“For three fifty you get one-time use, no archiving, no reprints.”
“Hold on.”
Hackett could hear a heated discussion in the background.
“They’re not happy with the no-archiving clause, but they’re too fucking tight to cough up any more dough. Send me an invoice, OK.”
“You’ll have it by email,” Hackett said, before adding, “Oh, and Bill, spell my name right in the credit this time will you?”
“Talk to the copy editors, pal.” Bill snorted. “This new generation of hacks were all hooked on phonics. I doubt they can spell the pet names for their own dicks.”
The line went dead.
Chapter 9
The sound of his own voice arguing over the intrinsic value of a mint Heavy Metal comic collection greeted Hackett as he lugged his backpack down the stairs and unlocked the door to his apartment.
“I’m home,” Hackett called out once he was inside. “End program. Authorization Byrne.”
The computer that monitored his home-built security system paused for a moment before shutting down the audio and canceling its intruder script.
Hackett placed his pack in its usual spot beside the door and dropped his coat on top. Adjacent to the door, filling most of the wall, was an overcrowded metal bookcase that Hackett had spray-painted army green and filled with an eclectic collection of modern mystery, horror and sci-fi, plus a scattering of yellowing dime-novel pulps from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.
In a place of honor, surrounded by a well-thumbed Mickey Spillane paperback library and a ragtag collection of vintage 12-inch G.I. Joe figures, was a large, cat-sized ceramic sculpture of a grinning Buddha. A denizen of tiny animals from frogs to crickets surrounded the bald, half-naked holy man. They peeked out of his pockets or hid in the grass beneath his cross-legged, meditative form.
Hackett reached out to stroke a tiny, sharp-spiked hedgehog that sat peacefully on one of the Buddha’s alabaster-white knees. Under the pressure of his finger, the prickly rodent sunk into the bleached flesh to release a hidden latch. The latch, in turn, popped open the Buddha’s swollen belly to reveal a small, cedar-lined drawer. The drawer was just large enough to hold a quarter-ounce baggie of Seattle’s finest hydroponically grown marijuana and a pack of natural leaf rolling papers.
Hackett removed one of the papers, added a liberal pinch of dried bud and rolled it into a thin, tight joint. After a lick of saliva and a slick twist at each end, he popped the joint in the corner of his mouth and replaced his stash. The Buddha sucked in its belly with a gentle push — invisible seams, hidden in the sculpting of the enlightened teacher’s frail robe, concealing its secret.
Hackett lit the joint off an old waist-high, pedestal-style cigarette lighter he had discovered lying in the corner of a junk shop. He inhaled deeply. The sweet, peppery smoke brought an instant calmness to his mind just as his body sunk into the well-used, bottle green leather office chair. Exhaling yellow-gray smoke, Hackett swiveled to face his phone, a voice-activated model that connected directly to his PC.
“Phone,” he said aloud. “Any messages?”
“You have one new message,” answered a metallic voice in a tone that yearned to sound more human.
“Who from?” Hackett attempted to sound sociable even though, logically, he knew the phone would only respond to a recognized command. In this case, the word ‘Who’.
“Caller ID unknown.”
That was the trouble with trying to keep up with technology, Hackett thought. Here he was running in the fast lane, while the rest of the world seemed to putt along without any regard to catching up.
“Play message.” Hackett closed his eyes and inhaled another lungful of sweet, dry smoke.
The playful voice that washed over him in stereo from the computer speakers brought a smile to his lips.
“Hey, Hackboy, your cell was busy. Hope you’re not screening calls, you know I hate to wait for your toys to decide whether or not I’m worthy to speak to.”
The caller paused, but Hackett could still hear the rise and fall of her chest. His imagination took him to Chandra’s office where he peered down from the ceiling like a vampire. The tops of her swelling breasts peeked suggestively from the low-cut V of a white angora sweater.
