Murder Feels Crazy

by Bill Alive

  I’d never known Zack to miss one of these meetings. Ever.

  The geeks squirmed. The paranoid one with the salt-and-pepper ponytail said, “He’s still upset. About… you know…”

  Oh, right. Roxanne.

  Before she’d died, the red-headed vet had started showing up here at the game store, hoping to “run into” her ex. Zack had assumed she was both single and actually into board games, and he’d managed to get this major crush on her.

  As I have occasionally mentioned, I myself tend to associate Roxanne with the whole bit where she nearly killed me.

  But standing here now, with these glum geeks and their empty chair, I glimpsed another side to her. Her ex Ed had been such a tool… what if she had had the time to move on? Make a new life with a decent dude like Zack?

  But now his chair was empty, and death was real, and I felt a little sick.

  We all sensed it. A shared, grim silence.

  Then the Kid threw an empty soda can and knocked Brzezinski’s glasses. The latter sputtered in Polish, while Paranoid Ponytail, from the far side of fifty, snorted like an eighth grader.

  I sighed, relieved. Life goes on. No matter how dumb.

  Brzezinski hefted up an entire cauldron of chips to retaliate. The Kid whooped and pulled out a gigantic dart gun. It occurred to me that the Kid might actually be a minor.

  Or he could be thirty. It’s so hard to tell when a guy has that look-ma-I-really-have-to-shave “mustache”. Finishing puberty might help with that.

  Not that I’m an expert there myself.

  “Uh, guys?” Mark interposed.

  Brzezinski and the Kid were facing each other across the tables, weapons raised. “Sorry, Mark, no help this time,” Brzezinski said. “Dr. Paul not good choice for hack.”

  Mark rolled his eyes.

  “Whoa!” I said. “How’d you know we wanted that?”

  The Kid snickered. “You’ve really got to stop downloading every free game.”

  “Absolutely,” cut in Paranoid Ponytail. “If it’s free, the product is you.”

  “Wait, you mean you hacked my phone?” I said. “You were LISTENING IN to Mark and me?”

  “Sure,” said the Kid.

  “Absolutely officially not!” said Paranoid Ponytail. “But speaking purely hypothetically, if you did install an app that had permission to use the microphone, and if you happened to get online on our local area network—”

  Mark growled, “This whole town is your local area network.”

  The Kid said, “It’s not our fault the town council voted to give the network bid to a company run by the mayor’s brother. They’re still running infrastructure on Windows 95—”

  “Hypothetically!” said the Ponytail.

  Mark glared at the Kid. “Delete it. And clean up his phone.”

  “Will do,” the Kid said with a grin. He vanished his dart gun back through some invisible portal or whatever and bent eagerly to the tricked-out blinking extra keyboard on his lap.

  “Hold up, delete what?” I said. “Wait, don’t!” I yanked out my phone. “You can’t just… gyah! What the hell, it’s gone? I was past level fifty! I just unlocked the Strawberry Panda! Mark!”

  Mark ignored my pain. “If you all are up to speed,” he said evenly, “let’s have a look at the man’s financials.”

  Paranoid Ponytail hunched down toward his screen and started typing like he’d just gotten a super important chat, maybe from the CIA. “What man? What financials?” he said, with painfully obvious chalance.

  (That is what you call it, right? When “nonchalance” bombs?)

  Mark groaned.

  The Kid said, “On a random, completely unrelated note that just occurred to me out of nowhere… we have heard that Dr. Paul is, shall we say, highly leveraged.”

  Mark perked up. “Oh?”

  “His pain clinic’s running on a major business loan. We’ve picked up some chatter that the bank might be getting skittish. There’s a clause where they can pull the loan. Same for the lease, and the owner there’s also getting skittish.”

  “What do you mean, chatter?” I said. “Is there like a Back Mosby smoky back room?”

  The Kid shrugged. “Okay, one Tribesy thread. But still.”

  Mark said, “So let’s see the guy’s numbers. We need to see his actual bank statements.”

