The Man Who Wouldn't Die

by A. B. Jewell

Thirty-One

  FITCH?”

  I forced my eyes open and saw Lieutenant Gaberson standing next to me, upright, which I decidedly was not. Bedridden, more like. Colors and lights blurred. Didn’t take but a moment to make sense of it: hospital. Blue and white colors, a TV in the distance, regular beeps, a tank of oxygen and a mask beside my head.

  Terry.

  I couldn’t get the word out. My head hurt something fierce. Gaberson looked concerned. “Just a concussion, pal, but a whopper. They sedated and cooled you to make sure that you didn’t suffer any spinal damage.”

  “Terry,” I whispered.

  Gaberson shook his head. “You’ve got one tough husband.”

  “He’s okay?”

  “Okay?” Gaberson laughed. “He decked you so hard your head slammed into the counter. Knocked you out cold.”

  “This gets you out of dishwashing duty for no more than a week,” a voice said, and I saw it was Terry walking out of the bathroom. “Frankly, I think the problem is yours for being so big. Velocity equals force plus . . .” He shrugged. “No clue how that goes. Maybe: force equals MC squared.”

  “Floyd Chiansky wasn’t so lucky,” Gaberson said. “No longer with us.”

  “You’re at Stanford Hospital,” Terry said. “It’s freaking me out. All the doctors talk to holograms of the patients rather than the patients themselves, who sit idly by looking at holograms of doctors.”

  He could see this baffled me.

  “The theory is that it’s easier to express your true emotions if you’re not looking a real person in the eye. A doctor told your hologram an hour ago that this technology makes for a better human experience. Your hologram didn’t respond, on account of the concussion, but it looked irritated.”

  “My hologram and I need a burger and fries.” But my mind was elsewhere: Floyd didn’t make it. “Anyone else hit?”

  “Glass shards injured Tess and Lester, but they’ll be okay.”

  “Danny?”

  “Fine,” Gaberson said.

  “Dutch Abraham?”

  “Clean getaway. People say it was the fastest MINI they’d ever seen.”

  Terry sat by the bed and put his hand on my shoulder. He pointed to the oxygen mask beside my head. “You get a little woozy,” he said, “take a puff.”

  “Lieutenant, I thought I was persona non grata?”

  “Yes. It’s complicated now that Jorge McStein is no longer with us.”

  I looked at him for confirmation: Deuce? Dead?

  He nodded. “The world is a better place. But your life might get worse in the short term: he had the best lawyers in the world and they are that much more effective when jacked up on double-synthetic Adderall. They’ll make a dandy civil case—wrongful death of upstanding citizen.”

  I let it sink in. Deuce was gone. Good riddance. His son, evidently, had come seeking vengeance on me and put a bullet into Floyd instead. Dutch Abraham was just a kid. Hell, he’d helped me find Terry. But maybe he realized he’d sent me on the mission that would kill his father; of course he would want vengeance. Another enemy out there in the world.

  “I might have a secret weapon to help you out in court,” Gaberson said. He looked down to the edge of the hospital bed at the black box that I’d seen him toting around. He patted it, the way Terry was patting my shoulder.

  “Thanks for not asking, Fitch,” Gaberson said. He looked down. He felt guilty. “This is OTR.” Off the record.

  I gave him a halfhearted okay with my eyebrows.

  “As you know, we would never violate anyone’s, um . . . which is the amendment to the, um, Constitution, about the privacy thing?”

  “Fourth?” Terry said.

  “Right. We’d never violate anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights or their, um, due process-y thingies.”

  “Cut the shit, Lieutenant,” I managed.

  “’Nuff said. So this little beauty lets us capture every conversation that ever takes place.”

  “That’s not a privacy violation?” Terry said.

  “Not if you get the proper warrant. It’s just we’re still trying to understand the paperwork.”

  “What? You’ve been getting warrants for decades.”

