travis’s room and the next one. It was a double door, locked on both sides. Travis knew this because, of course, it was one of the first things Nish had checked when they arrived. Nish was convinced that if he could slip into another room, he might be able to look at an adult movie and have the charge go to someone else’s bill.
    The voices dropped, becoming more of a murmur, but every so often a word or two came through the closed door.
    “No!”
    “We do as Bert says!”
    “This is a joke!”
    Travis remembered – yes,
remembered
, it made him smile with relief – a trick Data had taught them when the Owls were convinced a girls’ ringette team had taken over the suite beside them in a motel.
    The boys had heard giggling and were trying to listen through the wall to whatever it was the girls were saying. They hadn’t had much luck until Data went into the washroom and returned with a drinking glass. He moved his wheelchair up tight to the wall, placed the bottom of the glass against his ear, and pressed the other end hard against the wall.
    Data told them every word the girls were saying. They were talking about boys, he said. But none of them was called Travis or Lars or Nish or Jesse Highboy or Derek Dillinger or any other name belonging to a Screech Owl.
    Travis made his way to the washroom and found a glass neatly wrapped in paper. He undid the paper and returned to the door with the glass, placing it against his ear and then pressing tight enough to the door that the glass was snug against the wood.
    The voices were clearer now.
    “It’s the key, dammit,” one of the men was saying. “We won’t be able to get it until Sunday morning, and then we’ll only have an hour or so to pull it off.”
    Pull what off? Travis wondered.
    The other voice was angry. “This is
not
something you want to do in broad daylight,” he said. “We’ll be seen.”
    “Can’t,” the first man said. “And we can’t do it the night before, or tonight, because we don’t have access to the key.”
    “How do you know we will Sunday morning?”
    “Weekend shift for the staff. Our man will be in early and will make it so the key doesn’t work. When the guy comes down to get his key re-coded, our man will be the one doing it, and he’ll make a copy for us.”
    “Can we trust this person?”
    “He’s being well paid.”
    “Then what? How do we get it out of here without being seen? You’ve seen the parking area. There’s no place you can conceal something like that.”
    “We won’t be using the parking lot.”
    “How, then?”
    “We go down the fire exit, then around the corner of the building. It’ll be in a duffel bag and our man will be carrying a hockey stick – people will think he’s heading off to play