King of Code

by CD Reiss

  She looked away, a little pink in the cheek. Tucked her hair behind her ear. The diamond in her lobe had to be a carat and a half. It looked as real as she did.

  “No one in particular,” I said. “I was thinking of staying the night around here.”

  I actually hoped I wouldn’t have to, but no one who could hack me lived here, and I needed a place to drop my stuff.

  “Oh, uh. There’s a hotel on Oakwood.” She pointed in a general direction. Her hand was fine, delicate, with white tape around three finger joints.

  I took out my phone. She stared at it. Were they still using flip phones in Nowhereville or something?

  “Do you know what it’s called? I can look it up.”

  “The connection isn’t great around here. You just go right out of the lot. Go for about a mile and a half, and you’ll see a gate onto Oakwood. Take that until you see it.”

  “What’s it called?” I could GPS the name more easily than stare at my odometer.

  “Bedtimey Inn? But like I said, the connection’s pretty spotty around here.” She jerked her thumb behind her toward the little convenience store. “I’m helping out at the grocery. Want to call from there and see if they have any room?”

  “I’ll just drive over.”

  She barely moved, but I could tell I’d snubbed her by refusing her offer.

  “I’m sure you know what you want.” Her eyelids fluttered. Her lashes were blond at the tips and darker at the roots.

  Strange looking girl. Beautiful and exotic. Just a touch younger than me. Her nipples were probably the palest pink fading into bronze at the center. Or the other way around. I wanted to know.

  It was the wanting that tweaked a thought, a memory, a flash of déjà vu. It tapped a turtle’s shell, and though the animal heard the tap, it didn’t come out.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “Um, did you go to Montgomery High?”

  “No.”

  “Do you work at the distro center off the interstate? I sub there sometimes.”

  “No.” I couldn’t help smirking. The notion that I was from here, working at the distribution center off the interstate, was ridiculous, and I couldn’t hide it. “You just look familiar. But I’ve never been around here before.”

  I almost asked her if she’d ever been to Silicon Valley or suggested we’d met at MIT, but why push it? If someone that beautiful had ever left Barrington, she never would have come back.

  “Okay.” She folded her bottom lip in thought, and I knew where the crease had come from. It was so much sexier as the result of a habit than a genetic detail. “You sure you don’t want to call first?” Another thumb jerk toward the little grocery store.

  “I’m good.”

  A shiny blue pickup pulled up in front of the store. She waved at it. A guy in a baseball cap rolled the window down to give us a short wave and a dirty look that may have all been in my head. He looked to be in his late twenties, but hard twenties, with skin the product of sun and tobacco. A hound leaned over his lap and stuck his head out, giving a bark when he saw us.

  The girl turned back to me. “Bye, then.”

  “Bye.”

  She took two steps down to the lot, blond waves flapping like Old Glory on a fall day.

  “Do you have a name?” I called to her.

  She turned and walked backward. “Harper.”

  “Harper.” I said it more to myself than her.

  She didn’t ask me my name but went to the truck, gave the dog a pat, the guy a couple of words, then bounced up to the store. I flipped the key to the Caddy around my finger, watching her. When she disappeared, Baseball Cap opened the car door, watching me. The dog poured out and ran up the steps to the girl.

  Harper.

  I waved to the guy in the cap. He went toward the grocery store after his dog without waving back. I got in the Caddy and turned the key, but though I laid my hand on the gearshift, I couldn’t move until I said in the car what I couldn’t say outside.

  “Wow.”

  VIII

  Reception was worse than spotty. No hotspot. Data didn’t work until it did for five seconds, then my phone would buzz so hard with back notifications I thought the casing would break.

  I pulled into the motel parking lot. Two long stories. No cars. Unlit soda vending machine and a snack machine with nothing in the spirals. The office door had a coded realtor’s key box on it.

  So much for the locals knowing where to find a hotel. I plucked up my phone. No signal, but I could see what had come in. I ignored everything but Deeprak on our cloaked and encrypted message stream.

 

 
  in the Barrington Bottling Plant.>

  “Don’t tell me.” I scrolled down. “It’s—”

 

 
  spot. Oracle wants a meeting. We’re

  going to have to resell the whole thing

  to them.>

  “We have to close the hole first. Then GreyHatC0n.” I was talking to myself in the front seat of the car. I never talked to myself. I was too secretive for that.

 
  fix it and prove it at GHC0N.>

 
  wasteland. Set up Oracle meeting. Call

  Dan at Walmart. Tap me if anything.>

  The crunch of tires on gravel made me look up from my phone and roll down my window. A claptrap Chevy with a rusted-out bottom pulled up alongside the Caddy. At some distant point in the 1990s, it had been either dark blue, forest green, or some shade of grey. The hand-tinting on the windows was buckling and cracking, leaving clouds of transparency on the glass.

  The passenger window rolled down slowly, with an uncomfortable grinding noise, revealing the blonde from the grocery store.

  Harper.

