"Here," Jeremy said, touching the upper left corner of the screen. We could just make words in a very faint font.
Scintallant you're not. No puzzles or cryptograms for this group. I'll make it as easy as possible. Just log in here, Mute-Sweet Tooth-Doubletalk, to see the plain answer. No caps. No spaces. Underscore between passwords.
"Not even a 'good luck'," I said. When Jeremy and Barbara quizzed me with glances, I added, "Like good luck getting all this past the cops."
"Yeah," said Jeremy, standing and waving at the seat. "And whoever else is watching us. You're up first, Mute."
I sat. The curser blinked at me from the login box. I focused on the laptop's keyboard.
"Hey Mute," said Jeremy. "Don't stick your tongue out. It worries me."
"And maybe it draws attention," was Barbara's two cents worth.
I re-inserted my tongue in my mouth and allowed my finger to hover above 'b'. Then I drew back. "You'll see my secret word."
"You don't trust us?"
This from Jeremy, the least trustworthy of a worthless lot. I didn't respond.
"Don't worry, passwords are masked. When you type your word in all you'll see are black dots."
"Oh," I said. I raised my index finger again—and again lowered it. "You guys mind not watching me?"
Barbara and Jeremy had been bug-eyed with interest, practically lying on top of me. Their eyes went even buggier and they turned away.
Damn. My tongue was out again. I retracted it and began to type: b. A black dot popped up in the login field. b...r...i...n.... "How can you tell if you're typing capitals or not?"
"The caps lock is off, unless you pressed it," Jeremy said.
"Oh..." I looked back down at the screen. Where was I? I counted the dots by silently voicing the letters: b...r...i...n.... I entered the last two letters: k...s. Then I sat back.
"Did you underscore?" Jeremy asked.
"Uh..."
He nudged me out of my seat and typed a single key. Then he stood. "Your turn, Sweet Tooth."
Bracing herself in front of the laptop as though she anticipated a powerful electric shock, Barbara squinted at the faint login box.
"Well?" Jeremy demanded after a minute.
"I forgot my contacts," Barbara said, not complainingly, but with the reasonable plainness of an octogenarian explaining why she could no longer walk without assistance.
"You can't see well enough to type?" Jeremy said impatiently.
"Of course I can. I just need to...need to..." She inclined her nose until it nearly touched the keyboard. Abruptly, she said, "I have to go to the toilet."
"We don't have time," Jeremy said. "Hold your water."
"It's not water."
"Then hold your chips." My brother was relentless, prodding Barbara with a stiff finger that I thought would only make her bowels weep faster.
Barbara repeated the request I had made when I found her and Jeremy leaning over my shoulders. "You guys look away."
We complied. I found myself watching a kid slowly unravel a Danish. His significant mother rapped him on the fingers. He dropped the pastry, scowling. As soon as the nanny looked away he resumed his research, unwrapping the gooey twirl. I knew he was headed for disappointment, that the unrolled string of dough would lead him to an empty center. That much I had learned in life.
"Oh..." Barbara complained.
"What," Jeremy fumed.
"I think I typed the wrong letter. How can I tell? There's only dots."
She didn't protest when Jeremy and I turned around. She was on the verge of biting her index nail, a lengthy device that seemed grown for the purpose of inserting and destroying body orifices.
"No wonder," said Jeremy. "You should trim the daggers."
"But it's me!" said Barbara.
"What, you're just a fingernail?" Jeremy's eyes rolled upwards, but there weren't any answers written on the ceiling. I know, because I looked, too.
"It's my statement," Barbara shot back.
It wasn't the fragment of socio-babble that bothered me, but my belief that a growing portion of the population would have understood what she was talking about. I, personally, have no statements. I'm the null value on the Gallup scale, with drab clothes, drab values and a distressingly drab conscience.
"How many letters have you typed?" Jeremy asked.
"Two...maybe three," said Barbara, adding, "I have to go to the bathroom."
"The way you're going, we might have to join you." Jeremy pulled a chair over and sat next to our thank-God-one-and-only sister. "Let me give you a hand."
