The Lightness of Hands

by Jeff Garvin

  I stood frozen for a moment with the phone still pressed to my ear. I was so sick of this whole business. I should block his number. I should smash my screen again until I couldn’t read it anymore. I should call him back and tell him I missed him.

  Instead, I deleted the message and walked back to the car.

  Ripley was on me the minute I walked into McDonald’s.

  “Did you get it? The SSID?”

  “I think so,” I said, opening my laptop and bringing up the screenshot. “Is it . . . D-LINK?”

  He blinked. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Before I could ask what he meant, he seized my laptop and started typing.

  “Her router is older than me!” He snorted. “And she’s using WEP.”

  “Could you say that in English?”

  Ripley ignored me, hammering on the keyboard as if I weren’t even there. I tried to follow his moves on-screen, but all I saw was a vomit of numbers and symbols.

  “Yup!” he exclaimed, gesturing at an incomprehensible line of code. “She’s still using the default password. Some people deserve to be hacked.”

  “Can you just tell me what’s—”

  “Chicken-fried Jesus, she’s got LogMeIn client installed!” He resumed typing.

  Finally, I grabbed his wrist, harder than I meant to. He looked at up me, shocked.

  “Could you please stop and tell me what the fuck you’re doing?”

  Ripley frowned. “Okay, wow. First, let go of my arm.”

  I did, and he rubbed his wrist. “What the hell, Ellie?”

  I took a slow breath in through my nose. “I’m sorry,” I said, only half meaning it. This new Ripley was a bit of a know-it-all. “I just need you to slow down, please. I don’t speak computer.”

  “Okay,” he said, shaking out his wrist. “Next time, just ask.”

  I had asked, but I bit my tongue.

  “Here.” Ripley double-clicked an unfamiliar icon, and the screen on my laptop changed. It looked vintage now, like it was running an old version of Windows.

  “This is her screen,” he said, pointing. “I’m controlling her PC by remote.”

  “How?”

  He twisted the ring on his middle finger. “She did the internet equivalent of leaving her keys in the car and the windows down.”

  Ripley started scrolling through Turner’s browser history. “Recipes, online banking . . . huh.”

  “Huh what?”

  “She’s gone to LotZilla like a thousand times.”

  “Isn’t that the site you were using to look for Devereaux’s house?”

  He nodded. “It lets you search property values. She was looking at houses on the west side.”

  “She said she was in real estate.”

  “That would explain it.” He scrolled. “She’s got an eBay problem, too. And, wow. Craigslist personals?” Ripley turned to me. “Will your people stop at nothing to obtain sex? You realize it literally warps your mind.”

  “Wait,” I said, pointing at the screen. “Scroll back to the LotZilla stuff.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “A warehouse somewhere near the Strip.”

  He scrolled up, shook his head. “These are all condos and townhomes. . . . Wait.” He clicked on a link, and a new browser window popped up. A satellite map of Las Vegas appeared with a red dot just east of the Strip.

  “Can you zoom in?”

  The red dot marked a large warehouse located behind a restaurant on Hinson Street, a few blocks west of I-15.

  My head was buzzing. “Does it say who owns it?”

  He clicked and scrolled. “Flying Man Holdings, LLC.”

  My heart stopped. “That’s it.”

  Ripley and I pulled up across from the address he’d found on LotZilla. The building facing the street wasn’t a restaurant as the website had indicated—it was a strip club. Blacked-out windows, faded red awning, blinking marquee that read The Strip—High Steaks, Hot Girls.

  “That’s profoundly gross,” Ripley said.

  “Pull into the lot in back.”

  “Ellie, we don’t have time to satisfy your perverse cravings.”

  “Can you not make stupid jokes right now?”

  Ripley put his hands up like he was surrendering, then pulled into a spot at the far end. While he opened my laptop, I looked around to see if anyone had noticed two teenagers parking at a strip club. A girl in a long coat was vaping and texting near the back door, but she didn’t look up. There was no one else in sight.

