Snitch World

by Jim Nisbet

  Klinger had a look at the labels on the pill bottles. The first contained an antibiotic. The second label mentioned thirty forty-milligram ampules of a brand-name synthesis of opium-derived thebaine.

  These latter pills would bring thirty-five dollars apiece on the street. Without so much as a backward glance, Klinger cracked the cap, dispensed four ampules into the palm of his hand, dropped them into his shirt pocket, replaced the cap on the bottle and the bottle onto the night-stand, and was standing at the foot of the bed, retrieving the phone from his jacket pocket, when a nurse stuck his head in the door.

  “Did you say your name was Officer Clemens?” he asked.

  As if holding the phone away from the north light in order to study its screen, Klinger didn’t bother to turn to face the nurse. “Is Clemens on this case too?”

  “In other words,” the nurse said, as if annoyed with the obtuse answer and the wasted moment that went with it, “you’re not him.”

  Tentatively touching the phone, Klinger gave it a moment before he shook his head. “No. I’m not him.”

  “Shit,” the nurse said, and went on his away.

  The door to the hall closed silently.

  “This is the longest,” a muffled voice said, “that I’ve gone without e-mail in my adult life.”

  Klinger looked up. The patient’s eyes were open, and he was looking hungrily at the phone in Klinger’s hand. “Somebody took my phone,” Phillip said.

  “Good afternoon,” Klinger said. “Phillip Wong, I presume?”

  “It is I,” Phillip Wong replied. “Or what’s left of me. Phoneless and e-mailless me.” Phillip looked at Klinger, frowned uncertainly, looked at the red tie, shook off the thought and asked, “And whom do I address?”

  Well, thought Klinger, you almost remembered me. “Detective Schnorr,” Klinger said without hesitation. “SFPD.”

  “The police?”

  Klinger nodded. “The police. And how are you feeling, Mr. Wong?—May I call you Phillip?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks. Call me Reese.”

  “What day is it, Reese?”

  “Friday,” Klinger answered. “All day.”

  “And how long have I been here?”

  Klinger considered this. “Eighteen hours, maybe?”

  “I got a headache.”

  “I’ll bet.” Klinger took up the clipboard and had a look. Much of the language and notation were opaque to him, but he knew what a concussion was. “You took quite a whack.”

  Phillip tried to nod, but he winced instead. “I don’t remember a thing.”

  “What’s the last thing you do remember?” Klinger lifted the first page off the clipboard.

  Though it no doubt hurt, Phillip’s expression soured. “Marci,” he said bitterly. “Fucking Marci on the fucking phone.”

  Klinger looked up from the clipboard. “And Marci is … ?”

  Phillip sighed. “An associate.” His sigh made a lot of noise inflating his ventilator. “An associate from my job.”

  “I see.” Klinger replaced the clipboard on its hook. “Do you remember where you were, or what you were doing, while you were talking to her?”

  “Sure,” Phillip said. “I was eating pasta and drinking wine at the … At the …”

  “You had dinner in a place called Il Bodega di Frisco,” Klinger told him. “Is that when you talked to her?”

  “That’s right,” Phillip said. “I love that place. There’s never anybody there.”

  “Interesting,” Klinger lied. “I wonder how they stay in business?”

  “They run a sports book out back,” Phillip said offhandedly. “I—.” He shut up.

  Klinger nodded a jaded nod. “We know all about the sports book.”

  When Phillip’s eyes widened, the disparity in pupil size became obvious. “How come you—?”

  “Are you kidding? If we took down all the gambling in North Beach, there wouldn’t be a joint up there left to eat in. Not to mention to drink in.” Klinger put one of his desert boots up on the railing at the foot of the bed and rezipped it. “What I really want to know is, how’s the food at Il Bodega di Frisco?”

  “After a week of eating sandwiches at your desk three times a day,” Phillip said, “it’s goddamn excellent. Especially the wine. They got a deep cellar under there somewhere.” He squinted. “You ever eat sandwiches three meals a day?”