"I'm not stupid," Barbara said, angered by Jeremy's tutorial threat. "It's just that I can't think when I have to poop."
"Shit for brains," I murmured stupidly. Fortunately, no one noticed. Over half of the customers around us were college students, for whom swearing is the lingua fucka. Even here, in All-American Starbucks, the air was hazy with oaths spoken so casually that they were drained of all umph. The same oaths they used when they were really mad. Pretty soon English will be like Mandarin, with all meaning delivered by emphasis. Definition in a shout.
Jeremy had been surprisingly calm up to this point, but Barbara's flakiness was chipping his armor. Maybe he had been weakened by the long-awaited appearance of the treasure site. He had thought the whole thing bogus, and now it looked like it could all be true. The more you strain for the prize, the more you sweat, and Jeremy was sweating.
When Barbara proved unable to say how many letters she had typed, or if those letters had been accurate, Jeremy cleared the login field and nearly pushed her out of her chair.
"We have to start over," he said. "Mute, come here and reenter your password."
A little more briskly than before, I typed 'brinks', then jumped away, like a cat escaping a litter box. Jeremy inserted the underscore, then glared at Barbara.
"What's your password, Sweet Tooth? I'll type it in for you."
"Like hell you will." Barbara slapped his hands away from the laptop as she sat back down and focused on the keyboard. "Turn your backs," she said without looking at us.
We reluctantly complied and for the second time were subjected to the slow clicks of fake keratin on the keys.
"Okay," she said finally.
"You sure?" Jeremy said.
"I concentrated."
"That's good," her elder brother answered with a sneer that brought out not the best but the most familiar in him. "Did you do the underscore?"
"Just my secret word," Barbara said.
Jeremy took her place, added the underscore, then craned his head up at us. "Assume the position."
By the time we had turned away he had already typed in his password.
"Done," he announced, hitting Enter.
I was annoyed that he had made us look away. There was no way I could have deciphered the blur of his fingers. But before I could file my vapid complaint the computer screen went into convulsions that resolved into a tunnel-vision light show.
"Bells and whistles," Jeremy snarled. "Come on, Dad. Just the facts."
The light condensed into a diamond-shaped image with what seemed to be words stenciled on each facet. The diamond exploded and the words shot out in all directions, then floated down onto the calm pond of the screen and scooted back and forth like waterbugs looking for an escape until, finally, they resigned themselves to captivity and settled into sentences.
"About time," Jeremy said, looking at the clock. "He just wasted two minutes with this crap."
Barbara and I squeezed our brother from either side. To my surprise he accepted this intrusion on his personal space, it being the price he had to pay for being the master of ceremonies.
We read:
Ammo lockers into ploughshares. The leftovers of the old war include socks and underwear, not very well cleaned. Hidden away, the gin bottle scrambles the scrambled brain. A nip here and there from the secret compartment.
We waited for more words to appear. Perhaps a map, an X mar
ks the spot. But I didn't think that was necessary. My heart was racing.
"Nothing else?" Barbara gnawed on her gum another moment, then wailed, "I really have to go to the toilet."
Either her distress had stripped away her culture, or the years had coarsened her language. When I last saw her, she employed the much more refined 'little girls tinkle room'.
"I won't hold you back," Jeremy said graciously. I merely shrugged.
Barbara raced away.
"Should we tell her if anything else shows up?" Jeremy said, nodding at the screen.
He was still a mean bastard. Too bad for him betrayal had already entered my mind.
I didn't answer him. He waited for more juice from Pseudo-Skunk, but I knew the cyberwell was dry. The message was complete. The secret compartment was a mild puzzle, but the rest was clear. The real conundrum was Jeremy's pose of irritated ignorance. Unless he had suddenly become a retard—a reasonable if narrow possibility—he had to know as well as I did the meaning of the text. It was more likely that he saw the same opportunity as I did: screw bro and sis. I wondered if he was going through a process of self-justification similar to what was schmoozing through my own mind. I deserved the money because I was maintaining the old homestead. It was true that none of us placed any nostalgic value in Oregon Hill. True, also, that I only stayed because of my own profound inertia. But did I deserve all of the hidden loot? Only to the degree that my siblings did—and none of us did. The entirety was broken into thirds, and the thirds dissolved into nothing.
