by Chris Holm
Cameron swallowed hard. Poured alcohol over the paper towel on which her instruments rested: A pair of tweezers. A spool of thread. A sewing needle bent as best they could into a semicircle. All three were still damp from the last time she’d disinfected them.
Threading the needle was more difficult than she’d expected, but eventually she managed. She rested it against Hendricks’s side, flesh dimpling beneath it, and let out a deep breath before beginning. When the needle pierced his skin, his stomach muscles tightened reflexively and he let out a growl.
“Sorry,” Cameron said, pausing.
“Don’t be,” he replied, his voice low and strained. “And for God’s sake, keep going. You’re just doing as I’ve asked. As much as this sucks, I’m better off with you doing it than me.”
“Why?” she asked, twisting the needle through until the tip showed on the other side of the wound and then grabbing it with the tweezers. “You think because I’m a girl, I must know how to sew?”
Hendricks’s cheeks colored. “No! I—”
“Jesus.” She pulled the needle clear, thread trailing, and began a second loop. “I was kidding.”
“Anybody ever tell you you’ve got lousy comedic timing?”
“And here I thought that I was helping you relax.”
“I’ll relax when I’m all stitched up,” he said, although in truth, he doubted it. He’d be jumping at shadows until they were far enough away from Long Island that the likelihood that anyone would connect them to the Pappas mess was nil. And he wouldn’t fully relax until he’d tracked down every sitting member of the Council and put them in the ground.
“I wish I had some booze to offer you. I should’ve thought to swipe a bottle of vodka from the Salty Dog.”
“I’ve had quite enough today already.”
“Speaking of, I must’ve poured you eight shots this afternoon. How the hell’d you manage to stay sober?”
Hendricks, despite his pain, managed a weak smile. The kid had good instincts; she was trying to distract him so the stitches didn’t hurt so much. “A little sleight of hand and a strategically placed ficus.”
“So that’s why your corner of the bar always reeked of whiskey. I just figured it was you. No offense.”
“None taken,” he said. “That was kind of the idea.”
“Sorry I pushed that coffee on you. At the time, I worried…” She trailed off, lost in thought.
“Don’t sweat it,” he replied.
They fell silent for a while. Cameron concentrated on her stitching. Hendricks tried not to squirm. As the pain intensified, he decided he did better with the distraction.
“I told you my secret to staying sober,” he said through gritted teeth. “Now it’s my turn to ask you something,”
“Shoot.”
“Did you get yourself hired on at the Salty Dog just so you could keep an eye on me?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“That was a ballsy play.”
“Well, I’m nothing if not ballsy,” she replied.
“You didn’t give them your real name, did you?”
“I’m not stupid. I gave ’em a fake Social under the name of Cameron Franklin and rigged a trick license so the photo blurred out when they tried to photocopy it.”
“A trick license?”
“Yeah. All it takes is a little clear reflective paint. You know, the stuff that makes signs glow in the dark? It’s available at any hardware store. Anyway, you dip your paintbrush into it, wait until it gets a little tacky, and then flick some onto the photo—the address too, if that’s also made up. Not enough to cover them entirely, just a spatter here and there. Then, when they photocopy it, the paint reflects the copier light, and whatever’s behind it is obscured. If you do it right, it just looks like there was a defect in the copier’s glass plate, but no matter how many times they try to move it and get a better copy, the result’s the same.”
“Impressive,” he said, and he meant it. Even Lester hadn’t known about that technique.
“Just one of the many talents I’ll bring to the table if you decide to take me on.”
Hendricks sighed. “I thought we settled this already.”
“Not to my satisfaction.”
“What makes you think that you’re cut out for this kind of work?”
“What makes you think I’m not? You think unless a chick’s got a nose ring and a neck tattoo, she doesn’t know her way around a computer?”
“It’s not your computer chops I’m worried about,” he said. “Lord knows you found me easily enough. But now that you mention it, a pair of chunky glasses wouldn’t hurt.”
She feigned surprise. “Wait, was that a joke? Is the big bad action hero trying to grow a sense of humor?”
Much to Hendricks’s surprise, it was a joke. He hadn’t intended to crack wise just then—he scarcely had since Lester died. Sometimes, he was so focused on avenging Lester’s death, he forgot how much he missed the man’s company, or any friendly human’s, for that matter.
“All kidding aside,” he said, “you must realize I can’t possibly take you on. My job—my life—is just too dangerous. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I lost someone else.”
“Look, I get it. Your job is scary. But you choose to do it, just like I chose to seek you out. The risk is mine to take. And, I might add, you’re damn lucky I did, because if I hadn’t, you’d be dead.”
“Maybe so, but why on earth would you want to choose this life? You’re a kid, for God’s sake. You should be in school, not stitching up hitmen in some dump of an apartment.”
“Hitman,” she said. “Not hitmen, plural. And I’m not a fucking kid. Besides, I tried the college thing; it didn’t take.”
“What do you mean, it didn’t take? What happened? You don’t strike me as the type to wash out.”
