by Kate Moretti
Before Tonio took off with the money and Philly got pinched, it was Aiden whom they had agreed to protect. “He can do a lot more from the inside of Velocom than the inside of prison,” Tonio had said. Aiden promised to get Philly out of Pig Pen, but after she got locked up, she never heard from him again. Months later, he was dead.
Philly knelt at the base of Aiden’s headstone, ready to get to work. She examined the scratch marks inside the panel.
“What time is the visitor scheduled?” Philly asked Ralph.
“In an hour.”
“An animal didn’t do this,” she told him.
“Do what?” came a voice from behind her.
Philly startled and jumped up. She turned to see a young guy in a dark-brown uniform. A guy she’d once known. A guy who used to be a guard at the prison.
Philly staggered back into the gravestone and winced. “You’re early?”
“Early?” Zavier glanced down at Philly’s hand before putting up his own and taking a step back. In her haste, she had grabbed the screwdriver and was brandishing it in front of her like a knife.
Philly threw the tool into the metal box with a clang. “My boss said you were due to arrive in an hour. I thought I had more time.” She took in Zavier’s somber expression and the bouquet of cheap carnations he held in one hand. She dropped her shoulders and softened her voice. “I’m sorry for your loss.” It was an automatic response, the kind she used on all the visitors. She wasn’t sure if it was Zavier’s countenance, the way his blue eyes seemed dull and listless, or the droop of his shoulders, but she always recognized regret in others. Philly watched as Zavier lowered the flowers to the base of the headstone, all the while keeping an eye on her. She took a step back and gave him some space.
“Did you know Aiden well?” she asked, not even trying to keep the surprise out of her voice.
Zavier nodded. “He was my cousin. He was also my best friend.” He caught her glance. “Don’t look so surprised.”
Aiden had always called Tonio his best friend, but over the years, Philly had learned that words didn’t mean much. She didn’t dare mention that to Zavier, but she did say, “How come you never told me you were a Tonkin? You knew what I was in for?”
Zavier bit the inside of his cheek. It seemed to Philly he was stalling for time, maybe even stalling to find a lie. But he just shrugged. “The warden told us never to talk about our personal lives.”
Philly nodded. That seemed plausible.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. My contract is up.”
Guards did contract work and lived on the prison campus. Only the death of a parent or sibling could get Zavier out of duty. Sometimes, Philly thought the guards were as much the prisoners as the prisoners themselves were.
“I remember you telling me that,” she said.
“Yeah, and I’m not going back there.” He stared at the headstone. “I can’t believe he’s gone. I feel bad I missed his funeral.”
Philly knew Zavier was about to feel worse. “I have bad news. The holo emitter is broken. You won’t be able to see him.”
Zavier paled slightly. “The hologram thingy—”
“Emitter.”
“Whatever. Can it be fixed?”
Philly crouched and pointed to the opened access panel. “Normally, I could fix it but…”
“But what?”
“You see these marks here? Someone or something took a tool and gouged the bio scanner and memory chip.” She stood up. “You can’t put in your access code or your thumbprint.”
Zavier ran his hands through his dark hair and turned away. She could tell from the tension in his shoulders and back that something was wrong, something more than just wanting to hear a goodbye message. He turned around and exhaled. “Is there any way to see the original hologram without the emitter thingy?”
“You mean here?” He nodded. “Yeah, we have digital copies in the office.”
Zavier looked expectant. “Well, can I go see them?”
Philly shook her head. “They’re strictly audio. You can’t see Aiden, just hear his voice. Also, it’s not that simple. First, there’s paperwork to fill out. Velocom would need to authorize the viewing, and there’s the privacy issue. By bypassing the biomarker, I’d have access to everyone’s messages, not just the one Aiden recorded for you.” Philly put her hands on her hips. “You’re a Tonkin. If you want to see Aiden’s hologram, can’t you—I don’t know—ask your uncle?”
“He’ll want to know why, and he’ll want to see the message, too. He doesn’t respect anyone’s privacy, except his own. Can’t we just hear my message without going through all the red tape?” Zavier asked. “It’s important.”
“If I do it,” she said, “I risk getting fired. I risk violating my parole. I risk going back to Pig Pen. And no offense, but we barely knew each other inside. We talked only a few times.” Philly grabbed her toolbox and started to walk away.
Zavier matched her brisk pace. “I know Aiden was in on it.”
She quickly glanced at him before resuming her speed. “Huh?”
“He was part of the heist.”
Philly’s pulse quickened, but she kept on moving.
Zavier grabbed Philly’s sleeve and pulled her to a stop. “Listen, I know he was part of it. He wanted to get back at his dad and get back all that money from the people Velocom ripped off. He told me. He also told me he let you take the fall while your brother ran off to some Caribbean island. Aiden was supposed to join him before he got killed. Their plan was to leave you here alone.”
“Wh-what do you mean ‘got killed’?” she sputtered.
Zavier glanced off at Velocom’s headquarters and then back at her. “What would you say if I told you Aiden was murdered?”
Philly’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “I’d say he got what was coming to him.” She tried to storm away, but Zavier ran alongside her.