  “Hack bank?” snapped Brzenski. “Good recipe for federal prison. No thank you very much.”

  “I don’t mean hack the bank,” Mark said. “Just his system. Can’t you tap his hard drive? Cloud accounts?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” said the Kid. “The thing is—”

  “Hypothetically—” chanted the Ponytail.

  “Hypothetically… he’s actually got decent security.”

  “What about his clinic?” Mark said. “Those hospital systems can be insanely insecure.”

  “Maybe in the glory days,” said the Kid. “Dr. Paul did not hire the mayor’s brother for his network.”

  Mark frowned. “Are you seriously trying to tell me you can’t get in? And here I thought you all had skills.”

  The Kid bristled. At least, as much as he could, given his facial hair situation. But the Ponytail cut in.

  “Even aside from the Feds,” he said, “the word is this doctor might have hired a hit man.”

  “Yeah, I said that,” Mark said.

  “There is also Golitsyn,” said Brzezinski. “Shot. Dead.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Mark said. “You’re afraid?”

  “Well, we didn’t want to mess with him either,” I said.

  “I didn’t want to go get coffee with the man, no,” Mark snapped. “But we’re talking about a hack.”

  “Clinic network is bright shiny new,” Brzezinski said. “Like maybe he pay attention to detail. Find trace.”

  “This is a podunk small-town pain clinic,” Mark barked. “I’m out there dodging cars and getting gassed and shot at and maybe blowing a brain vessel, and y’all are afraid to tiptoe into this tool’s network?”

  “Yes,” said Brzezinski.

  “We’re not really into dying for strangers,” the Kid said. “Why stop with Back Mosby? The planet has billions of people; there’s no special ethical claim from proximity. Or what if I moved to New York? Would I have to keep risking my life for the entire megalopolis, or would it only extend to, say, Queens?”

  “Maybe there’s no limit,” I said. “That sounds kind of Buddhist. May all sentient beings find happiness.”

  “I was more going for love your lame-ass neighbor,” Mark said. “That’s already more than I can handle.”

  The Kid shrugged. “Your call,” he said, and from one of the twenty ports on his massive laptop, he pulled out a dark USB stick.

  The plastic was utterly black… as if it might cut his pasty fingers with a hole.

  Mark stiffened.

  The Kid pulled out a clean tissue and carefully wiped the stick. Then, holding it through the tissue, he handed it to Mark.

  Mark took it gingerly. “Is this what I think it is?”

  The Kid nodded.

  “Great,” Mark said.

  “Holy Toledo,” I breathed. “Is that a bomb?”

  The geeks snorted. Like, in unison. They do that. Mark rubbed his eyebrows.

  Grinning, the Kid said, “It’s a USB stick.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s what I thought. But then—”

  “With a keylogger. A particular keylogger that might just happen to work pretty much perfectly on Dr. Paul’s particular system. If you were to get that installed, his network would broadcast a constant stream of every keystroke on every computer. Plus screenshots every ten seconds.”

  “Wow!” I said.

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “All we have to do is stick it in an actual computer.”

  “Inside the clinic?” I said.

  “Yep,” the Kid said. “It’ll mount, install, and unmount, all automatically. Just give it a minute, and once it unmoun
ts, grab it and run.”

  The Ponytail grumbled, “And smile for the security cameras.”

  The Kid scoffed. “It’ll take care of the cameras too! Duh.”

  “But why do we have to go inside?” I whined. “You hacked my phone easily enough!”

  “Because they have actual network security,” the Kid said. “You’ve got to compromise one of their trusted machines.”

  “Also,” said the Ponytail, “this way you’re the ones committing the felony. Hypothetically.”

  “Oh this is all completely hypothetical,” the Kid said. “That keylogger’s purely for your educational edification. You should only use it ever on your own test machine.”

  “Right,” Mark said. “Because who would be stupid enough to waltz into a tiny clinic and try to jam in a USB stick without anyone noticing?”

  The Kid shrugged again. “You’re the empath.”

  “Woo woo,” Brzezinski put in.