  I turned my attention to the warehouse. It was signless, beige, and roughly the size of a cineplex; if Devereaux wanted a low-key place to workshop illusions and store props, this was perfect.

  “Got anything?”

  Ripley grunted. “If you want to know what kind of emails the manager of a strip-club-slash-steakhouse gets, I could tell you in about five minutes. But the Flying Man network is password protected.”

  “Can you hack it or not?”

  He turned to look at me. “Did I do something to offend you?”

  I clenched my jaw. I couldn’t lose my temper right now; I needed Ripley’s help.

  “There’s just a lot riding on this. Can you do it?”

  “Probably,” he said, with a condescending what’s wrong with you? expression. “But it’ll take me a while.”

  “How long is ‘a while’?”

  “I don’t know, Ellie. Twenty minutes? An hour?”

  I wanted to snap back at him, but I held it in. “I’m going to look around.”

  Ripley started to speak as I got out of the car, something about cameras, but I slammed the door before he could finish. I paused for a moment outside the car. I should open the door and apologize—I was getting more irritable by the minute—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was like being stuck in the RV again with the power steering locked: I could see where I was going, but I couldn’t change course. Without looking back, I headed toward the warehouse.

  As I walked around to the back, I saw what Ripley had been talking about: there were security cameras mounted on the building. I pulled up the hood on my sweatshirt to obscure my face and counted six cameras in all: one on each corner, one overlooking the loading dock, and one above the only pedestrian entrance, a single door on the side farthest from the strip club.

  There were two cars parked next to the loading dock—a vintage BMW and a red Mazda hatchback. That meant someone was inside, possibly watching me on a screen right at that moment. My pulse roared, and I savored the surge of fresh adrenaline; it would help me stay sharp.

  I kept my head down and approached the pedestrian entrance. The door looked heavy and solid. Instead of a traditional lock, there was a keypad above the knob. My heart rate spiked; this couldn’t be picked like a regular lock. And in combination with the cameras, it suggested that the security around this building was tight. This was going to be harder than I’d thought. I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of the lock.

  As I got back into the car, Ripley looked up.

  “What did you find?”

  I showed him the picture. “What do you think? Can you hack it?”

  “No,” he said. “Out of my league. But maybe I can get the pass code.”

  “How?”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Most people’s door locks aren’t connected to Wi-Fi. That would be incredibly stupid. But if someone keeps a record of the pass code on a computer—one that’s currently turned on and connected to the network—I might be able to find it.”

  My pulse quickened. “Great! Do it!”

  “There’s a risk.”

  “What risk? Can’t you just hack in from here?”

  “I could,” Ripley said, his voice rising. “But I’d have to reset their router.”

  I sucked in a breath. He was being such a goddamn know-it-all. “I get it, you’re a computer genius and I’m not. Could you please explain this in English? I don’t have time to Google every word you say.”

/>   Ripley gaped at me, shook his head, and then answered in a defeated tone.

  “If I restart their router, their IT guy will know immediately that they’ve been hacked.”

  “Does that even matter? I mean, what can they do?”

  “Well, for one thing, they could change all their passwords.”

  I bit my lip. “Including the pass code to the front door.”

  Ripley nodded.

  I glanced out the window at the looming beige warehouse. We were so close.

  “Do it,” I said.

  “All right,” Ripley replied, and started typing.

  After five minutes, he seemed no closer to “cracking the network,” and I was starting to get nervous about the security guy at the strip club. He had come out twice to glance around the lot, and both times his eyes had lingered on our car. I told Ripley we should move to the McDonald’s next door, but he said the warehouse’s Wi-Fi signal wouldn’t reach that far.

  “Will you please stop tapping your foot?” I said. Ripley didn’t respond.

  Ten minutes later, I was about to call the whole thing off when Ripley finally declared, “I’m in!”

  I leaned over to watch the screen as he entered yet another incomprehensible command.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Unleashing a bot that will scour the network for strings of characters that look like passwords.”

