by Rob Hart
“I’m not trying to fix this. I know I can’t fix it. But someone has to stop him.”
“I know you must be a mess right now, but please, for me, ask yourself who you’re doing this for.”
“What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
It happens without me thinking about it. The muscles in my fist ball up. And my instinct is to throw it at him. He doesn’t see my hand in my lap because his view is blocked by the table, but he sees something in my eyes and that makes him slide his chair back to put some space between us.
Breathe deep. I tell him, “Regardless of how things were between me and Chell, this is our home. This is where we live. And I will not tolerate this.”
Bombay pours himself a shot and throws it back. He pours another but lets it sit on the table. He reaches for it, but instead of taking it he says, “Then go catch all the rapists. Go stop every murder. Why don’t you go be a cop, if this is how you feel?”
“Cops are sanctioned bullies. They get their badge and their gun and then they’re more concerned with what the job can do for them, not what they can do for the city. All we have is each other. There are good guys and there are bad guys, and the good guys need to stand up for one another.”
“You’re Spider-Man now? With great power comes great responsibility? Do you even hear yourself?”
“My hearing is fine.”
Bombay takes the bloody towels and the vodka into the kitchen. He says, “I only say this because I love you. You do understand that, right?”
“Say that to my face, you pussy.”
He doesn’t say anything back.
My conscience tells me to go into the kitchen, hug him, thank him for being a good friend. I ignore it, ask him, “Make any headway on the crap I gave you?”
He comes out drying his hands on a dish towel and carries a laptop over to the table, pulls up a browser, and types in the URL from the business card.
It leads to an all-black screen with Noir York in big, white lettering. Underneath that it reads: New York is the brightest city in the world, but if you look close enough, you see the dark underbelly festering below the surface.
There’s nothing else on the screen. No buttons, no links.
Bombay says, “Now watch.” He clicks a couple of buttons, opening a small white screen of messy text. He pulls over a pad and a pen and writes down a phone number.
I ask, “How did you do that?”
“I pulled up the source code for the page.”
“Talk to me like I’m not a nerd.”
“The source code is what the site is built out of. The programming language. Sometimes people hide clues in it. It says you have to look ‘below the surface.’ It’s not fancy, but it’s decently clever.”
“What does it say?”
“Just a phone number.”
“How do you know it’s a phone number?”
“Because it’s ten digits long with a six-four-six area code.”
“You are such a nerd.”
He shakes his head. “You are really bad at saying ‘thanks.’”
“Fact.”
He hands me the sheet of paper. I fold it up and put it in my pocket and ask, “Can you tell me anything else about the site?”
He clicks at the keyboard for a little bit and calls up another website. “There’s this thing called a ‘whois’ search, which is how you figure out who owns a URL. When you buy a domain, you have the option of blocking it as a privacy setting. This person blocked it.”
“Can you get around it?”
“Maybe. Might take a few days. If I do it, do you promise to not kill anyone?”
“I love you too much to promise you anything.”
He stares at me for a moment, then his shoulders sag. “I’ll figure it out.”
Next he takes out the thumb drive. He doesn’t put it in the computer, just leans forward holding it in his hands. “Do you know what this is?”
I don’t want to tell him it’s what I almost got stabbed over. I say, “Of course I don’t.”
“It’s a Steel Drive.”
“Elaborate.”
“It’s military-grade. You could run this over with a tank. The encryption is impossible to crack. If you enter the wrong password ten times it self-destructs.”
“For real?”
“For real real. I mean, it doesn’t explode like a bomb, just the chip inside burns out.”
“Can you break in?”
“Dude, if you actually manage to crack this open there’s an epoxy that snaps the chip. I’m pretty good, but even if you took this to an elite hacker, they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. Where did you get this?”
“Chell’s apartment.”
“You stole it?”
“She’s not using it. Any idea where she got it?”
“They’re available to the general public. About a hundred bucks. I actually wanted to get one. They’re pretty cool.”
“Any idea why Chell would have one?”
He shrugs.
It doesn’t sit right. Military-style indestructible hard drive. I wasn’t even going to take it. Now I’m glad I did. Bombay plugs it in the side of the laptop and a prompt screen appears.
I ask, “Any ideas?”
“A few.” He types and hits enter. The screen shakes like it’s angry and the number six appears in the corner.
Bombay says, “Huh.”
“What?”
“Someone has already tried to get into this thing. Three bad attempts.”
He types two more, and both times it comes back wrong. The number drops to four. Bombay says, “The three most common passwords are ‘password,’ ‘sex,’ and the person’s birthday.” He takes the drive out and hands it to me. “You have four more tries before it’s useless.”
“I’m glad there’s no pressure.”
He closes the laptop and cracks the top of a diet soda. “You look like you need some sleep.”
“That is probably correct.”
“You can crash here if you want.”
“Need a little fresh air.” I get up and walk to the door, turn. “Thanks, man.”
“Any time. Please don’t come back here bleeding anymore. I’m not sure if you realize this, but people have a finite supply.”
“I’m getting a lot of reminders about that lately.”
