The Man Who Wouldn't Die

by A. B. Jewell

  Something else Deuce said: up until a day ago, he hadn’t planned to have me go after the Spirit Box. Suggesting what?

  That he hadn’t known about the Spirit Box before that, or hadn’t known I was involved before that, or somebody tipped him off to both?

  I glanced down at the two phones sitting in the dirt. Mine and the burner from the dead, frothy-mouthed Tarantula. Death by oxygen shot. How come they’d leave me with his phone unless they didn’t realize it was an official company gadget or they were setting me up with it or tracking me with it?

  So many unanswered questions. I’d leave them that way too if they didn’t have my beloved.

  I turned on the burner, and my phone too.

  First thing I saw was the time: 4:50 P.M.—about twelve hours since I’d woken up in the southern-looking mansion, taken the tunnel over to the troll house, and found the book with the . . .

  The paper I’d found in The Selfish Gene. I’d folded it into my back pocket. What were the odds?

  I reached back. Yep, it was there. I pulled it out, unfolded it, and saw three pages of symbols and code or whatever you wanted to call it. I could at least make instant sense of the first part: I, Donald C. Donogue, being of sound mind and body . . .

  And then the only other word I really understood was “herewith.”

  Was this a will?

  If so, I couldn’t understand it.

  The next line read: If index is not None (limit) > 89 . . .

  And on and on like that.

  Computer code, if I had to guess. With a few words of English mixed in, like “herewith” and some symbols I recognized.

  This was definitely a computer program.

  For a second, I flushed. Could it be the Spirit Box? Was this the code that had everybody’s panties in a bunch?

  And if so, how the hell would I know it?

  I hardly understood English, Terry sometimes joked, noting that it was hard to tell because I spoke so little. Terry, tied up . . . I winced; that was not something that could’ve gone down easily. Maybe the Tarantulas nabbed him in the middle of the night. But knowing Terry, he’d slept with the Winchester under his pillow and had the alarm working. I’d have bet even money that he took at least one of those suckers down with him. On the honeymoon, way back in from the fjords, we’d got to playing cards on the barge that carried us back to civilization. Stakes had grown to fifty dollars a pot, nothing really when you think of it, but Terry wasn’t about to give in when a cantankerous fisherman with leather skin clearly pulled a jack from his boot. Terry said something not nice about the guy’s mom and he threw a punch that Terry caught with his fist midair, like snagging a softball, and squeezed until the local yelled uncle, and that was the end of that. Happens when you grow up with brothers.

  I glanced at the three pieces of paper hidden in The Selfish Gene. At least one line of English, sort of, that I could read. English alphabet at least. Filed with: Snozzwanger, Veruca and Gloop.

  Now, where had I heard those names?

  On my phone, I found enough bars to do a Gooble search.

  Snozzwanger, Veruca and Gloop, LLC. Northern California’s premier law firm specializing in patents, divorce investment strategies, and disclaimers—and the first and only Silicon Valley firm to write its briefs on 100 percent recycled hemp.

  Now I remembered where I’d heard the name: muttered by Lester Wollop, his divorce firm.

  Interesting.

  I picked up the other phone, the Tarantula’s burner. I saw the call log; a bunch of calls from blocked numbers and one call with a number listed. It was in the 408 area code. I hit send to dial the number, put the phone to my ear. Ring, ring.

  Then: “Hello, you’ve reached Danny, at the beep, you know what to do.”

  Whoa. Da Raj’s killer, the tarantula with the blowdart and gingham shirt, had been in contact with Danny Donogue. I let it sink in. That little bastard. Well, maybe the key to solving a murder, several murders, getting the Spirit Box, and bringing Terry home in one piece. Then pulling the Tarantulas apart leg by leg.

  Seventeen

  GAMERS USA 2024. Gold or Bust.

  That’s what the sign read over an awning in the narrow retail outlet squeezed between a Ben and Jimmy’s ice creamery and Splatz, which sold “indoor-outdoor footwear for a changing climate.” Black tint hid whatever lurked inside Gamers USA, but I knew from basic Internet sleuthing that it was the Video Game Olympic Training Center. A regular hot spot for Danny Donogue.

