“Annette,” I said, frustrated and looking over my shoulder.
Busted. Johanna was already standing there looking at me, amused.
“No, go on Annette. I want to hear this,” Jo said, an eyebrow raised.
She was mad. I could tell by the way she was standing with her weight on one leg, a fighting stance. I’d seen how fast she could snap a kick out, and luckily I was turned somewhat sideways from her. If I decided I needed to flee into oncoming traffic, it was three quick movements, out the door, and hopefully a garbage truck would be available and driving recklessly….
“Oh, it was back when he first discovered girls. I used to think he was gay, which is ok, because if he was gay, I have a grandson who just adores Jarek, and the two of them would make a great couple—”
I walked towards the door. Oncoming traffic would be better than this. I opened the door and heard Jo bust up laughing behind me.
“I’ll have to remember to ask him that,” Jo called over her shoulder as she tugged at my arm.
I stopped walking. I hadn’t really been walking towards traffic, but the underground parking garage.
“Which one? I know you don’t like going down there,” she said.
“Are we going to Cohoctah?” I asked her.
“No, but it’s in the same area. Roughly.”
“Do we have a pickup truck?” I asked her.
The theory on owning so many cars was so when we had to tail people, we could blend in and have a variety. That way the subject wasn’t seeing the same car over and over. A pickup wasn’t something that my dad had ever driven, nor had I ever seen Jo drive one, but I thought I saw that we’d had one on a list when I was going through the financials, under the assets. It was something Burch the lawyer had drawn up in anticipation of trying to sell GIS.
“Oh boy, you really want the truck?” Jo asked, a smile plastered across her face.
“Well, I mean, it’s country out there. It’ll probably fit in better than a blacked out SUV or Lincoln,” I admitted.
“Let me go back in and get the keys. Don’t you play in traffic,” she said, tapping me on the nose with a manicured nail.
Hmmmmm…a truck?
Jo came running back out and headed immediately towards the parking garage. I waited, watching the traffic pass. I could smell the odors of burnt wiring, piss, and garbage that seemed to be a constant in this side of the city. As they tore down abandoned buildings, the homeless moved on, and eventually the old lots were paved over if the buildings weren’t going to be rebuilt. For a city that used to house many millions of people, it was now a ghost town, crumbling in its former beauty. Buildings like mine were kept up, often improved.
I wondered what it’d take to raze or renovate the buildings in the area surrounding the office and was thinking about the financial viability of such a thing when a shockingly red Dodge Ram 4x4 pulled up. The truck’s chromed step came well above my knee, and the tires were almost as high as my waist. The driver side window rolled down, and Jo stuck her head out.
“You going my way cowboy?” she called.
“Um. How do I get in?” I asked, and Jo laughed.
Getting in wasn’t what worried me the most though. It was getting out.
6
For what was an obviously expensive truck, it rode roughly. I almost felt like my kidneys were getting boxed as we went over the ruts in the dirt road. I suspected that Johanna was hitting every bump and pothole on purpose, because every once in a while, she would hit the gas hard, making the rear end skid left and right across the dirt road as she let out an ear-piercing rebel yell. If it wasn’t Johanna, I probably would have died of fright.
“You can slow down now,” I said. “I’m not in that much of a rush, and we have hours and hours until we have to get Skye to the detectives.
It had been my third plea.
“I’m just having fun. I’ve been dying to drive this thing. Yeeeee-haw!!!!!!” she yelled, sending the rear end going again until we were almost sideways in the road before the heavy tread of the tires pulled us straight again with a jerk.
“I’ll make you a deal. Drive normal the rest of the way and you can keep the truck,” I said, my forehead damp with sweat.
The truck immediately idled down, and Jo sat up properly, a serious look on her face.
“Thank you,” I said after a moment.
“This is my truck. There are many out there, but this truck is mine,” she said seriously.
“Yes, you can have it. I didn’t know you liked it so much. I didn’t even know we had it,” I admitted.
“Police auction,” Jo told me. “The one you had me go to and pick up a couple cars. I dumped the old S-10 and got this baby.”
“It is nice, but why is it so high off the ground?” I asked her. “It’s not big enough to crunch cars, but it looks like a monster truck.”
“It’s for mudding and rednecks.”
“I have a red neck?” I asked her, not getting it.
“No, it’s…it’s like a hillbilly.”
“So a country person?” I asked her.
“Sort of. Rednecks are different. Don’t worry, you’re not a redneck. Anything but.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that, whether that was a good thing or bad thing, so I just sat back. Jo played around with the radio a bit and found some music. I always grew up with my dad telling me that the driver always gets to pick the radio station or music, so I had no qualms about what Jo listened to. In fact, I didn’t listen to music, often not understanding it because of the cultural references and non-literal meanings of everything. I didn’t like to be the butt of every joke, and asking somebody to explain to me the inner meaning of a Pink song got me some strange looks the one time I spoke up.
What came out of the radio wasn’t Pink. Or Aerosmith, or Van-Halen, or anything she normally used to listen to.