Hackett grinned wider, imagining her glancing up, her almond-shaped eyes darker than burnt ochre but alive with golden flecks of amber, the beauty spot dancing lightly above her upper lip, and that luminescent red dot between her eyes that always made him go cross-eyed if he stared too long.
What would she do?
And then he knew.
She would lean back, cup her hands beneath her breasts and push them higher until the nipples practically exploded out of the tan-colored bra that seemed to match her caramel skin so perfectly. Then, when she knew he was fully aroused, she would walk away, twitching her perfect ass beneath a short, pleated skirt just to taunt him.
It was incredible how Chandra could make even breathing sexy. Although, he admitted, that could also be the dope.
“OK, I guess you’re not there,” the message continued, “or at least you better not be unless you want me kicking your pale white butt across the floor. Speaking of which, I have Muay Thai tonight, but I’ll pop in afterwards if you’re fortunate enough to be home. Kisses.”
The message ended with a harsh beep and a time stamp that stole all the romance out of her lips smacking the air.
Hackett pulled a pair of metal tweezers from his desk drawer to hold the disappearing end of the joint for one last puff.
“Erase message,” Hackett told the phone.
After dropping the roach into the discarded can of Coke he hadn’t finished earlier, Hackett jostled his mouse to cancel the animated Opus screensaver and checked his email.
One of the delights of having a high-speed optical connection was that his computer was always working. As soon as a new piece of mail arrived, a curvy blonde wrapped in a knee-length trench coat would walk across the screen and flash him. The inside of the trench coat displayed the words You Have Mail. Hackett had a thing for kitch.
There was no blonde on the screen, so Hackett brought his web browser to the front and checked the chatroom. The lone occupant was Fats. Hackett logged in.
HACK: Hey, Fats, you awake?
There was no immediate reply as Fats tended to keep the chatroom as just one small window on his multiple-monitor setup while he busied himself at a hundred other computer-related tasks. Hackett leaned back in his chair to enjoy his mellow buzz and wait until his friend noticed he was no longer alone.
Hackett and Fats had been tight since junior year when Fats transferred in as part of a trial integration program being run by the American School for the Deaf. While the other students tended to avoid the new freak in their midst, Hackett took an immediate liking to the overweight and painfully shy loser.
By senior year, Hackett was so proficient at sign language that his teachers began to worry he had become mute. Fats, on the other hand, learned how to roll a joint one-handed and lost his virginity on a double date to a midnight showing of Eraserhead.
If it hadn’t been for their mutual interest in technology, however, that friendship might have ended on graduation day. Hackett had surprisingly made the grades to enter college, while Fats turned down several high-profile scholarships to retreat behind closed doors. After three years of being gawked at, Fats lost interest in the outside world.
Over the next two years, Hackett worked four part-time jobs to pay for tuition and camera gear while Fats delved ever deeper into computers and the burgeoning possibilities of cyberspace. Those busy months after high school flew by and their friendship fell by the wayside as it became difficult to find the time to get together.
It wasn’t until a purple clamshell iBook arrived unexpectedly on his doorstep that Hackett discovered the wonders of late-night chatrooms and electronic mail. It became a way of communicating with Fats that fit into his hectic lifestyle and something he l
ooked forward to in the lonely hours after midnight when he was too hyped, angry or excited to sleep.
At the end of college, Hackett no longer wanted a steady job at one of the local papers. The economy had shifted and with it went the loyalty newspapers had shown to their veteran journalists. The publishers called it restructuring, but in truth they found that fresh meat was easier to squeeze.
Most J-school grads didn’t see the world through such cynical eyes, but Hackett’s practicum in the real world had coincided with the technology upgrade that swept across every newspaper in North America as they switched to the new frontier of multimedia, cross-platform, what-the-fuck-are-we-doing, social media bullshit.
This change meant a drastic learning curve. When the old-timers complained they needed more training, management found it easier to package them off and hire the new kids who already knew their way around a computer.
