The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  He set the crowbar on the stoop, pulled out the beat-up Colt 1911 Lewis had loaned him, reached through the door, and unlocked the deadbolt.

  The static hummed high as he stepped inside. The kitchen smelled like bacon and burned toast. The coffee was still warm in the pot, but the machine was off. A ring of keys sat beside it. He held the pistol up and ready. “Kiko? It’s Peter, from last night.” He thought it best not to mention the fire extinguisher. “I just want to talk.”

  The countertops sat at wheelchair height with open shelves below. The sink held a pair of plates and a frying pan left to soak. A small table in the corner had two empty mugs and a single folding chair. A row of intricate metal birds sat along a windowsill, each different from the next. More birds, depicted in flight, hung by monofilament line from the ceiling, wheeling on the warm breeze from the heat vent.

  He peeked past the kitchen into the living room. No movement. “Hello? Anybody here?”

  A cracked leather recliner, a couch, a wall-mounted television, and a live ficus tree in the corner that reminded Peter of the tree sculpture in Kiko’s office. An elegant heron stood on one leg in the big glazed pot, waist-high and imposing, his fierce marble eye glaring at the intruders.

  Peter opened the front door for Lewis. “I’ll take the bedrooms, you take the basement.” They worked their way through the place, but nobody was home. Peter waved June in from the Yukon. “See what you and Lewis can find here. I’ll go check the garage.”

  He took the ring of keys from the counter and walked down the ramp, the pistol held down along his leg. The second key unlocked the door, which opened without a sound. In the light from a pair of dirty windows, he saw professional-grade automotive tools and a big stepvan with a rear liftgate and no driver’s seat. Peter imagined Kiko in his power chair, loading finished bike frames or architectural railings, not letting his lack of working legs get in the way of the job he needed to do.

  The last parking bay was separated by a tarp hung from the ceiling. He pushed aside the plastic and found a storage room. Cheap metal shelves were loaded with cardboard boxes, and a ratty old couch was shoved into the corner, a plastic takeout container standing on the arm. The sauce on the bottom was still damp.

  The boxes were a random assortment of repurposed food or liquor cartons, although more than a few had once held bottles of margarita mix. Each box had a handwritten label on a wide strip of masking tape, cataloging everything from salvaged appliance or computer parts to specialized components that Peter didn’t recognize. But it wasn’t Kiko’s neat copperplate hand. It was a wild scrawl in a dozen colors of Magic Marker.

  The scrawl wasn’t the same on every box, either. If he rearranged the boxes by the quality of handwriting, Peter thought, he’d see the scrawl getting tighter, more controlled, more legible. Or considered in the other direction, getting wilder.

  He knew these were Spark’s things by the contents he couldn’t identify. Remnants of previous experiments or failed projects. Those had the wildest scrawl of all.

  He hoped that wasn’t the direction she was headed.

  * * *

  —

  Back at the house, he found June and Lewis in the kitchen. Peter told them about the garage. “At least we know Kiko’s in the S-10. What have you got?”

  June held up a small black book. “Addresses and phone numbers, from the bedside table. Your friend Kiko is old-school.”

  “Any listing for Spark or La Chispa?”

  June shook her head. “There have to be two hundred names in here. No telling how current any of them are. It’s possible that the new ones are all in his phone. I’ll take pictures of the pages and run them down when I have time.”

  Peter nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Down in the cellar,” Lewis said. “Another one of those shoebox things.”

  They descended steep steps into the low-ceilinged basement. Except for the furnace and water heater and a dehumidifier piped to the floor drain, it was nearly empty. Kiko probably had never been down these stairs.

  The main electrical panel was screwed to the foundation wall in the far corner. Beside it sat an unused workbench with a Red Wing boot box on top. A heavy electrical cable ran from the Red Wing box into the side of the panel. Lewis had removed the panel cover. The wires from the box were tapped into the main feed. The wires from the meter and the pole were disconnected and capped with wire nuts and tape.