  “So we just wait?”

  “There are only two PCs connected. It shouldn’t take very— Ha!”

  “You found it?”

  Ripley shot me a glare. “Will you please. Back. Off.” He turned back to the screen and clicked on a folder. “People are so stupid.” He gestured at the screen in disgust. “This guy Doug—Devereaux’s stage manager or whatever—has a ‘friend’ in his contact file, first name Top, last name Secret. The Notes field is a list of everything a hacker could want. CCVs on his credit cards. Social security numbers. His wife’s mother’s maiden name . . . Jesus, his passport number is in here—who does that?”

  “What about passwords?”

  He scrolled, frowned. “Shit. No. He uses password management software.”

  “The guy writes down his credit card numbers but uses a program to hide his passwords?”

  Ripley rolled his eyes as if explaining to a four-year-old why the sky is blue. I wanted to throttle him.

  “It’s not for security. It’s because he’s lazy. He doesn’t want to have to remember them.”

  He scrolled, clicked. “Wait a minute.” He pointed to a block of text that read:

  Facebook = Janey middle + last 4 ssn

  First NV Bank = Janey middle + Doug Jr. bday

  “They’re hints,” he said. “Not the passwords themselves. But if we know his wife’s middle name—”

  “You don’t have to mansplain hints to me. Is there one that says ‘door code’?”

  He shot me a hurt look, then scrolled down. The text read:

  Front Door: Daniel’s magic hero

  “Boom!” Ripley said. “The pass code is the name of Devereaux’s favorite magician.” He looked at me expectantly.

  I closed my eyes and knocked my head against the headrest.

  “What, you don’t know it?” Ripley’s voice rang with disbelief. “I thought you knew everything about—”

  “It’s not that,” I snapped. “Devereaux names the same influences in every interview.”

  “Well, who are they?”

  I ticked them off on my fingers. “Fred Astaire. Frank Sinatra. Alfred Hitchcock.”

  “Those aren’t magicians,” Ripley said.

  “No shit!”

  He sank into the driver’s seat. “So you don’t know.”

  I shook my head, let out a long sigh. “But I know someone who might.”

  Ripley’s eyes lit up. “Call them!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I looked over at him. “Because it’s my father.”

  Ripley leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. I stared out the window toward the back of the strip club.

  The momentary silence was interrupted by the chirp of my phone. I recognized the number from the motel—it was Dad.

  What if something had happened? What if it was his heart?

  My whole body tensed as I answered the call. “Dad? Are you okay?”

  “Elias Dante Jr.,” he said. “Where in God’s name are you?”

  I sagged with relief; he wasn’t sick, just worried. “On my way back,” I said, trying to sound contrite.

  Dad spoke again, his voice like gravel and ash. “I thought I made it clear you were not to leave the motel.”

  I clenched my jaw and squeezed my eyes shut. I needed to stay in control.

  “Did you hear me, young lady? Because this time, there will be consequences.”

  Anger heated my face, and my self-control evaporated. “Like what, Dad?” I asked, gripping the phone hard. “Are you going to ground me? Are you going to send me to my room? Because first I’d have to actually have a room!”

  Before he could reply, I ended the call and brought my palm down on the dashboard.

  “Jesus, Ellie! This isn’t even my car!”

  I clenched my fists. “We have to get back.”

  “Okay,” Ripley replied. “But can you calm down enough to drive? I need to do some research.”

  We switched seats and got on the road.

  I seethed behind the wheel. Here I was trying to save Dad’s ass, and he was treating me like a child. Meanwhile, I could feel Ripley’s eyes on me, judging me every time I braked or changed lanes. As I crossed Las Vegas Boulevard, a middle-aged hipster in a minivan cut me off.

  “Watch where you’re going!” I yelled, pounding the horn of Heather’s Hyundai.

  “Ellie,” Ripley said. “You’ve got to calm down. You’re going to kill us both.”

