Inside the garage, the door to the house was locked.
“Damn.”
There wasn’t an app for that.
He browsed the Needful Things store anyway, trying to decide why he’d come here in the first place. It hadn’t just been the arrows, pointing him this way.
His mission was innocent enough. He only wanted to get inside Meg’s house. Look around, maybe check their cupboards and eat a snack. Pick up any coins lying around and maybe switch Meg’s conditioner with that chemical stuff ladies use to remove hair from their legs—that was it.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t deserve it. Meg had laughed, too, that day. JJ remembered. The sound had reminded him of her showers, the shrill singing.
In the app store, he found an icon of a LOLcat, some app called
Whiskers, he thought, reading the cat’s ID tag. Hmm.
He downloaded the app.
Much like The Enormous TV, it worked similarly to a spy app. Except instead of people, JJ could look up any cat in town; there was even a section for dogs. The pets in the list must have been microchipped. And/or databased. That made sense. How else could the app find them all?
JJ looked up Meg Disney’s cat, because of course that prized hog would be chipped.
Apparently, the cat had escaped through yet another pet door, into the laundry room of the house. Leg in the air, it looked pretty upset about licking itself.
Meg really did love that cat. She hung pictures of it in her locker. Posted pictures of it on Follow, dressed in a Santa suit or bonnet. Everyone called it “Grumpier Cat.”
JJ selected a knife from an array of flaying tools and dragged it toward the beloved pet. He listened carefully through the door as he took his first poke.
A screech.
A meow.
He had expected to hear something.
But only the cat on his phone made noise.
He pressed his ear against the door and poked again. As before, only the cat onscreen yowled and dashed around madly, clawing up the couch while JJ chased it with the knife. As if, in real life, nothing was happening on the other side of that door.
After all, Mark’s diamonds weren’t real, the town hadn’t blown up. And Meg Disney had laughed and laughed.
* * *
JJ made it back to the tree in the Dick’s yard and started to climb for a window on the second-story.
He froze when he saw headlights.
The Dick’s mom.
Home from the bar.
Or wherever else.
JJ moved faster, scaling the tree, climbing out on the limb to the roof. He straddled it like he was riding a horse, and its skeletal branches knocked against the shingles with every scoot. Moss stained his crotch.
Too much noise, too much.
JJ froze, and the headlights swept past him. Just the car turning that last corner into the drive. Pretty soon it would park and the engine would cut off, and it would no longer cover JJ’s activities.
He scooted faster, damn the noise!
His jacket caught.
Crap, crap, crap!
He pulled it, ripped it, but then in the driveway the car shut off and JJ fell completely still, hugging his body to the limb. Mrs. Clement stumbled out of her car, a little LED blinking in her ear. She slammed her purse in the door and tugged on it several times before realizing she’d have to open the door to get it out. So she did that, but ended up slamming the door on the seat belt instead. She waved it away, leaving the strap dangling out the door as she stumbled inside.
The second the front door shut, JJ scooted forward, jacket free. He was climbing into the Dick’s window when the bedroom light flicked on.
“What the hell?” Mrs. Clement had been peeking in on them through the door. She’d caught JJ halfway out. “What the hell were you doing?”
The Dick stirred in bed and woke up. “Mom?”
“Well?” she asked, crossing her arms at JJ, shifting from foot to foot.
He didn’t know what to tell her. He certainly couldn’t tell her about the prowling, or Grumpier Cat.
“Mum, I’m so sorry,” the Dick said. “That’s where we go pee sometimes.”
“On the roof?”
The Dick looked ready to cry. “I’m so sorry, Mum.”
“In the gutter,” JJ said, playing along. They did actually piss in the gutter sometimes. More fun than walking to the bathroom. Although why the Dick was covering for him, JJ would never know. And why the Dick was ready to cry was the bigger mystery.
JJ waited for Mrs. Clement to start yelling. She didn’t, though. She stared out the window, distracted by something, still shifting from foot to foot.
“Just right out here?” she said, moving to the window.
“I’m sorry,” JJ said. “I didn’t . . .”
Mrs. Clement climbed out.
Both he and the Dick went to the window.
Out there in the dark, pants down, Mrs. Clement was squatting and swaying dangerously over the rain gutter. Her earwig blinked yellow in the dark.
Hangups
“Life’s too short to entertain people with
serious hang-ups.”
“We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
—Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
CHAPTER 15
Saturday morning, Steve woke to his old clamshell dinging. A text from Bill.
Sighing, Steve rolled over and lifted the curtain next to his bed. Bright. Too bright. He couldn’t see anything except a green and golden blur without his contacts. He got up and fed Barksdale, glad the kids were staying with friends. He loved them dearly, but didn’t particularly care to see their faces right now.
Folgers in my cup, he thought, taking a bitter mug of coffee outside to the deck.
Steve was trying to forget last night. He couldn’t stop, though. Bill had known. He’d known for a week and had said nothing. And now Steve would have to sit down with Sarah for some talk.
