by Tod Goldberg
Fiona leaned across me and smiled at Frank. She’d been sitting quietly up until that point, but I knew as soon as Frank concluded his speech that she’d have something to say. She can only go so long.
“Pardon me,” she said, a bit of Southern twang to her voice, playing the part, grasping her inner Southern belle ... provided Southern belles these days packed nines. “But what you just said positively gave me the chills. Is there a chance of a terrorist attack nearby?”
“Oh, no, ma’am,” he said. “Men like your boyfriend keep us very safe from that sort of thing.”
I gave Frank a firm nod of my head. It’s the kind of thing men like to think they can get away with in lieu of speaking, but it really only works on people who aren’t terribly adept at conversation as it is.
“Oh, well, thank God,” she said, and leaned back in her seat and fanned herself with her hands. “I think I almost caught the vapors for a moment.”
“I do have to tell you, Lieutenant, that a few buddies of mine still in the area have said that there is a criminal element in these parts now,” I said. “Damn shame, if you ask me.”
Frank took an exaggerated look over both of his shoulders, which I found particularly odd, as not a single car had even passed by since we parked. And if I couldn’t see them from where I sat, I would have assumed that they actually rolled up and stored the sidewalks at dusk. “I only say this because I respect your service to this country,” Frank said, his voice low, “but I believe immigration is one of the biggest blights on this nation. That I have to now protect people who aren’t even Americans is the reason why I no longer believe in the two-party system.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said. “This is a nation that should preserve its identity and not let in people who weren’t from here originally. If you can’t trace your roots back to before 1492, then you don’t belong. I mean, what is America if it’s filled with people who are from other countries?”
“The idea of a melting pot makes me positively sick,” Fiona said. “I particularly find the Irish repulsive. Don’t you know? It’s so bracing to be around people who share our values.”
“I may wear this on my chest,” Frank tapped at the rent-a-cop badge on his chest, “but if it were up to me, I’d have the flag right here. Not everyone in this development would agree with me. There are subjects here who, if I understand, have spent time in prison and who are possibly illegal in their entire nature. But, apparently, just about anyone can move in where they like these days.”
Frank was the strangest combination of conservative talk radio, conspiracy theories, faux law enforcement and outright racism I’d encountered in some time. If I gave him an opening, I’m sure he would have been happy to discuss the finer points of the Illuminati with me. He also, apparently, didn’t have a clear sense of American history or the basic laws of the land. That he was providing security for anything was frightening, but at least he was an easy and able cipher of the information I needed. Somewhere in the development, the Latin Emperors had taken hold. Or at least Junior Gonzalez had.
“Well, I could sit here all evening and trade war stories with you, Lieutenant,” I said, “but if you don’t mind, me and the little lady are going to take a drive around my old memories for a bit. Is that okay with you?”
“Of course,” Frank said. “There’s a very nice gazebo on the west side of the lake that you might enjoy sitting in for a bit. It’s where I write my blog when I get off.”
I gave Frank the nod again, and he actually saluted me. I rolled up the window and tried not to peel away from the curb.
“You should have let me shoot him,” Fiona said.
“Guys like him,” I said, “shoot themselves every time they open their mouths.”
We wound through the development as we headed toward Junior’s house, and every few seconds Fiona would gasp or moan about something. It wasn’t as exciting as it sounds, since her noises had mostly to do with terrible choices in lawn decoration, though her loudest protest was about the fake city square that dominated the center of the development, replete with a clock tower, a sunken lawn amphitheater and diagonal parking spaces for the shops and businesses that had yet to move into the empty buildings. A sign declared: CHEYENNE LAKES IS THE PERFECT PLACE TO DO BUSINESS ... AND LIVE.
“What is this?” she said.
“The future,” I said.
“That looks like the past?”
“I think that’s the idea. Or it was in 2006.”
“I suspect your friend Lieutenant Frank would blame this on the immigrants?”
“Surely,” I said. “But particularly those swarthy Irish people.”
“Did you like that?”
“It was a nice touch.”
We continued on, traveling deeper and deeper into the development. Cheyenne Lakes might have been designed as a mixed-use, master-planned community, but the more I drove through its labyrinthine streets, the more I recognized why Junior had made it his base of operations: It would be possible to have lookouts at all the possible angles without drawing any interest from the average citizen. For the cost of rent, Junior had a ready-made fortress. It would be disturbingly easy to run a very safe and secure base of operations for the entire Latin Emperors nation of prison and street gangs.
Once I finally found Junior’s street, I turned the car around and headed back to the fake city center, which was a good half mile away.
“What are you doing?” Fi asked.
“I have a theory I want to test,” I said, and explained to Fiona my thoughts, and told her I thought it might be best to approach Junior’s home on foot so as not to raise any flags of suspicion. I grabbed several of the cell phones and their assorted parts, too. If my assumptions were correct, we’d need them.
“If I’d known we were going for a midnight stroll I would have worn different shoes,” Fiona said.
“It’s not midnight,” I said. “And I’ve seen you fight a Chechen terrorist in higher heels.”
