Jen rushed toward Rey’s car while instant messaging with Greta, her boss. The engineers had another fix, but the build servers were unresponsive. Yes, yes, she was on her way. No, she couldn’t find her cell phone. Sorry. Yes. On the way.
Rey set the course on his GPS. A nerve rattled at the base of Jen’s neck. Shopahol was saved to his ‘Favorite Places’ list.
The muscle car roared onto the freeway. Rey tapped her. “Is this what it’d be like married to you?”
Jen stared at her iPad. His earlier attempt at proposing was insulting, ‘After all, no one would turn in his own wife,’ followed by a smooching sound. He hadn’t even bothered with a ring. Not that she wanted one. The blackmail and constant innuendo was enough of a bother. How would she ever get rid of him?
He jerked the steering wheel. “Bitch in the black Mercedes cut us off.”
Shaking his fist, he gunned his motor, passed them, and tapped the brakes.
“Can you stop playing games?” Jen typed on the virtual keyboard. “Greta’s going ballistic. Automation can’t run until the build is done.”
Rey lightened his foot from the gas pedal. “I asked you to marry me. You haven’t answered me.”
“You can’t be serious. You barely know me. Drive faster.”
“Don’t order me around.” He cut across three lanes of the freeway and exited on Shoreline Drive.
“This isn’t the way.” Jen pointed to the sign. The road grew darker, the GPS recalculating at every corner.
Rey meandered past deserted parking lots. Jen’s chest tightened. She searched for another car, anyone, her heart pounding furiously. Keep calm. He’s traumatized from the war, going into extreme mode; let him drive it off.
He pulled the car off the pavement near a soccer field, leaving the lights on and the engine idling. Jen unbelted herself and cracked the door open. Rey twisted her wrist.
Pain shot up her arm. “Ow, ow. Let go.”
He turned her toward him. His breath hissed through clenched teeth. Rey’s face, so much like Rodrigo’s, loomed over her. But where Rodrigo’s eyes had been soft, Rey’s were hardened pinpoints of steel. Rey had been to Iraq and discharged for psychiatric stress.
Jen craned her neck, darting her gaze toward the open door. A single set of headlights lit the dark road and approached the field.
“Shit.” Rey reached to his left for the headlamp switch while cutting the ignition. Jen swung her right leg out the door, but Rey yanked her hair and clamped her neck in a rear chokehold.
The other car’s tires crunched on the gravel behind them. Jen thrashed and kicked the door wide open. But the moving car turned around, and the engine sounds faded into the night air. Her pulse crashing in her head, Jen dug her fingernails into his forearms.
Oh, God, help me.
Rey pinned his hardened face against hers. “You didn’t deny my brother. Answer me.”
Jen whimpered, begging for the tiniest sliver of air. A taste like burnt leaves gagged the back of her throat and jagged flashes doused her vision.
Chapter 2
Someone shook Jen, this time more gently. She opened her eyes and shut them immediately. Rey brushed the hair from her face. Her heartbeat skipped helter-skelter, but she held her breath and counted to ten.
“Hey, you’re okay,” he said. “You fainted.”
Fainted? He practically choked the life out of her. But she would not panic. Jen touched her aching neck and swallowed with difficulty, her throat dry and sore. “W-where are we?”
“Around the corner from your company. I’ll walk you to the door.”
Jen blinked and focused. He was still staring at her, but the harshness on his face was gone.
“The car pissed me off,” he said. “Triggered the war zone and… well... you wouldn’t cooperate. You’re not scared of me, are you?”
“I-I don’t know what to say.” She swallowed the panic in her throat.
“I’m sorry I hurt you.” He caressed her face and handed her a memory stick. “The code. Any mobile app would do, but iPhone would be better since I have one and can test it before turning it in.”
“I could be fired.”
“Better than scrubbing toilets at Chowchilla.” His wink lifted one side of his face into a snarl.
“Sending me to jail won’t help you find a job or pass any classes. Why are you doing this?” Jen couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice.