He remembered how their last big talk had gone. Fact was, he and his daughter had a history of crappy big talks.
The first one, the birds and the bees, Janice had been there to help, thankfully. Sarah had been pretty young and, being the English teacher that he was, Steve had extended the birds and bees metaphor a little too far. If it weren’t for Janice, Sarah would’ve come away thinking babies were delivered via pollen-filled stings.
Their last talk came around the time Sarah got her license. He’d had to break it to her that they couldn’t afford a car, and it turned into this huge fight. She basically told him she wished he’d died instead.
Damn you, Bill.
He thought it, even though he knew it wasn’t Bill’s fault. It was his own damn fault. Still. Bill should have said something.
Out on the deck, Steve caught a glimpse of his car in the carport, the taped-over taillight.
Thank you, Bill. I guess.
He looked up toward the cell tower on the mountain. He saw the giant white letters and nearly sprayed out his coffee.
Instead of “PCo,” it now said, “PCo GTFO.”
* * *
After breakfast by himself, Steve headed over to Mars’ Greenhouse Gas Terraformer, Autowreckers, and Scrap Metal Yard (Or Anything Else You Don’t Want).
Bill texted him again.
Steve laughed.
Steve went to put his phone away, but it dinged again.
&nb
sp;
“I see you there, Marvin,” Steve said, putting away his phone.
The Martian jumped, hitting his head on an overhead rack of hubcaps, which rattled against their clothes hangers.
Marvin had been tailing him since Steve had entered the junkyard, watching him from under the brim of his CIA hat. Whenever Steve looked up, Marvin would stop walking and pretend to be combing through a pile of old fenders or rims or bloodstained old car seats—anything within easy reach.
Typical Marv. He didn’t even blend in. His tie-dyed shirt was way too bright.
“Where are the taillights again?” Steve asked.
Marvin, looking up from a tangle of exhaust pipes, said, “What? Oh.” He waved Steve toward the part of the salvage yard where whole cars sat in rows.
Steve hated this part of the yard. He couldn’t help but wonder how all these vehicles had gotten smashed in, and what had happened to their drivers?
He’d seen a car in here once, broadsided, the half-melted car seat still trapped inside. They hadn’t been able to pull it out—it had become too much a part of the wreck.
Steve spotted his make and model in the salvage yard and headed that way.
The car’s front end practically sat in the driver’s seat, completely smashed, but the rear end looked better than Steve’s. He popped the trunk and looked inside where the taillight assembly attached.
“Hey, Marv, you got a wrench or . . .?”
“Yeah.”
All around the junkyard, Marvin kept tool chests full of old rusty tools. This time, it was right under Steve’s nose. Marvin nudged him to one side and dug into the car’s trunk. He found an adjustable wrench under the floorboard and went to work, removing the taillight.
“Yeowch!” he cried, banging his elbow on the hinge.
“Here,” Steve said, “let me—”
Marvin elbowed him out of the way. “I got this. These things are tricky, that’s all. You’ve got to know the trick.”
“I would’ve had it out by now,” Steve muttered as Marvin went back to work, cursing and banging around in the trunk, all elbows. All he had to do was loosen three bolts.
“Hold these?” Marv said, finally thrusting out a cracked, grease-stained hand cupping some nuts. One rolled off his palm. “Well, man? Don’t you want ’em?”
“Yes, damn it. Would you stop?” Steve took the two remaining fasteners in Marvin’s palm before the Martian could drop those, too, then crouched to find the third one. He scanned the tiny metal scraps in the dead weeds and grass, the bits of colored plastic and shattered glass, cursing the Martian.
“Almost done,” Marv said once Steve finally stood up.
“Thank God.”
Nearly six minutes later, Marvin pulled out the entire taillight assembly, but forgot it was plugged in. The thing was yanked from his grip and it banged against the bumper with a crash.
Steve nearly tapped his foot waiting for the Martian to figure out how the little clip held the cord in.
Marvin rose up from the trunk. “This it?” he asked, holding the assembly up by its severed cord. He never had figured out the clip.
“Actually,” Steve said, “have you heard about this particular model slipping out of gear or anything? Like the parking brake failing for absolutely no reason?”
Marvin scratched his bushy red beard and lowered the taillight. “This car here?”
“Yeah.”
Steve knew Marvin had a ton of knowledge. He remembered this one guy, Don Reese, who’d had this old refrigerator. The company repairman had told him the ice machine couldn’t be fixed, so Don took the fridge to the dump and paid all this money for a new one. A week later Don saw Marvin at the store. Apparently, the Martian, against all odds, had fixed the ice machine. The fridge worked fine. It just needed this one little part.
Marvin studied the smashed-up car. “It’s new enough. Yours got any kind of onboard navigation?”
“No.”
“Hmm. You know what, man, even still. You ever heard of OBD-III?”