  I said nothing and kept my eyes on the road.

  “Here’s the deal with the lock,” Ripley said, reading from his phone. “According to the manufacturer’s website, you have to enter a five-digit alphanumeric code. You get three tries. Then it locks you out and alerts security.”

  “So how do we hack it?” I felt Ripley’s exasperated stare, but I didn’t look at him.

  “We don’t, Ellie. Not without special hardware.”

  “Where can we get that?”

  “Hell if I know,” he said. “I’m not a career criminal.”

  I gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead. We were fucked.

  “What’s plan B?” Ripley asked, his voice high and calm, as if everything was going to be just fine. “Are you going to ask your dad?”

  “Great idea,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’ll just ask him straight out. ‘Gee, Dad, who is Devereaux’s secret magician crush?’ And then he’ll ask why. And when I don’t answer, he’ll know exactly what we’re up to. Because unlike you, he is not a fucking idiot!”

  Ripley threw up his hands. “What did I do to piss you off, Ellie? Why are you being like this?”

  “This isn’t some fucking scavenger hunt, Ripley. It’s my life!” I was boiling over now.

  “I’m just trying to help you solve the problem! We have to do something!”

  “We?” I turned to glare at him, and the words poured out of me like hot bile. I knew they were awful, but I was powerless to stop. “You don’t have to do anything. I have to do it.”

  “That’s not fair,” Ripley said, his voice rising. “I drove all the way out here to help—”

  “Bullshit.” My face was on fire. “You drove all the way out here to run away. You couldn’t handle Mommy and Daddy fighting, so you left your four-bedroom, air-conditioned house and abandoned your little brother to run away to the desert. You’re so noble, Ripley. So fucking noble.”

  Ripley opened his mouth, then shut it.

  The rest of the ride was silent except for the sound of my furious breathing. I felt a tiny twinge of guilt, but it was
buried under my rage. This was nothing but a joyride to him; he didn’t care how it turned out. All he’d done since we’d arrived in Vegas was play on my computer and waste my time.

  When we pulled up at the motel, I stole a glance at Ripley. His jaw was tight, his eyes downcast. I knew I should say something, but the blood pumping through my temples was deafening, and it was all I could do to suppress the urge to slap his face.

  I looked away, feeling my chest growing heavier. This was my fault. As hard as I’d tried to hide my crazy, I hadn’t even lasted two days. I had driven Liam away, and now I’d alienated the only real friend I had.

  I wished he had never come to Phoenix. I wished we had never met in real life.

  Without looking at me, Ripley held out my phone. I wanted to say I’m sorry, to say this was just how I was sometimes, to say this wasn’t really me. Only it was.

  I took the phone, got out of the car, and left him in the passenger seat with the motor still running.

  CHAPTER 23

  DAD STOOD UP THE INSTANT I walked through the door.

  “Where were you?” His tone was equal parts rage and relief.

  “I’m fine, Dad, thanks for asking. Ripley and I just went for a drive.” My face was still hot.

  “You didn’t call; you didn’t leave a note. I thought something had happened to you.”

  “I’m not a baby. I can go for coffee without getting mugged.”

  “You can’t just walk out like that. You need to tell me where you’re going.”

  My hands trembled as I tried to steady my voice.

  “I’ve lived in a box with you my whole life, Dad. I’m not a pet. I need air. I need space. I need you off my back.”

  “We can talk about that. But let me be clear.” He took a slow breath through his nose. “You are not to go out again without my express permission. I’m still the adult here, and you are still just sixteen years old.”

  “Okay, you’re the adult?” I clenched both fists. “I get us money. I do the shopping. I book the gigs—I find the goddamn props! What do you do? You say no to everything and get in the way. You treat me like an employee. I don’t work for you, Dad, okay? I’m not your fucking assistant. I’m not Mom!”

  On the last word, my voice broke, and Dad’s face went white. He put a hand to his mouth and sat down hard on the bed.