  “Right, well, y’know, Terry, the forms change and the print is very small. Anyhow, you’re missing the point. This is all about protecting the public. See, what we do is we record conversations and then we wind up with a massive database of how people talk.”

  “What . . .” Before Terry could finish his question, Gaberson put his hand up, like: don’t worry and let me finish. “You know about fingerprints and how valuable those are in terms of getting bad guys. This is the digital version of the same thing.” He paused for effect: “Voiceprints.”

  He explained that individuals have individual voice patterns, subtly different ways of using language that make them different from everyone else. So if we could create a database of people’s voices, their manner of speech, we could know if they were in a particular place. “Say, the scene of the crime,” he said.

  “But to know that, you’d have to be listening in to every conversation,” Terry said. “So you could match each person at a place against your database. It would be like having the entire world under surveillance at all times.”

  “Which we’d never do without a warrant,” Gaberson vowed. Over his forehead, he held up three fingers in the shape of a W: whatever.

  “What does this have to do with Deuce?”

  “Officially, I’m to have nothing to do with you. Unofficially, I kept tabs on you—pointed this powerful thingy in the direction of the area I suspected you were in and scooped up all the conversations. I think Deuce’s attorneys will find it hard to pin anything on you.”

  “That’s absurd and inadmissible,” I said.

  “We’ll be okay. Our lawyers are smart too and they have access to their own medications that enhance focus. Which they’d never use without a prescription.”

  “Or a warrant,” I said dryly.

  “Yes. Wait, what?” Gaberson looked flummoxed and then recovered. He was a pal, sure, but he was one of them too. And I realized just how closely the good and bad guys had become aligned, how little the difference—and where all this technology was taking all of us. The Spirit Box preyed on the predictability of humans to want to create a digital afterlife; Gaberson’s new surveillance technology relied on the predictability of humans in order to create a digital voiceprint.

  “Y’know,” I said, “there’s a difference between fingerprints and this box you’re using to capture everyone’s language.”

  Gaberson stared at me.

  “People give their fingerprints willingly. You’re capturing people’s voices without their knowledge.”

  “No one is making people speak,” Gaberson said. “Besides, talking is sometimes an admission of guilt.”

  Terry said: “I think you’ve got that wrong. The cliché is that refusing to talk is an admission of guilt. And even that is wrong.”

  “Well, then, see, we may have it right this time.”

  Another no-win situation with the law. My ATF trainer was right. I existed as a private dick, outside the system, standing on the sidelines, sometimes yelling foul.

  “You did some good,” Gaberson said. “Evidently, Floyd gave a deathbed confession.”

  I perked up.

  “In his last moments, he said that Captain Don had died of an—”

  “Oxygen shot!” I shot upward, causing a surge of headache.

  “Jinx,” Terry said. “Look at my man go.”

  “How’d you know?” Gaberson asked.

  I didn’t answer but it made sense. No sign of foul play when they found Captain Don. Just a little extra oxygen. “How would he have gotten close enough to . . .” I didn’t finish.

  “Let it go,” Gaberson said. “He confessed. Said he’d wanted the Spirit Box and worried that Captain Don would destroy it.”

  “He confessed to whom?”

  “Everyo
ne there testified to the same thing, except an old man named Melvin. He said that generally he couldn’t hear anything at all and that his poor hearing was considered a job requirement. Case closed, Fitch, go back to your day job.”

  Gaberson took off after a bit and I thought it over, head back, eyes opened and closed, snoozing, then waking up every few minutes and taking in the oxygen port. Oxygen.

  I signed my release papers. “So it’s over?” Terry asked as we headed out.

  Over?

  I had to guess so—it was over. Best I could figure it, Floyd and Da Raj had conspired to blackmail Danny about Colester College. Floyd was the main man, a real bright kid, Da Raj his goofy sidekick. Then they got even greedier and pushed Danny to give up the Spirit Box. When it became clear that Danny wasn’t giving it up and neither was Captain Don, they got threatening and they put the old man down with an oxygen shot. Then I got involved and the Tarantulas got onto me, and Floyd, who seemed to follow everything—know every move—made a quick decision to bring them into the mix. He promised them the Spirit Box in exchange for taking out Da Raj, his weak link.

