Lucky Town

by Peter Vonder Haar

  I parked a few houses east of his, facing downtown, and rolled down my windows. Garcia’s driveway was empty, which I’d expected, and like just about every other house on the street, there was no garage. Unless Garcia was one of the handful of suicidal types who biked to work in this town, he wasn’t home.

  When cops and folks in my line of work talk about the drudgery of the job, they’re referring to stakeouts. I admit, it was one of the aspects of being a detective that really drove me nuts. Unfortunately, there’s only so much one can do with record searches and online sleuthing. And at the end of the day, it’s all about bringing in an actual human being and pressing charges.

  But waiting for those human beings could be maddening.

  Full dark came on as I stared idly at the house. There was no illumination there aside from the bulb on Garcia’s porch. A group of kids rode by on bikes, coming from the direction of Eastwood Park. Traffic was light this time of evening, most folks were home from work and ensconced in evening routines of meals and TV. The first wave of dog walkers was likely to emerge soon and were sure to take note of the white guy cooling his heels in a parked car.

  Surrendering to a combination of curiosity and impatience, I left the car and approached Garcia’s house, taking a legal-sized envelope with me in the hope anyone glancing my way would see a deliveryman or courier. A quick scan confirmed nobody else was on the street, and I swiftly opened the lever latch on the gate and walked up the short sidewalk to his porch.

  I mimed knocking on the front door for the benefit of anyone watching, peering through the textured glass of the window in the meantime. The inside was dark, except for what looked like LEDs from various chargers or appliance clocks.

  Moving over to the front picture window, I peered in between a crack in the drawn curtains. There was some ambient light from exterior and street lights, but no sign of current habitation.

  The curtains suddenly parted and a dog that looked at least two-thirds German shepherd lunged forward, barking furiously at me from the other side of the glass. I stumbled backward, catching myself before I fell off the rail-less porch.

  The dog remained on his hind legs, snarling at me even as my fear subsided. Of course the guy had a police dog. I should consider myself lucky he wasn't hanging out on the porch.

  I backed off the porch, keeping my eyes on the dog as if I expected him to jump through the glass. He dropped out of sight as I walked down the driveway and closed the gate behind me.

  Shipped overseas, but didn’t board his dog. Okay.

  I was about to pull up stakes when a woman emerged from the house next to Garcia’s. She was short and slightly stooped in posture, but moved self-assuredly. She swung the gate open at the head of her driveway, then retrieved her trash can and began wheeling it to the curb.

  Conscious of the optics of a six-foot man approaching a diminutive woman on a dark street, I made sure the envelope was in clear view as I came near.

  She was busy arranging the can just so — handle facing the street, so the garbage truck clamps could find purchase — so I halted about ten feet away. After admiring her work, she nodded, then turned and saw me. She was Asian and of indeterminate age, though north of 60. If she was frightened, she didn’t show it.

  “Hello?”

  “Howdy, ma’am,” I said. “My name’s Brett Johnson. I was trying to see if Chester was home.”

  "Chester … you mean Mr. Garcia?"

  “That’s right.” I didn’t dwell on why an elderly person would feel the need to refer to a guy who was still shy of 30 as “mister.”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” She glanced at his house as if to confirm her own statement. “Something I can help you with?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, holding up the envelope. “I’m a courier and I had a document for him. You don’t have any idea when he might be returning, do you?”

  She shook her head. “No. Haven’t seen his truck in a few days.”

  Of course. “Well, if you don’t mind, could I give you my card so you could let me know when he’s in, Miss … ?”

  “Nguyen,” she said. She took my proffered business card, one of my various fakes, this one confirming my “Brett Johnson” persona. “Why don’t you just leave the card for him?”

  I sucked air through my teeth in an impressive display of apprehension. “Well, Miss Nguyen, it’s kind of an official communication that has to be given to him in person, if you catch my meaning.”

  “Is that a subpoena or something?” Her eyes narrowed.

  I put up my hands. “Oh, no ma’am! It’s just some documentation from work. HR can get a little prickly if it isn’t put in the right hands.”

  Looking at my card again, she said, “What’s it worth to you?”

  A businesswoman. I could respect that. “Twenty now. Twenty after I deliver the document.”

  “A hundred now.”

  Twenty now, a hundred on successful delivery,” I said. “A man has to protect his integrity.”

  I fished the bill out of my wallet and handed it to her, where it disappeared somewhere into the cavernous depths of her robe. Walking away, she held the card aloft. “I’ll call you.”

  It didn’t occur to me until I was driving away that my brief conversation with Miss Nguyen was the most I’d talked to a woman I wasn’t related to in months.

  Chapter ELEVEN

  The ride back to the office was uneventful. I dared the main lanes and was treated to the sight of refineries towering in the night. East Houston sort of reminded one of Blade Runner, only with tractor trailers instead of flying cars.

  Charlie’s Audi was in the driveway when I pulled up, so she was still ostensibly “working.” Unlike me, she maintained a residence separate from the office. Also unlike me, she could afford one. Though given the amount of hours she regularly put in here, she might as well have her own bed and toiletries. I’d suggested she could move in at one point in the past and soon learned that not only was my sister capable of hysterical laughter, she could also keep it up for quite some time.

