“Why should I care about some Dr. Ramos?”
The man shrugged. “People I interviewed said he had a big smile. The thing that always got to him, though, made him flip, was when people called him Ricky Ricardo. Anyone who knew him learned very quickly not to do it. Bad temper, or so I hear.”
“I don’t understand. Who—”
“My name’s Frank Neff.” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and removed a card. He passed it to her.
At first she refused to touch it, but she was curious.
R. FRANKLIN NEFF, it read. CONTRIBUTING WRITER. ROLLING STONE.
“Right,” she said. She turned away again. He fell into step with her.
“Can I buy you a coffee or something? That place on the corner looks open.”
She stopped. “Anybody can flash a business card. You reach in one of those jars in a restaurant and you can be anyone you want.”
“Need proof? Come on, let’s fire up your computer. You have a computer, don’t you?” That smile again.
Instantly she went on red alert. The disc. He knew about it somehow. That had to be it.
“Magazines are dead,” she said.
“Most are. Not ours. Didn’t you follow that whole McChrystal dust-up? Not only did we get the guy fired, we upped our circulation by ten percent. We did good for the world and for us.”
“I don’t have a computer.”
“Right,” he said, “and I suppose you don’t have a cell phone, and you’ve never sent a text message in your life.”
She glared. “What’s a text message?”
“Ms. Austin, please, give me some credit. I have a sixteen-year-old daughter.”
And that sixteen-year-old has a family, Alexis thought. Her anger spiked. “Get away from me, please, or I’ll call the police.”
“Right,” he said. “Why do I think the last thing you want right now is for a cop to appear at your side?”
She watched him.
He pulled out a photograph of a man. It was the same man Alexis had a photograph of—the one she took from LJ’s room. He said, “Dr. Ramos was your father.” This time he did not smile. “I guess you never knew.”
“I never had a father.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t have a computer. You never had a father. You just appeared on the earth. Last piece I did was about the Brethren in North Carolina. You’d fit right in.”
“Very funny.”
He said, “I’ve already spoken with the police. I interviewed Detective Francolini yesterday. The one with the woman’s first name? I believe you’ve met him. As I understand it, he’s a little annoyed with you. I also spoke with an old friend, Detective Lou Rivers, of the Seattle Police Department’s intel unit. I knew him from something else a few years back. We had some friends in common. He’s the country’s leading expert on the Seattle Seven. He’s going to have a big part in this piece I’m doing.”
Alexis shook her head. “You don’t get it. I couldn’t care less about any of this. All of it. It’s just—dead. It’s all dead.”
“Look, I know about the disc. The police know about the disc. And they’re going to find it, unless you give it to me first. I promise to keep it safe. I’m a reporter, you—”
“Oh fuck you, I can trust you, right? Just leave me alone.”
He watched her a moment. “I’ll be in town for quite a while. We’ll talk, I’m sure. In the meantime I want you to think about something. Your friend LJ had four pounds of plastique in his warehouse. According to wiretaps, he was planning to blow up the restaurant in the Space Needle. At least, that’s what Detective Rivers thinks. He was ready to move against your friend, but something happened. Think about it, Alexis. Then please call me. You’ve got my card.”
She walked away, into the hotel. She watched through the window until the guy’s car disappeared around the corner.
Trust him. Right. Trust him, and next thing you know I’d have to trust Fox News.
She ran up the stairs to her room and found the disc. How strange—the past resided on that shiny piece of high-tech modernity. Her past. All of it. And now she would have to destroy it.
She found the disc. She moved it so that the light that played around its edges broke into hues of blue and green. This was the past. Her reality. And yet there was nothing real about it. Nothing was as she had thought. Her mother had wanted to sell the hotel. LJ was not the warm, loving man she had imagined, but a deranged burned-out revolutionary who had planned to kill countless others. And her father, Dr. Ramos—Dr. Ricardo Fucking Ramos, was a gun runner and probably a killer.