“It’s this place!” Fi let out an exasperated sigh. “It ages you by osmosis.” She slipped out of her shoes and then removed her top, too, revealing a plain white tank top underneath. “What?” she said. Apparently, the look on my face had a question attached to it.
“I was just wondering if you were going to take off your jeans, too.”
“Not tonight,” she said. “Besides, I’d better look the part, right? And what says ‘casual walk in the neighborhood’ more than no shoes and no bra?”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, so I took off my shoes, too. I’d have taken off my shirt, but then the butt of my gun might have been a bit too clear an indicator that I wasn’t just out to enjoy the lovely night air ... which, that evening, carried the strong scent of the Everglades blowing up from the south.
We got out of the car and walked, hand in hand, back toward Junior’s house. Had I known the plan for the evening, I would have found a dog to fill out the portrait of domestic bliss.
It wasn’t until we started walking that I realized every street, avenue, road, court and cul-de-sac was named for some aspect of Native American culture, another element that must have escaped Lieutenant Frank’s keen eye. We passed Natchez Court, Cochise Lane, Anasazi Road, even the requisite Seminole Street crossed Pueblo Way. But what Fiona and I were really looking for were things Lieutenant Frank probably wouldn’t take note of.
“That house up on the corner of Seminole there has a lovely window dressing,” Fiona said. “And some very nice rocks, too.”
It sure did. The house in question was fully illuminated, which made it odd, as the other houses on the block were completely dark. I guess people in Cheyenne Lakes didn’t bother to watch the late-night news, either. The house was pointed at a diagonal from the entrance to Acuera Street, which was where Junior’s house was located. We were coming up from the right side of the lit house, and I could see through the cheap blinds that there wasn’t any furniture in the room, which could mean nothing. Plenty of ba
nks keep the lights on inside foreclosed homes to discourage squatters and the like. But this house didn’t look like it was foreclosed upon, especially not with the two Honda Accords parked in the driveway.
The rocks, however, were the giveaway: They were fake rocks with security cameras installed inside them ... and not very well. They were the kind of fake-rocks-with-a-security-camera-in-them that anyone can buy at Target, and so the neighbors probably paid no mind to them, not even when the cameras pointed away from the house. I looked up toward the roof and noticed a satellite dish, which was probably just the wireless receiver for the cameras. Junior was beaming security footage from down the block directly to his house. Smart.
But not smart enough. Fi and I stepped back around the corner and found a park bench beneath an old-style lamp. It sure was a charming place for a gang leader to live.
I handed Fiona two cell phones. “Take these apart,” I said.
“How romantic,” she said. “What are we building?”
“Jamming device,” I said.
“Michael, you know I love the dirty talk,” she said.
Blocking a standard, unencrypted, wireless video signal requires only two things: another video signal and enough battery power to cause an alteration to the electromagnetic waves. Three cell phones with video capability can achieve this without much problem. If you have an old cell phone, it’s much more difficult than if you have the new 4G phones, which generate more power than was originally used to run NORAD. If you have three 4G phones, all you need to do is wire the batteries together so that they feed into a single phone and then begin shooting video. Place the phones next to the video source, and all that will be transmitted is blackness.
If you have the proper tools—in this case, Fiona’s earring studs, a paper clip from my pocket and a credit card—you can build this device in about five minutes. It won’t last very long, since the batteries will cook the master phone in about thirty minutes, but if you need to jam a signal longer than thirty minutes, you’d have better tools and material from the get-go.
When we finished up, we walked back toward the house with the cameras, this time from the opposite side of the street. From this vantage point, I was able to get a better view of the rock camera. It was fixed in position and wasn’t motion activated, which told me there were probably another three or four cameras catching other angles from the illuminated windows.
I circled back on the street and came up along the side of the house again, so that I was diagonal to the first rock. It wouldn’t be able to catch me because it was fixed, so I simply removed the back of the rock—they come with a handsome tab latch and several arrows to indicate just how to disable the device, which is nice—and placed the wired phones directly atop the electrical pack. I would have just unplugged the entire device, which would have been simple enough, but I saw that there were cables running the length of the house and up into the roof, which meant that it was all circuited together. This would jam the entire transmission, not just one camera.
I walked back around and met Fiona on the sidewalk.
“Sophisticated?” she said.
“No,” I said. “A good idea. Bad execution. Someone has given him good advice, but there’s a serious lack of skill involved here.”
As we passed the driveway, I knelt down to scratch my foot, but also to get a look at the space beneath the Hondas I’d noticed earlier. There wasn’t a single spot of oil I could see, and the tires on both cars were only slightly worn. The cars also had dealer plates, which I suspected meant that they’d been stolen.
If you’re going to steal a car, steal a car with dealer plates. Dealers move their plates from automobile to automobile, so it’s impossible to track them down to a specific car. Police also don’t care about a car with dealer plates—it’s a car that no one owns yet, so there’s nothing of criminal note for them to pay attention to.
In this case, the cars were probably stolen and the plates were probably stolen, but not stolen together. It was a perfect (and easy) crime to pull off in a community like this, where you could set off a nuclear bomb at 11:00 P.M. and no one would realize there was a problem until the next morning, when they stepped outside to fetch the newspaper. It was unlikely that anyone paid any attention to anything unless it directly violated the HOA’s codes.
