I wandered over to the window and looked down at the stained glass of the almost-ocean. "Full moon," I stated, watching it hover over the water like an egg about to be dunked in hot water. "They say it brings the nutters out."
"That would explain the guy who had me arrested..." Jyson muttered with a roll of his eyes. "All I was doing was looking through his rubbish...hardly a capital offence, is it?"
Well, you weren't supposed to do it, no, as it was a crime in Tree Valley to mess with anyone's rubbish. There were a lot of rubbish laws, actually. Ever since the meltdown of the power station and the dumping of the toxic waste into the Railway Reserve people had been a little touchy about the topic.
We had the ocean now, though. It wasn't allowed to be spoiled. Nothing within the boundaries of Tree Valley was supposed to be spoiled.
Maybe this guy was worried about what Jyson would find in his trash.
"What were you looking through his rubbish for?" I asked, still distracted by the egg above the ocean.
Jyson let out a sigh that was almost a growl. "It's quite the long story," he said. "It's a case I've been working on for almost a year." He glanced up at me. "Trying to get intel on a very...volatile subject, I suppose you could say." It was obvious Jyson didn't want me knowing any details.
"I appreciate you helping me tonight Jyson..."
He violently bashed the keys in front of him. "No worries. As you can probably tell, I've got my own selfish reasons for helping out." He frowned and shook his head.
"An issue?"
Jyson almost growled again. "You were right..." he murmured..."There's no evidence of Harris Whitemoore even existing -- at least in this town -- till five years ago."
I had a sudden urge to spill everything to Jyson, to vomit the whole bloody truth all over him. To say, "That's probably because Harris came here in a UFO...Taj was right...the Tree Valley government was infiltrated by aliens. The mayor is an alien."
But I didn't say that, of course, because I am not completely crazy. Or, if I am, I didn't want Jyson to know that. He was the most normal person I knew, and the closest thing I currently had to a friend, besides my trusty leather jacket.
Five years ago we'd been upgraded to a near-utopia. That's when the beach had been installed.
"God, this program is so buggy," Jyson said, banging on the screen. "You can't run this kind of software on a computer that is more than five years old. It's almost like..." Jyson suddenly seemed to think better of what he was about to say.
"Almost like what?"
"Er...no, it's stupid." Jyson sighed and let his hair fall into his eyes before he spoke again. "It's like the town itself rejects any technology from earlier five years ago. Have you ever tried switching on an old model of mobile phone? Strange characters flash up on the screen, like the power in the air scrambles it."
I knew what he meant. I took a deep gulp, wondering if maybe Jyson was more of an ally than I'd thought he was. Maybe he was open to the truth about aliens.
But I couldn't tell the whole truth. Not then. Speaking it out loud would...not confirm anything as a fact, of course, exactly, but it would confirm to an outside source that I actually believed it.
It would confirm that I believed the deepest, darkest, stupidest rumours.
That Tree Valley was only an almost-Utopia because we'd been visited by aliens. That the very beach that I loved was all an illusion, alien technology, that all of this could be taken away on a whim, that it had never belonged to us in the first place, that it was all an anomaly, that it was all fake. All "almosts." That we would never be complete, never be human, never be fully alive.
And I couldn't bring myself to believe that, not yet.
Even if I already was half-way to dead.
"I want to catch Harris. Before I...." I couldn't quite finish the sentence. Not truthfully, anyway. It was an almost-truth. "Before I retire," I said simply.
"You're not going to keep up the investigator work?" Jyson asked in surprise, looking up from the computer.
I shook my head. "I don't think it's for me."
How was a ghost supposed to solve crimes?
***
"How far did you get?" Jyson asked.
Hours had passed and the moon behind us was now concealed behind clouds. Jyson was onto his second bag of gummy worms and he'd even dared to light a cigarette indoors after disabling the smoke detectors.
