by A. B. Jewell
“That’s my price.”
“When can you start?”
I almost laughed at her quick embrace of my price. I looked at the mug Terry got me that read Big Daddy’s and thought I should replace it with one that read World’s Worst Negotiator. This woman spoke in Bs, billions, and I’d just low-balled her with the price of an appetizer at the French Laundry.
“And expenses.” I eked out some self-respect.
“Of course. I’ve got a list of a few people . . .”
“Stop.”
She looked up at me as I stood for the first time since she’d tsunamied in here. She seemed off balance.
“You’re a large person,” she said.
Six-four when I’m crouching, two-fifty when I’m benching. A gut, sure, but Terry always said it was more to love. “I can handle myself.” I winced when I wasted this truth on her. “This is the part where you stop telling me what to do.”
“Of course.” She lowered her blue eyes. Raised them again. “How can I help?”
“I’ll think on that.”
She stood as well. She patted the picture.
“And the e-mail,” I said.
“Tweep.” She paused. She unfolded the piece of paper, put it next to the picture.
“Mrs. Donogue, I’ll be honest with you. There is no way that your father wrote an e-mail—tweep—from the grave. Maybe he wrote it before he died. Maybe someone else wrote it. Maybe you made the whole thing up.”
She looked me dead in the eye. “People doubted my father for years. They doubted when he said there would be dumb terminals, doubted his investment in mobile, the motion-sensor stuff, Big Data. So I don’t blame you for being a skeptic.”
“Fancy boxes with wires are one thing, eternal life is altogether different.”
“Most of his stuff was wireless.”
“You take my point.”
“I don’t actually. The human brain is a computer. It computes and stores data. It uses an electrical system.”
“Okay, so?”
“So my father figured out how to keep the brain on ice. How to keep it alive, plugged in. How to connect it to the data stream even after the body was . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Go on.” I was at a remarkable crossroads between intrigued and incredulous, like watching a reality TV show when the host yells “surprise!” ’cause everyone’s been eating kitten.
“He called it the Spirit Box.” She said it softly again, incredulous herself, or embarrassed. “Immortality of our minds, our selves, the brain. I think Daddy figured it out. He solved it. I think someone killed him for it.”
I’d had enough. “Leave me your down payment, phone number, and a way to reach this Klipper. I’ll report back in a few days.”
She reached into her purse-back-case. “You take Bitcoin?”
“No.”
She shrugged. “Virtual currency has the upside of equity.”
“Cash.”
“Have it your way.”
I finally said it: “For someone whose dad just died, you’re pretty on the ball.”
“My dad would’ve hated the idea that just because he died, er, died-ish . . . I’d suddenly stopped trying to be efficient. I want to solve his murder and I want you to help me.”
She laid money and contact information on the desk and started walking to the door. Just before she walked out, she ran a hand along the back of her blue skirt to smooth it down. She peeked over her shoulder, suggestion made.
“I’ll be in touch.” But I’m not sure she heard me as she disappeared the way she came in.
I looked down at the photo, then the urgent message from Lieutenant Gaberson. Then the expense reports. I thought: there’s no amount of caffeine in the whole goddamn world . . .
Three
LIEUTENANT GABERSON AND I had a monthly standing coffee date at Lindy’s. Literally standing. Turned out, the research showed, it was bad for some reason to go from a standing desk to a sitting coffee. There’s a metric showing that it throws off parking karma or some ridiculous nonsense, but you argued with Big Data at your own risk. For years, Gaberson and I had come to Lindy’s and then it turned standing-room-only, as advertised, even when it was mostly empty. Which it was not on this cloudy midmorning.
Just as I arrived, there was a scuffle in the long line out front. Gaberson explained that they’d just gotten new beans in from Argentina, some family-owned plot that produced two pounds every six years, and Lindy’s had won the lottery for half a pound. The line had been building for days. Some guy near the front wasn’t scent-free and everything unraveled from there.
