by Nick Keller
Mark said, “Asshole…” Nobody was answering. Mark stepped away from the front door skeptical. That asshole—William Erter—was home. He just wasn’t coming down to the entry door.
Mark inspected the cars parked in the residence spots. There were only a few. He pulled out his smartphone, brought up his police access online metro database and began checking license plate numbers one at a time. All he had to do was find the vehicle registered to William Erter, then he’d know for sure if the bastard was home... and trying to avoid him.
The first vehicle was a nineties model Ford truck. Mark whispered, “Do psychos drive Fords?” He punched in the license plate number and waited a few seconds. It came up belonging to a Menial Salazar. “Nope.” Mr. Salazar had an outstanding warrant. Unpaid traffic ticket. Mark shook his head. “Not my guy.”
He moved to the next car, a Chevy Prisma, a tiny car, very compact. “Do psychos drive Chevys?” he mumbled, typed in the license number, and waited a few seconds. It came up as belonging to a Sandy J. Wentin. Mark sighed. “Guess not.”
He tried the next car, an old seventies model VW bug, ugliest car ever made. And this one had what looked like its original canary-yellow paint job on it. Cali plates. GTH-459. He thumbed the numbers in and waited, watching the upload bars spin. He started to need to piss.
“Come on.” He groaned at the pressure in his bladder.
Suddenly, the phone rang in his hand making him jerk. The screen changed. Caller ID showed Bernie Dobbs. Mark Neiman rolled his eyes. “Jesus,” he muttered and brought it up to his ear. “Yeah.”
“Neiman, this is Dobbs. You’re not at the station.”
“You keeping tabs on me, Dobbs?”
Dobbs’ voice went irritated when he said, “I’m not keeping tabs on you. I wanted to run over some things. Where are you?”
Mark looked up at the warehouse building, considering, then said, “Exactly where I should be—on my way home. What the fuck do you want, Bernie?”
Fucker’s lying! Bernie thought to himself. He’s not on his way home. He’s standing outside a William Erter’s residence.
It would be easy to prove, too. All Bernie needed to do was track Mark on the departmental GPS system. All cops were liable for their location. It was new state regs. He’d find his car unit parked outside 1310 Company Court—not on his way home.
Bernie gave him a pissed off face at three hundred feet watching him through the binoculars. He said, “Have you heard the name William Erter?”
There was a pause over the phone. “Why?”
“Possible connection. We should meet up. Let me come to you.”
“This isn’t your case, man. You’re not supposed to be on it. Why are you snooping it? And don’t give me some bullshit about the Dead Bin.”
“Look, why the friction, Mark? It’ll take ten minutes. Let me check your location. I’ll come to you.”
“Fuck you, Dobbs. Don’t go checking my location. If I tell Heller you’re digging around in my case, you’ll be lucky to stay in Cold Case. Go home, Bernie.”
“Awe, gee, Mark, you afraid I might crack your case?”
“Look, if you got information, bring it to me at the station. Otherwise, piss off, Killer.”
Bernie watched Mark end the call through the binoculars, slide his phone into his breast pocket, then glance back up at the warehouse. Obviously spooked by Bernie’s intrusion, Mark took a few steps back from 1310 Company Court and left. Bernie waited in his car for several minutes hearing Mark’s words ring over and over in his head.
Piss off, Killer…
“That motherfucker,” he said.
When Mark’s Camaro went by behind him and was gone, Bernie put his car into gear and slunk away.
Piss off, Killer…
Killer…
Killer…
It was time to get that drink.
From inside, William had watched Mark walk away scanning the parking lot left and right, as if guilty. Mark wasn’t supposed to be there. When he was gone, William stepped back from the window sighing relief. That was close. Too close.
23
New Recruit
During class, William tried to cue Jacky in that he wanted to talk to him. It was in the eyes, he gave him serious looks that were slightly prolonged. But Jacky wasn’t taking the hint.