Cameron pursed her lips as if she was weighing whether or not to tell him. “My first day at school, all the RAs in the freshman dorm broke us up into groups. Typical orientation-week bullshit, I guess. They made us sit in a circle and introduce ourselves. Asked us each to tell a story about an event that made us who we are. Most of the answers were pretty boilerplate and calibrated to impress. A game-winning slap shot in the state championship. That weekend spent volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. How a cousin’s peanut allergy inspired them to become an immunologist or whatever. It was excruciating, like sitting through a live reading of everybody’s college-application essays.
“Then the girl before me went. She’d been quiet until her turn, barely making eye contact with the rest of the group, but she came alive when she began to talk. About the nagging sense she had when she was young that something was fundamentally wrong with her. About the struggles in school and at home because of it. About her suicide attempt at fourteen and how the counseling her parents put her in afterward gave her the strength to come out to them. To tell them that their sweet little boy didn’t see himself that way. That inside, deep down, he knew he was meant to be a girl.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Everybody in the room was shocked. The bravery it took…the matter-of-fact way that she presented it. The fact is, she didn’t have to—with her parents’ consent, she’d started hormone treatment early, and she looked every bit the gender she presented as. I think she came out because she wanted people to know what she’d been through. Because she wanted to be understood and accepted for who she really was.”
“Wow. How’d you follow that?”
“I didn’t! Until she told her story, I was going to do what everybody else did and puff myself up so people would like me. But once she said what she said, I realized I couldn’t, so I just passed.”
“Did you two end up friends?”
“You’d think so, right? I mean, that seems like where the story’s going. Thing is, I was in awe of her bravery, but I was so caught up in my own freshman-year awkwardness, I didn’t really know what to say to her—or how to act around her—so no. Not that I was rude to her or an
ything. I’d say hello when we ran into each other. But I never told her how inspiring her story was to me. I never told her how much it helped me realize my own teen angst was so much self-indulgent bullshit.”
“And I’m guessing from your tone that you can’t tell her now. What happened?”
“The same thing that always happens when someone has a genuine, human moment. Someone else came along to shit on it.”
“How so?”
“One of the guys in our first-night group talked some smack about her to his friends. They started teasing her for sport. Next thing you know, the whole campus is in on it, and her sixth-grade picture’s stapled up all over campus—only then her name was Thomas, not Rebecca. They turned her into a pariah. A sideshow attraction. And while plenty of kids spoke out publicly against it, none of them—none of us—had the guts to actually be a friend to her; we just made tutting noises from afar. She was a cause to us, not a person. And truthfully, I don’t think anyone was too surprised when she turned up dead.”
“Suicide?”
“The cops said no. Officially, her death was ruled an accidental overdose—one of four that year on campus, although the others weren’t fatal. Doesn’t it just fucking figure the only time anybody looked at her like she was a normal kid was when she was laid out on a slab?”
“That’s awful—but it doesn’t exactly explain why you left school.”
“I left because of what happened after.”
“What happened after?”
“That’s the problem. Nothing—or at least, not officially. In the months she’d been at school, Becca had reported dozens of instances of harassment. Her dorm room had been vandalized, her Facebook and Twitter accounts spammed. She’d put up with catcalls, hate speech, and public ridicule. But once she was found dead, the school pretended like none of that had ever happened. They just wanted to sweep any unpleasantness under the rug and move on.”
“I take it you had other plans?”
“You’re damn right I did. I felt like shit for not standing up for her—for not standing with her—when I had the chance. When it might’ve mattered. When it could’ve saved her life. I was too self-involved. Too timid. Too afraid. But I felt sick at the thought that the people who’d made her life a living hell would get away scot-free. So I took it upon myself to make sure they didn’t.”
“How?”
“The only way I knew how. My interest in school was graphic art—a handy skill set for an ID forger, by the way—but my first love, and greatest talent, has always been computers. Mom raised me on them. I’ve been coding for as long as I’ve been reading, and I’ve been breaking into secure networks for sport for going on eight years. So I did what I do best. I hacked the dickbags who’d been harassing her online. Wrote a worm that’d infect their smartphones and look for any correspondence in which the name Becca was mentioned. Ditto the words tranny, she-male, and half a dozen other terms so awful they’d make you blush. Then I did the same for anyone who’d received those messages. In the end, I had a list of twenty-three hard-core offenders. Anyone who had just stood by while they jawed, I dropped from my list, because I figured they weren’t any worse than me—all they did was not speak up.”
“And what happened to those twenty-three?”
“I rigged their search history so it looked like they’d visited chat rooms of known terror groups. Added them to the no-fly list. Posted their Social Security numbers and credit card information on the dark web. Made a website for each of them that kept track of their online-porn-viewing habits and rigged the SEO so it’d be the first hit anybody who Googled them found.”
“Damn. Remind me to never piss you off.”
“Better to have me as an ally than an enemy,” she agreed. “Anyway, I mighta bragged a little that I was behind the sites, and the administration caught wind. The dean of students didn’t appreciate my efforts. It turns out one of the kids who’d been harassing Becca was a legacy whose family name was on our sports complex.”
“They tossed you out?”
“Yeah. For violating school policy on bullying, of all things.”