  “He’s not hooked into city power at all,” Lewis said. “He’s running the whole house on whatever’s inside this Red Wing box.”

  “Jesus. Did you open it?”

  Lewis nodded. “Didn’t figure it’d electrocute me. It’s in a damn shoebox.” He lifted the lid.

  Half the space was filled with a small rectangular pressure tank labeled with a red-and-white sticker that read hydrogen. The tank had a thin stainless tube that fed hydrogen into the side of a layered metal sandwich that took up most of the rest of the box. On the other side of the sandwich was a softly buzzing electrical transformer and the wire that connected to the panel. At the bottom was a thin plastic hose that dripped liquid into a plastic bucket on the floor.

  “I think it’s a fuel cell,” Lewis said. “It pushes hydrogen through a kind of atomic filter that pulls out the electrons for electricity, and mixes the remaining protons with oxygen from the air. The only by-product is water. They power spacecraft with these things.”

  Peter kept his hands away from the wires. “And you know about this how?”

  “Jarhead.” Lewis gave him a look. “We have a pretty good green energy portfolio. Which you’d know if you ever read anything I put in front of you. This fuel cell is way ahead of anything else I’ve ever heard about in terms of size and output. But if Spark can build something like this on the cheap, in her funk-ass little shop? She’s made at least one major breakthrough, if not two or three.”

  Peter couldn’t stop thinking about the 3-D rendering on Metzger’s screen.

  “You think this is what Holloway’s using to power his creature?”

  “Man, I hope not. You imagine one of those things running on household current with no need for an extension cord?”

  “What do you think Holloway’s going to do with eight hundred of those things?”

  Lewis gave a humorless laugh. “Don’t you know your history, Jarhead? Who’s always been the earliest adopter of new technology?”

  Peter sighed. He’d been trying to find a different answer for the last two hours, but had come to the same conclusion. “The military.”

  Since the ancient Greeks. Since the time of Gilgamesh before that. Since the first two disparate tribes met and went to war.

  Lewis nodded. “And who’s Oliver working for, trying to corral all this tech? It ain’t Toys ‘R’ Us. It’s some pointy head in the Pentagon, looking for a cheaper and more effective way to destroy the enemy.”

  “But what’s Holloway’s military use?” Although Peter had been thinking about that, too. He didn’t like what he’d come up with.

  “Oh, we gon’ find out. Trust me on that. Question is, whose military? And what the hell are we gonna do about it?”

  They made it upstairs to the kitchen just as June’s phone began to ring.

  She checked the screen. “It’s Detective Hecht. Should I answer it?”

  The clock over the door read twelve-thirty.

  “Are you going to meet him?”

  June sighed. “Do I have a choice?”

  She was already pushing her luck with the cops. If she missed the appointment, she might buy herself a few hours, but it would make everything else harder. The police would be looking for the Yukon, the Toyota flatbed, and June’s Subaru. They might also put a car at the house. And they’d be pissed.

  She lifted the phone to her ear, put a smile on her face, and walked into the living room. “Detective, how are y
ou? Yes, I’m just stopping to grab a sandwich on my way. Oh, I meant to ask—I don’t need a lawyer for this conversation, do I?”

  Peter turned to Lewis. “We’ve been on this thing for three days with nothing to show for it. Spark’s in the wind. Holloway’s still invisible. Edgar is a phantom. All we have is a delivery truck supposed to show up at Metzger Machine at four today.”

  Lewis flashed a tilted smile. “Don’t forget that nice sergeant trying to figure out why you smell like a bad guy.”

  “Oh, I haven’t forgotten.” Peter looked at the birds hanging from the ceiling, wings spread wide to catch the wind. “If he connects me to my arrest warrants, he’ll blow up this whole thing. June’s career is fucked. Your legitimate life is fucked. Which means Dinah and the boys are fucked, too.”

  Lewis gave Peter a look. “June got into this of her own free will, Jarhead. Hell, she’ll probably win the Pulitzer for her memoir about dating the outlaw Peter Ash. As for me and Dinah, well, Holloway ain’t the only one knows how to reallocate his assets.”

