*69 by Blake Crouch Page B

time. Can I call you back tomorrow?”
    “Well, all right. Love you. Kisses and hugs
to that pretty wife of yours.”
    “You, too. Bye, Mom.” Tim hung up the
phone.
    Laura said, “Does that mean we can’t star
sixty-nine whoever left the message?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You think there’s some number you push to
like, double star-sixty—”
    “I don’t work for the phone company,
Laura.”
    “Remember, I suggested we buy the package
with caller ID, but you were all, ‘No, that’s an extra five bucks a
month.’ I think it’s time to call the police.”
    “No, I’ll call Martin. He’ll be off his shift
in an hour.”
     
    A few minutes shy of eleven o’clock, the
doorbell rang.
    Tim unlocked the deadbolt, found his brother,
Martin, standing on the stoop, half-squinting in the glare of the
porchlight, his uniform wrinkled, deep bags under his eyes.
    “You look rough, big bro,” Tim said.
    “Can I come in or you wanna chat out here in
the cold?”
    Tim peered around him, saw the squad car
parked in the driveway, the engine ticking as it cooled.
    Fog enveloped the streets and homes of Quail
Ridge, one of the new subdivisions built on what had been a
farmer’s treeless pasture, the houses all new and homogenous, close
enough to the interstate to always bask in its distant roar.
    He stepped to the side as Martin walked into
his house, then closed and locked the door after them.
    “Laura asleep?” he asked.
    “No, she’s still up.”
    They walked past the living room into the
kitchen where Laura, now sporting a more modest nightgown, had put
a pot of water on the stove, the steam making the lid jump and
jive.
    “Hey, Marty,” she said.
    He kissed her on the cheek. “My God, you
smell good. So you told him about us yet?”
    “Never gets old,” Tim said. “You think it
would, but it just keeps getting funnier.”
    Laura said, “Cup of tea, Marty?”
    “Why not.”
    Martin and Tim retired to the living room.
After Laura got the tea steeping, she joined them, plopping down in
the big leather chair across from the couch.
    Martin said, “Pretty fucking quaint and what
not with the fire going. So what’s up? You guys having a little
crumb-cruncher?”
    Laura and Tim looked at each other, then
Laura said, “No, why would you think that?”
    “Yeah, Mart, typically not safe to ask if a
woman’s pregnant until you actually see the head crowning.”
    “So I’m not gonna be an uncle? Why the hell
else would you ask me over this late?”
    “Go ahead, Laura.”
    She pressed play on the answering
machine.
    They listened to the message, and when it
finished, Martin said, “Play it again.”
    After the message ended, they sat in silence,
Martin with his brow furrowed, shaking his head.
    He finally said, “I know you’re too much of a
cheap bastard to have caller ID or anything invented in the
twenty-first century, so did you star-sixty-nine it?”
    “Tried, but Mom called literally the second I
picked up the phone.”
    Martin undid the top two buttons of his navy
shirt, ran his fingers around the collar to loosen it.
    “Could just be a prank,” he said. “Maybe
someone held the phone up to the television during a particular
scene in a movie.”
    “If that’s what it is, I don’t recognize the
movie.”
    Martin quickly redid the buttons on his
shirt, said, “What do you think you’ve got there?”
    “I think someone’s phone got jiggled at the
worst possible moment, and we were on their speed dial.”
    “You call nine-one-one?”
    “Called you.”
    Martin nodded. “There’s gotta be a way to
find that number. You know, something you dial other than
star-sixty-nine.”
    Tim said, “Star-seventy?”
    “I don’t know, something like that.”
    “We tried to call the phone company a little
while ago, but they’re closed until eight a.m. tomorrow.”
    Martin looked at Laura, said, “You okay,
sweetie? You don’t look so hot.”
    Tim saw it, too—something about her had
changed, her