  On the door, a sign indicated hours of operation: 3 P.M. to 6 A.M. Place had just opened a few hours ago.

  I was standing in a strip mall in Redwood City, just up the highway from Palo Alto. This was an area in transition, not yet fully gentrified, a collection of boxy apartments across the street, an old-fashioned diner in this strip mall, along with one of those shoe outlet places where you could get three pairs for the price of one. I heard voices behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to see a mother and a boy, her son, I gathered, looking to be around ten.

  “Bobby, do you have your joystick?”

  “You said you brought it!”

  “No, absolutely not. Bobby, I’ve told you a thousand times: you have to keep track of your own gear. Do you think Ivan makes his mom carry his joystick?”

  “It’s pronounced ‘Evan,’ Mom.”

  “Evan.”

  “E-e-e-van.”

  “Isn’t that what I said?”

  “Sheesh, you don’t know anything. He’s only like the greatest first-person shooter who ever lived.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m trying. Did you look for your joystick in your trademarked vid-back-snack-case?”

  They’d stopped walking just outside the training center. On the boy’s back, a pack covered with a complex series of zippers and straps, Velcro, and a water bottle holder. He started trying to take it off, to pull his arms from the labyrinth of straps, but he got tangled up, then more flummoxed, and, eventually, totally tied up in the various straps and lines and a buckle and he was flailing around starting to whine and his mother was trying to untangle him and then she was getting more frustrated.

  “Help!”

  “Relax, sweetie, breathe. We’ve gotten out of this before,” his mother said to her son, a panicking but otherwise indistinguishable freckle-faced redhead who evidently had some video-game chops. His mother was an otherwise typical high-tech exec with drop-off duties.

  I’d heard about these kinds of incidents before, people getting tied up in their specialized backpacks. In the paper there had been a story about a guy who got pretzeled by his VitaMan™ Day Pack on a hike up Mount Tam and started chewing off his own arm to escape. Another hiker came by and discovered that it was just a matter of unfastening the waist belt the guy had gotten wrapped around his arm, but by that time he’d bled out.

  I saw my opening.

  “Double sailor’s knot, near the bottom left,” I said.

  Mother and child both looked at me. Then at the spot I was pointing to, and sure enough, it was just the tangle that needed untangling.

  “Thanks,” said the mom. “Hey, it’s your joystick!”

  “Didn’t mean to overhear,” I said. I gestured to the ice cream joint. “I was on my way into Ben and Jimmy’s for a . . .”—I had to make this authentic—“. . . granola-parfait-hold-the-ice-cream.”

  “No problem,” the mom said. “I appreciate it. Mile-a-minute parenting, I’m sure you know . . .” She turned back to her son, handing him a joystick-type thing. She spun him around and lowered herself on her haunches and looked him in the eye. “I’ll pick you up before school . . . and what’s important here?”

  “Results, not process.”

  He smiled and she smiled.

  “Process, not results.”

  “I know, Mom. Love you.”

  I took a step toward the picture in the ice cream shop’s window of a castle made of ice cream. The Middle Earth Sundae. Battle your hunger to the death with six flavors, ten to
ppings, and a root beer moat. My eyes glazed over. What I was trying to do was listen to what the video-game player and his mother said after she pressed the buzzer next to the black doorway.

  “Yep,” came a voice from inside—projecting through the intercom next to the door.

  “Billy Bear,” the boy said.

  “Number.”

  “Hashtag seven-pound-nine-eight-four-two.”

  The door clicked open and the boy disappeared inside. Through the window of the ice cream shop, I saw the mom turn and put her face in her phone and walk away.

  Shit. I was hoping for some generic code to get in. I squinted my eyes, thinking, when it hit me what I’d do next—what I had to do.

  Coffee.

  In Ben and Jimmy’s, I ordered a regular coffee, black, and then talked the flummoxed teen behind the counter into not adding any flavors to it, then pounded the caffeine and waited another five minutes. Then I hit the buzzer on the door of the Olympic training center.

