by T Paulin
He didn’t know much, really, but he knew what spyware was, and that information went around in packets, and certain software sniffed around for good packets.
It was possible someone had detected him searching for Azzure and decided to shut that down.
But why?
If you were trying to hide top secret information, the best way to do that would be to bury it in misinformation, or quietly scour every trace of it online.
The stupidest thing to do would be to alert the casual internet user that they were onto something.
Therefore, if that dialog window was the work of a hacker, the hacker actually wanted Eli to keep searching for Azzure. Reverse psychology. Eventually they would let him “find” some trail of breadcrumbs that would lead him directly to them. He’d walk right into their trap, and they’d use mind control cult stuff on him and turn him into a terrorist, and set him up for some cyber crime.
Eli’s electric toothbrush stopped its timed run. He rinsed out his mouth, feeling pretty pleased with himself that he’d figured out some hacker organization’s entire devious plan in the time it took him to brush his teeth.
Nice try, stupid hackers.
He climbed into bed with a smile on his face.
He had a good mind, when he applied himself. And first thing tomorrow, he was going to figure out how to catch that poltergeist. Or both of them, if there really were two.
He could hardly sleep, he was so excited.
Because of this excitement, instead of the usual sixty seconds it took Eli to fall asleep, he lay awake for nearly fifteen minutes.
Meanwhile, in a bunker deep below the surface of the earth, a computer printed out a new filing label: Eli Carter, Threat Level Yellow.
Chapter Thirteen
Things were going smoothly enough on Tuesday morning, until Eli and Brenda got down to the van and found the passenger side window smashed.
Eli let out a steady stream of expletives as he checked to see what else had been damaged or stolen. The stale granola bars from the glove box were gone, as was the parking meter change Eli kept in the ashtray.
At least Khan’s bags of gear were still there, right where Eli had stupidly left them overnight. He should have brought the stuff up to the apartment, but Khan had told him not to touch the stuff, and Eli had felt just belligerent enough to take the order literally.
Brenda helped him clean up the pebbles of broken safety glass, and they continued on their way. She would typically be more upset about this type of thing, but this morning she had an aura of calm, as though she was above such petty worries. Even her chin seemed to tilt up higher than usual.
They’d been driving for ten minutes when she reached for one of the camouflage-print bags.
“Khan didn’t want me to touch the equipment,” Eli said.
She unzipped it anyway. Eli gave her a dirty look, and she responded with, “He didn’t say anything about me not touching it, did he?”
Eli admitted this was true.
She held up one of the objects. “What’s this?”
“A hexapod.”
“Hmm.” She dug around in the bag. “Shouldn’t it be called a pentapod if there are only five of them?”
Eli’s heart sunk into darkness faster than the sun in the time-lapse opening of a nature film about bats.
The thieves had taken his granola bars, parking change, and an integral piece of high-tech equipment, the replacement cost of which he couldn’t begin to imagine.
He explained this to Brenda, who helped him look through the bags and then search the interior of the van while he kept driving. Eli’s heart stayed down. One of the hexapods was definitely gone.
“I’m sure you’ll figure out something clever,” Brenda said calmly.
Eli eyed her suspiciously. Why wasn’t she freaking out, or at least driving home the point that she’d already told him, on multiple occasions, to empty the glove box and leave it open whenever he parked in the underground parking spot?
Had the thieves also snatched Brenda during the night and replaced her with a pod person? He kept stealing glances over at her. Something about her face wasn’t right.
Chapter Fourteen
Brenda sat in her usual seat in the van while Eli drove toward the delivery depot. She was going to her usual job, but she wasn’t feeling the usual Tuesday morning feelings.
The vehicle break-in bothered her more than she was letting on. She flicked a stray pebble of safety glass out the open window. The broken glass was a metaphor for her life, she decided.
Just when she had everything organized, with the two of them in a comfortable groove, along came this exciting new job for Eli. At first, she’d been hopeful, but then the fears and doubts of all her coworkers had infected her.
She couldn’t tell everyone Eli was working as a ghost exterminator. As far as her coworkers knew, Eli was delivering for an appliance repair shop. They couldn’t understand why he’d taken a step down.
Her co-worker Jeffrey kept popping his head up over the cubicle, asking questions. Had Eli taken an interest in losing weight or working out? Jeffrey said that was a sign Eli was cheating on her. Changes were bad for couples, according to Jeffrey.
The van rattled over train tracks. Brenda pulled out her phone and sent a text to Rachel, complaining about Jeffrey trying to look down everyone’s shirts while giving bad relationship advice.
Rachel replied by sending photos of people on the bus with her, along with her critique about their appearances.
Brenda put her phone away, because the negativity was increasing her sense of impending doom. Why did she feel so awful? She’d taken her supplements.
What Brenda didn’t realize, thanks to the chaos of the van break-in, was that Eli’s job wasn’t the only change in their lives.
The night before, Brenda had slept with an ancient Egyptian god curled up at her feet. It was the second time, and that’s the sort of new routine that’s going to make a person feel a little weird in the morning.