“Ouch.”
“The irony wasn’t lost on me,” she said. Then she patted his stomach gingerly. “You’re all stitched up, by the way.”
Hendricks inspected her work. For someone with no medical training, she’d managed a passable suturing job. It wouldn’t heal pretty, but it’d heal. One more scar for the collection, he thought. There’d come a day he wouldn’t be able to tell this one from all the others.
“Thanks,” he said. “You got anything to eat? Seems like I should replace some of the stuffing that I lost.”
“Sure,” she said. “You want ramen or ramen?”
Hendricks smiled. “Ramen’s fine.”
Cameron filled her electric kettle and turned it on.
“Shame you don’t have a TV,” he said. “I’d love to check the local news, see if anybody’s looking for us.”
She looked at him like he’d just lamented her lack of a Victrola. “What century is it again? I don’t need a TV—I have a laptop.”
“Oh,” he said, chastened. “Right. Fire it up for me, would you?”
Cameron took a USB drive from her pocket, inserted it into the port on the side of her laptop, and turned the laptop on. It booted scary-fast. “Can you take it from here,” she asked, “or do I need to explain to you what a browser is?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
Hendricks went to Google News, but before he’d typed anything in the field, the day’s top headlines caught his eye. “Ah, hell,” he muttered.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s been some kind of attack.”
“Where?”
He clicked through to CNN. A video began to play—three talking heads blabbing at once, with a disaster scene behind them on the big screen. “San Francisco,” he said. “The Golden Gate.”
“Oh God,” she said, crossing the room and peering over his shoulder at the screen. “I grew up just south of there, in Redwood City. Is it still standing? Is anyone hurt?”
“The bridge is still there,” he said, watching shaky helicopter footage of first responders trying to rescue people trapped atop it. The faces of the stranded were filthy and slick from the spray of the fireboats below. Their expressions were a mix of hope and terror. Thick dark smoke mingled with the rising steam and periodically blocked the bridge from view. “But it looks like there were casualties.”
The kettle clicked off, the water inside boiling. Neither of them moved.
They watched awhile in heartsick silence. The images of the rescue efforts were soon replaced by cell-phone footage of the attack itself, film that looked as if it was initially intended to be a cheery home movie. Then came a grainy video of a young man with a scraggly beard dressed in traditional Muslim garb. He claimed credit on behalf of a terror group whose name meant nothing to Hendricks—which was odd, he thought, given that his old unit had hunted terrorists for years—and promised there were more attacks to come. After that was a statement from the president urging calm, followed by a tirade from that blowhard Senator Wentworth, who insisted America close its borders and turn the Middle East into a parking lot. Between each segment, the talking heads parsed, speculated, stoked, argued, and divided.
Hendricks forced himself to back his browser up and search for any fallout from the Salty Dog.
“Anything?” Cameron asked.
“Nothing but a headline: ‘Reports of Shots Fired at Local Eatery.’ When you click through, there’s no story—just a note saying the page will be updated as more facts are available.”
“That’s good news, right?”
“Could be. At the very least, it’s not bad news. If I had to guess, I’d say local PD is distracted, their attentions elsewhere. Probably every cop from coast to coast is tracking down known militants. I hate to say it, but what happened in San Francisco helped us. It means we should be able to crash here tonight without much
worry and then head out first thing in the morning.”
“That’s ghoulish.”
“That’s life—my life, at least. And it’d be yours, too, if I were to take you on.”
“If?” she said hopefully.
“Poor choice of words,” he said, “because it’s never gonna happen.”
Cameron sighed and returned to her vestigial kitchen to set the water boiling again. She unwrapped two packets of ramen and dropped the tangled noodle-bricks into two bowls. While she was otherwise occupied, Hendricks opened an incognito window in her browser and pulled up Twitter. He typed in his user name, j_rambo1972, and his password, 3v31yn, and hit enter.
His account was protected; a little lock icon beside the user name indicated that only those to whom he’d given permission could see his feed, and he had only one follower. That account was also protected. Neither of them had ever tweeted. Both their avatars were Twitter’s default egg.
The accounts were set up years ago by Lester as a way for them to communicate if their usual channels were compromised or otherwise rendered inaccessible. To the outside world, the accounts appeared inactive—two of the literally millions of abandoned handles on the platform. But they could be used to communicate via direct message without affecting their perfect-zero tweet count.
For the longest time, the other account had belonged to Lester. But last year—just after Lester died—Hendricks briefly saw his ex, Evie, and he’d slipped her the user name and password on a piece of paper as she squeezed his hand in good-bye. The account was intended only for emergencies, and it had sat dormant for months, but Hendricks still checked it every day.
Today, when the page loaded, he sat up ramrod straight. His stitches strained, though he hardly noticed.
Over the envelope icon in the toolbar, there was a 1.
Hendricks had a message.
He clicked on it, pulse thrumming in his ears. A window opened.
We need to talk, it said.
Hendricks replied, Where/when? Then he held his breath, although he had no reason to expect the reply to be immediate.
The reply was immediate. Roadhouse Truck Stop, I-76, PA. ASAP.