Even I didn't dare to smoke in May's office. I had visions in my head of her taking out a ruler and rapping it over my wrists if she caught me. I did, however, grab another handful of gummy worms out of the packet. "How far did I get with what?"
"Checking into Harris' background."
I shrugged. "I used that same program you did."
"And that's all?" Jyson asked.
"Yes?" I said. "What else was I supposed to use?"
Jyson shook his head and grinned at me. "See, this is why you need me for your mentor..." he said. "There are more channels than just the official ones. Or, rather, just the legal ones." He tapped his fingers against the desk for a moment. "What we need to do is hack into the very database of the town itself..."
I suddenly got a funny feeling in my stomach, like there were pirates riding a ship down there inside my guts and it was a rocky night at sea. "What are you talking about, Jyson?"
He grinned at me again. He loved this job, I could tell. What made me feel sea sick gave him a rush. I will mess with just about anything in the real world, bend the rules till they snap, but he was talking about hacking into something that had paranormal origins.
And that was a line that I just would not cross.
I gulped. Until I had to cross that line. What if the only way to bring Harris to justice was to break into the very system that put him into power in the first place?
"How do you suggest we go about that, Jyson?" I whispered just in case someone was listening.
I noticed the temples of his head bulge like he was about to explode with the force of holding something in. Just like me. Only he started to spew at me whereas I'd managed to swallow my secrets down till my stomach acid burned. "I've already been doing just that, Lana..." Jyson looked up at me with wild eyes, made crazier by the full moon that suddenly came out from behind the clouds and illuminated the entire office, black white and green.
"You have?"
Jyson nodded. "I've been trying to figure all this out for almost a year..." He lowered his voice. "Well, nine months, really. It all started when Brent and I decided to have a baby..." His face suddenly softened. "I never cared much about the future of Tree Valley until then. Heck, I didn't even care about the present of Tree Valley. I always thought I'd leave and get a job in the city..." He stopped talking and shook his head. "Can't believe I'm about to turn thirty and I'm still here, sometimes..."
I perched myself on the desk and laughed. "Ha. Join the club. I'm 31 and I still can't believe I'm here...I almost escaped once..." I murmured.
Jyson nodded. "I was a big fan of you on X Factor. Voted and everything."
"Thanks," I said quietly.
Jyson slowly chomped on a gummy worm. "When Brent decided he wanted to have a baby, and wanted us to settle down in Tree Valley, I started to ask questions...questions that people in this town didn't want to answer."
I'll bet, I thought. Still playing ignorant, though. I had to test the waters first, make sure we were on the same page. "This town can be pretty crazy."
Jyson bit his lip, his floppy hair falling into his eyes like 1992 Robbie Williams in Take That. A little before my time but my mum was a big fan before she died. "You don't know the half of it, Lana."
"I know some of it," I said softly. I gritted my teeth before I dared speak the words. "I know Taj Robinson."
Jyson's eyes flew wide open. "May...does May know that?" he asked, keeping his voice so low and raspy that it barely squeezed out of his windpipe.
"Why do you think she fired me?" I sighed like the little brat I was, kicking my feet out fr
om underneath me.
Jyson turned pale. "Taj Robinson is like...patient zero for all of this...he's the one with the answers, only he'll never talk to anyone..." Jyson looked away guiltily.
Suddenly I understood.
"You have talked to him though, haven't you?" I asked flatly. "You've been in contact with Taj Robinson, haven't you?"
Jyson still wouldn't dare meet my eyes. "Every now and then..." he muttered finally, looking at his hands. "Sometimes I'll go to the shops for him -- grab him some tea bags or something -- in exchange for him leaking some info..."
"He the one who called the cops on you tonight?"
Jyson turned a little pinker. "Yes. His whole yard is a junkyard, though. Kind of hard to avoid looking at the rubbish."
So he'd seen the UFO that Taj kept as a souvenir.
I narrowed my eyes and looked at Jyson's hair. "Ever give him a hair cut?"
"Occasionally."
Interesting.