Looking at all viewpoints isn't very profitable. Truly, I jumped off of that path real quick.
Jeremy was one helluva an actor, though. His fingers curled on the tabletop in a spasm of suspense. I glanced at the floor and saw the same jiggling of the legs that accompanied all his nervous moments when we were kids. He tried urging the computer along with a couple of bursts of humming. Come on, follow the bouncing cursor! Show us what you've got! But www.treasure447.com was not in the mood for music. We stared at the time in the tray at the bottom of the screen. Fifteen minutes was almost gone.
Barbara reappeared, looking relieved and anxious. I glanced back down at the screen, but a moment later my attention was drawn by several voices raised in protest. Some women emerged from the back, slapping at the air as though they were being attacked by rabid bats. Throwing accusatory glances at Barbara, they raced like the wind out of Starbucks.
"We can go now," she said, fidgeting nervously.
"We've got a couple of minutes left." Sensing she needed a visual aid, Jeremy explained the concept of time with a tap on the system tray clock.
"So there's nothing new?" Barbara asked. When Jeremy and I shook our heads, she continued: "Then that's it. Let's go before someone comes in."
The place was packed. Anyone else coming in would have had to punch someone out of their chair to sit. I figured she was talking about a SWAT team charging with guns drawn, bellowing "Everybody down!" as they busted in.
"A few more seconds won't hurt," I reasoned—and was quickly proved wrong. A stench wafted from the back of the building. It was powerful enough to grab my half-digested breakfast and try to pull it out through my throat. "Jesus," I gasped, invoking my less-than-palpable religious sense against the elements.
Jeremy's eyes went wide. He found religion, too. "Christ, Sweet Tooth, you use beach towels for Tampex?"
A hundred-thousand years of brotherly compassion for sisters was summed up in that comment. Barbara assumed the dejected stance of the eternally downtrodden.
"Where else can I put them?" she complained. "Anyway, that's not the...problem. I need to go to the doctor about it. I've got helicopters."
Jeremy and I were not inclined to hang around for an explanation. All around us customers were abandoning their tables, practically gagging on the sulphurous cloud that I'd almost swear was visible. Yeah...it was a brown cloud.
"A minute left," said Jeremy, gritting his teeth. He was damned if he was going to surrender a second of website time, even if it meant paying with his health. As the stench trailing Barbara from the women's bathroom grew worse instead of fading, I was forced to conclude Jeremy was truly ignorant of the meaning of the message—he was waiting for a final installment that would never come.
But holding the key to the secret wouldn't help me if I was asphyxiated. Usually, a person is not repelled by his own body emanations, but even Barbara was beginning to lean towards the exit, although I guess embarrassment also played a role. I wondered if Starbucks could hold her legally accountable for loss of business.
I looked at the laptop just in time to see the screen change to 'Unable to Display' before running out the door. Jeremy was not long in following.
"Where's Sweet Tooth?" he demanded.
I shrugged. Surveying the parking lot, we spotted her wandering between cars at the adjoining mall. When she spotted us coming towards her, she turned away.
"Hey!" Jeremy yelled, breaking into a trot. My dread of physical effort is deeply ingrained, and I dropped behind. When I finally caught up, my brother was holding Barbara by her arm.
"You know what it means, don't you!" he was shouting.
"No!" Barbara tried to wriggle out of his grip. "You're hurting."
"We have a deal," Jeremy insisted.
"What deal?" Barbara said, breaking loose with an emphatic jerk of her elbow. "Skunk didn't say anything about a deal. He just—"
"Skunk is dead, you twit!" Jeremy lowered his voice, suddenly realizing a fracas in public would draw attention, even if one was only stating the perfectly obvious. "We don't know who's behind this, all right? You must have helicopters in the brain."
"How smart you are." Superior knowledge lifted Barbara's chin. "Helicopters live in your intestines. And don't tell me the name doesn't make sense, because that's what they're called. The doctors have their reasons."