The day’s lesson to his class was about the human psychological threshold. It was a concept that always interested William, himself, and he often gleamed that the class sensed it when he covered topics of criminal psyche that particularly interested him. They sat up a little higher at their desks, looked at him with more attention.
The threshold concept expressed the idea that once a person’s natural, physical strength reached its limits, a mechanism within their psychological framework triggered allowing them to exert physical qualities beyond their initial limits. This, combined with a cocktail from the adrenal gland, allowed teenagers to pick cars up off their parents, or mothers to pull rolled-over tractors off their children.
The interesting thing, to William, was that this threshold had much higher response rates with lucid-minded killers, whereas it hardly existed at all with the more insane. In other words, as he put it to the class, “… those well-spoken, highly articulate killers like Ted Bundy per say, who was a college graduate and political activist, was psychologically profiled as having a tremendous threshold trigger, very responsive, very sensitive. But others,” he said, pacing up and down through the desks, “like say, Edward Gein or the Zodiac killer who were schizophrenic by nature blabbering on about demon dogs and witch gods, hardly had any threshold at all. On a psychological level, nothing excited them, nothing horrified them. They were blank.”
The whole time, Jacky sat leaned back in his chair listening with a thoughtful, interested frown. Then class was over and William found himself unusually swamped by his students watching Jacky walk off in his relaxed, foot-skidding way.
Not knowing Jacky’s class schedule, William had to investigate through the admin office on his lunch break. For all he knew, Jacky had already left campus. Fortunately, he discovered he had a class at one-fifteen. So promptly at two-thirty, when he assumed Jacky would be leaving, William was in the east parking lot hoping to head him off. He spotted him walking out to his car in the distance, and headed that way.
Jacky moved through the rows easily and came to a scooter. The thing had a bulbous forward headlight housing with a fat compartment on the rear end. William watched the kid key open the rear compartment and pull out a half-helmet and throw on the chin strap.
“Jacky!” William called at a half jog.
Jacky flinched and looked over, startled. He smiled in his big, charming way. “Hey, Prof. You follow me out here?”
William caught up to him and said, “Jacky, I wanted to talk to you.”
Jacky waved him off, “I know, I know. Asking how likely a criminal is to reoffend falls under the actuarial role of crime psyche, not the advisory role. So, I blew it.”
“What?”
“Uh—question twelve on the quiz. I got it wrong. Yeah, yeah, don’t worry, Prof, I still scored higher than the rest of the class ... combined.” He chuckled putting the ignition key in and cranking the motor. The thing quivered to life with a chainsaw buzz and settled into idle.
William said, “Oh, right. Very astute. I actually wanted to speak to you about something else.”
“Yeah?” He looked up. “What’s that?”
“Hypotheticals.”
They made eye contact. They were talking hypotheticals again. William needed resources that might go beyond the police department’s. Jacky had knowledge. He was the key to some very dangerous questions. William needed him. Jacky killed the scooter with a curious grin. “Oh—gotcha.” He forced a swallow. “Can I trust you, Prof?”
William grinned. “You study psychology, Jacky. You know better than to ask that question.”
“Fair enough.” He squinted at him. “I smell leverage, though.�
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“And where you have leverage…” William said.
“There’s trust.”
William nodded. “I taught you too well. So then, the question is, can I trust you?”
Jacky returned the grin. “You teach psychology, Prof. You should know better than to, uh—you know…”
William nodded looking left, then right, contemplating his next words. He looked back at Jacky and said coolly, “Someone in our city is about to start killing people. I want you to help me stop him.”
Jacky’s eyes bugged.
“How’s that for leverage?” William asked.
“Uh—pretty good.”
“So, do you trust me now?”
“Oh, hellz yeah.”
William followed his student to the north side of L.A., that little scooter buzzing along. Jacky’s apartment building was a big stucco saltbox off Bunker Hill Rd just north of the 110—a busy neighborhood with flat, three story housing to either side. They all looked like they had been Motel 6’s back in the day. The occasional house was stuffed in between the complexes, all with tiny, postage-stamp concrete yards and chain link fences. His place was at the top of a hill and in the southern distance was the ever-present silhouette of downtown Los Angeles. To the east was an endless landscape of more flat-topped roofs and squeezed-in apartments. Though it left William feeling out of place, it vaguely reminded him of his own warehouse homestead ten miles to the east.
