by S. J. Rozan
“No.” I could barely get the word out. “Not, that’s not better.”
“I knew it! You’re so dependable, I just love ya for it, bro. Okay. Talk to you later. Oh! One more thing. You better hope I don’t get stuck in traffic or anything. Or see too many cops around. Cops kinda spook me, you know? And when I’m spooked I stop walking and hide someplace. You don’t want that.”
“I don’t control the cops, Kevin.”
“No, but you can hope. You can pray real hard. See, you want me to get there kind of soon. Because your girlfriend, I think she’s got maybe two, three hours of air left. Tops. After that, sayonara! Hey, what a great exit line! It’s good, right? I think I’ll use it. Check it out, asshole: sayonara!”
He hung up. I sat for a few seconds, paralyzed, hearing nothing but the silence and the fading echoes of Kevin’s sneer. Then my own voice exploded. “MOTHERFUCKER! Goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch! I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!” I slammed my fist against the door hard enough to send fiery pain streaking up to my shoulder.
Linus grabbed my jacket from behind. “Dude! Dude! People are looking!”
The driver beside us was staring into the car. So was a passenger in the car ahead. I grabbed the strap above the door as Joey made a quick left through the yellow light to get away from curious eyes. Linus toppled into Trella, righted himself.
“Dude! That’s not gonna help.”
“What is? What’s going to help? You heard him, what he wants. Fucking bastard, fucking Kevin, I’ll kill him, I swear I’ll kill him, slowly, as bad as I can make it. After all this shit, that bastard—”
“Dude. Dude! We gotta think here. This time it’s air. He’s up to air, did you catch that?”
“I caught it! Great, he’s down to the end! So? Think about what? What? Motherfucking Kevin—”
“Yeah. Okay. Stop. Have a smoke. We gotta think.”
The smoke was a good idea and I lit one up. But think? “Linus, you get an idea, you tell me. That Webcam, that’s not connected to anything, right? Anything we could trace?”
“Might, but it would take hours. Maybe days.”
“Fucking lot of good that does! What else? What the hell else can we do?”
“Dude? He’s on the street. Sooner or later he’ll head back there.”
“We don’t know where he is and we don’t know where there is.”
“There is here. Somewhere here, downtown.”
I pulled in smoke. He was right. At least it was something. “But what the hell are we supposed to do, just drive around and hope we get lucky enough to spot him?”
“Better than nothing.”
“Not by much.”
“Would this be the time to bring in the cops?” Trella ventured. “They could be on the lookout, just to follow him, not to stop him. There are a lot more of them than us.”
“He’d notice. He’s looking for it; he’ll notice. Every sector car that drives by, if the cop inside turns his head, Kevin will know. He’ll either go to ground, or he’ll try to and they’ll chase him, take him up.”
“Couldn’t they, like, make him talk?” Linus asked. “Promise him immunity or something?”
“Immunity from what? What are they going to charge him with? Kidnapping hookers? Their word against his. Murdering Lei-lei? Their case against me is better.”
“Kidnapping Lydia?”
“Jesus, Linus, how would you even begin to make that case? How could you even prove she was kidnapped in the first place?”
“We have the tapes. Of the phone calls.”
“Can’t prove it’s him. Or her.”
“Voice pattern matching?”
“It wouldn’t be fast enough. They’d need a warrant. He’d shut up. All he has to do is sit there and grin for two hours, and if he’s right about the air where Lydia is, then after that it won’t matter about anything else.”
A brief silence, as that sank in for everyone.
Trella shrugged. “Probably they wouldn’t even find him. They don’t know what he looks like.”
“Well, I have that photo,” Linus said.
“You do?”
“Not a real one, I mean. Photoshopped.” He took out his iPhone. “Here. This is him, pretty much. According to, you know, Jasmine.” He flushed. Trella gave him a curious look, then leaned over the phone, examined the photo silently. Linus leaned with her. Suddenly he sat straight and yelped, “Yo! Twitter! Hey, Trell! We can tweet it!”
Trella looked up, eyes glowing. “Yes! Yes!”
“We can make, like, a flash mob, but in reverse!”
