by A. B. Jewell
“Makes you?”
He looked at me again. “I asked you where your food comes from. That’s where it comes from.” It was tough for me to tell in the dark, but it looked like there was water in his eyes and tears running down his cheek.
“Pissed you off that he made you kill a cow, I bet.”
“Oh, I liked it just fine.”
I let the words settle in, measuring the tone.
“So is that the point of your little soliloquy? That you know how to kill stuff in real life? You’re letting me know you’re a tough guy?” I was asking in a mildly hostile tone, not liking his vibe, but I was genuinely curious too. I couldn’t get a handle on this guy. He didn’t sound like he liked killing that animal a lot.
“We’re standing over this cow and . . . Captain Don tells me that, well, y’know . . .”
I wait for him to get where he’s going.
“He’s sick. He’s got something or another. He doesn’t go into details, but I got the point.”
On the big screen, the virtual skier executed a somersault, jumped over a gigantic canyon, and shot a bull’s-eye while using a selfie stick. Then, just before sticking the landing, the skier wobbled, and pulled a mobile phone from his pocket, and skidded and crashed. Danny brought a microphone to his lips and said: “What the hell was that?”
A voice responded: “I don’t know, Danny. It was weird. The phone rang with a U2 song.”
“That guy. Turn off your damn phone. We’re training.”
I took this moment to gather my thoughts. So Captain Don had taken the kid to a farm, a real-world field trip, back-to-the-earth stuff, and told him he was sick, dying. Maybe it was a cycle-of-life lesson; cows die, we all die. It didn’t quite make sense, if I was even getting the straight skinny from this half-pint.
“Danny, I’m not sure what you’re getting at with this whole cow story.”
Silence again.
It was time to shake him up. “Was seeing the cow drop like seeing Da Raj go down? Same thing? Just another life-form hitting the ground with a thud?”
The kid clenched his jaw.
“Listen,” I said, “I saw your phone number on the Tarantula’s mobile—the guy who shot Da Raj. So we can quit playing games here.”
He turned to me and now he looked stricken.
“Quit playing the aggrieved grandson. Acting the victim is your mom’s game. You may have learned the behavior but you can’t sell it.”
“I’m nothing like her!”
“Yeah, yeah. Danny, let me level with you. Can you handle that?”
He rolled his eyes, tried to.
“Da Raj fingered you right before he died. I heard it, and that spiritual-nut CEO of yours heard it. You heard it. That testimony is locked up tight. Then I’ve got your phone number on the phone of the Tarantula that spit the blow dart. This is starting not even to feel like circumstantial evidence anymore. Even if I haven’t got you pinned on your grandfather’s death, you can go down for Da Raj.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. He was threatening me!”
“That right.” I was egging him on. “And you let him know who was boss, by putting a slug into a cow’s brain.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about! He was going to expose . . .” Danny slowed down and then hit a full stop. “I’m done. You can talk to my lawyer.”
“Danny, listen. You’re a decent kid. That’s my take.”
“Don’t patronize me, Detective.”
“Fair enough. But you are—a decent kid, somewhere under there. But you’ve no idea who you’re dealing with when it comes to the Tarantulas. I think you hired them to kill Da Raj because he was going to expose you and something involving your grandfather. Let’s stop pussyfooting around—”
“You’re so far off base.”
“Straighten me out. What was Da Raj threatening to expose?”
He smirked. Then he said: “I didn’t get where I am by fighting worthless flame wars.”
“That what you think this is? Just me throwing taunts your way? If I find out you were involved with your grandfather’s death, you’re going down. You, your mom, every damn greedy one of you. I don’t know how yet, I’ll admit that, but all of this ties together with a neat little bow made of money. Billions at stake in inheritance, that’s what I think, that’s what people fight over. Or, just maybe, there’s no inheritance at all.”
Danny stared at the screen. The game had changed. Now it was bowling with virtual balls shooting flames at pins that were jihadists.