  “Hey,” she said. “I called, and it turns out they closed.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Sorry. I don’t stay in the hotels.”

  “Not your fault. I should have listened.”

  She acknowledged my apology with a smile. “I can take you somewhere else.”

  “Actually.” I ended the sentence. I didn’t want to ask this across car windows. I opened the Caddy door as much as I could without denting the Chevy and slid out.

  She took the cue and got out of her car. We met by the taillights.

  “Actually?” The wind caught the edges of her hair, sending blades out in a corona around her face. I gripped my thumbs in my fists. She folded her hands in front of her.

  “Do you know anything about the Barrington Bottling Plant?”

  She gave me half a laugh that was as good as an eye roll but wasn’t. I got the impression eye-rolling was beneath her.

  “Why? It’s cl—”

  “—osed. I know.”

  “You want to buy it? It’s up for sale if you can pay the back taxes.”

  “I’m not in the market for a bottling plant. I just… you know…” I put up one hand in surrender. “I’m a lousy liar. So I can’t make up something plausible, but I can’t tell you either.”

  “Okay?”

  “Can you take me to it?”

  “Are you going to cut me into little pieces when we get there?”

  “Uh, no.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Do you intend any harm to me at all?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to come on to me?”

  “No, but if you want to come on to me—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  “You really must be a lousy liar.”

  “Truth is easier. You’re safe. Promise. I’ll keep my hands in my pockets.”

  “We take my car.”

  “Deal.”

  She pulled out so I could open the door. When I closed it and she smiled, for the second time, I had the nagging feeling I’d seen he
r before.

  IX

  She drove as if her Chevy was starving and the asphalt was its single food source. We passed a house in the rolling brown plains every thirty seconds. Some were in worse shape than others, but none looked occupied.

  “You have a name?” she asked.

  “Taylor.”

  “Taylor what?”

  Did I want to answer that? I wasn’t famous (yet). The odds that revealing my last name would endanger me were slim, but I was habitually close with information.

  “Why are all these houses boarded? Oh, wait.” We passed a set-back two-story with a car in the drive and a dog tied to a tree. “Not that one. But the rest.”

  She shrugged, flipping her hand off the wheel for a second. “Barrington closed, uh… I guess nine years ago? Give or take, so there wasn’t anywhere to work. Folks moved or died eventually. No one’s going to buy a house where they can’t find a job so… here we are.”

  A big brick box crept over the horizon, closer than it should have been, as if it had sneaked up on us and whispered, “Boo.”

  “Why did you stay?” I asked without thinking.

  “This is my home.”

  I was glad she couldn’t see my face because my mouth was closed against a ton of shit I didn’t say. Like, you could model anywhere, or you’re staying for your boyfriend, aren’t you? Which was followed by weirdly compulsive offers to dump him and come back with me. She’d said about ten words to me, half of them questions about whether or not I was a serial killer, yet I wanted to hear her voice again and again.

  “Your parents from here?” I asked so she’d talk again.

  “My family goes way back. Most left, but my sister and I stayed. I can’t really see living anywhere else.”

  That seemed like a huge failure of imagination.

  We got close enough to see the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence around the factory. The yellow warning signs became visible as the road got rutted, but we were still a quarter mile away. The car rocked, and Harper had to slow down to a less death-defying speed. I opened the window. Vs and Ws of screeching birds headed south.

  She stopped in front of a yellow-and-black arm blocking the road, next to a boarded-up guardhouse.

  “Okay, you have to drive.” She put the car in park. “When the thing goes up, you have to go through fast.”

  “Okay.”

  She got out, and I slid over.

  She pointed at me through the window. “Put it in drive. You have to go right away. I mean it.”

  I put the car in drive. She nodded and gave me the thumbs-up.

  Disturbing a nest of crickets or cicadas or some other noisy, hopping bug, she reached around the base of the arm and did something I couldn’t see. The yellow-and-black striped arm jerked up violently. I went through.

  Barely. I hit the gas and sped through. The back of the car was scarcely past when the arm slammed down with a high-pitched squeal.

  “Jesus.”

  Hair flying behind her, she crossed in front of the car, giving me two thumbs up.

  Yeah. That deserved a thumbs-up. My life was falling apart, but that had been fun.

  She got in the passenger seat. “Great. Take this to the gate. Then we can get out and walk around.”

  “Can you get me inside?”

  I had no reason to go inside, but it wasn’t as though I had any idea what I was looking for anyway.

  “That’s why we’re here, right?” Like a tour guide with nothing better to say, she pointed toward a bank of tall reeds to the left. “River’s over there. I live just on the other side.”

  She smelled like ozone, the buzz of the air before it rained, crackling with the pressure of something about to happen as it pushed against the few seconds preceding it.

  “Pull over here.” She directed me left, around the chain-link fence and away from the parking lot.