“Yes!”
“With the photo on Facebook, and my Web site!”
Trella threw her arms around him, kissed his cheek. Leaning over her own phone, she said, “Send it to me. You are so brilliant!”
“Naw,” he said, turning crimson for a second time. “Well, okay.”
“What?” I said. “What?”
“Twitter,” said Linus. He was feverishly working his phone. “You know what that is?”
“No idea.”
“It’s like . . .” He was groping for words, distracted by what he was doing. “Like e-mail, but it goes to lots of people at once.”
“So?”
“No, but then everyone else sends it out, too. Dig, you re-tweet.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We send it out,” Trella said, looking up from her phone. “I only have a couple of hundred followers, but Linus has thousands. Those are people who read the messages we send. Tweets.”
“And, see,” Linus picked it up, “all those followers, they have followers. And they have followers, too. So me and Trella, we send tweets that say, ‘Dudes, it’s life and death, for real, if you’re in New York and you see this guy, take his picture and tell me where right now. We don’t find him, he’s gonna kill somebody. But don’t follow him, don’t stop him, don’t spook him!’ Course,” he shrugged, “gotta be shorter than that.” He started thumbing buttons and swiping at his screen.
“No.” Trella sat up straight. “Wait. We can’t say that. If people think they’re chasing a killer they’ll go right up into his face.”
“No, only you would.”
“But I would,” she said. “And there are bound to be other people in New York who would, too. He’ll know right away.”
The spark of hope I’d allowed myself to feel died out. Kids, daydreaming a techie fix to a real-life disaster. But I was no kid. Why had I fallen for it?
I started to turn away, but Trella went on, “No. Look—a contest, we say it’s a contest. Prizes. A promo, for, for—”
“For Wong Security! That’s why the picture’s on my Web site!”
“Yes! Perfect! We say, take a photo of this guy, send it to us. He’s somewhere in New York. Like Where’s Waldo! Random drawing. Only, if he spots you, you’re disqualified. And only one entry per person, multiples to be discarded. So the photos will be sneaky, and no one’ll follow him because once you send one, that’s it for you.”
“Wait,” said Linus. “If it’s a prize, why would people re-tweet? Only adds more players. Lowers your chances.”
“Because,” Trella said, “because there’s a prize for the assist, too! If he’s not in your neighborhood or even your city but it was you who re-tweeted and it’s one of your followers—”
“Dudess!” Linus beamed. “You are the genius!”
Trella shrugged. “My dad says I have my moments. Prize?”
“Security sweep and any fixes, year’s monitoring free, any installation, any size.”
“Got it.”
They both returned to their phones.
I watched, unsure whether to believe or not. Tentatively, I asked, “Can you send the photo?”
“Not on Twitter,” said Linus. “But I just now put it on Facebook and my Web site and sent the links. And my phone number, to send the pictures to.”
I responded to one of the few words I understood: “W
hat pictures?”
“That people are gonna take with their cell phones. When they think they see Mr. Crazy.”
“Linus, not all that many people can possibly need the prize you’re offering. It’s computer security, right?”
Bent over his phone, he nodded. “That’s what I do.”
“So why would people pay attention to your tweet, or whatever it is?”
“Dude, it’s not about the prize. It’s not even about winning. You want like a thousand people in Union Square in an hour, you Twitter it.”
“That’s a flash mob,” Trella added.
“If I want them there for what?”
“Just to go. To be part of the flash mob. Then they all go away again. Dig, dude, people like to be part of shit.”
“Friend me,” Ming rumbled from the other side of Trella. He had a phone out, too.
“You’re on Twitter?” Linus asked, eyebrows raised. “Whoa. Not sure I want to meet your followers.”
“No. Just Facebook. But I’ll post it. Friend me and give me your cell number.”
Whatever that meant, Linus seemed to do it. Ming grunted and worked his sausage fingers along his phone’s keyboard. Beside me, Joey dug his phone from his pocket. “I’m on Twitter, and on Facebook. And MySpace.” He started thumbing his phone, steering with his wrists at the bottom of the wheel. “What’s your number? Friend me, too.”