“Your jaw just clenched again, kid. That idea strike a chord? No inheritance, no money. Captain Don isn’t dead at all, maybe. He’s alive, the Spirit Box carrying him into eternity. Cheating every damn one of you out of the billions you think you’re entitled to.”
At that point, I was just riffing, testing out ideas, trying to shake the tree to see if coconuts fell out or maybe a confession would hit the ground with a thud. But nothing, not a peep; he’d clammed up, I could see that. He was done. I stood.
“I’m older than you, Danny. A lot older. I went to college. I’ve shot some people and been shot at. And the sum of that experience is this: the Tarantulas will eat you alive. If you’re in with them, and even if you’re not, they’re a bad, bad group. I can see that you’re proud, maybe like your grandfather, and you’re alone. I’m your best hope.”
“Wow, college sounds really helpful. Did you major in making speeches?”
I sighed. I reached into my wallet and pulled out one of those old-fashioned cards I carry around.
“It’s got my mobile number and e-mail.”
I dropped it in his lap; I started to walk out, then paused.
“How come you stopped using social media?”
“What?”
“You had a huge Twipper following, millions of followers, right? And then you went dark. Why was that?”
He shrugged. “Got old. I needed to focus.”
“On what?”
“Other stuff. Social media is awesome, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes it gets in the way.”
Meaningless verbiage this kid was tossing out, sounding canned. “Give me a call when you’re ready to get clean,” I said. I turned and left behind a troubled kid and artificial silence before stepping back into the sound of machine-gun fire and screaming, inflamed jihadists. Then I was outside, and back into the dusk.
Eighteen
I DIALED LIEUTENANT GABERSON.
“I thought we agreed you weren’t calling me,” was the first thing that the lieutenant said.
“All bets are off when my husband gets kidnapped.”
This gave him pause and I explained the outlines. I gave him Terry’s cell-phone number and other key details and asked if the police might start a search; maybe they could track his phone. Presumably, Terry didn’t have it with him when he was kidnapped, but maybe he hid it somewhere. He was resourceful.
“We don’t track people’s phones,” said Lieutenant Gaberson. “That’s laughable. Absolutely ridiculous. Not without a proper warrant.”
“Jesus, Lieutenant, it’s me. Not the ACLU.”
“Sorry, we have a department policy requiring us to read that disclaimer. I’m all over tracking him. How else can I help?”
“I need to know about Danny Donogue.”
Silence.
“Lieutenant?”
“What’re you into, Fitch?”
“Background check. That’s all I need. Can you help me out?”
“Related to Terry?”
“I don’t know.”
A heavy sigh.
“We’re not supposed to know each other right now, Fitch.”
“I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t drowning.”
“Meet me tomorrow, usual place?”
“Not soon enough.”
“I’ll call you back.”
He hung up.
TWO STOPS I needed to make, one to Alan Klipper, the Shipper, and the other to a law firm t
hat seemed to have its hand in everything, Snozzwanger, Veruca and Gloop, described to me as a firm alternately doing intellectual property work and divorce funding, whatever the hell that was. I checked the time: 5:40. Would the firm even be open? Of course, those guys go round the clock, but I was already halfway to the Shipper’s place, winding up the same hills I’d ridden to get to Tess and Lester’s place. I kept looking over my shoulder, but no sign of the Tarantulas. I guess they figured they already had me by the lapels.
After a jag down an unpaved side road, trees overhanging, I found Alan Klipper’s estate, looking stately and surprisingly unguarded, at least at first glance. There was no fence between me and the expansive home, which was brown-shingled with white trim and lit with footlights. Then I saw the sign: This Property Is Protected by a Zero-Deforestation 12-Foot-High Electric Fence. On close inspection, I could make out the occasional line of jagged blue electricity. An invisible fence. On the ground, to my right, I saw something crumpled on the ground and leaned in, and made out a UPS driver’s discarded uniform that looked crispy around the edges. No trees harmed, but humans seemed to be getting a raw deal.