Jo sang along with some guy talking about having friends in low places…whiskey and beer and…
I tuned it out. I pulled my tablet out and looked at the last message I got from Skye. It gave us the town’s name and the address to the volunteer police department. Susan had told Jo she could use her name to unlock doors, as the Anonymous unhooding was all over the news. They had already been questioned and had gotten calls, mail, and email, as the doxing had been done very thoroughly.
We pulled into the library instead.
“We’re here,” Jo said.
“But…I thought the police department…”
“This is about the only place out here with internet. It’s got its own satellite connection, see? Skye pulled up the numbers. There’s a few folks here with dial-up, but to do what Mephisto wanted to do, he’d need broadband and a semi-modern computer, which, if you look around…”
I did. It was a very small, very old town.
It had probably seen its heyday in the early 1900s, when it had been built because a rail-line came in through it and there had been a rail depot in operation for farmers to load their grains and supplies to distribute throughout the country. Once the tracks had been re-routed to go through some larger towns and cities, eventually linking up towards Lansing, the town had evidentially died. At least, that was the story according to the Wikipedia page I was able to pull up on the place before the internet went out on my LTE.
“That makes sense, unless somebody’s got a cellular connection or a satellite connection of their own.”
“Skye’s running that, but…”
We had gotten out of the truck and were walking towards the library when an older woman stepped in front of the glass-paned door and stared at us.
“Friendly place?” Johanna asked me.
“She likes your truck,” I said out of the corner of my mouth.
“Shut it,” Jo hissed, even though she was now wearing a fake smile plastered over her face.
“Hello dears,” the woman said, opening the door up for us. “I think I heard that Garth Brooks blasting almost a mile before I saw the dus
t clouds kicking up,” she told us.
She was a tiny woman, easily in her 70s. Her hair was cut short and neat.
“Sorry about that. She likes to play the radio loud and sing along. I think she’s excited because I just gave her the truck, and she really liked it, so it was the thing to do, so I didn’t wind up—”
“You gave her that truck? Oh my, you two must really be in love!” she said with a cackle and walked inside the darkened main room of the library.
I followed, silently.
“It’s so nice to see a young couple in love. For a minute there, I thought you were police or the FBI, the way you’re dressed. Until I saw the way you was making eyes at each other. And the truck? Lordy, what happened to just a big old diamond? Am I right?”
“Oh yes, for sure,” Jo said, playing it up.
“You do kind of look like cops though. Fancy suits. He looks like he’s up to something sneaky though. He’s just standing there all quiet, letting us chatter away like two hens.”
“I’m not a cop,” I told her.
“Federal agent?”
“Not even that,” I admitted.
“Who are ya, then? You’re not from around here,” the librarian said.
“We’re with Grayson Investigative Services,” Jo said, handing her a card. “We’re here about the guy who tried to get a job here a couple months back.”
The librarian’s face darkened.
“Him,” she said. “You here on official business?”
Her sharp tone and words made me think she was mad. Often times I’d assume Johanna was mad when she was like that, but it really meant she liked me. Maybe this old woman liked me?
“I am, but I was curious if there was somewhere in town I could buy you a drink. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about—”
“Jarek!” Jo all but screamed.
The woman lifted her head back and laughed loudly, pulling her spectacles off and wiping her eyes when the laughter didn’t let up right away.
“Oh this one is a big flirt, is he? No wonder you’re all protective of him. Oh it’s ok, you don’t have to get old Sally here liquored up to get me to talk about John Smith.”
“John who?” Jo asked, disbelief or anger coloring her tone.
“Smith,” Sally the librarian said. “Johnathan Colten Smith, at least according to his resume. Here, let me get it for you,” she said, hobbling off towards a door that had black stenciled letters that read, “Office.”
“What are you doing?” Jo asked.
“Well, she seemed like she was mad, and when you acted like that and I thought you were mad, you were in fact overcompensating because I think you liked me, and then we ended up having all kinds of wild monkey sex, so I thought if I could be flirty with Librarian Sally—”
“Shut…up.” She pointed a nail right at my nose. “Or I’ll end you.”
I swallowed. Oops, I brought up the act that shall not be—I mean, the regret…Damn, the mistake.
“It worked,” I whispered back to her. “Don’t knock it till you try it.”
“If I were flirting with some guy in front of you, you’d probably flip out,” Jo hissed.
“No I wouldn’t. You’re the one who gets prickly when I find a date for a night or weekend.”
“And then you have me drive you and the floozy back to the apartment. Do you know how degrading that is? For me?” Jo’s voice was loaded full of something, but I couldn’t divine her meaning.
“Why is that degrading?” I asked her.
“You treat me like your servant sometimes, and you know how I feel about you being the world’s biggest pickup artist—”
“Here you go, and good riddance,” Sally the librarian said, slapping a sheaf of papers on the desk.
Johanna snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and opened a satchel she’d grabbed from the truck. She pulled out a plastic document bag and placed them inside. After she was done, she put the documents in the satchel and removed the gloves.
“Is that all, dear?” Sally asked me, her hand pinching the back of my bicep, causing me to jerk my arm.