At the ATM I’m very tempted to check my balance, but the fear holds me back. I ask for twenty dollars and the machine spits it out. Enough for a pack of smokes and a granola bar.
What I didn’t tell Bombay, what I can’t tell him because I don’t want to hear the words out loud, is I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do when I find this guy. I do know it’s going to be long, and it’s going to be bloody, and it’s going to end up with him dead.
Just the thought of Chell screaming, helpless. Thrashing. It hurts so bad to think about, but then I realize that’s just the charred skin from where I’ve wrapped my hand into a bloodless fist around my cigarette. I drop it to the pavement, brush the loose tobacco off on my jeans. There’s a little scorch mark on the fat pad under my thumb.
Breathe deep.
The door to my apartment is kicked in, splintered around the lock. My muscles deflate. This is fucking ridiculous.
The place is a wreck. Everything has been tossed. Drawers are pulled out. Clothes scattered everywhere. The cushions have been sliced open. The plates have been smashed on the floor. Which is just mean.
I panic, run for the scanner. It lives on a little table by the outlet in the kitchen. It’s been knocked over and unplugged. I plug is back in and a calm, tired voice says, “10-27, 221 5th Street.” Incinerator fire, a few blocks away.
Small wonders.
I check the apartment. Nothing seems to be missing, not that I have anything worth stealing. The scanner is the only thing with sentimental value. I can buy more clothes. My television is smashed too, but I hardly ever watch it.
Probably t
he two assholes who tried to mug me for the drive did this. They must have been coming out and seen me.
If they were in here, they saw my murder map on the wall. I get a little sensitive about the information I’ve written down, so I stand in the kitchen and stare at the wall and wonder if there’s anything there I should worry about. I can’t think of anything, so I fall onto the couch and pull the drive out of my pocket. It can’t have a tracking chip in it or else they would have gone to Bombay’s apartment.
Someone knows I have it.
The door. I need to fix the door. If Aziz stops by and sees it, he’ll come in and then I’m out of here.
My phone buzzes with a text from Dave: Groper struck again.
I wing my phone against the exposed brick wall and it shatters into pieces, then I curl into the couch and prepare to pass out. If someone wants to break in and kill me, so fucking be it.
The guy at the cell phone store tries to talk me up to a smartphone. But since I haven’t gotten a new phone in two years, I can get a plastic flip phone for free. I tell him I want that.
He grumbles and tells me I should at least buy a protection plan and a case. I call him an asshole and tell him to sell me the phone. He complies and activates it, treating me like I have the plague.
I walk out of the store and immediately get a text: Apocalypse. But I don’t have any phone numbers programed so I have no idea who it’s from. It was my next stop so I head there anyway. Maybe it’s a trap. At least I’ll know who’s after me.
Instead I find Lunette and Margo sitting at the bar drinking mimosas. Since Dave is working alone and the bar is otherwise empty, he’s playing Bach’s cello suites over the speakers. He’s also playing an invisible cello behind the bar.
I sit and ask for a bottle of water. Dave passes it over and when I reach for it, my sleeve pulls back and reveals the fresh bandage I wrapped around my arm when I woke up. Lunette grabs my shoulder. “What happened?”
“I got mugged last night. Well, I almost got mugged last night. They didn’t get anything off me.”
The two of them look at me, mouths agape. Dave asks, “Did you show them your umbrella?”
“I did.” To the girls I say, “It’s fine. They came out of it worse. Listen, what are your numbers?”
I pull out my new phone and they rattle them off. Margo asks, “I thought you said they didn’t take anything?”
“No, I broke my other phone.”
“Why?”
“I was angry.”
They both have looks on their faces like they want to sit me down in a corner and lecture me. I take another swig of water. Lunette excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Dave tells me he needs to run down the block to get smokes and asks if I can watch the bar.
I walk around to the other side and pick up the iPod plugged into the speakers and switch over to Cock Sparrer. Dave is good for two things: Classical music and British punk.
Margo asks, “Does your arm hurt?”
“It’s fine. What’s your deal?”
“With what?”
“With Lunette?”
Margo pauses. “You’re not going to tell my mom?”
“I don’t give a damn what you do.”
“Thanks. I just don’t know how she’d take it. She’s a little… conservative.”
“As I recall. Still, I didn’t realize you were on the muffin squad.”
Margo narrows her eyes. “Are you kidding me?”
“What?”
She shakes her head, takes a sip of her drink. “So the thing last night. Did you call the cops?”
“No need. It was two guys who wanted my wallet and ended up embarrassing themselves. I’m not going to waste a day filling out reports and looking at mug shots.”
“You’re surprisingly nonchalant about this.”
“Not the first time this kind of thing has happened.”
Lunette comes back and takes her stool, holds her open palms above her empty drink and shrugs. I root around under the bar for the champagne and orange juice. She says, “We’re going to the walk around Central Park.”
Margo jumps in. “I’d really like to see Times Square, too.”
Lunette shakes her head. “God fuck no.”
“I’d rather kill myself than go to Times Square,” I tell her.