And she did feel weird. Very weird.
“I don’t know how late I’ll have to work,” Eli said.
Brenda pressed her lips together tightly and kept looking out the window.
She worried about him spending so much time with this guy, Khan. A necromancer. It was bad enough they lived in a city with Crashers running amok, eating each other in falling-down buildings and doing heaven-knows-what to survive.
What Eli and Brenda really needed to do was build up enough of a nest egg so they could move somewhere better, to a city that wasn’t the sinkhole of the country, sucking evil towards itself like some dank, dark, pit that led straight to—
“Babe?” Eli stopped the hamster wheel of darkness in her head, the way he always did. “Ride? After work?”
“I can get a lift home easy enough,” she said lightly.
“What’s wrong? You sound worried.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “I’m a grown-up. I can take the bus if I need to.”
“Okie dokie, smokie.” Eli nodded and kept driving, with his typical, worry-free expression on his face. She envied him his calm, and his ability to take a nap anywhere.
It was only natural that she was worried, Brenda told herself. Eli was everything to her, the only person who made life good. She had created a life for herself in this sinkhole of a city, but that was just for show.
None of it would mean anything without Eli.
There were things he did that drove her crazy, but, as they both joked, it wasn’t a long drive to Brenda’s Crazytown. You could get there by foot.
She tried to cut him some slack, but it was hard. Being easygoing wasn’t in her nature.
Sometimes she opened the secret cabinet behind the bathroom mirror and took out the engagement ring Eli kept hidden away in there.
It was such a beautiful ring, and she wanted it so badly that she just had to occasionally kick him in the kidneys. She knew it was wrong of her, but it was wrong of him first,
and two wrongs was the theme of their relationship.
Two wrongs that go together all right.
On Saturday night, when he called late and said he was crashing at some farmhouse, way out in the countryside, she didn’t think much of it. She stayed over at friends’ houses all the time—always girlfriends, of course, because Eli was the only man she trusted on her side of a locked door when she was sleeping.
Eli never stayed over elsewhere, though. All night long, she suffered nightmares that he’d died, and this was her life now, without him. The night had been the longest one of her life, and she’d had some long nights in her twenty-six years on the planet.
She couldn’t tell Eli about her fears. He’d think she was even more screwed up than his initial assessment.
So, she did what she could. She bought dead cow and stuck her hands in the meaty bits, squishing in breadcrumbs and ketchup, just like the recipe said.
If dead cow was the way to Eli’s heart, she would squish it through her fingers every day.
This new job of his wouldn’t last long. Eli had started a half-dozen things in the last year alone, from learning to play bass guitar to taking entrepreneurial classes by correspondence. He’d never finished any of the classes, and he certainly couldn’t play bass guitar.
Eli took a hard right turn and the van rattled up to the staff entrance for the delivery depot.
He grinned over at her, looking more handsome than ever. He always looked extra cute when she thought critically about him, which made her feel awful.
He said, “Don’t tell the gang in the office I miss them, because I don’t.”
“Okay. Catch some big ghosts today.”
“Can’t make any promises.” He gave her a grin so charming, it nearly broke her heart.
Chapter Fifteen
Eli parked the van at the office staff’s entrance, and leaned over to kiss Brenda goodbye.
Up close to her face, he realized her eye makeup was different. Her mascara application had been scaled back to only a few coats, and her eyes were rimmed with dark crayon. Cat-like.
She noticed him staring at her and smiled sweetly. He kissed her again, drawn in by her charm.
He would have kept kissing her, too, but someone rapped on the driver’s side window. It was the grizzled warehouse foreman. Eli rolled the window down and greeted him.
“Got somethin’ for ya, young fella.” The man cleared his throat and spat on the ground via the gap in his front teeth.
“I don’t work here anymore,” Eli replied.
“Ya don’t, huh?”
Eli smiled. He was still worried about the missing hexapod, but had just realized how good those five words felt, put together in that order.
I don’t work here anymore.
Such a beautiful phrase.
The foreman thrust his meaty fist through Eli’s open window. He held a silver hand tool.
“Present for ya,” he said. “This is for scraping the company decal off the side of your van. Go slow so you don’t scratch the paint.”
Eli thanked him and took the tool. The man spat again and went on his way. Brenda had already jumped out and was on her way to the admin office.
Alone in the van, Eli looked down at the silver scraping tool. Its retractable blade was covered in sticky goo.
Did he really want to scrape off the decal already? It had cost Eli a good chunk of money to get the delivery company’s decal put on the side of the van. If something were to happen, and Eli needed his old job back, he didn’t want to pay for the decal application a second time.
He tossed the tool in the glove box and continued on his way to Ghost Hackers.
* * *
The storefront was dark, but the door opened. Eli walked back and found Valentine in the workshop. She wore the same red hoodie and jeans as the day before, giving him the impression she’d never left.
He let his footfalls be heavy so he didn’t startle her.
“I have bad news and more bad news,” Eli said.
Her ponytail flicked to acknowledge his presence.
He set down the bags of gear he’d brought in. With the van’s broken window, he didn’t dare leave the stuff behind again.