I also found a doorway standing in the center of it all. No fence, just a door, steel-framed, with a doorbell. I was standing fifty yards from the house, staring at a doorway in the middle of nowhere. What a perfect damned metaphor. I hit the buzzer. No answer.
My phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket and glanced at the screen. Private number. I answered. “Fitch.”
“Fitch, it’s Fred Pern.”
“How ya doin’, Mr. Pern.”
“Call me Fred. I’m fine, but I want . . . I want to know what’s up with my tenant. Any progress?”
The tenant, right. It took a second to pull the case to the surface. The Perns ran Urban Ketchup and owned a house in the Richmond that they rented out. They suspected their tenant of foul play, thought he might be working the old School District Double Switch to get his kid into a better public elementary.
“I spent some time there yesterday. I have a lead I’m working on.”
“Great, tell me about it.”
Truth was, I didn’t have much of a lead, but I didn’t need this guy knowing I wasn’t taking care of business. I remembered that I’d found some scraps in his tenant’s trash. “He’s gotten himself an attorney.”
“An attorney?” Pern sounded alarmed. “Sheesh, figures.”
“How so?”
“He’s up to no good. Of course he’s lawyering up.”
“Why don’t I try tomorrow and give you an update?”
“Okay, sounds good. We’re up to our ears, Fitch. We’re trying to build up our french fry operation—to go with the ketchup—and the city has us crazy with permitting. We have to promise that our subcontractors will be locally sourced and have all the paperwork permits but we also have to promise we won’t ask them for their immigration status or for their work permits. I told the city that I didn’t understand how I could accomplish both things at once and they told me it sounded like I might enjoy opening a restaurant in Marin. It’s costing me an arm and leg to get through this process. What the hell, Fitch?”
The question sounded rhetorical.
“Christ, and this tenant. It’s like you don’t even own your own property anymore.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nothing, I’m rambling. Let me know when you make progress, will you?”
“That’s what you’re paying me for.”
“See ya.”
We hung up.
I looked back at the Shipper’s place. What did I know about this guy? He’d first made his mark selling automation software for fast-food restaurants. You know how the clerks at those places only have to click on a picture when you order, rather than having to key in a cost? That was this guy’s thing. As lore had it, he was so keen on making it fail-safe that he tested it on cats, to see if they could hit the right picture—and they actually did most of the time. Not coincidentally, he also was the first guy to make money with cat videos. Genius, they said. Later, once he was swimming in the dough, he invested in everything from Gooble to Snipchap and raked in his winnings while becoming the yacht king of Silicon Valley. His boats had a freaking zip code.
And then there were the dolphins. They’d become his pet symbol, part of the empire, a brilliant bit of branding, I had to admit. Made him seem smart, I guess, if you fall for that stuff.
I laid on the buzzer, really hit it.
“Hello, Mr. Fitzgerald,” the voice came over the intercom.
“Mr. Klipper?”
“I’ve been expecting you.” The door swung open. I cautiously entered, walking a stone path between manicured succulents. Far less ostentatious or weird than the last place I’d visited in this hood. I walked up the porch steps of the three-story house, wide enough to have wings. The door opened and there stood a guy I recognized from the papers, tall and thin, bald but for gray stubble on the sides where he’d shaved, weathered face, Stanford basketball T-shirt, jeans, leather moccasins.
“Pretty nasty defense system. Fried a delivery driver,” I said.
“I seriously doubt that. More like an uninvited guest in a driver’s disguise. Our regulars know to use the service entrance. Come on in and we’ll talk about it.”
He looked around the property, like maybe keeping an eye out for something. Odd.
Clueless as to where this was heading and why he so readily let me in, I followed him, let the estate wash over me: an ornate staircase bisecting the house and leading up, an open doorway to the right exposing a massive dining room, more like dining hall, and an opening to the left that my host entered. I followed as we made our way through a traditional living room, then down a hallway and an underground ramp and into a brightly lit courtyard. I emerged to view a gargantuan fish tank. Understatement. Like an indoor ocean.