“I remember you from Pig Pen. You were never that kind of girl.”
She stopped and crossed her arms over her chest. “What kind of girl?”
He closed the space between them and lowered his voice. “Bloodthirsty. Even though Aiden double-crossed you, you’re not the type of girl who lets injustices slide. If you were, you wouldn’t have agreed to his plan in the first place.” His dark eyes searched her face. “Look, you saw the access panel. Someone tampered with it so I couldn’t see the hologram. Aiden knew he was in danger. I believe he left me a coded message on that hologram.”
“Whomever did that would have to know that I couldn’t fix it,” Philly said, her hands on her hips. “I can fix anything.”
“You can’t fix a shattered bio marker. By the time a Velocom tech comes out, it will be too late. I’ll never know the truth.”
Philly narrowed her brows in disbelief. “If you think Aiden was murdered, why not go to the police? Or tell your uncle?”
“Don’t you get it? I can’t go to my uncle because he’s the one who killed him. He murdered his own son.”
Philly closed her eyes for a second before holding out her hands. “Do you think Alexander Tonkin discovered Aiden’s role in everything?” It was possible, but no one was supposed to know how Aiden got Tonio inside Velocom’s labs, how he got Tonio the account number. They had been careful to cover their tracks, but Aiden had made a big misstep. He hadn’t been able to get the encryption key. And Tonio’s arrogance meant he thought he could hack into any system without help. He had been wrong, and it had cost them everything.
“Did you ever read Aiden’s blog?” Zavier tapped his watch and tilted his wrist toward Philly. He had the newest model, the one people camped outside the store to get. She could see an image of a profile in silhouette and a post headline that read, “Down with Velocom.”
She bit her lip. “I rem
ember that one. He outed Velocom as a bunch of thieves. He alluded to his father stealing money from clients.” It was the blog post she had sent to the FBI in the email that went ignored. “But so what? His blog was anonymous.” Aiden had gone by the name “Robin Hood.” No one knew his identity.
“Velocom pays people to figure out this stuff. You don’t think they unearthed Robin Hood’s real identity? They figured out Aiden was behind the blog with no trouble. Uncle Alex didn’t take it well. He had to hire a firm to do an internal investigation to appease the shareholders,” Zavier said. “As well as some other things.”
Philly felt her blood boil beneath the surface of her skin. “So what? Nothing came of it.” She wiped some sweat from her temples with her sleeve. “If the investigation got swept under the rug, why would Alexander Tonkin go after his own son?” She stared at him, trying to get him to doubt his story. She didn’t believe Tonkin was capable of murder. Stealing, yes, but murder? She shuddered. It was all too much.
Zavier’s eyes were wet. “The papers said Aiden died of cardiac arrest caused by a pill overdose. He was only seventeen with no known heart defects and no drug addictions. His father killed him. Alexander Tonkin slipped his son a pill with a nanochip inside that programmed Aiden’s heart to fail.”
“How do you know this?” Philly whispered.
Zavier swallowed a lump in his throat before wiping away the line of tears that trailed down his cheeks. “Because I watched him do it.”
For the next twenty minutes, the two of them sat against the smooth stone of the mausoleum. Philly listened as Zavier recounted watching through a crack in the door as his uncle and cousin fought over the future of Velocom. He saw his uncle slip something into a glass of wine and then hand it to Aiden. The next moment, Aiden was on the floor, his face a sickly shade of white. Frightened, Zavier fled to Pig Pen, where he could safely hide from his uncle.
“How’d you know what was in the pill?” Philly asked.
“We studied it in my med school class. It has a nanochip that can mess with cardiac rhythms.”
“Wouldn’t an autopsy show that?” she wondered.
“It’s indistinguishable from a drug overdose.”
“Oh.” Philly felt as if she were suffocating inside her coveralls. Suddenly, the autumn air wasn’t cool enough. “We’ll have to do this quick. Ralph usually gets a cheesesteak from Marty’s on Seventh, but then he brings it back to the maintenance shed and watches old movies for an hour.”
Zavier stared at her for a moment, his eyes widening. “Are you sure you want to do this? I don’t want to be the reason you go back to prison.”
Philly stood up and brushed twigs and leaves from her pants. “Aiden left me to rot in prison, but I didn’t want him to die.” Philly sniffled and wiped her nose to fend off her own tears. “A long time ago, my father had an idea to install the hologram emitters in the headstones. He made the prototype and pitched it to Velocom execs, who then stole the idea and fired him. He was broken after that. The next job he took, working in a manufacturing plant, gave him cancer. Now, Alexander Tonkin makes his living by stealing from poor people. The man belongs behind bars.”
“I’m sorry about your dad,” Zavier said.
Philly toughened her stance. “Don’t be. Maybe we can use each other to get what we want. An end to Velocom.”
Zavier nodded. “Let’s do this.”
Philly and Zavier pressed their bodies against the maintenance shed’s rough brick facade and waited for Ralph to leave. As soon as Philly heard her boss’s heavy footsteps move away from the shed, she put a finger to her lips and signaled to Zavier. They ducked into the shed and let out deep breaths. Zavier glanced at the large map of the cemetery that was tacked up to an ancient corkboard with rusty pushpins. “How many of you work here anyway?”