“Let’s go to Starbacks,” Gaberson muttered.
This, whether intended or not, quelled the in-person, Instacharm flame war over who deserved the rare beans. They all had a new common enemy: us and our gutter tastes in coffee.
Ten minutes later, we’d perched in a green booth on Market near Van Ness. Gaberson was carrying a brick-size black case, looked like something you’d use to store snow chains. He set it at his feet, under the booth. He didn’t explain and I didn’t ask.
The place was empty except for three middle-aged men, sitting separately but each wearing a hoodie graced on the front with the word “Fresno,” the latest city whose name inexplicably had begun to label all clothing.
“Lieutenant, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
He twirled his super-petit chai. I’m a big fan of Gaberson. It wasn’t easy working with the PD and their shrinking resources and ever-changing demands. A year earlier, he was right in the middle of their new community policing test for which, over the course of a day, he had to ask people in a twelve-square-block area how they were feeling. Never bitched about it. Not to me.
He did the thing with his lips where he runs them like a motor. I could see he was figuring out how to tell me something. Gave me a little pause. Gaberson didn’t shrink from the truth, or anything. Lean all around. He stood about six feet tall, wiry, tough; at the academy, he’d won the Kale Challenge half marathon the night after he drank Mark’s Hard Limeade until dawn. He wore wire-rims and cut his hair himself, but you wouldn’t have known it.
He was about to say something when his phone rang with U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—his tone. He pulled the gadget out of his windbreaker, glanced, grimaced, set it on the table.
“How’re you doing, Fitch?”
“Cut the crap.” No edge to it, though.
He nodded; yeah, fair enough, he’d cut the crap. One more motor churn with his lips. I took a sip of my Scorpion Bowl—coffee, Red Bull, echinacea.
“We’re gonna have to chill for a while,” he said, glancing up.
I let the words settle in. Nodded like I was thinking it over. But it was pretty clear what he was talking about. Gaberson and I had a mutually beneficial, if unofficial, relationship. He asked me to check into things now and again that might not meet the letter of approved police procedure and I asked him to run things through the databases, and no one was the wiser. It’d helped us each catch a few bad guys who might otherwise have slipped away or taken longer to net.
“The Argyle case?”
He nodded, pulled his lips tight. “Come home to roost,” he said.
Had to figure it would at some point. Too much about it smelled too rotten below the placid surface. Before he could elaborate, his phone rang again. He reached to silence it.
“Take it,” I said, starting to scoot out of the seat to give him some privacy.
“It’s not a call.”
“Text?”
He shook his head. He silenced the phone. “New app I can’t figure out how to get off the phone.” He rolled the gadget over in his hand like he was looking for some mystery button he’d not found. “Every few minutes or so it rings to let me know that it hasn’t rung in a while.”
“Sorry, I’m not—”
“Of course it doesn’t make sense. It’s an app to let me know that my ringer is still working in case I get panicked that I’
m not getting anyone checking in. Truly insane, but like I say, I can’t figure how to get rid of it.”
I shook my head.
“Somehow, Bono got it on here,” he continued. “Arranged it with Jobs, is how I hear it. People say they love the feature. Doesn’t just let them know the ringer’s still working but reminds them to check the phone in case they’ve put it on silent.”
“But if you have it on silent, doesn’t that mean you don’t want . . .” I realized the folly of this conversation. Besides, something else struck me. “Isn’t Steve Jobs dead?”
He shrugged. “When you’re that big, you can put things in motion, keep them in motion, even after . . .” He laughed. “Jesus, the stuff I hear. Jobs is still pulling the strings. Anyhow, about Argyle.”
I’d stopped midsip. “What do you mean Jobs is still pulling the strings?”
Another shrug. “Nothing. Nonsense, stuff you hear. He’s still”—Gaberson looked around the room, eyes sweeping the ceiling—“. . . out there.”
“You’re serious.” Second time I’d heard something like this in the last hour.