The past resided in invisible digital dust. It was time, she realized. This past no longer mattered.
She ran down to the kitchen. She had seen this trick done once on a television show. She took the twist-tie off a bag of bread and shaped it into a loop, then twisted the ends together. She put the disc on a plate and put the loop on top, then put both into the microwave oven in the kitchen.
She turned the cook time to one minute and set the power on High.
Thirty seconds later the microwave filled with the same tangerine light as the blast that took LJ away. A sound like a dragging chain. Smoke. The oven shut down.
There was little left of the disc. She took the remains to the basement and hid them in one of the coffins, then shut the lid.
CHAPTER 25
GARTH STEIN
THERE IS NOTHING MORE REASSURING to Alexis than a moon in the daytime. Something about the palest white shard pinned up against the blue. Something about the swipe of the Sea of Tranquility. And now with the disc gone, with all the garbage gone, what is left? Nothing but Alexis and the moon, making quite a couple in the late morning.
Exhaustion seems to have seeped into her very bones, right to the marrow. Oh, she slept a few hours the night before, but the psychic toll has made her tired to her soul. It will be lifetimes until she recovers.
Downstairs, Otto is still being Otto. Ursula, Ursula. Nothing has changed. And yet the seismic rift in Alexis’s life is nothing short of catastrophic.
She pours herself half a glass of orange juice and fills the rest with mostly flat TalkingRain from a two-liter bottle that’s been lurking at the back on the refrigerator for who knows how long. But before she can put the glass to her lips and drink, the doorbell rings. The residents come to order. The house is alive again.
Otto looks at her from the front door, where he is standing guard by the peephole.
“Coppers,” he says. “A bunch of them.”
Alexis laughs and drops her shoulders.
“Let them in, Otto, I give up. Game over.”
Of course the game is over. All those things, those secrets about her father, about LJ and the accidental killing, are now hidden forever. All the players are dead, and she’ll be long dead before they can beat the information out of her, that’s for sure. “Let them in,” she says. “Tell them they can find me in the sea of tranquility with the man in the moon.”
She turns and goes upstairs, marches up the steps she knows so well with the worn carpeting that should have been replaced years ago, holding the banister that was not up to fire code—no, thank you very much—but always seemed to pass code when Edith offered up a little sherry to the inspector (don’t tell on him, please, he was a nice guy). She retreats to her apartment and waits for the knock that will signal the end of the end for Alexis. Foster care. Adoption. Who knows?
In the disgusting apartment, which has really gone to hell since her mother died, she turns on the bath. That’s what she wants. A hot bath. With little bath toys like she had as a kid. She wants a mom to wash her and dry her and tousle her hair, dress her up in her pajamas and snuggle her in bed. She can’t have all of that. But a bath. That she can have.
The knock comes. She opens the door without even asking who’s there. She knows.
“Detective Francolini,” she says. “So good to see you.”
H
er mock smile vanishes as she opens the door. Hillary Francolini is there. And the other dude with the sandy hair—that must be Lou Rivers. But who are the other two? The Men in Black. Who are they?
“Are you dating?” she asks Francolini. “Or multiplying? What’s with the clones?”
But they are not clones. While SPD has its “look,” so do the feds. These guys look just a little sharper. Like they spend their slightly bigger paycheck exclusively at Brooks Brothers.
“Detectives,” one of the other guys says to Francolini, “I think this is ours. You run along now.”
“Fuck you, Chuck,” Francolini says.
“Hillary!” Alexis says, shocked. “Such language in front of a minor!”
“You’re not a minor,” Francolini says. “You’re a thirty-eight-year-old stuffed into a midget’s body.”
The other cops laugh.
“That’s derogatory,” one of the nameless ones says. “A ‘little person’s’ body.”
Francolini glares at him.
“Who’s got jurisdiction here, Chuck?”
“May we?” the guy supposedly named Chuck asks, and Alexis invites them in.
