Chapter Forty-One
(Friday, Late Afternoon—Owen)
Owen lounged on the Fusty Navel’s aft deck and argued with Aaron about the feasibility and profitability of doing a traveling trained-porpoise act. The transport costs, he pointed out, would be minimal. Other acts would have a difficult time competing on that level.
The kid actually seemed offended by the idea, so Owen stuck with it. He had just offered to bankroll the whole thing, and suggested he could pay Aaron’s share of the profits in raw fish, when Martina joined them. Aaron, seeing he wasn’t going to get a chance at any other form of rebuttal, stood and kicked Owen in the arm on his way inside to get yet another Coke.
Owen grinned after him. “Trouble?” he asked Martina.
“I don’t know.” She held the Hermit’s phone out to him. “It’s Johnny.” The Hermit looked up from the book he was reading, marking his place with a finger.
“Hey, man,” Owen said into the phone. “Did you hear I’m no longer considered a dangerous criminal?”
“No,” Johnny answered. “Who’d you have to pay off? And how do you know they won’t get a better offer?”
Ouch. For all he knew, that might happen. “Funny. What’s up?”
“Owen, dude, I found some stuff that’s enough to turn your stomach. I’m a little worried about what to do with it.”
“Stuff? Like from Danny’s office?”
“Sort of. I found a jump drive in there. I didn’t get around to checking it till today. Anyway, I found a text file with a couple of random-looking jumbles of characters?”
“Yeah? Short ones? They look like passwords?”
“See, there’s a reason you got the big bucks. Yeah, passwords. There were some other interesting things on the jump drive, but nothing incriminating.”
“Uh huh.” So the passwords had been incriminating? “Go on.”
“One of the passwords was for Danny’s network account. I checked his files on the server. Lots of stuff, but again, not much of what I was looking for.”
So where else had he looked? “What about his personal machine?”
“Bingo. I logged in over the network, so I could check it from my desk. I found some stuff hidden in there. It might have been harder to find, because it was in a kinda obscure location, but he didn’t keep much on that box. I had to log on with a local account—it used the other password—to read the files at all, and then he password-protected them on top of that. But, dude…he used the same password he’d used for his network account. So you needed two passwords, one for his personal machine and one for the files, and he kept them both in the same place on his jump drive.”
That sounded like Danny. Clever and sneaky, but also fundamentally lazy. “Got it. But, Johnny? What’d you find?”
Johnny hesitated. “Uh, that’s the thing. I’m still at the office, and I don’t want to talk about it over the phone anyway. Can I meet you somewhere? And…well, it might be a good idea to get the police involved in this too.”
“Sure. But why’d you call me, instead of them?”
“Well, you know, you’ve been having all this trouble with the cops. I figured we should find a way to let them know you helped me find this stuff. I mean, it was your idea.”
Owen winced. Somehow he didn’t think that would help.
Johnny went on after a pause. “Anyway, it’s really mind-bending. I’ve gotta show it to somebody I know, get a reaction from someone who isn’t a cop. I wasn’t kidding about turning your stomach. There are some pictures here that are deeply disturbing, man.”
Pictures? Maybe the cops weren’t such a great idea. “Johnny…do these pictures have anything to do with, ah, sea life?”
“Sea life? What are you talking about?”
“Never mind.” They’d just have to hope for the best. “Do you know where the new City Marina is?”
“The one they built a couple of years ago? Sure.”
“All right. I’m on a houseboat, the Fusty Navel—I bought it, I didn’t name it—out on the first finger to the left from the parking lot. What time?”
“Fusty Navel? Gross. New City Marina, first finger to the left, got it. How about seven o’clock? I want to check out some more things here first.”
“Okay. I know a couple of cops who might be interested. I’ll see you then—and be careful.” Speaking of which…“You’re on your cell phone, right?”
“Yeah. I’m sleepy and dumb, but not that dumb. See you in a couple of hours.”
”‘Kay.” They hung up.
Aaron had come back outside. Owen looked around to see three pairs of eyes staring at him. Shadow, oblivious, watched one of the neighbors reel in a fish.
Owen shrugged. “Sounds like Johnny found something, but I don’t know what. I’m gonna call Gordon and see if he wants to be here.”
“Cool!” Aaron said. Owen grinned at him as he dialed the number. Martina pursed her lips slightly, the vertical crease Owen had been monitoring reappearing between her eyebrows.
She nodded when Owen sought her eyes. “Go ahead,” she told him. “I just keep hoping it’s over, that’s all.”
Aaron looked baffled for a moment, then shook his head, his eyes dancing. The Hermit went back to his reading with an air of uninvolvement.
Owen nodded to Martina, shrugged, and hit “Send.”
“Gordon? It’s Owen Tremaine. Listen, I may have something for you . . .”
Shiver on the Sky Page 64