Rey stared straight over the steering wheel. “It’s for my daughter.”
“You have a daughter?”
“It’s complicated. Rod didn’t tell you?”
Her throat clenched at the mention of his brother. “He stopped talking to me long before he died. Why, what’s up?”
More like he had told her to stay away when all she wanted were answers. That had been six years and sixty pounds ago. The next time she saw him was at his funeral.
Rey scratched his left cheek. “Everything’s screwed up. What can I do to gain custody?”
She could think of several smart remarks. But the ringing in her ears and the condition of her throat reminded her to be wise. There was real pain in his voice. Maybe he wanted to marry her to show he could provide a good home.
“It’ll be best to get back together with her mother,” Jen suggested.
He shook his head and drummed the steering wheel with his fingers.
“Look, Rey. You don’t really want to marry me. I get you the code, and you’ll leave. Like everyone else.” She hoped he’d take the hint. She pocketed the memory stick, picked up her iPad, and opened the car door.
He walked her to the lobby door, his hands in the pockets of his baggy pants. “I’ll wait for you.”
“Okay, but it might be awhile.” Jen waved her badge over the reader and unlocked the door.
He shuffled his feet, his shoulders slumped. “Rodrigo’s death wasn’t an accident.”
A flurry of chills grazed her scalp. She had heard how he died—crushed in a metal compactor at the scrap yard he owned. “But that’s what the police said it was.”
“How would they know?” He glanced toward the parking lot.
“Who’d want him dead?”
“Did you?” His lips compressed as if he were about to blow taps on a bugle, and he turned away before she could answer.
What was that about? Jen stepped into the building and pushed the door shut. She hurried through the corridor of cubicles to the double doors of the lab. A cloak of safety wrapped around her when the steel doors shut behind her. The rows of servers and switches, humming and blinking green and blue, welcomed her with familiarity.
Jen set her iPad on the lab bench and flipped on the lights. A stinging, electric smell came from the last row where her build servers lay. She wavered. Run and call for help? No time to lose. Greta wanted a new build by midnight. She unstrapped the fire extinguisher and ran toward the last row.
The servers were dark with no blinking lights. A wavy grey smoke simmered from the giant power supply—the new ‘uninterruptible’ unit that Bruce, the lab technician, had installed on Friday.
She pulled the trigger and sprayed them. Maybe overkill, because the fuses had blown, but she felt better covering the smell with halon. Fortunately, Bruce had left the old unit in the corner. Re-racking and re-cabling took her a good hour. After all the servers blinked green, she sent a message to the team, checked her email and restarted the build.
Now for Rey’s business. Jen took Rey’s memory stick to an old LINUX system sitting under a bench. All the new employee laptops were encryption shielded to guard against unauthorized file copying. No one remembered the server virtualization appliance left over from a beta trial.
Jen stepped between the mass of wires and whirring machinery. She peered over her shoulder, feeling as if someone watched her. What did Rey mean about wanting Rodrigo dead?
Her eyes moistened. Rod had been crushed like an aluminum can. What pain and panic he must have felt. She bent under the table, trying to
wiggle the stick into the slot. Dang! It fell beneath the grate into a jumble of wires and conduits.
She shouldn’t have attended Rodrigo’s funeral. That had led to Rey coming around insinuating things. Jen rummaged around the lab desk. No flashlight. She opened the supply cabinet and found a memory stick used to make dongles. She inserted the stick and located an outdated snippet of code, enough to help him understand the conceptual design and create a working executable but incompatible with the current release.
This blackmailing had to stop now, tonight. She’d expose him for plagiarism and get him kicked out of San José State if he breathed a word of her past. And she’d convince him he had to be a model citizen if he wanted anything to do with his daughter. She pressed around her neck, wincing. Yep, she had enough for a restraining order.
But then, she’d have to go to the cops, and they might reopen their investigation. Her stomach ground against her diaphragm. She needed this job, and if the CEO of her company recognized her from his past…
She finished doctoring the code and pocketed the stick. It had taken longer because of the power supply swap. Who knew what kind of mood Rey would be in after waiting so long?