Well, Francolini and Rivers are actual real cops, and Chuck Dalaklis and the other guy, Lindquist, are feds, it turns out, once all the IDs are thrown on the table like guys showing their hands at a Friday poker game.
Alexis sits back on the ratty sofa. How quickly we adjust to our new circumstances, she thinks. A federal penitentiary or a state prison or a correctional facility for women out near Gig Harbor . . . does it matter what hell looks like when you finally get there? I mean, sixth level or seventh level or all the way down. Head facing backwards or being stabbed by demons. Dante was cool.
“Who first?” she asks.
Lindquist clears his throat. “We have no claim to your fate, Ms. Austin,” he says. “So in that sense, us second. But our local friends here with SPD—you know, we like to work with the locals. It fosters a degree of, well, work-togetherness . . .”
“Work-togetherness?” Alexis asks. “Um. School much?”
“Collaboration,” Chuck, the other fed, says. “Reciprocation. Back-scratching. You know.”
“We’re friends.”
Alexis snorts. “That would explain the mutual verbal abuse.”
“Bottom line,” Chuck says, “we get to chat with you a bit, and then we’ll turn you over to our compatriots, and they’ll take you into custody.”
And flush me into the toilet, Alexis thinks. Flotsam and jetsam (where’s Jim Lynch when you need him?).
“We need to talk about Robinson,” Chuck says. “He has information that we could use to clear up about . . . well, about twenty-four unsolved cases over the past forty years. If we could get to Robinson’s files, we’re pretty sure we could lock up about, well, twenty-five of them.”
“You said twenty-four,” Alexis says.
“The Fremont Inferno,” Lindquist says quickly. “And counting.”
“Well, officers, or, if you’re federal agents, I guess I should address you as . . . what? Your Highnesses?”
“Special Agents will suffice.”
“Right. LJ left me a computer disc. But it was a personal message for me. And if you can figure out how to suck my brain out of my ear, paint it onto a CD, and play it on your computer, you can have access to that information. Otherwise, the four of you can bugger off.”
The men look at each other.
“Feisty,” Chuck says to Hillary.
“I told you, Chuck. You know who her dad was.”
Chuck nods and frowns.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Austin. So, look, we’ll get the ram and take down LJ’s door and go get it ourselves. How’s that sound?”
“Get what?” Alexis asks.
“The laptop.”
The laptop. Right. On LJ’s desk. But what good would that do them? It was locked up and shut down with some self-destruct mechanism LJ had the clarity of mind to install.
“His laptop is garbage,” she tells them. “I tried it. He erased the whole thing. Done. Doesn’t work.”
Chuck and Lindquist laugh heartily. Rivers and Hillary chuckle like dopes, trying to be in on the in-joke. But these losers have never been in on an in-joke in their lives. Sycophants. Sidney Suck-butts.
“Here’s the thing,” Lindquist says, leaning in. He’s a leering one. Thin, bladelike skull, likely squashed into that shape by a horrible obstetrician yanking him into the world with a clumsy pair of forceps back in the day. Blue eyes that are too big for his head. And a dimple in his chin that looks absolutely horrible to have to try to shave inside of.
“Computers are like people,” he says, continuing his leer, head tilted ten degrees starboard and a little dot of spittle in the corner of his mouth. “Just because it’s been erased, scrubbed of data, wiped clean and killed, that doesn’t mean that traces of it aren’t floating around in the ether, you know? Like, a person dies. Sure, that person is dead, but there’s the soul, right? The spirit? Most people can’t see that stuff. But if you find the right talent . . . You think ghost movies came out of nowhere? Plato said we can’t conceive of something that truly doesn’t exist. So . . .”
“So?” Alexis asks, really not getting it. “Is this a history lecture or an interrogation or what?”
“So, just because a computer hard drive has been erased, doesn’t mean the right ‘talent’ can’t see what is on that disc.”
He sits back and nods at his comrades. Compatriots. The Man.
And Alexis has to admit to herself that it took her too long to really put the pieces into place. The puzzle was a tough one, because she had been working from the middle. If you want to solve a puzzle, you have to find the corners, then the edges, then you go for the belly.