  Sure enough, she was back at her desk. The only evidence she’d moved being the presence of a mug of what I deduced to be ginger-lemon green tea, owing to both the lingering aroma of ginger as well as the fact it was the only kind of tea she ever drank.

  I used to be a hell of a detective.

  “What have we got?” I asked from the kitchen as I pulled out the French press.

  “Are you making coffee?” she asked, not looking up. “At eight o’clock at night?”

  I grabbed a bag of roasted Costa Rican, frowning at its lack of heft, and started spooning beans into the grinder. “I haven’t had any caffeine since this morning; just a beer with Roy.”

  Charlie said, “You’ll never get to sleep.”

  “I never go to sleep,” I muttered. Then, to her, “What have you got?”

  “Not much,” she said. “Just access to Mike’s email accounts.”

  My hand hovered over the coffee grinder. “No shit? Which one?”

  “Accounts. Ssss. Plural. DHS and Yahoo!, which he uses for his personal email,” she said.

  “Hold on a sec,” I said, taking a moment to grind the beans to a coarse finish. I lifted the tea kettle, decided there was enough water for my needs, and set it on the burner before turning on the flame.

  That accomplished, I walked over and pulled up a chair next to Charlie.

  “Show me.”

  She slugged me in the leg. “Watch it with the orders, Mr. Man.”

  I rubbed my thigh. “Sorry, I meant, ‘Please demonstrate for me how you accomplished this most Herculean of tasks, wise sister.’”

  “That’s better, but I can’t demonstrate it for you, because I’m pretty sure I’d lose you forty-five seconds in. Suffice to say these guys really need to upgrade their OS. I used a known Windows 7 exploit to backdoor DHS’s single sign-on mechanism and their own lax password protocols to crack into their client access server.” She looked at me. “
With me so far?”

  “I, uh, think I hear the water boiling.” I didn’t, but it was close enough, and I hated it when Charlie went full techno-speak.

  Her smirk was practically audible behind me as I poured the adequately hot water into the press. As the grounds steeped, I said, “Okay, so you hacked the Internet, how did you figure out Mike’s password?”

  “Which one?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Surprise me.”

  “His DHS password was the hardest, probably because he had to adhere to agency standards.”

  “Let me guess, it can’t be ‘password.’”

  Charlie said, “True, but that’s about the extent of it. Certain words are off-limits: ‘password,’ any consecutive series of numbers, ‘QWERTY,’ ‘Astros,’ ‘Rockets,’ but not ‘Texans,’ curiously.”

  “Need to make it to a conference championship for that kind of respect,” I guessed.

  She laughed. “Maybe. Anyway, the only other real restrictions are the requirement for one capital letter and one number. As far as I can tell, he could’ve inserted as many special characters or wildcards as he’d like, but …”

  “Charlie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “My coffee’s getting cold.”

  “Asshat,” she muttered. “The point is, Mike only used one capital letter in the word, plus two numbers, which is the bare minimum.”

  I nodded. “Just like Jennifer Aniston’s flair in Office Space.”

  Charlie ignored me. “From there I ran a simple Python script to brute force upper and lowercase and digits. Took about six hours.”

  “You have a snake?” I secretly understood about ten percent of whatever Charlie was talking about when it came to computers, but it helped to let her think I was even more ignorant than that.

  “You’re such a tool.” She breathed in deep. “Man, that coffee smells really good.”

  “Here, I’ll pour you a cup.”

  She held a hand up. “Forget it. I drink that, I’ll be up until four in the morning. You must be some kind of mutant.”

  “Worst superpower ever,” I said, and emptied the rest of the press into our carafe. “Okay, so that covers his DHS email, what about Yahoo!?”

  “What a joke,” Charlie said. “It was his wife’s name and the birthday of his son.”

  I thought for a moment, “‘Kayla0917?”

  “You are the world’s worst brother,” she said. “Tyler was born on August 5.”

  “Sorry. I think I have a mental block when it comes to that name.”

  “Could’ve been ‘Braden.’”

  “Give him time.” I resumed my seat and looked at the monitor. “Did you find anything in his work email?”

  Charlie nodded. “Plenty, but I’m not sure there’s anything to use.”

  She brought up a series of tabs and started scrolling through them rapidly. I didn’t bother trying to follow along until she selected one to show me.

  “This is pretty indicative of his work email up until last week: weekly reports, meeting reminders, agency-wide bulletins, that sort of thing.”

  Okay,” I said. “What happened last week?”

  She said, “I’m getting to that.”

  Charlie scrolled through another series of tabs, of which there must have been dozens open across multiple browsers. How the hell she kept track of them was beyond me.

  “Here we are,” she said, pointing to the screen. “What do you see?”

  I scanned the text of the Outlook form. “There’s an update about suspicious activity at the Port,” I said. “Hammond’s telling his subordinates to prepare for possible extra-office action.” I looked at her. “So?”

  “Keep reading.”

  I did so, then stopped. “What the hell is that?”

  At the bottom of the email, below Hammond’s email signature, was a line with six characters, then an unbroken string of what appeared to be random text. “Is that PGP encryption?”