"Helicopters," Jeremy nodded, as though seeing reason. "I guess that's better than supershit."
I spent this charming moment scanning the parking lot. No one seemed to be watching us, but I didn't suppose spies made it a point to be seen. A few vans parked nearby had ominous potential. One or all of them could be packed with eavesdropping equipment. At least Yvonne Kendle's heap was nowhere in sight.
I looked back at my sister and suddenly understood her secret sorrow. She couldn't keep a man because she stank of helicopters. I took a step back. Jesus, a mutant! I half expected her to sprout rotor blades. With me, understanding and empathy occupy opposite ends of the field.
"I can't find my Sentra," Barbara said, bangles clanging on the side of her head as she twisted around.
"Aren't we supposed to talk, first?" Jeremy danced into her line of sight. "Do you understand the message? Is that why you're trying to get away?"
Barbara jerked as she came on-topic. It was like seeing a cat respond to a can opener. Then her eyes as quickly faded, and we could see that she had already forgotten half of the message.
"Shit," said Jeremy.
"Don't swear at me," Barbara scowled. "Did I swear at you?"
"'Ammo lockers into ploughshares'," I quoted, watching both of them closely.
"Hey Mute, you have a memory." Jeremy shot me a jalapeno grin.
"'The leftovers of the old war include socks and underwear, not very well cleaned'." My face was a mediocre Tums. "Do you know what it means?"
But now Barbara was staring at me. How could she guess what I was thinking? Was it feminine intuition, or did brain farts clear the mind?
"Doubletalk should know," I said, then tumbled down a mental hole. Crap. I had not had enough practice disconnecting my mind from my mouth. Too much time spent alone.
"If you know what I should know, then you must know." This was not the old Jeremy speaking, who would have stumbled after two words of reason. Prison had really honed his thought processes.
"Come on," Jeremy needled. "What's the rest?"
I tried to dodge. "Why didn't we bring a notepad?"
"What happened to your whoop-de-do printer?" Barbara said.
"You saw how small the tables are there," said Jeremy. "I couldn't fit it alongside the laptop. Damn!"
"We should have written it down," Barbara moaned.
"But we don't need to take notes, do we?" said Jeremy, leering at me. "We've got you. Come on..."
I took a deep breath. "'Hidden away, the gin bottle scrambles the scrambled brain. A nip here and there from the secret compartment.'"
"Yeah, that's it," Jeremy nodded.
"Then you remember it word for word, too," I said.
"Redundancy can't hurt."
Okay, they had a dictionary at the Powhatan School for Scoundrels. One that included definitions. I didn't look at my brother with more respect. Actually, it was more fear. A punk with a jailbird education was an awkward joe to deal with. Before prison, they knocked you over the head with tire irons. After prison, they knock you down with words—then bring out the tire iron.
I was like a crumpled piece of paper and Jeremy and Barbara were busily unfolding me. No matter which way I turned, it was my two hands against their four. They bracketed me, Jeremy's hard chest heaving up against one shoulder while Barbara's venomous jugs weighed down on the other.
"Okay, okay," I said.
"Yeah," said Jeremy. "Okay."
CHAPTER 9
The so-called door to Flint Dementis' house was a piece of plyboard that sagged beneath Jeremy's knuckles with each hairy knock. This was old-style Oregon Hill architecture, where keeping up with the Jonses meant clearing a path through a museum of cans and bottles and other assorted garbage (not to mention the occasional drunken derelict) to reach the front porch—and even that was considered the height of hoity-toity. Thirty years ago the entrance to Flint's house would have been indistinguishable from most other doors facing the street. My own house, a couple of blocks down, had the same flaked paint and sagging exterior, but some nutcake inspector had threatened to invoke a dozen city ordinances against me. I caved in and swept the catshit off my steps.
There was a soft murmur from inside which sounded like "Get the door!" I found this ominous, since Flint lived alone. He had been married once. His wife had not passed on, but passed through, a rolling stone who had divorced the moss.
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