The laptop. All of LJ’s information. All incriminating. All of it. They could pin twenty-four or twenty-five criminal acts on him, postmortem.
She’s brought back to attention by the sound of running water. Shit. The tub.
“Left the tub running, boys!” she shouts. “I’ll be right back!”
She bolts into the bathroom and locks the door behind her. Oh, shit. She was so where she was, and suddenly she isn’t there anymore. LJ. Laptop. Camera. Think. Think. Think.
She doesn’t turn off the water. She lets it overflow. Running over the rounded tub and onto the cool, old-style hex tiles Edith liked but probably didn’t really like; she realized how expensive it would have been to replace. And why replace them when the house would be torn down in a matter of months. Alexis opens the bathroom window.
Ha! Fire Code Man with the sherry! Ha! You are my new “The Man”!
The Fire Code Man at the time had required the installation of a fire escape on the outside of the building when it was converted from a funeral home to a hotel. So Edith’s parents had bolted an iron stair on the outside of the building, along the bathroom line, because all apartments had bathrooms and it was the cheapest way to go.
Alexis climbs out onto the fire escape and starts up.
Immediately, Habib arrives.
“I’m cool, bird,” she says. “Got steps. Humans use those. No need to go ballistic again. All is good.”
The crow caws at her. She starts down the steps and makes the top floor landing. LJ’s apartment. Ha. She pulls at the window. It’s locked.
“Crud,” she says. She looks around for a tool, but nothing is obvious. Now what?
She hears a strained caw and looks over the edge of the fire escape, and there he is—Habib, trying as hard as he can to get to her while carrying a footlong piece of iron pipe in his claws.
Oh, how he works!
“You can do it, kid!” she shouts. And that bird does do it. He brings her the pipe, which she promptly uses to smash LJ’s bathroom window.
Inside. What’s to get? Laptop. Camera.
Laptops are like people. They have souls. They have a lasting life. They have to be destroyed in the most incredible fashion, or
they will live forever, a ghost stuck between the living and the dead. They will carry echoes through the dimensions.
She grabs them quick, stuffs them into a purple shopping bag from the PCC and makes for the window. Down the fire escape, she hits the latch, drops the ladder and is in the back alley and lands . . . well, when you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll. When things are going good, they’re going good. She lands right next to that damn pedicab she hijacked the night before.
I mean, if you could have seen this scene, you would have laughed. A fourteen-year-old girl busting out from an alley behind a decrepit old hotel on Capitol Hill riding a pedicab to beat all hell, and four dark-suited gumshoes running down the street after her waving guns and shouting and calling on their cell phones.
And she turns a corner onto Pine, and she is gone.
She takes out her cell phone and dials as she rides. The ride down Pine is fast when you don’t use your brakes, and she calls Linda.
“Honey, baby, sweetheart,” she says when Linda answers, “I need you.”
There is silence, but not discontent, she knows, because she doesn’t hear that beep-beep-beep of the phone being disconnected.
“I need you bad.”
“Physically, metaphysically, socially, or what?” Linda says. “Because Papa Bear has me on lockdown over here because you fucked up by running. Again. Pattern recognition will come in handy when you start your standardized testing for college.”
“I need you and I need your Bug. Cops are on me. One last time. I promise,” Alexis says.
“Yeah,” Linda snorts. “Thelma and Louise, Part Seven.”
“One more,” Alexis says. “One more and I’m done.”
There’s a long pause. “You know what my dad said to me this morning? He said to me, ‘That friend of yours, Alexis, is worth keeping.’ Do you know he said that?”
Alexis could hear the emotional edge in Linda’s voice, even though she was on a cell phone going nearly thirty miles per hour down Pine and about to make a screeching turn onto Third.
“LJ once said something to me,” Alexis shouted into her phone. “He said, ‘We can’t control the past, and we can’t control the future. But we can control the now!’”
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