It took up the entire side of the wall we were facing, with the tank extending both well below us and also upward, maybe to the top of the house. It teemed with fish, mostly small, but a few big ones.
“Is that a dolphin?”
“A rescue, more like a hand-me-down,” he said. “Lillybud. She was part of a Gooble X project aimed at figuring out how dolphins reacted to various digital stimuli, pop-up ads, incoming texts, and data bursts sent in dolphin language, their sonar. They tried to figure out if Lillybud could use sonar to organize songs in a playlist, a way of testing dolphins’ intelligence and our technology. The big question was whether sonar would be the next Wi-Fi. Could we interact with our devices using our minds?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Right, ridiculous. I mean, we’ve invested so much in Wi-Fi. Anyhow, Lillybud got so juiced up on fast-twitch data streams that she developed a terribly short attention span. She started craving stimulation. Can’t stay focused. She’d be midflip and she’d switch directions.”
“Mid what?”
“What?”
“What did you say she’d be in the middle of?”
“I forgot. Where were we? I’ve lost my train of thought,” he said.
“I’ve got a problem, Mr. Klipper. I need the Spirit Box.”
“You . . .” He started to laugh. Not disingenuous, not maniacal, a genuine laugh. “Don’t we all.”
He was standing to my right, staring at the fish, shaking his head, finding this all so laughable. The largely empty courtyard echoed with the tail end of his laughter. Behind him, against a wall, an elegant wooden table held several models of yachts. He crossed his arms and I noticed how frail they looked, the thin arms of an old man. Had to be late seventies, this one.
“I need the Spirit Box.”
“You’re serious.”
“And then some. It’s at the center of some bad business.”
He clenched his teeth and looked pained as he watched Lillybud the dolphin swim back and forth in a jerky motion.
“You see that fish,” he said, and walked toward the tank.
“There a
re millions of fish. I’m talking about the Spirit Box.”
“I’m telling you about it. Be patient. You see that fish, over by the sunken ship? The rainbow-colored thing, small. You see it?”
“Mr. Klipper—”
“Do you see it? I’m trying to tell you about the Spirit Box.”
I joined him. Yeah, I guessed I saw it. There were a lot of damned fish.
“It’s a hundred and sixty years old,” he said.
“Give me a break.”
“In human years. In fish years, it’s four. But it should have been dead six times over.”
“Okay.”
He turned to me. “This is nothing, Fitch. This isn’t even close to science fiction. Using stem cells, we can regrow organs, give people ‘Fresh Flesh,’ which is a term I’ve trademarked but, respectfully, I’d ask you not to use it in public until I get the paperwork through. My point is, we can use stem cells and genetic engineering to make entirely new body parts. It’s happening, today. Look, you see my shoulder? This thing is the shoulder of a twenty-five-year-old. I had to go in for rotator-cuff surgery and they slapped some stem cells in there and my ligament is now ten years younger. I can hit a hell of a spin serve, but then I’m so tired I need a nap, so what’s the point?”
“You took the words out of my mouth. What’s the point?”
“We’re not so far from being able to rebuild the physical parts of a human being. We’re on the cusp. In a few years, we’ll be manufacturing tissue like tissues.”
“Like what?”
“You know, Kleenex, but that’s trademarked, so tissues, unless I win that one in court. The point is, that’s not enough. Tissue is not what makes a creature. That’s not soul, spirit. That’s not our essence.”
“The Spirit Box.”
He turned to me, and answered in the affirmative with a serious look. His arms were crossed, eyes watery, bloodshot, tired, old—emotional, moved.
“It’s not immortality if you keep a body alive. Hell, we can put people on an IV drip and leave them in a chair for years, long after their brains have left the building.”
I held the silence. He was getting somewhere.
“You bet your ass it’s personal to me, Fitch. I can see that’s what you’re thinking. My wife got Alzheimer’s and she’s sitting in the other room like a vegetable, sucking pureed soy protein from a feeding tube. She doesn’t even recognize me. Little better than Eliza.”