“Sure,” Bill said. “Why the hell not?”
“Ugh. Call Aaron.”
“No, cancel! Aaron, goddamn it!”
“No!”
“Thanks a lot,” Bill said, certain the computer was toying with him.
The line rang a few times before Aaron answered. “Oh, hey there, how are you feeling? Do you need any cold medicine?”
“Yeah, about that. Can you keep a secret?”
“Uh . . .” Aaron moved to a quieter place in the office. “What’s up?”
“I’m not really sick.”
Aaron chuckled darkly. “Playing hooky, huh? Didn’t you just bust Steve’s daughter for that?”
“I didn’t bust her, look. I think I, uh, I think I might’ve lost something. Has anyone called?”
“No.”
“Okay, well . . .”
“What’d you lose?”
Bill thought about his answer a moment. “I hate to swear someone to this much secrecy in one day, but . . .”
“My lips are like a vault,” Aaron said.
It was true. Some dispatchers had giant mouths. Aaron, on the other hand, had a small, cute one.
“My badge,” Bill said. “I lost my badge.”
“Oh my gosh—Bill.”
“I know. Listen, I don’t want to make a big stink about this. If someone brings it in, or if someone calls, let’s keep this between you, me, and the telephone poles, all right?”
“Yeah, absolutely. Wow, what’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
He’d made the right move, leaving out the part about his flask. He knew that wherever they were, his badge and his drinking can would likely be found together. And if someone called it in, Aaron was a big enough girl to figure out why Bill had covered his ass: undercover was undercover.
In the meantime, a missing badge would make her cautious enough to take this seriously. And, hey, if Bill found everything first, no one would be the wiser.
“Get Steve in a three-way, would you?” he asked Aaron, thinking on his feet.
“Bill, I know you wanted me to get a drink with him, but . . .”
“Oh, haha. Just add him to the call, okay?”
“Oh.” Aaron fell quiet for a second. This time she wasn’t joking when she said, “Seriously, though, I can’t make plans right now. I’m at work.”
“Calm down. It’s work-related.”
“Oh.”
“It’s like I said. Steve’s got an awesome dog.”
Aaron giggled, but then, very officiously, she said, “Hold, please.”
She got Steve on the phone and informed him he was on a conference call with Bill.
“Hey, Bill,” Steve said. “What’s up? I’m in class.”
“Oh. Surprised you picked up.”
“The deputy sheriff was calling me. I figured it was important.”
In the background, Bill heard Steve’s class erupt with laughter. Steve always had been able to get those kids in an uproar.
“Sorry, buddy, listen. I need to deputize your dog. Just for the day.”
“Oh, yeah?” Steve got quieter. “He’s not really interested in sniffing out drugs or bodies, if that’s—”
“No, that’s not it. Besides, I’m the one who told you that.” Barksdale had never been trained to be a corpse-sniffing dog, although he could do the work if inclined to; he was just more inclined to help out the living. “It’s not that kind of case,” Bill said. “Can I borrow him for a bit?”
“Well, can you promise me he’ll be safe?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“The kids would never forgive me.”
“No, absolutely. It’s nothing like that. I need his help, uh, finding something. No car chases, no hostages. Just good old-fashioned police work, I swear. It’d really help me out.”
“Well,” Steve said, “okay.”
“Thank you.”
“One problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I haven’t seen Barksdale in a couple of days,” Steve said.
Bill rocked back. Couple of days?
How long had it been? How long ago had he seen Barksdale go into that mine?
“He was spotted up around Mrs. Hayworth’s last,” Steve said. “If you can find him, be my guest. And bring him home, okay? In one piece?”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “Of course.”
“Bar tonight?” Steve said.
“Uh, we’ll see.”
“Okay, partner. Whatever works best for you. I know it’s been a rough couple of days.”
Bill knew what Steve meant, but Steve didn’t know the half of it, not really. This wasn’t just about the crash.
“Look,” Bill said, “I need to take care of this thing before it blows up in my face. Sorry to interrupt your class.”
“Anytime. Talk to you later?”
“Hell yeah.”
They hung up, and Bill paced in his driveway for several minutes, clucking his tongue, trying to think through the sludge he’d made of his brain. He didn’t have time to chase down Barksdale. He—
Wait a minute.
Most of Bill’s memories from last night had been cemented into brick shoes and thrown off the deep end of the quarry, along with all other witnesses. But a few fragments were coming back to him now.
He remembered JJ, caught in a barbwire fence. Bill tried to remember whether he was in uniform or his flannel jacket at the time, but any impression he had of himself last night was watery.
Bill hopped into his cruiser and headed out to the spot where he thought he’d run into JJ. Sure enough, he found a scrap of black fabric twisted around one of the barbs.
He searched the ground all around and checked the shoulders and the road itself, boots crunching in the frosty grass. All he found were some beer cans and the rotting corpse of a deer.