When the Post-Intelligencer ended its print run for a new home online, Hackett attended over a dozen farewell parties. But unlike a lot of his fellow students who saw this as a great opportunity, Hackett believed the experience, passion and dedication that made up the heart of the newspaper industry was being thrown aside.
Maybe he was born in the wrong era because Hackett loved to knock elbows with the old-timers. Their stories could curl his hair and make his belly ache from laughter. Back then, journalism was a trade that delivered experience by the bucket load and you either swam through the muck or drowned trying. Today, it seemed more like a word factory where every story followed the same agenda and truth became lost in a corporate blur.
The trouble was that Hackett didn’t want to throw aside his dream of being a photojournalist — especially since he didn’t know what else he could do so well.
It was Fats, when Hackett was in one of his late-night, self-pitying moods, who gave him the advice to go freelance. That way, Fats reasoned, his only boss would be his conscience. Well, that and the fact he still had to make the rent at the end of each month. But so far, it was working out OK.
FATS: Didn’t see you there. How did the shoot go?
HACK: Gr8. Sold to the Times and AP. Front page, baby
FATS: Way to go
HACK: What u up to?
FATS: Cheating husband. Cross-referencing credit purchases to see if he’s been giving jewelry to the wrong girl
HACK: Is he?
FATS: Looks like a definite and he wasn’t too clever in covering his tracks, either
HACK: When will they learn?
FATS: Hopefully never, I need the dough
HACK: Come on, u must be richer than God by now. You bought Apple stock back in 99.
FATS: I’m aiming to get up there with Satan and Oprah
HACK: LOL :-)
Fats found his true calling after a brief stint as a hacker known as RabitGod and the developer of several multi-platform gaming engines that still brought in impressive monthly royalties. Although he never stopped dabbling, the deluge of fan mail from obsessed techno-weenies had driven him away from the gaming industry and into highly specific, multi-threaded search engines.
None of them were intended to compete with Google, since that was opening a can of worms he had no interest in swallowing. Instead, he set out his shingle as a cyber-sleuth.
FATS: So you want to make a little money?
HACK: U ever known me not to? What do you have?
FATS: This idiot I’m tracking books the same motel every Tuesday. I need to contact the wife, but I’ve got a feeling she’ll want visual proof
HACK: Motion or stills?
FATS: :p Stills are fine, they’re usually more interested in seeing the girlfriend’s face than what she does in bed
HACK: Pity
FATS: I’ll buzz later with details
HACK: Cool
Hackett logged off and thought about calling his uncle to make sure everything was all right. But he didn’t know how he would explain how he saw what happened, and more importantly, how his uncle’s face was going to be splashed across the front page of the morning Times?
As he wrestled with his dilemma, a video window opened in the top corner of his computer screen to show Chandra skipping down the stairs to his apartment door. Instead of wearing the sexy short skirt and angora sweater he had imagined from her phone call, she was dressed in a bulky red sweatshirt that had seen its fair share of wash cycles, baggy red cotton shorts, red ankle socks and white sneakers. She also wore a matching crimson band in her waist-length, indigo-black hair.
At the bottom of the stairs, Chandra knocked once on the door before turning around to look up at the tiny security camera. With a mischievous smile, she slid her fingers under the waistband of her sweatshirt and began to slowly raise it up.
The diamond stud in her belly button caught the light and glistened against the dark brown of her stomach. Hackett could feel all the moisture drain from his mouth as he watched her on the monitor.
She stopped just as the delicious, full curves of her breasts — unburdened by a bra — began to appear.
Hackett laughed aloud as he went to the door and pulled it open.
“Nice show,” he said.
Chandra glared at him playfully. “I wondered if you were going to stop me.”
“Normally I would have,” he said, “but since the video feed is also linked to Fats’ machine, he asked if I would keep it running.”
Chandra screamed in mock horror and pushed him backwards into the room. Laughing, he stumbled over a pile of magazines and fell to the floor. Chandra kicked the door shut and pounced. Straddling him, she pinned his arms to the floor, strands of loose hair falling over her shoulders to form a silken cage around their faces.