"But he doesn't want to talk, Lana. It was like drawing blood from a stone."
"I know. I think someone hurt him."
We fell into silence for a minute.
Eventually, Jyson moved his rolling chair back over to the computer screen and cracked his knuckles. I winced.
"Don't tell May I spoke with Taj."
"Don't worry," I said. "I won't." It was cold to be on the outs with the ice queen and I didn't want Jyson to suffer the same fate as me.
"What do you say then?" Jyson asked as the green lights of the screen swallowed his face again. His voice was low and eerie. "I can hack in to the program, Lana. The program they used for the Upgrade. I've been training to do this for a year." The program that kept the beach running, the town, running.
"Do it," I whispered.
Jyson hesitated a second. "But if you're a witness, you're part of it. We could both go down for this. This isn't just a local offence, or a federal offence, it might be..."
"An intergalactic offence. I understand."
And so it came to be that on that night, while the full moon hovered behind us, Jyson and I hacked into the Tree Valley main frame to try and figure out if our mayor was an alien.
And to figure out just what he had done with May's money, of course. This is a mystery novel, not science fiction, despite all evidence to the contrary. Evidence can be deceiving. What you see with your eyes can be more deceiving still.
It looked, to the naked eye, like there was a beach and an ocean in the middle of Traralgon, for crying out loud. We are one hundred kilometres away from the real ocean.
Sorry. I meant Tree Valley.
"Do you remember why they called it Tree Valley five years ago?" Jyson mused quietly from in front of the computer.
"Because it was an easier to pronounce version of Traralgon. And we live in the middle of a valley," I said.
Jyson nodded a little, pulling on his lip. "Surrounded by the haunted hills..."
Oh, brother, not Jyson as well.
He sat up straighter. "But it was also because of the trees."
I had to stop myself from saying, well, duh. The trees, palms, flowers and insects that they had brought in and planted along the beach and the esplanade. "Palm Tree Valley" had been one of the original suggestions for the new name but that was poo-pooed at a town meeting for being a little too much. We were still in Victoria, after all, not Queensland. Plus, those of us still loyal to the old way of life didn't want to stray too far from the original name. We still wanted a splinter of it left behind.
"Did you ever notice anything unusual about the trees?" Jyson asked me, as he squinted at the screen.
I shook my head. "Only the insects that hover around them."
Jyson let out one of his trademark groans. Thinking he'd found something I raced back over to the desk. "It's Brent texting me. He's asking if I'm planning on coming home before dawn. If not he's going to divorce me."
He placed the phone back down on the desk. Must have been an idle threat then. Or Jyson was so exhausted from caring for a crying newborn that he was ready to abandon ship anyway. Jyson leaned in closer to the computer, his face turning green again. And then, after a few clicks on the screen, pink. "Look what I've got here, Lana."
The codes to the town glowed pink on the screen.
I gasped. Now was the time to tell him to stop. To say, "What the heck are you thinking, Jyson? Are you trying to get us all killed?"
You're messing with the supernatural.
But instead, I nodded, staring at the program, full of pink numbers and lines swirling on the screen, and whispered, "Go for it."
I crossed the line.
"Here we go..." Jyson took a deep breath. I never asked how he found the program that could completely destroy our way of life, at least, not till much later when it just about had done that, and I needed to know. I figured it was one of those 'I tell you and I have to shoot you' things and I still had two days left on the planet I wanted to enjoy.
***
"You're quite the little hacker, Jyson," I said, patting him on the arm and giving him a giant grin after our night of madness. "A genius, in fact." I was going to miss working with him after I was dead. I wondered if we'd still remain friends if by some miracle I did manage to stay alive after the weekend. It seemed pretty unlikely, given my track record. The staying friends bit I mean, not the staying alive bit. My track record at staying alive was all right...apart from the one time I did already die, I suppose. I couldn't figure out if only dying once was actually a really good effort or rather, an extremely terrible one.