Bill got back in his cruiser and slammed the door. He scratched at the dark stubble on his neck and chin, trying to remember more about last night.
A blinking light caught his eye.
Dragnet.
His silent partner winked at him from the passenger seat. Even in trial mode, the glasses could reveal a ton of information. Bill slid them on.
“Shut up and take me to my badge.”
Aaron 2 fell silent and the display in the glasses faded away. Great, Bill thought, you really screwed that one up.
But then a map overlaid his vision. Aaron 2 said. Bill checked his pockets for his keys, and his hand hit something on his utility belt.
The flap of his holster was loose. The button clicked against the clasp.
No, Bill thought, jamming his hand into the empty space. He’d been so out of it, he hadn’t even noticed.
Deputy Sheriff Bill Biggs had lost his gun as well.
* * *
Quivering, greasy with sweat, JJ’s thumb finally came down on the UNINSTALL button . . . only to turn off the safety of the 9mm instead. He’d also put on Bill’s deputy sheriff badge without realizing it.
Delete it! JJ screamed at himself, watching in horror as his body, like some non-playable character, followed the golden mission arrow down the south wing of the school and out of his control, Bill’s gun hanging at his side.
CHAPTER 26
“And that is true irony,” Steve was saying, pacing in front of his Language Arts class, totally unaware of the trouble brewing outside.
“Like we discussed, stories are steeped in it. Sometimes, readers know something characters don’t. Sometimes maybe readers expect the story to go one way, only for it to zag the other. And sometimes—in fact, most of the time—characters don’t say exactly what they mean. All instanc
es of irony.”
Steve heard whispering from his class. Two kids, Meg Disney and JJ’s friend Richard Clement, were huddled around Richard’s phone.
“For example,” Steve said, “it’s slightly ironic I expect students to pay attention in my class, only to find out they’re playing on their Tethers.”
Neither Meg nor Richard seemed to hear him. They kept whispering and pointing at things on Richard’s phone.
Steve clenched his jaw, trying to bite back all the nasty words that wanted to fly out of his mouth. He didn’t like using anger to manage his class. He found it only led to rebellion. But these goddamn phones.
“And yet more irony,” Steve said, walking over to Richard and Meg. “I bet neither of you could’ve ever predicted I’m about to share what you’re doing with the entire class. Am I right?” He held out his hand for the phone. “Come on. It’s share time.”
* * *
JJ was panting by the time he exited HMS. Fighting his body was like running through water. He’d actually pulled a muscle. But getting to the parking lot would be worth it.
He went from car to car, peeking through windows, hoping to find loose change on floorboards or in ashtrays and center consoles. He searched the pavement as well.
“I’m trying.”
JJ couldn’t find a single cache. No one carried change anymore. The transactions were all done on their Tethers.
The golden mission arrow pointed back toward the school. It wouldn’t stop. He knew it wouldn’t stop. Resisting was giving him a headache and running him down. He didn’t know how much longer he could control his legs.
Just see what it wants, JJ thought, and he followed the arrow toward HMS. Just see, then decide.
* * *
On his final approach, he sifted through the intelligence Dragnet had on the place. Apparently, Marv’s lot wasn’t zoned as a junkyard, but as an unzoned industrial area once used for refining ore from Empty Mine. The glasses told Bill virtually everything except why Dragnet thought his gun might be at the Martian’s junkyard.
Bill parked and scanned the place with the glasses. He could barely filter out all the information tags flagging every piece of junk.
“Hey, A2, you see a bomb in there? Fertilizer bomb? In a moving van? Or anywhere?”
“Fine, any other dangers I should know about?”
<—round check, please say “Accept.”>
Bill almost told her to go to hell, but didn’t want her to misinterpret and call Sheriff Perkins again. He got out of his cruiser, still scanning. A low mist clung to the junk, leaving pockets of low visibility. The mist was all Bill could hear.
“Marvin!” he shouted, pounding on the door of one of the four travel trailers. “Marvin Jones, we need to talk!”
“Then why the hell did you bring me here?”
A new map overlaid Bill’s lenses. He punched Marvin’s door one last time and took off, following Dragnet’s map.
Chuffing, Bill stopped and waited, then took off again, this time in a different direction.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
Like most mobile GPS apps, Dragnet got confused whenever you stepped off the main roads. Either that or it was messing with him again.
He recognized this part of the junkyard. The Martian’s maze of copper, aluminum, and lead. Bill stood at the mouth of it, using his eye movements to scroll ahead on the map. Dragnet’s route took him right through the Martian’s Dead Zone.
If Steve was right, if Marv had built the Zone to block out all radio frequencies and radiation, Dragnet was about to drop off the map. Bill took a second to memorize the route, which twisted its way through the maze.
All right, he thought, and stepped inside.