That was when he noticed her swollen left eye.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Muay Thai. One of my opponents got a little overzealous in a two-on-one.”
“Ouch! Does it hurt?”
She shook her head, but then stuck her lips out in a pout. “Doesn’t mean you can’t kiss it better.”
“Oh, I can do better than that.”
Chandra screamed as Hackett pulled his right arm free and pushed her to one side. She rolled onto her back with Hackett on top, her eyes blazing with challenge.
“What you going to do now, Hackboy?”
“Torture time!” Hackett cried.
Without warning, Hackett lifted the waistband of her sweatshirt and dove under. He pressed his face against her naked stomach, the stubble of his chin rough against her soft skin. Chandra screamed again and started kicking her legs to buck him off as Hackett pressed his mouth to her flesh, his cheeks filling with air, and then—
He began to make loud and moist farting noises.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Chandra cried.
Her voice was alive with laughter, her body squirming like an eel under the ticklish assault.
Hackett moved up her body, his noisy attack relenting only when he arrived at her breasts. The sight of her excited nipples, erect on the peaks of gorgeous butterscotch mounds, was too much for him to resist. His mouth locked on one breast with a forceful desire and soon their sounds of playfulness turned into something more basic, hungrier, and full of need.
Chapter 10
Reddy knew he should have left town as soon as he was done. There was nothing to keep him in New York apart from curiosity, and he knew the cat’s tale about that. Still, this was the first person he had ever killed and he couldn’t help wondering why it meant so little.
His father’s fists had broken something deeper and more brittle than bone.
After stripping naked to scrub himself clean in a rain barrel behind an Italian restaurant, Reddy pulled on the spare clothes he had brought along in a black garbage bag. He didn’t have a second pair of shoes, so he rubbed dirt into the blood and wiped it as best he could. The shoes were a mess — no one would notice a few extra stains. At the depot, he watched buses come and go, the return ticket burning a hole in his pocket.
He knew his brothers and sisters would be angry if he cashed it in, but the fantasy teased that if he stayed in New York maybe he could find Theresa, go to a movie or something like a normal kid.
He eventually shook the idea out of his head and checked the schedule. Two more buses were heading to Chicago tonight, the last of which didn’t leave for another two hours.
Reddy stuck the ticket in his pocket and wandered the streets, slowly making his way back to the scene. When he arrived at the alley, he found it blocked off with crime tape and a huddle of curious onlookers.
Reddy pushed his way into the crowd.
“What happened?” he asked when he reached the flimsy plastic barrier.
A uniformed cop looked over at him. “Go home, kid. Nothing to see here.”
“What happened?” he asked again.
An obese woman in a heavy overcoat clucked her tongue. She was clutching a nylon grocery bag close to her chest. A thick loaf of black bread peeked from its rim like a giant turd.
“Some scum got what was coming to him.” She spoke in a thick Polish accent that reminded Reddy of one of the women who worked the soup kitchen back in Chicago.
“Yeah?” said Reddy. “You know him?”
The lady shrugged, her meaty shoulders rising almost even with her ears. “They all same,” she said. “Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”
“I heard he got skewered,” said a tall man with a hooked nose that pulled his whole face forward. “Had so many holes in him, the cops thought he was Swiss.”
The man’s shorter companion snorted. “Yeah, Swiss Cheese,” he said as though the joke needed explaining.
“Anyone see who did it?” Reddy asked.
“Who cares,” said the Polish woman. “They should give a medal.”
“A Swiss medal,” chimed in the shorter man.
Nobody laughed.
“Hey, mister,” Reddy called to the cop. “Any idea who did this?”
“Looks like suicide to me, kid.” The cop winked. “Hopefully, it’s catching.”
The crowd roared at that one, but Reddy didn’t join in. Instead, he pushed his way back through the crowd and started retracing his steps to the bus depot.
Karma Page 4