  “Sure,” Klinger said. “All the time. I never drink wine, though,” he added truthfully. He placed the palm of his right hand over the lower-left side of his stomach. “It aggravates my digestion. But I drink a lotta coffee. Coffee and hot pastrami with the works—pickles, pepperoncini, onions, lettuce, mayo, mustard—.” Klinger smiled contentedly. He sounded just like a cop. “What else?”

  “Sprouts,” Phillip suggested. “Avocado.”

  “Although sometimes,” Klinger confided, “I go for a giro.”

  “I can’t handle lamb.” Phillip made a face. “Too greasy.” “You drink enough coffee?” Klinger dropped his foot back to the floor and chopped the side of one hand against the palm of its opposite. “Cuts right through the grease. I don’t care what you’ve been eating.”

  Phillip groaned.

  Five seconds passed in silence.

  “I think I’m gonna puke,” Phillip said.

  Uh oh, Klinger thought. Aloud he said, “You want a wastebasket?”

  Phillip smacked his lips and moved his head back and forth.

  “No good if you puke inside that mask,” Klinger submitted nervously. “Maybe I’ll get a nurse,” he lied.

  Phillip held out a hand. “Give me a minute,” he managed to say. “Give me …”

  Klinger gave him two. In the intervening silence, while keeping one eye on the patient, Klinger paced the room. On the cover of a celebrity magazine a former governor of Alaska was astride an ATV and showing a lot of leg. Out the north-facing window, despite the mist, he could make out the top of the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The crisis passed. “Okay,” said Phillip weakly. “I’m okay.”

  “How about some water?” asked Klinger.

  Phillip nodded.

  Klinger took up a plastic flask from the bedside stand. A glass tube protruded from its mouth, and the tube had a dogleg in it. “Is this water?”

  Phillip nodded. Klinger held the flask in one hand and aimed the tube at Phillip’s head with the other.

  Phillip pressed the mask to his face, took several deep breaths, then moved the mask aside. Klinger quickly fit the end of the glass straw tube to Phillip’s lips, and Phillip drew a long draught through it.

  Nodding, Phillip pushed the straw aside, refit the mask over his nose and mouth, pressed it into place with palm of one hand, and inhaled greedily enough to concave the transparent contours of the mask. The machine to which the mask was hooked ticked determinedly. Then Phillip exhaled loudly, as if exhausted. Beads of moisture flecked the inside surface of the mask. “Thanks,” he managed to say.

  Klinger replaced the flask on the table, then indicated the upholstered chair. “May I?”

  Phillip nodded eagerly.

  Klinger took a seat, retrieving the phone from his jacket pocket as he did so.

  “You’re racked up and you need your rest, Phillip. I won’t keep you much longer. Is this your phone?”

  Phillip’s eyes brightened. “Sure looks like it.”

  “Is there some way you can tell for sure?”

  Phillip nodded so that the tubes festooning him rattled. “How?”

  Klinger handed him the phone. Phillip held the phone, swiped a finger over its screen, then again, then again. He looked happy. The transformation was something to see. “I’m surprised it’s not dead,” he said, watching the screen. “Did you charge it?”

  “It was dead when we found it,” Klinger said easily. “A guy in the precinct has the same model. He loaned me—you—a battery.”

  Phillip nodded. “Where’d you find it?”


  “Well get to that in a minute. It’s password protected,” Klinger added.

  Phillip nodded again.

  “The thing is,” Klinger continued, “there’s a chance the guy who mugged you made a few calls after he stole it. He might have been that stupid, anyway. That’s if you’d left it on when he stole it, of course.”

  “I can check that,” Phillip said. “Easily.”

  “Yeah,” Klinger said. “I’m sure you can.”

  “Here we go,” Phillip said. As Klinger watched, Phillip held the phone in front of him in his left hand, then, despite the resistance of the various tubes inhibiting his agility, placed the first three fingers of his right hand across the face of it. The phone emitted three escalating tones.

  “Wow,” Klinger repeated truthfully.

  “It’s my phone all right,” Phillip said.

  “Your password has to do with fingerprint recognition?” Klinger realized, amazed.

  “Three-fingerprint recognition,” Phillip nodded. “It’s an open source app that I modified,” he added modestly.

