Not much in the way of personality. All the houses were small and made of brick, with wide porches and scrappy yards. The Impala purred. Lannes parked behind a white pickup. He and the woman got out of the car. The air was cool.The neighborhood was quiet, but that was merely a lull-he heard doors banging and car engines roaring, saw tiny children crying and screaming, throwing down their book bags on the concrete sidewalks while their mothers ignored them and leaned on chain link fences, cigarettes dangling from their fingers.Folks going to work, school. It was only Thursday.Lannes stood for a moment, watching the woman posed frozen on the sidewalk, her gaze sharp, thoughtful. She was still wearing only socks. He needed to get her some good shoes if they were going to keep on like this. A first-aid kit for her feet, maybe.They walked down the sidewalk to a small brick house surrounded by a chain-link fence decorated with plastic windmills shaped like birds. Yellow grass and bushy weeds filled the small lawn, which was covered in stone birdbaths and bird feeders that hung from iron poles jammed into the earth, leaning at an angle.