They took a steel exterior staircase up to the third floor where Jacky unbolted the lock, opened the front door, and walked in. William followed looking around at the place, interested. The place looked like a bomb had gone off in it. An incredible amount of electronics was stacked on a server shelf toward the back, science and tech magazines littered the table, radio receivers, cable provider units, amplifiers, chain-wired computer monitors, modems, a complete office phone system and PC towers were all wired together in complicated and intricate fashion winding throughout the whole apartment. Lights twittered and blinked with some sort of digital life.
Everything else looked like it was Salvation Army—a couch, the coffee table, a bookshelf stuffed with coding textbooks and ‘how to’ guides. Everything had that hand-me-down feel to it.
William stood amidst it all thinking on how unusual this Jacky Lee Hobar truly was for a junior college student. “This is all yours?” William asked.
“Of course.” Jacky opened his arms with a big smile and said, “Welcome to the underground, Prof.”
“Huh. What does all this do?”
“It interferes.” He sat down on a chair designated The Control Bridge swinging a keyboard up. Tapping the space bar, the entire room buzzed to life. He plugged in a spider wire and the flat screen TV against the far wall showed his desktop.
“Interference?” William asked.
“Yeah, it’s not a short conversation.” He flicked on a modem the size of a standard brick. It went click and on the TV, an old time loading bar popped up and the chipper squeal of a fax came through the speakers, loud. Jacky winced, leaned over, and turned the volume down on the speaker unit.
“Is that eighties?” William asked.
“Yeah. I wasn’t even born,” Jacky said.
“It’s pretty old,” William said.
“Yeah, man, but that’s the point.”
“Why?”
“They overlook old tech. I mean, wouldn’t you? Just ogle that piece of Dino crap, right?”
“They overlook?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s they?”
“Big Brother, man. You read Orwell?”
“I’m familiar,” William said.
“Then you know they.” He typed a few keys and looked up. “It’s all a part of what I do.”
William scanned for a place to sit. He had to shove a stack of boxes bulging out at the seams to nestle down onto the couch leaning forward. Jacky’s place wasn’t the most visitor-friendly, but he figured Jacky rarely, if ever, had company. “So, what do you do, Jacky?”
He looked up grinning sardonically. “I’m a student, Prof.”
William gave him a look.
Jacky melted and said, “Okay, okay, alright, alright. I build underside bridges.”
William shook his head, ignorant.
“Yeah, I can tell you don’t know what that is. Underside bridges—real backdoor stuff. It’s what I do. I find ways in where there aren’t any.” That made him chuckle. “It’s all ports and entryways.” He studied William, reading. William still had that I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about look. Jacky chuckled and said, “Okay, you got guys that are dynamic set builders, algorithm identifiers. Real chaos stuff. Those are your total network guys. I don’t know networks. I mean, I do, but it’s not my forte. Then you got worm guys—you know, bugs.”
“Bugs?”
Jacky popped up and went into the kitchen area through a bead curtain. “You want a Mountain Dew, Prof?”
“No, thank you.” William heard the refrigerator open, the sound of a soda can hissing, then he felt the lightest touch twitter up his arm and jerked away. Something large with enough weight to thump along whipped around the back of his head, darted across the couch cushion, and disappeared into the boxes. “What—”
Jacky came back through the beads, rattling them like a toneless, alien windchime and slurped on his drink, “Bugs. eBombs. Viruses. The guys that create those are badass. They shut down whole systems. I knew this one guy, danced with NORAD. I mean, I didn’t know him know him, but I knew of him. Yeah. They weren’t too happy about that.”
“NORAD?”
Jacky cleared his throat pulling back on the conversation, hitting the brakes as though he’d let the cat out of the bag. “Well, I mean—uh, yeah, you don’t want to hear about all that. Anyway, I do bridges. But I can hook you up with any type of interference you want.”