Margo gives me an inquisitive look. I tell her, “It’s the same reason I would never want to go to Disney.”
Margo shakes her head. “Liking Disney doesn’t make you a bad person. Do you want to come with us on our adventures?”
Check with Bombay.
Fix my door.
Address the groping issue.
Find Chell’s killer.
“I’ve got a packed day,” I tell her. “Will you two be okay without me?”
Margo nods. She doesn’t seem upset. That’s good. She heads for the bathroom. Lunette leans forward and holds up her hand for a high-five. “Dude, I fucked your cousin.”
“Fuck you. I’m not high-fiving you for that.”
“Don’t leave me hanging.” She pushes her open hand toward me, practically in my face. I roll my eyes and give it a smack. Satisfied, she sits back with her drink. Dave leans in the front door, holding a lit cigarette outside, and asks, “Talk?”
I leave Lunette in charge, tell her to say goodbye to Margo for me, and head out to meet him. He hands me a sheet of folded-up paper, ripped from a yellow legal pad.
“The location of last night’s grope attack,” he says. “Plus, a bonus. One of my guys heard about a trend of purse-snatchings and muggings. He did a little research and found a lot of incidents, all within the last two weeks. Could be a random spike, I don’t know.”
I check the page. There’s a dozen dates, times, and locations as well as other details on perps. Four of them include a note about ski masks, and two about glasses. It sounds a little like my friends from last night.
Which doesn’t make any sense. These are random, scattered around the East Village. Those two were after me for a reason.
More shit to figure out.
“Thanks for this,” I tell him. “Listen, can we get a few other people out on rotation tonight? I really want to get this asshole.”
“You think he might be the guy?”
“That got Chell? No, these attacks are too small. Takes a special kind of monster to do that to someone.”
“I’ll send a few people out. Will you be around tonight?”
“I’ll try, but no promises.”
I bang on Bombay’s door for nearly two straight minutes before he yanks it open. He’s bleary-eyed, wearing a tank top and plaid pajama pants. He sees me and goes to shut the door, but I stick my foot in it. He lets me in and heads into the kitchen.
“Got anything for me?” I ask.
He comes back out, the coffeemaker hissing behind him, and sits across from me at the table. He slides a sheet of paper over. “I stayed up late. Couldn’t resist. It took a little doing but I found the name of the guy. Joel Cairo. Do you know who that is?” He waits for me to answer. When I don’t, he says, “A character from The Maltese Falcon.”
“So whoever registered the site did it under a dummy name?”
“Yes. But.” He taps the page. “There were some financials I may or may not have stumbled across, and if I did, which is only allegedly, I might have cross-referenced an address. Not that any of this is actually possible to accomplish. But if I did, this is where the bills for the site would be sent. It’s a bar called Slaughterhouse Six in Bushwick.”
“Are you kidding me with this nonsense?”
“Sorry.” He goes back into the kitchen and comes out with two steaming mugs, sets one in front of me. I put my hands around it to warm them up. He says, “There’s something else. You’re not going to like it.”
“Because I’m in a peachy fucking mood already.”
He hesitates. “Last night after you left, I went to the bodega. I ran into Tommy. Tommy had just seen Quinn.” He pauses to take a sip.
“Tommy said Quinn was pretty broken up about Chell.”
“He would be.”
“Quinn told Tommy the night before Chell died, he proposed to her.”
“What?”
“And apparently she said yes.”
What was it, Chell, that attracted you to Quinn?
He’s handsome like a model in a Sears catalogue. Forgettable. He has a fat bank account from his fancy Wall Street job, but you weren’t a gold digger. He’s sweet in a dumb way. Other than that, I don’t know what he has going for him.
I remember that night I first saw the two of you together. We were in my office at Apocalypse. There were a couple of us. Lunette and Bombay, one of the Kellys, a few other people. We were passing around a magnum bottle of wine and doing bumps off a little pile of coke in the middle of the coffee table. We were slung low on the couches and talking about music, or politics, or something equally as pointless.
You were sitting on the opposite side of the room. This was a couple of months after the Brooklyn Bridge. After I shifted the tectonic plates of our relationship. We were still talking, but less. The space between us felt like a vacuum. I kept a candle lit in the window in case you came around.
Quinn walked in and greeted us each in turn, and sat on the arm of the couch next to you. You crossed your legs toward him and the two of you talked like old friends. Something sharp and cold slid between my ribs.
Lunette held a rolled-up twenty in front of my face and had to smack me on the side of the head to make me focus, because I couldn’t see anything besides his hand on your arm as you laughed at a joke he made.
After a little while, he whispered in your ear. You smiled and nodded. He got up to leave and said his goodbyes and walked out. You waited two minutes and checked your watch and left without saying anything to anyone.
I followed you into the bathroom, caught you just as you were swinging the bookcase back into place. You looked at me like you were expecting something. Like you knew what was coming.
So, I said. Quinn.
He’s a friend.
When did you meet him?
A few weeks ago. Bombay introduced us.
Okay.
Are you upset?
I thought you weren’t interested in that kind of thing.