I gave him the receiver. He held it up close to his ear and turned around slowly in the middle of the kitchen, all the way around, the way you'd turn with a transistor radio looking for a station. The voice came and went. "Mama. Chispa. No." Then a lot of hiss. Then the yapping, and the crying.
"How far does this thing reach?"
"The box says three hundred feet," I said. "But I don't, it gets my house from here. My house is a hundred and twenty steps. It never got anything else, Captain. Just a phone sometimes. Just the radio once."
"Three hundred feet." He was looking at the wall, but I could see him seeing through it, seeing the block, the alley, Evans Avenue. "So there's another one of these, close. On the same channel. And today it's louder than yours." He looked at the receiver in his hand as if he could make it tell him more. "Eloy, has the dog been barking at this every day?"
"Yes, sir."
"At the same time."
"Four-thirty," Hank said from the doorway, with the radio microphone in his hand. "I said it. I said four-thirty."