  “Wow,” Klinger replied frankly.

  Phillip tapped the screen, waited, tapped again, waited, and tapped again. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the call I took from Marci. Initiated at 8:37 p.m., terminated at 9:05 p.m. Pretty much the whole time I was trying to enjoy my meal.”

  “Marci’s the associate you mentioned?” said Klinger.

  Phillip nodded. “But I see no other incoming calls, and no outgoing calls. Not that night, anyway. But,” he added, “there’s … eleven incoming calls that went to my InBox starting at … one-thirty the next morning.”

  “Can you tell who they were from?”

  Phillip nodded. “Marci … Marci … Then, yesterday, all kinds of people …” He tapped the side of the phone. “Then, this morning, Marci again.” Phillip Wong sighed. “All work-related. Speaking clinically,” he added, “I don’t have too many friends.”

  Klinger pursed his lips. “Okay. But he still had the phone on him.”

  Phillip didn’t look up from his screen. “Who did?” “The guy we arrested this morning for …” Klinger hesitated.

  Phillip waited a few seconds, then, his forefinger in midswipe, he looked at Klinger. “For?”

  “… Driving a stolen vehicle,” Klinger decided. He shrugged. “It was a complete fluke. A coincidence.” He nodded. “Guy has a long record, this is a high-end phone, and he had a cheap one in his possession that seemed way more obviously his speed. One of those pay-as-you-go phones you get out of a vending machine.”

  Phillip made a face.

  “Also,” Klinger went on, “he was in possession of several freshly dispensed ATM twenties whose serial numbers,” he pointed at Phillip, “we traced to the North Beach branch of your bank.”

  “You know,” Phillip frowned, “I vaguely remember using an ATM recently …”

  “And so you did,” Klinger nodded. “At something like ten-forty the night you got mugged. So,” he indicated the phone, “our boy was driving a stolen car and in possession of stolen property. Too bad about the outgoing calls, though. If he’d been dumb enough to call his mother on your phone, it would be pretty easy to stick him with a couple of extra charges, and felonies at that.”

  “Like what felonies?”

  “The stolen vehicle’s a good one. And your ATM money. The phone was stolen too—right?”

  “Right,” Phillip nodded gravely. “Definitely.”

  “Okay,” Klinger put out his hand. “Would you mind giving it back to me?”

  Phillip look distressed. He looked at Klinger, then he looked at his phone. “But you just returned it to me,” he said defensively. “What do you need it for?”

  “It’s evidence,” Klinger said.

  “Evidence …” Phillip said uncertainly. “But … But it’s my phone.” He gestured with it. “I got to return all these calls. All my numbers are in here. My address book. E-mail. I—.”

  Klinger nodded as if patiently. “I understand that, Phillip. Really, I do.” Klinger patted the breast pocket of his jacket. “If I lost my phone, I’d be fucked. My whole case load would fall apart.”

  “Well?” Phillip replied. “You’re making my point for me.”

  “Yes, yes,” Klinger nodded. “But—.”

  Again, Phillip made as if to object, and, in doing so, he held the phone away from Klinger. Phillip’s intravenous tubes moved with his right arm, and the IV tree, being on wheels, rolled into the curtain.

  Klinger caught the IV tree with one hand and held his other hand aloft, its palm toward the patient. “Wait, Phillip, don’t get excited. I’m not saying you’re not going to get your phone back. What I’m saying, however, is that your phone is evidence collected in the course of an investigation. At the very least we need—.”

  “Creation of Tron,” by Wendy Carlos, woke up Phillip’s phone.

  “Whoa,” Klinger said. As Phillip made to answer the call, Klinger held out a hand. “Wait.”

  Phillip blinked. The ringtone repeated.

  “Do you recognize the incoming number?” Klinger asked.

  Phillip stared at him, blinked, then looked at the screen. The ringtone repeated a third time. “No,” he said.

  “It’ll stay in memory,” Klinger said, “right?”

  Phillip nodded.

  “You want me to answer it?” Klinger said.