Valentine didn’t look up from her circuit board. “I already heard all about yesterday.” She leaned forward and adjusted a magnifying lens on a swing arm. “He really shouldn’t drink like that, because of his heart condition.”
Eli completely misinterpreted what Valentine said and began to laugh. “Good one. Hart condition,” he said, referencing the siblings’ shared last name.
She turned and gave him a perplexed look.
Eli realized she hadn’t been making a pun after all, and tried to explain his misinterpretation, and that he wasn’t a monster for laughing. However, as with trying to convince someone you’re not crazy, the very fact the situation has come up guarantees you can’t succeed.
He gave up and moved on to the worse of the bad news. His van had been broken into, a hexapod was gone, and he was very sorry. “Take it off my pay,” he offered.
“Forget about the hexapod,” she said neutrally. “I have some new gear in beta testing that’s…” She paused.
“Safe and effective?”
“Effective,” she finished.
The way she omitted the word safe gave Eli some concern.
Valentine rolled her chair back and dismounted, then nodded for Eli to follow her over to a wall of flat panel screens. She tapped away at a keyboard, and the screens all lit up. She pointed to one screen, which showed Khan, in a bed, rolling around in a fitful state.
“Is he okay?” Eli asked. “Is he taking the day off?”
“His heart works better when he gets a full eight hours. I’ll wake him up now.” She tapped away at the keyboard. Khan immediately jumped out of bed and disappeared off the edge of the screen.
Valentine explained, “The wake-up alarm plays bagpipes in the other room. He hates bagpipes.”
“That’s a good trick.”
“The apartment’s just up there.” She pointed to the ceiling. “He’ll be down shortly.” She glanced at the other video screens. “You’re getting a parking ticket.”
Eli followed her gaze to the monitor that showed a parking enforcer leaning over to get his van’s plate number.
He took off running.
Outside, he gasped to the woman, “Have mercy.”
The parking enforcer was a woman of about fifty, with gray hair coiled up in tight curls. She was the same one who’d given him a ticket the week before, outside the Zone.
“My middle name is Mercy,” she said. “Go ahead and plead your case.”
“Are you serious? You really want to hear about my problems?”
“Son, do I look like a bartender? Don’t tell me your problems. Tell me why I shouldn’t give you a ticket.”
“See how I have a broken window? My van got busted into last night, and they took some valuable equipment I need for my job, plus they took all my parking change.”
“Did you keep the change in the ashtray? You shouldn’t do that. Very stupid.”
Eli hung his head. “I know.”
“I’m going to write you two tickets, one for the parking and one for that pathetic attempt at swaying my feelings.” She made a tsk-tsk sound. “I think you can do better. Let’s go double or nothing. Dig deeper.”
Eli looked up into the woman’s steely eyes.
“Dig deeper,” she repeated.
“Have mercy,” he said slowly, “because last week, I had a safe job and an ordinary life, and now I’m throwing it all away. I’ve been strangled, drowned, and suffocated. I don’t know what’s happening from one minute to the next. And I think I like it.”
The woman rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She glanced over at the logo on the side of the van.
“You used to work for them?” she asked.
Eli nodded. “Up until yesterday.”
“They’re a good company,” she said. “I used
them to take care of my final business before I left everything and moved out of Castle Point to start fresh. I used their rush courier service to smuggle my husband’s rare tropical birds back to the rainforest they’d been captured from. And do you know why?”
“Because you’re a crazy old lady?”
She laughed at this. “I like you, kid. I sent them away because a caged bird’s got nothing to sing about.”
She put away her ticket dispenser without issuing a ticket. Before Eli could thank her, she hopped on her bike and rode away, whistling.
Eli stared after her for a moment, and then he grabbed the scraping tool from the glovebox and began removing the van’s decal.
Eli Carter was no parakeet.
Chapter Sixteen
Eli was still scraping the decal off the van when the front door to Ghost Hackers opened and the store coughed up Khan like a cat with a hairball.
“Morning,” Khan grumbled as he staggered to a stop. He had more heavy-looking bags of gear strapped over each shoulder and dark sunglasses over his eyes.
“Good morning,” Eli replied. “Five more minutes. I’m almost done.” He turned back to scraping the decal off the side of the delivery van. It had been tricky to find the optimum angle for scraping. The edges of the decal were brittle and cracked, but the inner area was sticky and required the perfect amount of pressure, not too fast and not too—
Khan yanked the silver scraper from Eli’s hand. “Give it a rest.”
“But I’m almost done.”
“So?”
Eli looked at the remaining portion of decal. He couldn’t leave it like that. He went at the job with his fingernails, picking away desperately. He could see Khan at the edge of his vision, shifting from side to side with impatience. A brittle edge of the decal snapped off and cut him under his fingernail. “Five more minutes,” Eli begged.
Khan handed Eli back the scraper and went to wait inside the van, in the passenger seat.
* * *
Once Eli had removed the entire decal, he smiled with satisfaction. Then he hurriedly got into the van and started the engine.