That hurt!
“This Jonathon Smith, that’s obviously a fake name. What was he like?” I asked her.
“Short, slender. One of those pretty boys who wore glittery skinny jeans.”
“Skinny jeans?” I asked, confused.
Glittery skinny jeans? What in the world—
“Oh, and what kind of hair color or style?”
“Jet black, and it was short and spikey, you know…the way the young people do now a days. I told him that it would cause an uproar and that the pastor here would have kittens if we hired somebody who looked more like a girl than…”
I let her drone on and I walked over to their multimedia section, denoted by a hanging sign. It was two computers, out of lease Compacs with dual core processors. I knew that because there were stickers all over the front of the case. About ten years out of date, but modern enough to have started the worm.
“Are these the only two computers in the library?” I asked over my shoulder.
“No, there’s one in the office, and the one for checking out books,” Sally called back before continuing to talk to Johanna.
I heard Jo bring up the unhooding, as Anonymous called the KKK hack. Oddly, their voices got even quieter when discussing the topic. I wiggled the mouse to wake up the computer and then pulled my tablet out. I still didn’t have great signal here, so I found the Ethernet cable and pulled a USB to Ethernet adapter out of the case for just such an emergency. Skye had insisted and now I was glad. I plugged an extra cord into the network hub and hit the video call button.
“Tech Support,” Skye chirped a moment later.
“I’m in hillbilly hell,” I whispered, remembering hearing the reference from somewhere.
“Snerk,” Skye said, smiling.
“I don’t know what a snerk is, but I’m in the system. Can you look for the worm on the networked computers? I’m going to check out the rest of the systems in here. My tablet is tied into their network.”
“Sure thing, boss man. They uh…called about my brother,” Skye said, her image crystal clear in the tablet’s nine-by-five-inch LCD. “He woke up, but they’re only giving him enough methadone so he doesn’t…”
There were tears in her eyes again, something that seemed to happen a lot lately.
“They’re drying him out?” I asked her.
She nodded. “I just worry. Going clean is what we all wanted, but not in the middle of…a murder investigation,” she finally finished.
“Did Susan call?” I asked her.
She nodded, but I could hear the keys clacking in the background.
“Hey, there’s something…yes. I got it. What do you want me to do?”
That was what I’d been getting stumped on all day long. Did we want to disable the virus, did we want to change the coding, re-infect the computers with the new code? If we did that, it would be in hopes of tracking down John Smith, but that was probably a burned name. It would be good to remove a potential botnet from his arsenal. Could we rig it so we could continuously get new updates? Who got the feed from this? Was Smith just the shill, or was he Mephisto, like Skye thought?
“Leave yourself a backdoor,” I said quietly, “and you and I will talk later on. Do you still need me to keep the connection open?”
“For another thirty seconds,” she said.
“What are you doing over there?” Sally asked. “That’s an awful long time to gaggle something.”
“You mean google?” I asked her, wiggling the mouse on the screen so it looked like I was using it, letting my body shield the tablet.
“Whatever. Yeah. What are you looking for?” the librarian asked. “Maybe I can help. That’s my job, you know.”
I know.
“Got it, boss. We’re all set,” Skye said. I killed the connection and pulled cords as I heard two sets of footsteps crossing the small distance to where I was sitting.
I closed the browser just as the ladies stood behind me.
“Hey, you’re pretty handy with computers huh?” she asked me. “Think you can help me fix the computer in the office? My printer won’t work.
* * *
“What did you do in there?” Johanna said as she slammed the door of the truck.
I’d already climbed in, a mention-worthy feat because the floorboards were almost chest level for me.
“I got Skye in on their network. Since she designed the first worm or virus, she knew what to look for. I don’t know what to do with it yet, but it’s there and I feel pretty confident it was the point of infection. Part social engineering, part actual hack.”
“Sounds exciting. Want to know what else sounds exciting?” Jo said, gunning the motor.
“What?” I ask her, already feeling the trepidation as she got a look in her eye.
“Yeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!” She let out another rebel yell before cranking the music and making the truck start spinning donuts in the empty gravel parking lot of the library. Finally she tore back out towards the road.
“Where to now?” she asked me after a moment.
The bathroom, definitely the bathroom.
“Somewhere where I can change my clothing,” I told her.
“Why? Is my driving scaring you that badly?” she asked me.
“No, not really, was mostly kidding,” I said and then whispered, “Mostly.”
“You want some McDonalds? Where we headed next?” she asked.
I don’t think I’d ever seen Johanna this happy and bubbly. Ever. Like, I’ve known her for over twenty years, coming close to twenty-five. I was mostly quiet because this was a new side of her I never knew about.
“No to McDonalds, though I don’t care if you stop. Let’s head back towards Detroit. I want to get that resume to Susan to see if there’s any usable prints on it. I doubt it, but it’s a lead.”
“You don’t think he was actually trying to get a job there, do you?” Johanna asked.
Framed: A Jarek Grayson Private Detective Novel (Grayson Investigative Services Book 2) Page 6