  Phillip, as if entranced by the screen, ignored him. Klinger put his hand on Phillip’s shoulder. “At least put it on speaker.”

  Phillip blinked, then nodded. He touched the screen once, nodded, then touched it again. “Hello?” he said, holding the phone equidistant between Klinger’s head and his own.

  “Marty?” a woman’s voice said.

  “Who?” Phillip said. “I mean,” he corrected himself, noticing Klinger’s visible wince, “Hello? Yes?”

  “Who is this?” said the little speaker. The voice was muffled and there was a lot of noise in the background. It sounded like freeway traffic and maybe even a helicopter.

  “Hello?” Phillip repeated.

  The caller rang off.

  “You don’t know the number—right?”

  Phillip shook his head.

  “And the voice?”

  “No,” Phillip said.

  Klinger retrieved a pen and a little spiral notebook from the breast pocket of his jacket. “What’s the number?”

  Phillip read it aloud. Klinger wrote it down. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Sure.”

  “If somebody found this phone, or stole it, is there a way for them to figure out the number that rings it?”

  Phillip smiled. “I think so.” He turned the phone edge-wise and showed it to Klinger. There, as Klinger could see, a ten-digit number was etched into the edge of the phone.

  “That’s the number?” Klinger asked in amazement.

  “I can recite a hundred lines of assembler instructions without making a mistake,” Phillip said shyly. “But I’ve never been able to remember my own phone number. Besides,” he added, “until very recently, if you changed phone companies or even plans within a company, you had to change phone numbers, too. I’ve had a million phones and almost as many phone numbers and plans to go with them. Oh yes,” Phillip nodded his head gravely, “I go all the way back.”

  Klinger raised both eyebrows, nonplussed.

  Phillip brooded a moment. “Sometimes I think the modern world just asks too much of its citizens.” He looked at Klinger. Above the seams of the ventilator mask, the unequal sizes of Phillip’s pupils clearly indicated a concussion. “Don’t you?”

  “Sure, kid,” Klinger said. After a pause, he resumed copying the phone’s number into his notebook. “Unlike the clowns in the police department, I’ll bet this clown we caught noticed this number here and passed it on to his girlfriend or his mother. We missed that detail entirely. But if we could make that connection, we’d have a pretty airtight case. Tell you what, Phillip. Let me b
orrow your phone long enough to run it by our technical people again. Maybe they can trace that incoming call. I’ll bring it back tomorrow, about this time, I promise.” Klinger replaced pen and notebook into his jacket pocket. “You think you can be a phoneless citizen of this crazy world for another twenty-four hours?” He favored Phillip with a warm smile. “I’m sure you can use the rest. A concussion is no joke. I know.” Klinger tapped the side of his head.

  Phillip looked just a little lost, and then he looked just a little chagrined. “Sure, Officer.” He handed Klinger the phone. “I’ve enjoyed my semi-conscious morning on drugs and without a phone. I guess I never realized how demanding a phone can be.”

  “I appreciate the trust,” Klinger said sincerely, accepting the phone. “I need one more favor.”

  Phillip knitted his fingers together, folded his hands over his chest, and gazed dreamily at the ceiling. “Name it.”

  “I need you to override your password on this thing, just long enough for the lab boys to check it out thoroughly. Don’t worry,” Klinger added, “they won’t be calling your girlfriends or anything like that.”

  “Girlfriends?” Phillip said sourly. He took back the phone. “No problem.” He manipulated the phone with multiple touches and swipes, powered it down, counted to ten, powered it back up again, tested it to his satisfaction, powered it down again, and handed the device back to Klinger. “Now you’ve got access to anything on it.”

  Klinger looked at it. “Even if the battery dies?”

  “Even then. Even if it goes to sleep,” Phillip said drowsily. “No password required. Just … fire it …” Phillip’s eyes almost closed, then he opened them. “If you find any girlfriends in there, bookmark them for me.”

  He closed his eyes again.

  “Thanks, guy,” Klinger said. “If the lab boys get done with it by tonight, I’ll drop it off on my way home, after my shift.”

  “Keep the son … of … a … a bitch …” Phillip said, not bothering to try keeping his eyes open.