Linus did for Joey whatever he had for Ming.
“What if Kevin’s on one of these things?” I asked. “Won’t he find out about this?”
Linus shook his head. “He’d have to be following one of us or one of our followers. Or a Facebook friend.”
I didn’t understand what that meant, besides “No.” I gave up. I was surrounded by people thumbing buttons on cell phones and I had no idea what was going on. I half-expected Woof to paw a phone from his collar. Joey pulled into a bus stop so they could all focus. I lit another cigarette and watched the street. “What are we waiting for?” I asked. “I mean, how will we know if it’s working?”
“We’ll—” Linus’s phone pinged. “Like that! Yo! Here comes something!” My heart pounded, but he said, “No. Shit. It’s some other dude.” He held the phone up to me. A city street, the face of a man with a passing resemblance to the photo he’d sent out, but not Kevin. I shook my head.
Joey, apparently done with his part in this, pulled the car out into traffic again. We rolled along for a couple of minutes; then Linus’s phone pinged again. “Wait, here comes another one! Damn. No.”
After a third wrong photo I turned away, resettled in my seat to stare out the front. I smoked, worked hard to keep my disappointment and anger bottled up inside. Like forcing the lava to stay in the volcano, but I did my best. The kids had tried; exploding at them wouldn’t do any good. And it was myself I was furious with anyway, for falling for it, for getting my hopes up over the possibility of some stupid Internet trick. Maybe Trella had been right, before. We should call Mary. Or wait for Kevin to activate his Webcam and try to trace that, while it transmitted images I didn’t want to imagine. Or pray for the one-in-a-million chance of spotting Kevin as he strolled by. Three bad choices, but they were all we had.
Ping. “Yes! Yes! Dudes, I think it’s him!”
I whipped around in the seat, resolve blown. “Dammit, Linus—”
“It’s him!” He held up the iPhone. A man’s three-quarter profile on a city street, slanted and not quite focused, but my heart hammered when I saw it.
I nodded. “Son of a bitch. I think it is.”
“It is! That’s from Forty-first and Seventh, says the dude who sent it. Shit, he’s gonna walk down from there? That’ll take forever!”
“About an hour. He’s going to burn up an hour walking down here,” I said, thinking about Lydia, thinking about air.
“You want we should go up and get him?” That was Joey, ready to rocket.
Before I could answer, Linus said, “Another one! Next corner.”
“Head up there,” I told Joey. “But not to pick him up. Can we parallel him? He might lead us right to her.”
“You sure you want to do it that way?” Ming asked. “Give me five minutes, I could get him to tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Didn’t work on me.”
He shrugged. “You didn’t know anything.”
I regarded him, considering it. When I turned the offer down, it wasn’t from benevolence.
“As long as he seems to be headed in this direction, our best bet is to follow him,” I said. “For about an hour. After that, maybe we’ll do it your way.”
Ming gave a slow nod. He didn’t smile but his eyes glinted.
Pings from the iPhone began to fill the car, faster and thicker as we drove uptown. The next two photos were of other people, and strangers’ faces kept cropping up after that, too, but pictures of Kevin began to outnumber them in a big way. In shade and sunlight, sharp or blurred, close and from a distance, Kevin made his oblivious way downtown. From corners, midblocks, and the middle of the street, people who didn’t know me, didn’t know Lydia, most likely didn’t know Linus, Trella, Joey, or Ming, clicked away on their cell phone cameras and sent photos of a pedestrian’s progress to a stranger’s phone number.
“Won’t he see them?” I asked early on. “So many people taking photos around him? Even though you said to make sure he doesn’t?”
“Dude.” Linus gave me that pained and patient look. “Check out your window. What do you see?”
I turned and looked. “Point taken.” Every third person was talking on a cell phone, thumbing a text into one, or, yes, shooting a cell phone photo.
“Fortieth and Seventh,” Linus said. “Thirty-ninth. Wow, another one, same spot. Thirty-eighth. Wait, from the same dude. And same again. Trella, this jerk, send him a text: ‘No joke, don’t follow, you’re about to disqualify yourself!’ Thirty-eighth and Eighth. Mr. Crazy’s heading west.” Then, briefly, nothing.