Jen checked the build log one more time and exited the lab. The empty lobby was lit by a single blue emergency light near the phone. She took the memory stick out of her pocket and opened the front door a crack. “Rey? You there?”
Wind swirled through her hair, but no Rey. Moonlight cast moving shadows through the trees surrounding the parking lot. No one there. She walked around the corner to where Rey had left his car.
Gone. Strange. Guess the code wasn’t so important after all. Mark that she wasn’t important either. So much for saying he’d wait.
She turned toward the building. A scattering of dried leaf fragments blew around her feet. Something moved to the right, and a large body pushed her into the wall. Jen screamed, but a gloved hand covered her mouth and yanked her head to the side. She kicked at his shins, but the man was too massive to dislodge.
“Baby doll, hand over the memory stick.” The gruff voice didn’t belong to Rey, and the cinnamon breath mints provided scant cover for the reek of cigarette smoke, stale cologne and road tar. He pried it from her fingers and shoved her headfirst into the juniper bushes along the side of the building.
A car’s engine idled nearby, and the door slammed.
Jen brushed hair and twigs from her face. The taillights of a white sedan disappeared around the corner. She stumbled to the lobby door and ran into the building. Her heart racing, she pounced through the double doors of the lab and hid in the last row of servers and storage arrays.
She bent her head between her knees, unable to catch her breath—the fluttering of her ribcage fanned like the dry, omen-laden Santa Ana winds. She had fucked up big time.
By tomorrow, the code could be posted on the internet, and her fingerprints were all over the memory stick.
* * *
Jen turned on top of a coil of extension cords. She blinked the sleep out of her eyes and stretched on the hard floorboards. The build servers were still flashing green lights and their humming fans blew warm air over her face. Her neck ached and her shoulders were tight. The screensaver on the lab monitor blinked 5:54 am. Sunday morning.
The panic of the night before rose like a plume of acid. Jen went to the women’s room and peered into the mirror. Angry bruises encircled her neck, and her throat was raw and dry. She washed her face and walked to her desk. A flashlight lay next to the toothbrush in the corner of the bottom drawer.
Praveena had a scarf on her coat rack. It was a flouncy polka-dotted knit with pink pom-poms, but it would have to do. After wrapping it around her neck, she left a note, bought a yogurt from the vending machine, and went back to the server room.
She’d retrieve Rey’s memory stick and give it back to him without the code. Whoever took the stick from her last night would hopefully not tell where they got it. But Rey? He’d have another thing to hold over her. If it came down to it, she’d turn herself in. She wasn’t a criminal. Okay, withholding evidence, lying to the police and possible accessory to a kidnapping. Her eyeballs ached. Not going to think about it, nor the man whose life she ruined.
Jen pried the floorboard up and shined the flashlight into the mass of wires. The red stick lay halfway between an outlet and a jumble of cables. She fished it out and shoved it into her pocket.
The heavy double doors thumped and footsteps lumbered over the hollow floor. Jen’s hairs prickled. She lowered the panel slowly and hid behind the row of storage arrays. Their fans hummed quieter than the higher-pitched whine of the server farms. She peered around the cooling unit.
Bruce’s broad frame stopped near the burned out power supplies. “Who left the fire extinguisher out?”
The nerve of him! Where was he last night while she did his job?
She stepped behind him, her hands on her hips. “I did. The data center could have burned down if I hadn’t come by to check on my servers.”
He jerked around, his multiple rubber-banded ponytail swung like a baby rattlesnake. “You’re overreacting. They all had safety fuses.”
“Well, you still have to thank me. I re-cabled my servers to the old supplies. You overloaded them and I couldn’t reload all of them, so I only have half my cluster working.”
“Sure, thanks.” He tugged on his nose ring and answered his cell. “Hi, Greta. I got everything fixed already. Okay, no prob.”
Liar.
He ended the call. “Hey, thanks for covering. You were here all night?”