  The factory was predictably huge. Red brick. Big windows behind steel grates. What had once been graffiti dripped from as high as a kid’s arm could reach, as if it had just been melted by cleaner but not wiped away. BARRINGTON GLASS WORKS stretched across the top in chipped green paint.

  “This thing steers like a bumper car.”

  “How does a bumper car steer? Pull over by that concrete slab thing.”

  “It slides when you turn, like it’s got no relation to the actual world. And it shimmies left.” I put the car in park. “Is this even safe?”

  She got out without answering. I rushed to follow her, taking the key out of the ignition as she ran her hand along the length of the fence. It rattled like chains.

  “Wait up.” I jogged after her. “Where are you taking me?”

  “To the back.”

  “You’re not going to cut me up into little pieces are you?” I handed her the car key.

  She smiled slightly as she took the key. Just enough to let me know she was considering it.

  “So, you came into town in such a rush, you didn’t figure out where to stay. Can’t tell me why you want to get into an old bottling plant. Got on a snazzy jacket.” She whipped around the corner. “Driving a rented Caddy. Those are really nice shoes, and you don’t even care that they’re getting full of dirt.”

  “I have money. Never said I didn’t, Miss Diamond Earrings.”

  She stopped short by a gate with a lock. “Tell me what you want here.”

  As far as I was concerned, I’d been the picture of patience and charm up until that moment. I hadn’t pushed her to help me. I’d been nice. I hadn’t freaked out half as much as I wanted over the fact that a trapdoor had opened up under my life.

  “Are you done helping me?” I asked.

  “If you’re not here to buy the place?”

  “I told you—”

  “Everett Fitzgerald’s talking about buying it so…” She drifted off as if I could infer the rest.

  The Fitz I knew was eccentric, brilliant, two generations from royalty. I couldn’t believe he’d ever heard of Barrington Glass Works. Not for a minute. Fitz was in the business of eliminating traffic and solving world peace. Not bottling.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “Heard about it a month ago from a realtor in Doverton. He needs it to build the personal helicopters is what we think. He’s coming in three weeks to look at it.” She glistened with excitement. “When I first saw you, I thought you might be scouting for him.”

  “I’m not.”

  She shrugged, clearly disappointed.

  “I’m not going to hurt you or the property. I’m not going to buy the plant. I’m not going to do anything you expect. In an hour, I’m going to be a crazy story you tell your friends. Are you going to let me in or not?”

  “No.”

  My patience was held together with scotch tape, and it was getting loose. “Why not?”

  “I don’t have the code.” She tilted her head toward the padlock. It was the size of a box of pushpins and had a row of buttons.

  “Okay, you know what? This was fun. But I could have done it myself. I could have driven here with my GPS, parked at the guardhouse, walked here, and been in the same barrel of shit as I am now. No, I would have been better off because I would have had a car. So, no, I don’t want to cut you into little pieces. It’s not my thing. But my God, if I were a cut-a-girl-into-little-pieces kind of guy, this would be the day I started.”

  She raised an eyebrow. Daring me. She was daring me to cut her into little pieces, which wasn’t even on my list of shit to do.

  “Let me see this.” I got my hands on the padlock.

  It attached the ends of a heavy chain, which was wrapped around the poles of the gate. It had a code, which meant it could be cracked, right? I took out my phone to check the Tor boards. Maybe someone had a master code that worked.

  No signal.

  “Is this the only gate?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Do you have tools in the trunk? A hacksaw? Stick of dynamite?” I looked at the top edge of the fe
nce. There was a break in the barbed wire. Maybe I could get in there. I hooked my fingers on the chain link just above my head.

  “No.”

  I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t think tools would do it either. I also didn’t believe she didn’t know how to get in. There was enough graffiti to account for a hardware store full of spray paint.

  “Rebecca or Carlyle would have the key, I guess. She’s the realtor over in Doverton, and he does security for everything around here. We can call them if we go back.”

  “Yeah. No. Don’t worry about it.”

  I took out my pocketknife and pinched out the awl. I didn’t have time to pretend a normal way in was going to work, nor did I have the patience to explain a hundred times why I wanted to get into an empty factory.

  I lifted the weight of the lock and looked under it. Three pinholes. One bigger than the other two. “Those earrings? They platinum?”

  “White gold.” Her veil of suspicion didn’t obscure her curiosity enough to silence her.

  “Can I borrow one?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s white gold, so it’s hard enough that I won’t bend it.” I held out my hand. “If I break it, I’ll replace it. But I won’t break it.”

  She thought for a second, looking me up and down as if scanning my complete character. Either liking what she saw or accepting my shortcomings, her hands went to her ear. When she looked at the tall reeds, her hair blew back. Her neck, her jaw, those earrings. I wanted to mark her right at the base of the curve and the center of the length of her throat.

  I didn’t even have time for the fantasy, much less charming it into reality.

  Two pieces of jewelry sat in her outstretched palm. The diamond post and the backing.

  I reached for the post. “Thank you.”

  She closed her hand before I got it. “What do you think is in there?”