“We lost him?” My heart pounded. “Maybe he ducked inside somewhere? Maybe he has Lydia in one of those buildings, not downtown at all?”
“I don’t know. Could be there’s just no one on that block—wait, no, here comes one! Still Thirty-eighth.”
We were nearly there. Joey turned left, rolled us east on Thirty-eighth Street. My eyes roved over every inch of sidewalk, both sides of the street, never stopped moving. Was he really here, that son of a bitch?
Halfway along the block I was stabbed by an adrenaline spike. “Shit!” I exploded, then clamped my jaw shut, glad the windows were up. I pointed. Kevin Cavanaugh, sunglassed and baseball capped, sauntered along the sidewalk, sipping a takeout coffee. He was graying, big, and bronzed. He must have spent the months since his release working to erase his jailhouse pallor. He hadn’t stopped hitting the gym, either. Muscles mounded his arms and shoulders, and the soft gut I remembered had been replaced by large pecs and a solid waist. Jesus, you bastard, I thought, you should thank me, I did you a favor, you never looked so good! But the face: even behind the dark glasses, under the shade of the brim, the arrogance, the challenge, the sneer were the same. I’d never wanted anything as much as I wanted right then to jump out of the car and beat him to an unrecognizable pulp.
“Dude? You okay?”
“Fuck. Yeah.”
“Then let go the strap, you’re gonna rip it out of the roof.”
From Ming: “I’m saying again. You want me to go get him?”
As I watched, a pair of young women pointed their cell phones in Kevin’s direction. A few seconds later, two pings sounded inside the car.
“No,” I told Ming. “He takes us to Lydia. Then he’s yours. If I don’t get him first.”
“You don’t,” Ming warned me. “Remember what Mr. Lu said.”
I lit another cigarette. I didn’t give a good goddamn what Mr. Lu said. I was having enough trouble following my own sensible, reasonable course, enough difficulty shoving aside visions of Kevin with his brains greasing the
pavement.
We followed Kevin’s path from a block over, or a block behind, or two streets down, circling, preceding, trailing. Time felt like it was racing and standing still at once, but it was really passing normally and we were still okay. Twice more we drove right past him. “It’s a car service car,” said Joey. “They all look alike, you know? Guarantee he won’t notice.” That was probably true but I was reluctant to push it. And we didn’t need to. The pings were steady and so was Kevin’s progress. In a little under an hour, we were almost back downtown.
23
“Trella.” I turned to the backseat as we hit the college student anthill that was lower Broadway. We’d gotten down here by a winding route, weaving a complicated pattern required by one-way streets and Kevin’s meandering. He was working his way south and east, but he wasn’t in any hurry. The photos coming into Linus’s iPhone showed him window-shopping, smiling up at buildings, buying peanuts from a street vendor. He looked like what he said he was: a man drinking in the sights and sounds of a city he was about to leave.
The photos and Joey’s expert driving, paralleling, following, and pulling away, had been enough for a while. Here, though, we were getting close. The area covered by the cell tower he’d been using was a few blocks away. So I asked Trella, “You ever tail anyone?”
“No.” She grinned. “But I bet I can.”
“If this is where he has Lydia, somewhere down here, he’ll duck into the building soon. Too much to hope for that someone’ll take a photo of that. We could lose him.” Ping. “I want you to go around the block, follow him on foot. Keep him in the corner of your eye, don’t stare directly at him, even at his back. He’ll feel it if you do. Okay?”
She nodded. Ming said, “She’s an amateur. Why her, not me?”
I looked from Trella to Ming, the Goth teenager to the skinhead man-mountain. “You’re kidding, right?” To Trella again: “Window-shop, talk on your phone. To me, the whole time.”
“On this.” Linus, a step ahead, handed me a new prepaid from his cargo pocket. I gave Trella the number.
“Smile, laugh,” I said. “Try to look like everyone else who’s on a cell phone and has no idea what’s going on around them. If Kevin seems to make you, if he shows the slightest interest, dash into a store like the stuff it’s selling is what you’ve wanted all your life.”