  “Yep.”

  “I brought Billy’s snack. He forgot it.”

  “Who?”

  “Billy Bear. Forgot his . . . quinoa, um, protein gummies.” Shit, what was I saying?

  “Number?”

  Number. I repeated what I’d heard: “Hashtag seven-pound-nine-eight-four-two.”

  The door clicked and I opened it. I was hit with a lilac fragrance that surprised me and dim lighting that didn’t. It was a small entry room. Spartan. A teen sat behind the counter preoccupied with something on the monitor in front of him. There was an American flag behind his head. “Billy’s in, uh, Milky Way, or Andromeda. You know the way?” He never looked up.

  “Of course.”

  One of the few beauties of living in an era in which people have their faces buried in their gadgets is that they are not paying attention. Could be useful for a private detective but also, unfortunately, good for bad guys. I’d heard of a guy stealing a ride from a dude standing beside his car so lost looking at his e-mail that he hadn’t seen the thief get in and drive off. Guy who lost his car didn’t even realize what had happened for ten minutes and the thief would’ve made a clean getaway, but a few blocks later he’d been so distracted texting the chop shop that he ran into the side of a police car.

  I walked through a doorway to the right of the counter and a new world opened up—one with the sound of shooting. I almost hit the floor out of instinct, when I realized it was video games. Pop, pop, copter rotors, whiz, whiz, bang, tat-tat-tat . . . this had to be what war sounded like. Maybe looked like too, at least the colors and lights. I stood in a long hallway extending the length of the building. Narrow though it was, it wasn’t claustrophobic. That was because the hallway wall to my right was only waist-high. Above, it remained open and I could see a line of massive screens in the middle distance, almost the size of movie-theater screens, one beside the other, stretching the length of the building, six in a row. The screens were on the far wall, about fifty feet away from me, each one ablaze in a shooting game, each of them separated from the others by five feet of empty space. Now the setting began to make sense. I was on a sort of balcony—with the video-game players below me, controlling the action on the screens. And as my perceptions came into focus, I realized that there were small booths on this level, accessed through waist-high entrances in the waist-high wall; in a few of the booths, people sat and observed.

  I walked two booths down, where I saw a woman holding something to her cheek. She couldn’t possibly hear me approaching with the wall of sound. Then she turned and looked right at me. She had a blank expression and a walkie-talkie pressed to her cheek; she spoke into the device. “Tell her to try bending the wrist. Christ, for the last time: she’s pronating like she couldn’t make a club team in Boise.” She eyeballed me. “You with Perrin?”

  I was having trouble figuring out how the hell I could hear this woman so clearly. It was like her voice was being piped into my ears, overtaking this wall of sound.

  “Billy. Forgot his protein. But . . .” I decided to go for it. “I have a note I’m supposed to give Danny.”

  She crinkled her nose. “I think he’s in two. You know where it is?”

  I pointed right.

  She looked at me with a hint of dismay. I pointed left. “That’s what I meant.”

  She shrugged and off I went. A few booths later, I recognized the back of the head of Danny Donogue. The distant screen displayed a tank emitting bursts of fire at a nest of enemies as it crawled over and crumpled a building labeled Orphanage.

  Danny was not watching. He was looking down at something in his lap. I opened the waist-high door and slid next to the dead innovator’s grandson. He turned to me, started to stand, and I put my hand on his shoulder. “No need to get up, Danny.”

  I settled in next to him in a cushy theaterlike seat and measured his stricken expression. He didn’t look likely to run or call out for help. Just in case, I figured, I could always tell him I had a real old-fashioned gun, not the virtual kind. I decided to save that information.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure, Detective?”

  “Come on, Danny. No one talks like that.”

  He clenched his jaw.

  “I come here to hear myself think.”

  I glanced at what was in his lap. It was a pad of paper. He was sketching in it, or making notes of some kind that I couldn’t make out.

  “You’re joking. How can anyone hear anything?” Even as I asked the question, I was stunned to realize I could hear myself, and Danny, just fine. The sound of the video games became increasingly distant, dreamlike background noise.