“Not really. We’re getting off topic. My bad. Argyle.”
I let this odd moment pass. Turned my brain to the Argyle sextuplets, reaching their sweet sixteen when I first came across them. Great cover story, so to speak. Darlings of reality TV, traveled the country, backstage passes to every event, skipped through airplane security. Five boys and one girl, the mastermind. Then, after their six-month blitz run as America’s darlings, they seemed to drop off the map and return to their San Mateo roots to run a summer tennis and piano camp in Mandarin. Gaberson, who was working the quasi-celebrity beat at the time, was instantly suspicious: Who doesn’t try to parlay a reality show into a sequel? The Argyles, that’s who. They were just lying low.
And kept rolling in dough.
So Gaberson asked me to do a little freelancing and it was clear within days that their hands were dirty with something. Late-night rendezvous, lingering in the back of the store after book signings, plane flights south of the border. Visits to South by Southwest when they weren’t even presenting. You don’t have to have worked in the ATF to recognize drug runners when you find them. I had it all zipped up by the time I gave it to Gaberson. It was smooth as silk right up until the bust.
Gaberson had me along for it, the vicarious thrill, and to point out any characters they might’ve missed. Took place at a grow house near Modesto that was licensed for medical marijuana but didn’t have a damn thing growing inside. When the cops moved in, the family started shooting selfies, like they were poised for the police brutality lawsuit the whole time. I took the bait. Knocked a camera out of the hands of one of the toughs that always seemed to keep the family company, and may’ve knocked a couple of his teeth out at the same time.
“It wasn’t what we thought,” Gaberson said.
“They weren’t bringing in unlicensed sativa?”
“Yeah, but that was . . . a loss leader.” Gaberson took a sip of his drink without losing eye contact. “You’ve heard of the Tarantula Clan.”
Who hadn’t? One seriously ruthless and efficient cartel. Nodes and cells, loyal street guys, prison connections, hired killers, a team of Romanian hackers, the whole bit. You had to wonder how much was mythology, but if even 10 percent was real, it was some serious downside risk—for society, or for whoever messed with them.
“Doing business with reality TV stars. I don’t buy it. Too public,” I said.
“Front, like I said. They were market-testing, getting in with the kids, working the angles.”
“For what?”
He looked around, lowered his voice. “These guys, the Tarantula Clan, they’re in it deep. Moving huge quantities of the nasty stuff.”
I waited for him to continue.
“Adderall.” He paused, rephrased. “Synthetic Adderall.”
“Isn’t it all synthetic?”
“Double-synthetic, with zinc extract for immune-boosting. Wicked powerful.”
“Stimulant.”
“Yeah, sure, with a twist—two, actually. It’s causing a huge problem for the schools.”
“Young addicts. What’s the second twist?”
“Between us,” he said, then waved it off. “Sorry, I know that goes without saying,” he continued. “We’re starting to see huge improvements in the CPAC.”
“What?”
“State mandated tests in schools, and in the SATs. Across the board. The achievement numbers are through the roof. Perfect. These kids are hyperfocused.”
“So the parents don’t mind.”
“You read me. Where it gets weird is I think there might be an angle with the testing companies. They’re lobbying the governor for more dollars to put in more tests, create better strata, distinguish among perfect scores. It’s spiraling. I have no idea how high this goes.”
I looked down in the bottom of my Scorpion Bowl, thought about how tough it is out there for parents. Made me glad Terry and I decided not to have kids, for now at least.
“What’s this got to do with me?”
“Very little, Fitch. Most of it. You remember Fievel Lavin, goes by Tiny.”
“Little guy.”
“Right. Well, he got in with the Tarantulas. Worked his way up. Got invited to their year-end gala, almost won a RAV4 in the raffle, the whole thing. He muled a message out to me last week. It was about you.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“We’d kept you off the grid—on all of this stuff. Was always in my interest to do so. No one even knew who you were at the bust. Somehow, they put it together—you, the Argyles, the punch to the mouth.”