  Charlie turned to me sharply. “What do you know about that?”

  “Hey, I pay attention sometimes,” I replied.

  “I’m gratified to hear it,” she said, “but what you’re thinking of is a PGP public key, appended to the end of an email, and that’s not what this is.”

  I said, “Then what is it?”

  “It’s a cypher,” Charlie said, a smile dawning on her face.

  “A cypher,” I repeated. “Like code? Hammond sent this?”

  “Not Hammond,” she said. “Mike. Look at the subject line: ‘FW’ means he forwarded this to himself and added the cypher at the end of it.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, what does it say?”

  “I have no idea,” she said again, “but I bet these initials have something to do with it,”

  She pointed to the nine characters above the gibberish. “C2U0J9M7D,” I read. “What are they supposed to be? A license plate? Phone number?”

  She sat back, her smile fading. “It’s a key of some type. The rest of Mike’s emails are the same boring office crap, until we get to three days before he disappeared, then they all have this text added to it.”

  This was getting strange. “Is it the same text each time?”

  “The text is the same, but without knowing what the key is, I have no way of deciphering it.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Just our luck the disappearing sibling turns out to be an Enigma enthusiast.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, and rose from her seat. “I’m out, little brother. I downloaded most of the directory contents in Hammond’s secure drive, but there’s a lot to sift through, and it’s been a long day. I need to recharge if I’m going to crack any of this.” She gave my arm a squeeze, which was about as close as we usually got to hugging.

  “Try to get some sleep,” I said.

  “You too. You want to be fresh for family dinner night… . ”

  I sat up. I’d clean forgotten about going to Mom’s tomorrow, and from the shitty look on Charlie’s face, she knew it.

  “Night,” she said, closing the door behind her. I could hear her soulless cackling all the way down the path to her car.

  Luckily for me the scary guy called before I had much time to dwell on it.

  Chapter TWELVE

  The phone screen showed UNKNOWN CALLER, meaning I should have known better. But I really liked to give those fake IRS agents shit, so I answered.

  “Clarke?” A tentative inquiry, to be sure.

  “Speaking.”

  Breathing now, but more ragged than heavy. This was shaping up to be the worst obscene phone call of all time.

  “Still there? I gotta say, if this is the IRS, I don’t know anything about those Swiss bank acc —”

  “You need to back off.”

  I’d been reclined in the chair with my feet up on the desk, but sat up. “Do I now?”

  “Yes.” The person on the other end of the line had an almost comic Russian accent. I decided right then his name was Boris.

  “Okay, great. Uh, thanks for calling?”

  “This is not a joke.”

  I went to the window. It was a straight-up noir cliché, I knew: the sinister figure calling from the shadows right outside the house. And besides, there probably wasn’t a functioning phone booth within two miles of me.

  I looked outside anyway. Nothing there.

  “Are you sure? Because this is all pretty funny.”

  “You won’t think so when we’re breaking your fingers.”

  He pronounced the W in “won’t” and “when” like a V. I wondered if his Vs turned into Ws, like “nuclear wessels.”

  “Look, Boris …”

  “My name is not Boris.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” I said. “But maybe if you could tell me exactly what I need to back off from, we could come to an agreement.”

  “You know what —”

  “For example,” I interrupted, “if this is about the fact I haven’t watered the g
rass in three months, I’d remind you our neighborhood doesn’t actually have a binding homeowners association agreement.”

  “That’s not —”

  “Also,” I continued, “I think it’s fairly obnoxious to expect us to deplete our water supply for our yards. Now is the time to rise up against the tyranny of Big Lawn! Wake up —”

  “We know where your sister lives.”

  It was the flat, emotionless way he said it that cut me off, and “wake up, sheeple” was always my favorite part of my anti-lawncare diatribe.

  “Is that a fact?”

  “It is,” said Boris. “And as long as you stop snooping around the Ramirez shooting, she’ll be just fine.”

  “The Ramirez shooting,” I repeated.

  “Not such the comedian now, are you?”

  My mouth was always causing problems. I developed into an incurable smart-ass early on, a condition not helped by the existence of four big brothers who loomed in the imaginations of potential bullies every time I cracked wise at school. Ironically, it was joining the force, and learning to develop relationships with the community and rapport with citizens, that kept it briefly in check.

  However, now that I was a civilian again, all bets were off.

  “Still there, Clarke?”

  “Sorry, I was just trying to imagine how small a penis a man must have in order to threaten a defenseless woman.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, needle dick.” My tone was light, and I had to keep myself from snort laughing when I referred to Charlie as “defenseless,” but my non-phone gripping fist was clenched hard enough I heard knuckles crack. “You’ve got a beef with me, then that’s just the way it is. But leave my sister out of it, because if anything happens to her, I will reach down your throat and strangle you with your own fucking intestines.”

  I hung up on Boris before he had a chance to splutter whatever dime-store threat he’d saved up. Now that I knew he was referring to the Ramirez thing, I didn’t need to indulge his bullshit theatrics anymore.

  My phone buzzed. UNKNOWN CALLER again. I sent it to voicemail and called Charlie.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey yourself. You home yet?”