  Weak, just like my theory. It was all I had. And now Floyd was dead.

  Thirty-Two

  CLYDE!”

  “Whaaaat?” His singsongy voice came from outside my office.

  “Can you show Fred Pern in?”

  Clyde appeared at the door. Dapper-looking, a totally different façade; three-piece suit, top hat. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Clyde, can you show Fred Pern into my office?”

  Clyde looked at me, and then at Fred Pern, who was sitting in the chair opposite me. “He’s already in your office.”

  “Very good, Clyde.”

  “So why are you bothering me?”

  “Because it’s your job to show people into my office.”

  “Well, then, frankly, Fitch, I’d like to ask you to not do my job for me. It’s very emasculating.”

  “He walked right by you, Clyde. Because you were lost in your Them magazine. He couldn’t get your attention.”

  Clyde looked at Fred Pern, a squat fellow in his forties, prematurely gray. “I apologize, Mr. Pern.”

  “No problem—”

  “I just don’t know why Mr. Fitzgerald gets like this,” Clyde continued. “It’s not like I try to do his job, whatever that is. Do you realize that the other day, he took over the expense reports—just commandeered them? How am I supposed to have any feeling of authorship?” He shook his head. “Fitch.” He looked at me. “I’m going to be taking the afternoon off.”

  “Is that right?”

  “If you insist.” He tipped his top hat and left.

  “Interesting character,” Mr. Pern said.

  “I actually asked him here for a reason, Mr. Pern.” I leaned back in my chair. It had been a good morning. Slept in a bit, had Terry’s French toast, the subway free of Phippies, and I was about to stick it to Fred Pern. “He’s guileless.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You know the word?”

  “Sure, I don’t—”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t understand it. It wouldn’t surprise me if you can’t even pronounce it.”

  “I’m not paying you to shout at me.”

  “I’m not shouting and you’re not paying me at all. Your money is no good here. You told me that your tenant was up to no good. But it was you, all along. You wanted me to dig up dirt on him so you could find a way to evict him, get around the tenant protection laws. You wanted to flip the property and make a killing and pour it into your trendy restaurant.”

  “So?”

  “So you admit it.”

  “Sure, whatever. Why can’t I evict my tenant and flip my house and make some money? Everyone else is making money. How am I supposed to survive in this town?”

  So there it was, his admission. It hadn’t been hard to put together. The van parked outside his tenant’s house belonged to Flippers, the company that fixed up houses that were for sale. The lawyer that the tenant had contacted was a tenant advocate, as I discovered after a few phone calls.

  “Mr. Pern, get out.”

  “You’re a child, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  “Fitch.”

  He stood.

  “Fitch, listen to me.”

  “Out.”

  “Just listen. I . . . I got caught up in terrible debt. It was one of those horrible upgrade cycles. You heard about this?”

  “No.”

  “I bought a new phone, a great one, and I tried to use the Bluetooth function to pair it with my car, y’know, so I could talk when I drove. But my car was too outdated to pair with my phone, see?”

  “No, I don’t s—”

  “So, obviously, I got a new car.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But by then, my phone was outdated, so I had to upgrade that. Three phones and four cars later I couldn’t afford anything. And this deadbeat is living in my house and I can’t oust him with all these pro-tenant rules in San Francisco. I need the money and this town is moving way too fast.”

  “My heart bleeds.”

  “How am I supposed to survive?” he repeated. “What about me?”

  I didn’t answer him. What was the point? This one had succumbed to the whole filthy idea that you said what you needed to say, and did what you needed to do, to get yours.

  Anyhow, I had something else on my mind. This upgrade cycle. I realized it had been the boy all along.