Philly set her sights on the outdated keypad lock above the door handle. “Just a few of us. I work nights. Taft works days. Ralph does swing, and then there’s Chuck, who covers for Ralph a lot. Small crew. One might say a skeleton crew.” She snorted at her own joke. Zavier gave her a pointed look, and she swallowed her laughter.
Zavier watched as Philly contemplated the keypad. He frowned. “Don’t you know the code?”
She shook her head.
“Can you get in?”
She put up a finger to silence him and then stared at the lock before pressing a random combination of buttons. The door clicked open.
“Was that a mind hack?” Zavier asked, impressed.
“Nah.” She pointed to the keypad. “If I squint, I can see Ralph’s greasy fingerprints. 3-9-9-8. His birthday.”
Zavier pushed open the door and waved her inside. “After you.”
It was weird to think that only a few hours earlier, she had been sitting at that grimy table, promising her parole officer she wouldn’t do anything to get her locked back up. Philly grabbed a tablet off a metal shelf, brought it over to the table, and laid it on some mysterious crumbs. She typed in another code and scrolled through the directory. “Ready?”
Zavier bit his lower lip and nodded. “Yeah, I guess. As ready as I can be hearing my dead best friend.”
Philly tapped on Aiden’s name, and within moments, they could hear Aiden’s deep voice, except now when he spoke, his voice crackled like an old staticky radio channel. Something was off.
“Zavier,” Aiden said.
Zavier’s eyes brightened. “Yeah, it’s me.”
Aiden laughed, and the sound echoed off the shed’s metallic walls. “Well, if you’re listening to this, then I’m dead. I want you to have my music library.” Philly wondered if this was the coded message Zavier had expected to hear. Aiden’s voice grew deeper and got slower. “And my aquarium.” And then there was silence.
Zavier’s mouth dropped opened. “That’s it? He wants me to have his music and fish? Is your tablet broken? What about the messages he left for other people?” His voice sounded shrill.
“What about them? You can only hear yours.” Philly glanced at her wrist. It was almost time for Ralph to return.
“Do they sound garbled? Does your message work?”
Philly balked. “What makes you so sure Aiden left me a message?” She grabbed the tablet, and her fingers moved across the screen. Her eyes darted over the code, trying to see why the audio had petered out. Philly pointed at the code. “Your message has been edited.”
Zavier shook off his disbelief. “What?”
“Someone messed with the code. A large chunk is missing. That’s why the audio file isn’t working right. Could your uncle have done this?”
Zavier leaned against Ralph’s desk. A cup of tablet pens rattled, unnerving Philly. He stood and paced. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, he owns the company. I have to hear the messages.”
Philly grabbed Aiden by the elbow and hustled him outside. “We need to get out of here.”
“No, no,” he sputtered, “he can’t get away with this.” He ran his hands through his hair. “He’ll get me next—I know he will.”
“Okay, calm down.” Philly put her hands on Zavier’s shoulders to steady him. “You’re gonna have to accept that we’re at an end. I don’t know what to tell you. The original holograms aren’t here. They’re on Velocom’s servers.”
Zavier looked at her. “Well, then we’re not really at a dead end.”
She shook her head vehemently. She knew what he was asking even if he didn’t say it. “Breaking into Ralph’s office is one thing, but Velocom’s? No way. If I get caught, I go away for life.”
“What about your dad’s legacy?” he asked.
Philly gritted her teeth. “Don’t bring him into this. It’s one thing to bring evidence to the police, but it’s another to risk everything, everything for revenge. My brother and Aiden attempted to steal money from Velocom, and they ro
ped me into it, but they screwed up big time. I lost two years, and I’m not losing any more.”
“I can pay you,” he said.
Another rich guy who thought he could just throw money at problems. “My freedom isn’t worth whatever you can afford.” She started away. She still had a list of repairs to make, and Ralph would wonder what she’d been up to. “This has been fun, but you need to leave now.”
Zavier jogged alongside her again. “Please.”
“No.”
Zavier stopped and let Philly get a few steps ahead of him. “I know where your brother is!”
She stopped and whirled around. Her eyes glowered. “What do you mean you know where he is?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly, but I know how we can find out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My uncle has a team. They’ve been trying to find him for years. They’ve narrowed their search to a few islands in the Caribbean. They can’t pinpoint where exactly, but something tells me you can. One glance at their records, and you’ll find him.”
Philly gritted her teeth. “I don’t care.”
Zavier shook his head. “If you find Tonio, you can warn him.”
“Warn him about what?”
“If my uncle gets to him before you do, your brother is as good as dead.”
Philly felt a burning sensation behind her eyes, but she refused to cry. She thought about her mother languishing away on their thrift-store sofa, exhausted from working double shifts. Philly glanced up at the night sky and took in the stars. They glittered like diamonds. Somewhere, Tonio was looking at those same stars. Did he think about her or their mother?
“Just think. Money. Your brother. No more crappy graveyard job.” Zavier’s voice sounded smooth and controlled, but he was enticing her on a fool’s errand.