  “We’re not actually going to do this?” I said.

  Mark pocketed the stick and gave the Kid a firm glare. “Fine,” he said. “Just tell me when you see something good.”

  “I have no idea what you mean,” the Kid said. “I hope you’re not suggesting we would stoop to snoop on a stream of compromised data…”

  But Mark was already striding away.

  I scooted after him, eager to escape and looping the word felony. But right as I stepped into the dark hallway, Mark stopped.

  “Crap, I didn’t ask how to actually get the data,” he said. “Wait here.” He headed back toward the geeks.

  “Hey wait!” I called. “Don’t start some configuration gabfest! We’ll be here till Chinese New Year!”

  But he shut me out in the hall, alone. In the dark.

  My anxiety spiked.

  “Relax,” I muttered to myself. “It’s just a hallway.”

  A wiry hand closed around my arm.

  I shrieked. I pulled away.

  But the grip was strong as steel.

  Chapter 33

  In my first flush of panic, the man who’d grabbed me was an utter stranger in the shadows.

  Then my eyes adjusted.

  “Zack?” I gasped.

  To be fair to me, Zack wasn’t wearing his grief so well. Maybe it was the lousy lighting, but he looked almost as haggard as Jocelyn. He was stooping like a much older man, and wearing some crappy sweatshirt that was totally blank, with not a geek reference in sight. He was also over six feet tall and squeezing hard enough to sprain my forearm.

  “Oh, hey,” I said, like I always gasp my friends’ names when they assault me in the dark. “Nice to see you, man. Hey, I’d love to chat, but Mark and I, we’ve got to do this thing, we’re going to, um, recompile our email.”

  “Drop it,” Zack rasped.

  “Yeah, okay, I admit, I don’t really know what ‘recompile’—”

  “Drop the case.”

  “What?” I was so surprised I almost forgot my arm pain. “Why?”

  “You’ll destroy Mark.”

  “Me?” I pulled away, and the guy mercifully let me go. Well, aside from his stare boring into me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “No, you don’t,” Zack said. “Because you’re a twerp.”

  I flinched.

  He ground on. “I’ve known Mark since you were drooling over Saturday morning cartoons.”

  “Hey now. First off, if we’re going to get all ageist, that wasn’t even a thing anymore—”

  “You have no idea what he’s been through.”

  Ugh. I shriveled a bit; I hate when people pull rank with Friend Seniority.

  But then I rallied. “Mark’s told me plenty. In fact, we did this whole separate ebook about that first case with you and the Condo Killer—”

  “You’re deluded,” Zack said. “This could break him.”

  “This case? Why? We just tackled a crazy prepper cult!”

  “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  Zack sighed. “Before he thought he had a shot at being happy.”

  A cold premonition crept across my chest. He looked and sounded like some deathly Oracle, his face already drooping in mourning.

  “Look at him,” Zack intoned, and he nudged open the door to the geekly sanctuary. “He’s changed.”

  Mark was standing near the Kid, joshing and hassling him about something on the screen. The Kid griped and tossed his hands up in mock exasperation, and they both smirked.

  My heart twinged. Zack was right.

  Ever since we’d made it through that bunker in Murder Feels Bad, Mark had had a certain… lightness. Something. But whatever it was, it also felt fragile.

  “And I heard about him and that cop woman,” Zack said.

  “Don’t get too excited. They’re currently at ‘bowling’.” (And for all I knew, they’d managed to cancel even that.)

  Zack scowled, and he poked a bony finger in my chest. “Listen to me. You push him to keep doing this Holmes shit, it’s on you if he shatters.”

  “On me? Mark is very much his own dude—”

  “And you’re supposed to be his friend. He deserves better than messing with scum his whole life. That cop probably does too.”

  “They’re a cop and a detective. This is what they do.”

  “The cop, maybe. I don’t know her. I don’t know you either; you seem like the type that could blunder through a zombie apocalypse as long as a girl in your bunker was hot.”