"I'm just glad we know what Harris really is..." Jyson said. He was too destroyed from exhaustion to even be shocked about the information we'd found. And I was too exhausted from lack of sleep to even be able to properly comprehend that I'd just taken a peek behind the wizard's curtain, to see the inner workings of the computer program that kept Tree Valley spinning on its axis, which kept it from converting back to the old Traralgon.
Just one wrong click, and we could have been there.
I nodded. "A no good lying cheat." Who launders money from everyone in town to pay for his mansion on Melrose Avenue It had all been there, in black and pink, written on the screen. Money funnelled from May's firm right into Harris's pocket. He'd sucked her dry.
Not only that, there was evidence that he skimmed money off taxes, income and even stole from the money that Gun Employment was supposed to be handing out to the almost-unemployed like myself. I'd always known the man was evil.
There was no real evidence he was an alien, to be fair. But there was evidence that he was evil.
We were going to take the evidence to Louis first thing in the morning. He wouldn't want to arrest his buddy, I knew that, but with cold hard evidence like this, he'd have no choice but to put Harris behind bars.
And maybe, just maybe, May would have no choice but to forgive me my terrible trespass into the wild.
"Hey, since I'm not taking the job, maybe you shouldn't leave after all," I said as we headed out the door, dawn just about to break, and Jyson's divorce imminent. I stopped. "I'm sure May will be happy to keep you on." As long as she never found out he'd been speaking to Taj Robinson.
"Ha," he said. "I wish. But the deal Brent and I made was that he would return to work while I stayed home with the baby..." Jyson sighed and flicked his floppy hair out of his eyes. "For better or for worse, right?"
"What does Brent do for work anyway?" I asked as we reached the car, baby seat still in the back. "It must be pretty important if he can't take time off."
Jyson shrugged.
"Not that important, at least, I don't think it is. He just works as a lifeguard at the beach."
Chapter Thirteen
All I Want To Do Is Get Pink By The Beach
The beach had re-opened to tourists who knew nothing about what would happen in the future or the past. They were just happy to be able to sun tan again under the artificially hot sun, or grab a kebab and eat it on the sand while the waves
bathed at their feet, sauce dripping down their hands and arms. I can hardly ever bear to watch anyone eat lunch. It's always sandwiches with sauce dripping down arms, like blood. Turns me off my own food. And it was lunch time at Tree Valley beach. Luckily they didn't import any almost-sharks when the rest of the flora and fauna came in. Kebabs and bikinis were the order of the day.
I was the only person on the beach wearing a black leather jacket.
I looked down at the spot where I was supposed to die and felt indifferent.
But one thing I knew for certain. I didn't have pink blood.
***
Grace shot me a wide grin as she stepped out of her new car and took off her shades. "Thought you might like it," she said. "It's going to look so sick when I drive it along the beach...that's mainly what I got it for."
"I didn't even know they made BMWs in musk pink..." I murmured, unsure whether I ought to be impressed or sickened by the colour. Grace looked like a barbie doll next to it, with her long blonde ponytail and her white faux-fur jacket.
Okay, I admit it. I was jealous. I didn't even own a car and she had a pink BMW.
Grace shrugged. "I guess my old one is never coming back, so I might as well splurge."
Where did she pull the money to buy a brand new BMW? I mean, I knew I was undercharging on rent, but this was ridiculous...
"Don't look so shocked," Grace said, following me through the front door with a full arm of groceries. "I've been working a lot of late nights and triple shifts."
"Why have you been working so many late nights?" We entered the kitchen and I made sure to put the milk in the fridge right away, keeping a close eye on it.
"Stay there," I commanded the milk. I backed away slowly as I let the fridge door fall shut. "I'm gonna check on you in a minute so don't go anywhere."
Grace perched herself on a bench stool. She became very quiet. I hadn't realized I'd asked such a heavy question -- I'd only meant to make light conversation.
Pink Blooded: A Lana Pink Mystery Page 11