“Yeah, the EPA thing. Something to do with emissions, right? It detects any kind of malfunction in the emission system or something? I don’t see how this could’ve been related to emissions, though, Marv.”
“That’s what they say, man; it’s just there to monitor emissions.” He put air quotes around the word. “But they got satellites and roadside scanners mining all sorts of information from your car all the time. It’s telemetry, man. They’re spying on basically every system in your car. They know where you’ve been, what time you were there, how fast you went, right down to every time you applied the brakes, man. They can even tell if you have a passenger with you ’cause of the airbag detection in the seat.”
Steve thought back to the diagnostic app on JJ’s phone, how it could read error codes from the car—any car. Bill’s cruiser, even.
“But it’s not just for spying.” Marvin leaned in close. He glanced around, then continued in a whisper. “They can control your car. They can shut it down if they really want to. You know, from, like, satellites in space? Oh, sure, they say it’s to stop criminals, but all cars after a certain age can be remote-controlled, man, it’s wild.”
“Right,” Steve said, wondering why he even bothered. “So it was the government that broke my taillight. Makes sense.”
“Man, you know as well as I do the government is just a puppet for the company, man, you know that.” Marvin punctuated each you with a finger jab at Steve’s face.
“Oh, yeah, of course.”
“I mean why do you think there aren’t as many regulations around what kind of personal data companies can collect from you? Government is just a way for companies to legally justify doing shit, man, how many times I gotta keep telling you that?”
Steve reached for his taillight. “Well, Marv, thank you. This ought to do it.”
Marvin nodded, and Steve waited for the Martian to lead him back to the register. Marvin just stood there, though, waiting too.
“What do you think it means?” the Martian finally asked.
“What, the end of privacy? The death of our Constitution? I don’t know, Marv, you’re the expert.”
“No, man, the letters. GTFO.”
Steve laughed. “Oh, that? Get the fuck out.”
Marvin stared at the letters on the hill, nodding, extremely deep in thought. Steve looked up, too, wondering what the Martian was thinking.
The tower dragged his eyes higher up the hill. Man, the thing was so close to the dump Steve could feel it humming.
“I assumed it was . . .” Marvin narrowed his eyes at the letters. “Golf Tango Foxtrot Ocean. Or something.” He turned back to Steve, but his eyes had started to tick back and forth, as if he were constantly looking over both shoulders. “So, hey. You don’t have one, do you? A Tether?”
Steve pulled out his phone, his crappy old clamshell. “The school tried to force one on me. I never activated it, though. It just sits in the desk in my office.” He smiled and said, “This phone just makes calls.”
“Can I see the battery real quick? I want to show you something.” Marvin held out his grimy hand, the nails gnawed to the nub.
Steve frowned but popped out the battery anyway. Damn you, Bill. Again. He wanted to go home. But here he was, doing favors.
Marvin snatched up Steve’s battery and grinned. “Great, man, great. Follow me.”
Finally, Steve thought. But then they passed right by the old coffee stand where Marvin kept his till.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“Got something to show you,”
Marv said.
“I thought you meant show me something about my phone.”
“Oh, man, you’ll see.”
“Marvin . . .”
“Come on!” Birkenstocks flapping, the Martian went winding down a maze of what looked like copper and lead pipes and stacked crates full of lead slugs, lead balls, lead fishing weights, and old discarded cans of lead-based paint, plus all sorts of aluminum: crumpled-up balls of tinfoil, pop cans, beer cans, bike frames.
“Marvin! I just want to pay and get my battery back, come on!”
“Yes, pay! Pay here! Follow me!” He kept going, shaking the taillight assembly over his head as if it were bait.
Cursing, Steve went deeper into the maze, turning this way and that. The stacks of pipe crates grew higher, taller than he was, casting shadows over him.
Marvin disappeared around a corner, and Steve heard him stacking something heavy. He rounded the corner. There, near a big pile of pipes, Marvin was lugging a bunch of the lead- and copper-filled crates from one wall of the maze to another. He revealed an old lead-lined door sheeted in tinfoil. It was spray-painted in red, “SoS.”
“Come on,” he said, that wild grin still opening a secret cave in his beard.
Steve peeked into the room beyond the Martian. Metal grates supported by rebar and wooden struts held hundreds of lead-acid batteries in place. Taken from cars, riding lawnmowers, and whatever else, the batteries stacked up to form the walls, ceiling, and even the floor of the space.
“They can’t hear you in here,” he said. “It’s my Dead Zone, my Shack of Silence. A complete radiation shield—”
“Marvin . . .”
“No, man, come on. I’ll give back your things and you can be on your way, I promise. You’ll like this.”
Steve had to admit he was curious. And there was that favor he’d promised. Sighing, he stepped into the room and Marvin shut the lead door behind them.
“Look,” he said, striding over to the largest wall in the shed where he’d hung a giant corkboard. “It’s all right here, man, look. OBD-III, everything.”
The Phone Company Page 16