“So, what is interference?”
“Code breaking. App-dev. That’s application development. Programming. That kind of thing.”
“You’re a hacker?”
Jacky gave a hardy laugh. “No, no, no. Hacker? Come on. We don’t use that word. Hackers are gamer boys that plow UBISOFT and Blizzard and shit, get unlimited lives on freakin’ Assassin’s Creed and HALO,” he shrugged, “not that that isn’t cooler than shit, mind you. It’s just—no, we’re not hackers.”
“Who’s we?”
“We’re like the shadow. The edge of vision stuff. The Zamyatins. You ever read Zamyatin?”
“Uh, no.”
“Orwell, is they. Zamyatin, is we.” He waited for William to show some sign of understanding. He didn’t. Jacky slurped again and said, “There’s a whole system of us. Like I said, there’s…” he looked down, then back up. “Look, if they knew I was telling you this, they’d freakin’ kill me. I mean seriously freakin’ kill me. Like, I’d be dead. I’m junior level, anyway. Total junior level.”
William gave him an understanding look still reticent of the creature that had made its appearance a moment earlier. He looked back at Jacky unsure as to whether or not he wanted to know who we were anyway. William cleared his throat, “Okay, so you’re a—a bridge builder. What’s that?”
“A chameleon. That’s what they call it. I do databases. It’s about information. Data. Knowledge sharing.”
“You hack—or whatever you call it—into databases?”
“In a nutshell, yeah. But that’s just the tip of the dick, man.”
William’s eyebrows went up. “Tip of the what?”
“Tip of the—” his eyes went to William and he grinned embarrassed. “It’s just something they say. This shit—it’s like sex to these guys. How much can you do? How far can you go? Can you go all the way? That kind of thing. Most of them are holy freakin’ nerds, man, so they’re all sex-depraved maniacs. This stuff, it’s what they turn to. They get off on it. They say tip of the—well, you’d probably say tip of the iceberg, right?”
“Uh huh. And the NORAD guy, he took it all
the way, I’m assuming.” William attempted to settle back on the couch, to get remotely comfortable.
“Oh, he’s a big hero. Huge.”
“And you do databases?”
Jacky slurped again, licked his lips. “Like I said: tip of the—thing. I can do more than that, though.”
“Well, how did you figure all this out?”
“It’s just computers, man. Here let me show you.” Jacky popped his fingers and began typing like a madman on the keyboard. The screen on the big TV switched to a standard website’s home page. William squinted, but the screen switched away just as quickly replaced by a black screen with green type—maybe DOS? William cringed. He thought he made out the Citigroup Inc. logo—the white letters on a blue field, the red arch over the top. But it was too quick. He could hardly tell.
Suddenly a bug, or whiskers, or something, caressed his ear!
William shot a look to the right and the thing was gone with a rapid flurry of fur and motion. Then it disappeared over the back of the couch. “Jeez…” William choked, “tell me that’s a cat.”
Unfazed, Jacky continued typing and talking. “So, lesson one, Prof. It’s all about anonymity. You don’t want these tickle-brains knowing what you’re doing, right, especially if you’re transferring their communications to your own private hub. Oh—a hub is like this place, where a Zamyatin operates. So…” he typed and clicked with a sublime efficiency, “you have to get into their underside network—sort of like the dark net but, well, not. Because these morons use standard firewall apps like a Watch Guard or, God forbid, Cisco, it’s easy to avoid them. I mean, look at this…” he motioned to the TV screen navigating windows at the speed of light. “This is total child’s play. And ...” with a final poke of a key he declared, “… we’re in.”
William squinted leaning forward. “In where?”
“Hold on,” Jacky said, swiping bits of code, cutting and pasting through a page full of symbols. “You gotta mod your search engine. There’s like down-low apps you can get, helps reconfigure your browser, muddy up your history, that sort of thing, so they can’t see.” He highlighted a stream of text. “See that?”