“So.”
“So that guy’s teeth you busted? Number two Tarantula.”
“Deuce?”
“Yep.”
“I busted the guy’s teeth. Practically a badge of honor.”
“Not the night before his kid’s ConfirMitzvah.”
“The heck is that?”
“Half confirmation, half bar mitzvah. Part of the effort by the Tarantula Clan to be inclusive; they think it builds loyalty. Whatever. So the number two is set for this big all-comers spiritual gathering and you make him look like a Canadian hockey fighter.”
“I did get a good shot in.”
“And they want to shoot back. Tiny heard it firsthand. They’re going to make your life very miserable, way beyond a tooth-for-a-tooth, if you get me.”
It was all I could do not to look over my shoulder. I took a second to digest.
“Thanks for the tip. So: see ya around?”
“Like I said, let’s chill. That’ll keep you out of the public eye, make it harder for them to find you.”
“How hard can that be?”
“Not hard. Keep your eyes open, Fitch. These are not the kind of people to mess with, especially . . .”
“What?”
“The Adderall.”
“What about it?”
“They are incredibly focused. Patient. They can stake you out for days, sitting there, Glocks loaded, doing sudoku, expert level. It’s not fair anymore. We’re totally outgunned.”
I exhaled, patted the table.
I was getting up to go when I saw the hesitation in his eyes. “What are you leaving out?” I asked.
“It’s for our protection too—mine,” Gaberson said. “I was never supposed to have you involved. If this thing goes public, we get sued—again. We’re already spending eighteen percent of our budget defending lawsuits and we’ll get slaughtered if people think the Tarantula case was built by an outsider.”
“Okay, Lieutenant. I’ll consider myself chastened and forewarned.” I scooted out of the booth, and he took my lead. Then he paused and reached for the black box at his feet.
“Ask you something, Lieutenant?”
He cleared his throat. “Shoot.”
“You know Captain Donogue.”
“Scion took a dump on his bike?”
“That one.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Anything going around about that?”
He thought about it, not for long. “I’ll keep an ear open. Amazing what you can pick up if you just listen these days.”
Said absently, a bit of a non sequitur, but I went with it. “Thanks, y’know . . . for letting me know.”
“You’ll be fine. If I hear anything about Captain Don, I’ll get a message to you through some back channel. For now, let’s lie low.”
He patted my shoulder and walked off, mysterious black box dangling from his left hand.
Four
NOT EVEN FOUR blocks later, I picked up the tail. MINI Cooper with a Tarantula stuffed in it, no doubt about it. If memory served, I thought I must’ve seen him earlier, tracking me to the coffee meeting. The MINIs had become all the rage with the midlevel bad guys. Had to do with parking. It’s how cities were raising most of their revenue—parking tickets—so bad guys figured they had an easier shot getting busted as a drug runner by double parking than by hawking meth out of a den. MINIs made it easy to get a spot, stay below the radar.
This was a nice one, the MINI. Gold on the bottom, white top. Crossed my mind to do a U-turn and run it over with my truck. But there was no sense in confronting without a plan. I took a sharp right onto Van Ness, then another right in front of the BMW dealership, figuring the Tarantula would start rubbernecking the new 7 Series. Sure enough, three blocks later I’d lost the tail.
I lucked into a spot with a broken meter out front of the Wells Fargo and stared at the main branch of the public library. It’s where I web-surfed when I wanted to make sure someone wasn’t monitoring my keystrokes. My basic working theory is I figure my phone is tapped, traced, hacked, laid bare by a nine-year-old working for whoever needed his services for free time on Xbox Live. I made sure my phone was off and hiked the majestic marble steps of the venerable institution. If I ever got money, I swore to myself, I’d put it into the last bastion of information altruism. It was just you and whatever your thing was, which, unfortunately sometimes meant pornography.