“Huh,” Bill said, amazed he still had a signal. He found the turn and consulted the map again. Dragnet persevered. So all this work Marv had put into creating the Dead Zone, all wasted on the world’s smartest phone.
Bill passed by some crates of old lead paint. He’d been down this path yesterday, when he’d found the empty moving van in Marv’s lot. Had he really dropped his gun back here? And his badge? It didn’t make sense.
“Uh . . .” Bill stared at a huge roadblock of crushed pop cans, copper pipes, and lead weights. Maybe Dragnet was bugging out in the Dead Zone after all.
“Ugh. This better be good.”
Clattering down the other side of the roadblock, Bill saw the fork ahead, two paths shielded with copper and lead sheeting.
No way, he thought. No way had he ventured this far. No way could he have dropped his gun this far back.
“Wait, what? Do you mean the bomb?”
Spitting, Bill stayed right at the fork. He followed the map around a few more corners and over a hidden aluminum ladder.
“Holy shit,” Bill said. He’d come to a huge bowl made out of flattened cars. The path leading inside was made out of a giant slope of coins, all denominations, all different years.
Quarters, pennies, nickels, and dimes. Half dollars, whole dollars, wheat pennies, and even some half cents. Others were foreign—Canadian loonies, euros, old German Deutschmarks, and many Bill other coins didn’t recognize.
Dragnet labeled each one, along with the face value and estimated market value. Bill swam through the descriptive tags, his boots crunching coins as he slip-slid his way up the slope into the huge bowl of cars.
“Holy . . .”
They had believed it as teenagers and had rejected it as adults, but here it was, the X on all their treasure maps. The Martian’s fortune, entirely in coins—hundreds of thousands of coins he and his old man had collected over the decades, some of them thick with parking lot grime, some of them oxidized and caked in green dust. It was a fortune you couldn’t easily steal, not without earthmovers and a dump truck. The bowl of cars acted like a makeshift bank. Off to the sides, coffee cans, jars, and wooden boxes contained even more loose change.
Bill stopped halfway up the slope and caught himself as he started to slide down.
Marvin Jones’s body lay sprawled out on the coins. His tie-dyed shirt had turned a brick red from the blood.
* * *
“Excuse me,” Steve said, holding his hand out for Richard Clement’s phone.
The Tether started to blare “Ironic,” by Alanis Morissette. Richard and Meg looked at each other and laughed. What had Sarah called Richard Clement? The Dick?
“Okay, okay,” Steve said. “I guess you get some extra credit. Playing that song really is ironic. It’s the last thing I would’ve expected . . .” You dick, Steve thought.
* * *
Inside, the class laughed, and JJ felt the heat bubbling up behind his cheeks. The mission arrow had led him to a window looking into his dad’s classroom. Through all those golden coins crowding the headspace of the room, JJ could see the Dick—sitting shoulder to shoulder with Meg Disney.
The mission arrow pointed right at the coins above the Dick’s head. Out of everyone so far, Richard Clement was worth the most coins.
Something broke in him then. JJ felt it happen, felt some membrane in his head finally burst. Like a thunderclap, a headache spread from the nape of his neck to his entire skull. He nearly passed out. Tendrils, tentacles of heat, wormed into his brain. For the b
riefest second his vision flashed infrared.
JJ didn’t care what the Tether did with his body, not now. So long as it stole every last coin from that whiny little penis, Richard Clement.
Jacking a round into the chamber of Bill’s gun, JJ approached the door into this wing of HMS.
* * *
Dragnet’s infrared filter didn’t reveal any life in the junkyard. It had already told Bill the cause of the Martian’s death, as well as the exact time.
The second bullet. That was what killed him. The gut shot. Marvin had lain there for nearly an hour, bleeding out and crying.
Bill could barely stand the smell. Corpses always voided their bowels, but gut shots were a particular type of appalling.
Tromping back down the coins to catch his breath, Bill scanned the dirt path leading into the bowl.
There, he thought as Dragnet highlighted a boot print. Only a partial.
“Lay off the goddamn background check, all right?”
He lifted his boot to study the bottom. Standard issue for the sheriff’s office. Sure enough, his sole seemed to have the same diagonal tread, with little plus signs in the center. He hovered his boot just above the footprint, then shook his head.
Bill investigated farther down the path, but the dirt was harder here. The glasses didn’t highlight any more tracks.
He returned to the corpse and reviewed Dragnet’s bullet trajectories. They resembled bullet time, translucent tunnels threading the air. The blood spatters were charted out in crimson threads.
Bill didn’t need Dexter Morgan to figure this out; Dragnet did all the legwork. Judging by the angle and size of the bullet wounds, plus the spray of blood, the shooter had been standing at the mouth of the bowl.
Right about here, Bill thought, following the bullet trails to their origin. According to Dragnet’s report, the shooter stood approximately six-three. Bill kept shaking his head.
The Phone Company Page 27