  Thirty-Three

  SHEESH. THIS KID should pack it in,” Danny said. He sat in the balcony of the Video Game Olympic Training Center. On the theater screen in the distance, a gorilla repeatedly slammed a hammer down on an animated baby that was screaming: “Uncle.”

  A voice came over the intercom into our little booth: “Danny, I’m sorry, I missed the trapdoor.”

  “Hit the showers, kid,” Danny said. He turned to me: “I’m going to have to tell him he’s got no future and he should resign himself to the college route. Maybe he’ll get a job at Starbacks or become a doctor.”

  “You’re just a kid yourself.”

  “Age is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “Let’s talk about your college days.”

  “You’re still humming that tune, dick?”

  “No one talks like that, I told you. I think things went down at Colester a little differently than you’ve told me.”

  He turned to me and looked incredulous, like: Are we really rehashing this?

  “Want to hear my version? Actually, strike that, Danny, I’ll tell you my version and you can sit here and pretend to look uncomfortable.”

  “Suit yourself, Detective.”

  “You went to Colester because you weren’t sure about your abilities and you wanted to grow up and learn—and your granddad liked the idea. No shame in that. Then you got pulled aside one day by Floyd, who had discovered your real identity.”

  “This sounds a lot like my version of events . . .”

  “Here’s the twist. He didn’t really threaten you. In fact, you were thrilled to meet Floyd because you realized he was a brainy dude. He could program and figure things out and code in ways you couldn’t. He seemed like he had genius potential. You two started talking—about business ideas, concepts. You told him about the Spirit Box. Sound familiar?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I can see it, Danny—late-night bull sessions drinking energy drinks with immune boost, getting existential, just like everyone does at college, asking the big questions: Is there life after death? What’s the point of being here? What if we could live forever?”

  I stared at Danny. He tried to roll his eyes but couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “The Captain was getting sicker—he told you. You came back and you invited Floyd with you to Silicon Valley, right? He had a reasonable cover story with his facial recognition software. But the reality is that you were going to pair up and put together the final pieces of the Spirit Box, take it out from under the Captain.
Get there before he did.”

  “You’re crazy.” Now he wasn’t looking me in the eye. He was looking at the distant screen, where a bullfighter with a flamethrower was holding a cape and being charged by a lamb with a nuclear warhead attached to its back.

  “Here’s what I think, Danny. I think you were terrified. I think you hated the idea you wouldn’t be Captain Don or live up to his legacy. I think you were terrified that you’d become like . . .” Christ, it hit me. “Alan Klipper. You didn’t want to be the sidekick, the guy in the shadow of the great innovator. Or a faux innovator, revered for money but not ideas.”

  “He had a stroke, you know. Alan Klipper.”

  I didn’t say: couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  “You needed your own thing, right, Danny? You wanted to have a real innovation of your own.”

  “Froom,” he said weakly.

  “Oh yeah, wonderful. About as innovative as pictures on cash registers or cat videos.”

  “Heretic,” he mumbled.

  “You can’t even sell your emotion right now. With Froom, you looked like the big man on campus, at least relative to Da Raj. But it was just a stupid idea. You know it, in your heart. In fact, my guess is it was just a ruse, a cover so you and Floyd could work on the Spirit Box.

  “You suckered Da Raj into it. Made believers out of a few gullible saps, but little by little Da Raj got wind of your sinister side and so did Floyd. They saw the madman behind the boy wonder.”

  On the distant screen, a lamb exploded into a billion little pixels and words appeared: Gold Medal Contender.

  “It took me a while to understand why you wanted the Spirit Box so badly.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You knew your grandfather like no one else. You knew he wouldn’t leave you or your family anything. You had to put the finishing touches on the Spirit Box before he got there. You had to figure it out.”

  “Oh, I get it, so I was competing against him.”

  “In a way, yes. But the Best and the Brightest—you and Floyd—you couldn’t crack it, even after you got some inside looks from Klipper. He loved you like his own grandson. Even though you resented his second-class status, compared, at least, to the Captain.”