  He put a sympathetic hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Actually, brother, you the one really screwed. Gonna end up making license plates in a cold Icelandic prison, sharing a bunk with your hairy Viking boyfriend, and eating that stinky-ass dried fish the rest of your life.” He shook his head. “Now that is one sad fucking story.”

  Peter laughed. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

  “Always do,” Lewis said. “Listen, I been thinking. Where else we see those cardboard boxes? Spark had one at her apartment, charging her bike. Kiko had one running his power chair. Was there another one?”

  Peter blinked. “The kid at the bike shop,” he said. “Plugged into his phone.”

  “There you go. Let’s go talk to Carson.”

  June walked back into the kitchen. “Can I get a ride to District Five? And maybe stop for a sandwich on the way?”

  53

  They found Carson with his back to the service counter. He had a cargo bike clamped into a repair stand, its bottom bracket in pieces on the workbench. The shoebox with the electric outlet was in the same place as last time, although nothing was plugged into it now.

  “Be right with you,” Carson said over his shoulder, reaching for a rag with greasy fingers. His long hair was up in a man bun and the steel grommets hung pendulous in his ears.

  Peter walked into the service area with Lewis on his heels. Lewis had locked the front door behind him to discourage visitors. “Hi, Carson. Remember us?”

  Carson froze in place when he saw Peter. A look of sweaty panic flashed across his face before he got hold of himself. Then he leaned against the bench and wiped his fingers with the rag. He was trying for cool but got stuck staring at the pistol on Peter’s hip. “Uh, sure, yeah. Yesterday, right?”

  “Exactly,” Peter said. “We have a problem and you’re just the man to help.”

  “Is it the bike you bought?” He turned to Lewis, trying to get back to his comfort zone. “There’s a ninety-day warranty, parts and labor. Just bring it in and we’ll get you all fixed up. Or, hey, if you want you can just return it, no questions asked.”

  Lewis smiled and unzipped his jacket, revealing the gun in its shoulder rig. Carson started blinking rapidly. The grommets quivered in his ears.

  Peter wasn’t sure if Carson was reacting to the gun or the smile. “Actually,” he said, “it’s the other thing. The electric bike we were looking for.”

  “No, hey, I told you guys, we don’t do electrics.” The sweaty panic was back.

  Carson had been nervous yesterday, but not like this. Something had changed.

  “We don’t have time for bullshit.” Peter looked at Lewis. “Where do you want to shoot him?”

  Lewis’s smile got wider and he put some extra street in his voice. “I like to start with the foot.” He pulled the big black pistol. “Shatters all those tiny little bones, won’t never walk right again.” He looked Carson up and down, taking inventory. “Course, the knee always a solid pick. Hurt a lot more, for sure. Just depend on how fucked up you want him.”

  When he racked the slide, Carson flinched.

  Lewis looked like he was having entirely too much fun. Peter felt a little bad. He was afraid Carson might wet himself. But he just shrugged. “Or the kid starts talking, I guess.”

  Carson opened his mouth but nothing came out.

  “Lemme just shoot him a little bit,” Lewis said. “For motivation, like.”

  Carson cleared his blockage. “That’s, no, really, no, please.”

  Now Peter was just embarrassed for him. “I know you know Spark.” He pointed at the shoebox wired into the exercise bike. “She made that. And we need to find her.”

  “I don’t know where she is.” But his hand twitched toward the front of his right hip, where a rectangular outline in the fabric showed his phone in his pocket.

  Peter had learned to watch for this kind of tell in Baghdad, working checkpoints. When people are carrying something important to them, like money or a weapon, they often unconsciously reach to pat the place they’ve put it, to reassure themselves that it’s still there. Peter did it with his truck keys all the time.

  “Give me your phone, Carson.”

  The kid crossed his arms. He was sweaty and shaking, but he was standing tall. “You’re the guys who were hassling her. You’re the ones who broke into her apartment.”