  I was stung. “That’s not… entirely true…”

  “But I do know Mark. He’s not built for this.”

  “He’s no coward!” I snapped.

  “I didn’t say that. I said he’s good. And he acts all badass, but he feels it all deep.”

  “That’s kind of his thing.”

  “And that means he gets a life sentence?” Zack said. “You really think the good are meant to spend their short lives taking bad people’s shit? In my mind, that does not compute.”

  “Sure, and it’s all about computers, right? He should just hide behind a screen.”

  Zack’s eyes flared with anger, and I flinched. But he mastered himself, and his voice sank low. “We geek types know what we can handle. We’re no good to anyone if we’re miserable and broken. Or dead.”

  Despite all my denial, that one got me. Hadn’t Mark been telling me he might not be able to handle this? And what was I doing? Pushing him as hard as I could. Why?

  Because he could freaking save lives. With a superpower. That’s why.

  Zack peered closer at me and frowned. “You really don’t give a shit.”

  “On the contrary!” I said, and poked him on the damn chest. A grimy smear rubbed off on my finger. “One, I really am sorry about Roxanne, but you still need to keep up with your laundry. Please wash that thing. Two—”

  “Skip it,” Zack said. He straightened and turned away to shuffle down the hall.

  “Mark was made for this!” I called after him. “Just watch!”

  He stopped and twisted back. The low light glanced off his glasses, hiding his eyes into glints in the shadows.

  “Oh, I’ll be watching,” he said.

  The ghostly glints floated in the dark, like the deathless orbs of some silent spirit that could only see the future’s pain.

  Chapter 34

  I wasn’t sure when Mark planned to make our move on the pill mill, and the next day he managed to drop me off at work for a fun-filled Saturday of catching up on my hours before we had made any plans. I admit, I assumed that both the bowling date had been fried and that we might be procrastinating on the whole computer virus felony thing.

  But when he picked me up that evening, he drove straight over and parked at the pain clinic.

  Maybe I was biased, but the place creeped me right out.

  At first glance, it shouldn’t have felt threatening. Just another single-story ranch-style office building, squatting behind its own little parking lot.

&nb
sp; Did it bug me how the gray twilight drained the new sign dead? Or that there seemed to a lot of cars still here when it was past five o’clock?

  Maybe it was just that we were about to commit a felony.

  At least Mark looked respectable; he’d had time to wash his one dress shirt since the scenter catastrophe. But how were we going to do this with so many people still here?

  “Relax,” Mark said. “This place is always packed.” One day, he was going to start at least pretending I had the option not to say things. “Besides, having more people around should help us, because they close at six. The receptionist will be distracted and trying to wrap everyone up for the day.”

  Still sitting in the driver’s seat, he dug into his pocket, then handed me the black USB stick.

  “Shouldn’t be hard,” he said. “Just get in position by the front desk.”

  “What?” I said. “Aren’t you coming in?”

  “Um… no,” he said, with a distinct air of miffage.

  I gaped.

  “Pete, this is a pain clinic. Remember? I’m an empath?”

  “So shield!”

  “I am shielding. My Golden Bubble of Leave Me the Hell Alone is a foot thick, and even parked here across the street, I still feel like I just had my wisdom teeth pulled. Okay?”

  I started shaking hard. Everywhere. My gut, my arms, my legs. “You want me to do this? Alone?” I said. “It’s a freaking felony!”

  “I’m not sure it’s actually a felony.”

  “It might be! We didn’t even check!”

  “I’ll do the next one. Now hurry up. Scoot. Or we’ll be late for bowling.”

  “Bowling? You didn’t tell me that was still on! I’m all dressed for work!”

  He frowned. “You’re right. That polo might actually be a felony.”

  “Mark! This isn’t funny, I have no idea what to do in there! You’re the tech guy!”

  “Just stick the stick in the computer at the front desk. It’s all automatic. Wait till the little icon pops up that says you can pull it out.”

  “How am I supposed to do that right in front of the receptionist?”

  Mark shrugged. “That part will take some finesse.”