I stood up awkwardly, just in case anyone was watching, which I doubted. It was so quiet you could hear time.
“Is it your Achilles, darling?” Fiona asked.
“No,” I said, “just a slight irritation, my sweet.”
I didn’t think our voices were being recorded, but as we walked we kept up a running dialogue about the weather, the Johnsons’ new pool, Mr. Jones’ new goiter and our collective desire to spend the next Christmas in Spain. It was the kind of domestic conversation I imagined real people had all the time, but that was about as foreign to my domestic experience as I could possibly get. I tried to remember what my parents used to talk about when they were together, and then I remembered that they didn’t talk about anything. They screamed a lot, but there wasn’t much in the way of meaningless conversations about the life they were living. Not a great way to prepare young men to grow up into chatty adults, which neither I nor my brother, Nate, really were. Oh, we could talk ... we just didn’t chat very well.
As we got closer to Junior’s house, I noticed yet another empty home, this one directly across the street from Junior’s. This one wasn’t lit up like it was on fire, as the house down the block was, but I could see a dipole sound antenna mounted above the storm drain. It wasn’t a complex system Junior had working—in fact, it was about as rudimentary as they come, and could be so easily hacked into that I could see the wheels in Fiona’s mind already turning—but if you’re in a safe area, surrounded by people who mean you no harm, you don’t exactly need satellites sending you the positions of Russian subs every morning.
“Follow my lead,” I said to Fiona, and then turned up Junior Gonzalez’ front walk. His house was modest—a one-story ranch style with a neatly trimmed lawn. A bed of roses was beneath the two picture windows that likely looked into the living room, though the drapes were closed, and there was a wicker basket with fake flowers sitting atop a distressed wood bench in the portico, just adjacent to the ten-foot-high front door.
When we reached the door, I attempted to open it. I could tell immediately from the complete lack of movement that it was secured by more than just a mere dead bolt. That the front door was actually metal overlaid with wood was also a pretty good clue.
If you have a metal front door, it’s because you expect that one day someone is going to try to break it down. If you’re smart enough to build a metal door into your house, you’re probably smart enough to have a camera on the door, too—Junior’s was buried in the fake flowers, another Target special—and maybe you’re even smart enough to not answer the door when a stranger starts kicking it and making a bunch of noise.
“Jeff? Jeff? It’s Marvin! You locked the door! Jeff!” I pounded on the door a few times, which didn’t make much noise on account of the dulling nature of the metal, so I started slapping at the wall. And then Fiona started shouting, too.
“Mary? Mary? I’m freezing out here! It must be seventy degrees out here!”
I stepped back from the portico and slapped at the living room windows. Double paned. Nice. I slapped them again and shouted for Jeff. Fiona stepped out onto the lawn, fished around for a rock and then threw it at the garage door, and screamed some more for Mary.
“More?” she mouthed.
I shrugged. Why the hell not? Fiona picked up another rock, but before she could throw it, the front door opened and an exceptionally large Latino man stepped out. He wore only a robe and shower shoes and a confused look on his face. “Why are you screaming and throwing things at my home?” he asked. It was a rather pleasant entreaty from a man who’d spent twenty-five years in prison and had either killed or ordered the deaths of probably dozens of men.
&
nbsp; “Oh, crap,” I said. “All these houses look alike. I thought this was Jeff’s house. We’re visiting him, took a walk down to the gazebo and I guess we got lost. I’m really sorry. I thought this was Jeff and Mary’s place. Honey, do you know what street they live on? This isn’t the right house.”
Fiona, still with a rock clutched in her hand, sat down on Junior’s lawn. “How can you be so stupid?” she said.
“Honey,” I said, “this is not a big deal. We’ll find the house.” I turned to Junior, gave him one in my new series of looks meant to convey instant brotherhood—this one was my “Women, what can you do with them?” smile—and then took a step toward him so that I could give him a loud stage whisper. “There can’t be that many houses in the development, right? I think it was on one of those Indian streets. Apache, maybe?”
“Please, get off my lawn,” Junior said. “I just had it reseeded.”
“No problem,” I said, and then Fiona began to cry.
“Why is she crying?” Junior asked.
“We both had a little to drink tonight,” I said, and then I gave him the “We’re both in this together look” men often share in situations that involve crying females. “I hate to ask this, but would it be possible to come inside and use your phone? It’s awfully dark out, and I don’t feel like there’s a great chance my lady friend and I will ever find Jeff and Mary’s house.”
“No,” he said.
“What?” Fiona said. She was up now and storming toward Junior. “No? What? What kind of person are you? What kind of values do you have? We aren’t going to come inside and steal your plates, you asshole. We just want to use the telephone. And if I don’t get to a restroom in the next five minutes, I’ll be back on your lawn! And then what will you do?”
I caught Fiona in my arms before she could begin doing whatever crazy, drunk, Southern women are prone to do to hulking ex-convicts, which is probably whatever they damn well please. “Easy, honey,” I said. “He doesn’t want us in his home. That’s fine. It’s his right.”