  Peter sighed. “Let me guess. Spark is your friend and you want to protect her. But you don’t know the whole story, Carson. Did she show you her assault rifle? Did she tell you how she shot up the Public Market?”

  “What? No, that was some guy with a beard. Don’t you read the news?”

  “It was a fake beard,” Peter said. “It fooled us, too, and we were there. But she got away on a custom electric bike, the very same bike I saw at her apartment. Spark stole something very important from a very bad man. We’re trying to keep her out of trouble and catch the bad man. So where the hell is she?”

  Carson tried to assimilate this new information. “What did she steal?”

  Peter ground his molars. “Government fucking secrets, okay? Now shut up and give me your phone or I will tear those fucking grommets out of your fucking ears and my friend will blow your knees to smithereens.”

  Carson held up his hands. “Wait, okay, wait. She called me.”

  He pulled out his phone, used the facial recognition to unlock it, and handed it to Peter. There were only two calls in the last sixteen hours, the same number incoming and outgoing. Her new burner.

  “Her name’s Maria Velasquez. She’s a good person. She wouldn’t do what you said unless she had a good reason.”

  Peter thought about Kiko’s reaction at his office, after they found Spark’s bike plans. Kiko felt pretty strongly about her, too.

  He handed the phone to Lewis, who immediately changed the passcode and started poking through the contents. “So what would that reason be?”

  Carson looked at the floor. “A few years ago, someone cheated her out of the design for this new battery she developed.” He pointed at the shoebox. “That’s an early version. You know she’s, like, insanely smart, right? So she hired a lawyer to go after him. Not only did the guy sue her back, he hired some trolls to go after her on social media. It went viral, man, got way out of hand. They totally fucked up her life, trashed her reputation, the works. Then some real-world lunatic went after her parents. Chased their car into the river or whatever. It was January. They died. It totally wrecked her.”

  Of course it would, Peter thought. It had driven her to the brink. Or maybe past it.

  Carson said, “We used to be friends, you know? I hoped we might become, you know, more than friends? But then she ghosted me. Shut down her social media, sold her parents’ house, moved away, stopped answering my texts, totally vanished. I hadn’t seen her since sh
e built that bike.”

  Peter waited.

  Carson cleared his throat. “Then, last night, out of the blue, she called me. Said a couple of scary assholes—that’s you guys, I guess—had broken into her place, and she didn’t want to go back there. She wondered if I would pick up her bike for her.”

  Which would explain why Carson was more freaked-out today than yesterday, Peter thought.

  “Where did you take the bike?”

  “I met her on the Hank Aaron Trail this morning. That was it. That’s all I did.”

  Lewis looked up from the phone, smiling. “But that ain’t all you got, is it?” He showed Peter the screen. It showed a map of Milwaukee with a blinking red bull’s-eye. The bull’s-eye was labeled maria.

  “It’s an app called Findr,” Lewis said. “Lets you track any device with a GPS locator. Is she wearing a beacon?”

  “No,” Carson said. “It’s her bike. She built a GPS beacon into the power hub, in case it got stolen. She gave me the ID number this morning. She said she had a big meeting today, and when it was over, she wouldn’t need the bike anymore.”

  “A big meeting.” Peter looked at Lewis. “With who?”

  “The guy who killed her parents. But she told me to come find the bike after I get off work. She was giving it to me.”

  “What time do you get off work?”

  “Five o’clock,” Carson said. “But why would she say she wouldn’t need it? She rode that bike every day.”

  Peter watched the kid’s face as he put it together. Spark the market shooter. Spark with the assault rifle. Spark whose life was in ruins.

  “Zoom in,” he told Lewis. “Where’s that damn bike?”

  54

  SPARK

  South Shore Park was a good place to meet a bad man, Spark thought.

  It was one of a long string of green spaces along Milwaukee’s Lake Michigan shoreline, all connected by a web of bike and hiking trails, which gave her many different escape routes. She knew cars could drive on the paved trails, because she’d seen maintenance vehicles on them, but there were plenty of narrow dirt paths that wound through the trees where no car could follow.