Jen yawned. “Looks that way. You owe me one. Could you give me a ride back to my apartment?”
“Sure.” Bruce pulled out a packing box and rolled the ‘uninterruptible’ power supply into the Styrofoam forms. “Hey, did you hear the sirens?”
“No. What happened?”
Bruce’s deep-set eyes brightened while he taped up the box. “A jogger found a body in the parking lot.”
A chill scratched down Jen’s back, and she clutched at Praveena’s long knit scarf. “A body?”
“Some gangbanger guy. Wanna look?” He grabbed his keys and shoved them into his pocket. “I’ll pull the rest of your servers back online later.”
Jen followed him out of the lab to the edge of the parking lot, marked off by yellow crime-scene tape. A shrouded form lay on a gurney in front of an ambulance, and an outline was spray-painted onto the asphalt. Jen averted her face. There could be blood, bits of bone and hair. She never looked at smashed squirrels and skunks while jogging, but crossed the streets to avoid them.
A small crowd of onlookers gawked from the sidewalk.
“There’s the jogger who found the body.” Bruce pointed to a silver-haired man in shorts, his legs pink from windburn. The old man jogged in place and shook his arms as if impatient to be on his way. A tall black man wearing a suit handed the jogger a card.
The man in the suit strode fluidly in their direction. His gaze swept over Jen once, twice, and stopped at her neck. He grinned, showing perfect teeth. “Any tighter and that scarf would be a leash.”
Jen tugged at the pom-poms, feeling like a ninth grader walking past the senior jock table.
“She was here all night,” Bruce said, looking at Jen.
The man extended his hand. “Detective John Mathews, San José Police Department. Do you work here?”
“Yes, and so does he.” Jen shook the detective’s thin, firm hand and glanced at Bruce. If the officers weren’t around, she would have kicked him.
“Miss, may I ask you a few questions?” Mathews gestured for them to step away from the crowd.
“Sure. What happened?”
Detective Mathews took out a notepad. “What time did you arrive?”
“Nine, nine-thirty.”
“See or hear anything?”
Jen shook her head. “I was in the server room.”
“All night? Doing what?”
“Re-cabling the powe
r cords and monitoring my build servers.”
“That’s dedication.” The detective raised an eyebrow. “No car?”
Jen grimaced. “A friend dropped me off.”
“I suppose he or she can corroborate the time of your arrival?”
“No need,” she replied evenly. “The badge reader would give you the exact time.”
No way was Jen going to admit to being friends with Rey Custodio.
Mathews scratched his goatee. “Do you make it a practice of spending the night here?”
Tiny pinpricks of sweat wet Jen’s forehead, but she didn’t dare wipe it. What if Rey killed someone? He had that rage problem. She almost looked around to see if he were in the crowd, but the detective’s predatory glare fixed her gaze on the knot of his jade colored silk tie.
“Sometimes,” she said. “I’m the build engineer, and Bruce is the lab manager. We have to make sure the systems are functioning, so the rest of the team can work from home.”
“What do these jobs entail?”
“I take care of the servers and storage arrays.” She noted the detective’s puzzled expression. “Servers are high performance computers used for backend processes and software builds. And storage arrays are giant enclosures full of disks.”
Detective Mathews didn’t comment, so Jen continued. “Last night, some of our servers were not available from the network, and I had to manually bring them back online.”
The detective tapped his pen on his chin. “And lab manager? You take care of physical premises?”
Bruce shrugged. “More or less. I install the hardware, make sure they’re wired and cabled, configure the network, and maintain the power and air conditioning systems.”
“Any other engineers around last night?”
Bruce shrugged at Jen’s direction. “Ask her.”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“Hard to believe how things change.” Mathews rubbed his goatee. “Back in the go-go nineties, cars were piled up in these startup parking lots day and night. Nowadays, these lots are empty except for illegal street racers. Did you hear any tires squealing or see any kids out here?”
“No,” Jen said. “I wasn’t looking.”
Broken Build: Silicon Valley Romantic Suspense Page 2