  “We pipe in AS.”

  “What?”

  “Artificial Silence. Trademarked. Let it wash over you.”

  I did, I let it wash. Hell, it felt good. Silence. Like my brain getting a back rub. It was all I could do not to fall asleep in the sunken theater chair.

  “Do you know where your food comes from?”

  “Listen, kid—”

  “Do you know?”

  “I guess: Safeway. What? Not organic enough for you? Let’s cut the small talk.”

  “Chateaubriand comes from the top of the cow, just below the filet. Meat and gristle. The key is that you’ve got to bleed the cow for a good period. You know why?”

  “I’ll play along. To let the muscle loosen up so the meat’s not so tough.”

  “These cows, they’re really just babies, the ones we eat. Probably less than a year old, but already eight hundred pounds. Hard to call them cute, though, or scared. Who knows what they’re thinking. Not really our problem, is it?”

  Now he seemed to be thinking aloud as much as talking to me. His eyes were focused straight ahead, looking at a cadre of animated soldiers shooting massive shoulder-carried artillery at a giant Godzilla-like creature wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Russian sickle. The creature started shooting lasers from its eyes and had just nailed one of the soldiers when words appeared on the screen: Eat Gluten, Loser!

  “My husband grew up in the Midwest,” I said. “Spent summers working farms. He used to say that the worst part was watching out that your foot didn’t get stuck in a machine, a combine. I’d call him paranoid, but he did lose a toe.”

  “One of the important ones?”

  “Eh, they’re toes.”

  “This dairy farm Grandpa took me to had a get-to-know-your-cow attraction. For twenty dollars you could get in a stall with a cow and have a handler tell you about its personality.”

  I didn’t say anything. This kid was heading somewhere, I hoped. And if not, he was getting comfortable with me, which could pay dividends. The best part about being a PI: sometimes you get furthest by blending in with the woodwork. Maybe I’d get a confession.

  “So this woman is sitting on a stool next to this cow and the thing looks all droopy-eyed and she goes: ‘You guys sure got lucky.’ And Grandpa says: ‘How’s that?’ And she says: ‘Your cow is peppy.’ Grandpa nearly fell over laughing.”

&
nbsp; Now the kid drooped his head, looking not much different from a cow about to get bled.

  “Sounds like you loved the Captain.”

  “So next thing you know, he says: ‘Let’s go shoot one,’” Danny said without looking up.

  “Who said that?”

  “Just listen, dick. There’s a Jeep outside of where they keep the calves and Grandpa let me drive and he pointed me in the direction of a field,” the kid said, ignoring my question, or answering it in his own way. “I hit the gas and we bounced up and down along the ground between stalks of wheat and he didn’t say anything and just pointed and we drove for like five minutes, maybe it was less. The watch function on Fitbit wasn’t working because we were out of wireless range, like maybe Grandpa had planned that.”

  He was talking like I wasn’t there and I wasn’t planning to stop him ’cause I felt like, just maybe, he was working his way toward a revelation. On the huge theater screen in front of us, the game had switched to a triathlon: skiing, shooting, and taking selfies. In an apparent mix-up, the player skiing took a selfie near the bull’s-eye target and shot himself in the face and Danny winced at the action but kept going.

  “We get to this field and there’s this cow, not much bigger than the calf we’d been petting, and I’m not an idiot, I know what’s going to happen. Grandpa tells me to stop and he reaches behind him and he goes to the back of the Jeep and he gets out a gun.” Now he looked at me. “I don’t know what it was called, exactly. I mean I’ve shot a million guns on video screens but this one wasn’t fancy like those. A basic shotgun, even more basic than the ones they have in Zombie Kill I, the original game with the horror-film graphics. Grandpa says . . .” Now Danny paused.

  “Danny?”

  “‘You may not remember, Danny, but you used to love to go out with me for prime rib.’ That’s what he said to me when he handed me the gun.” Another pause. “Anyhow, Detective, I’m making this story too long. Out of respect of time for both of us, I’ll give you the Twipper version: he makes me shoot the cow in the forehead.”