Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

  Hector tried to push Hal’s hand away. He tried to scream for his black valet. None of this succeeded. Hector Ramirez’s eyes blinked several times like the Christmas tree lights, like the Santa Claus on the roof of the trailer. They blinked and then they closed.

  Then the black man was out on the porch. He was waving his weapon. He was yelling at Hal to step back. But Hal held Hector as a shield between him and the black man until he had entered Hector’s body and done the deed.

  Then he let Hector fall to the pavement. As he pulled onto the quiet street of that hillside neighborhood, he looked over at the house across the way and saw the woman in the blue dress was still at the window, a telephone pressed to her ear.

  By seven-thirty in the morning the temperature in Miami was already in the mid-eighties. Misty Fielding wore denim overalls over a shorty white T-top, showing a little midriff, the curve of her waist. She wore white Keds and a baseball cap with the Miami Heat’s logo. In her right pocket was the wolf eye. She could feel it through the material of her overalls rubbing against her thigh. As she got out of her car at Dinner Key Marina, she reached into the pocket and touched the glass eye. A good luck touch.

  She was nervous but pumped. Following Hal’s plan, the two of them were a team now. Feeling the blood fizz in her veins, the pleasant breathless tingle of nervous energy. This was the day everything came together, all the random story lines of her life intersected into one. Misty and Hal. Misty and Randall. Misty and Hannah. Misty and her father. All the strands braiding.

  She carried a straw bag with five derringers in it, and she was wearing her wraparound shades. Trying for a nautical look, though she wasn’t sure if she was close or not. She’d never spent much time around marinas or boats or the water, but as she crossed the parking lot and saw the way some of the other people headed toward the docks were dressed, she relaxed. Apparently any scruffy thing would do.

  There were several entrances through the high chain-link fence, but Hal had told her which one to take, the one on the far left. She passed an old man with white hair who was sitting on a bench having a breakfast beer. He had a grizzled Ernest Hemingway beard and bleary eyes that he turned on her as she passed.

  “Tight lines and good fishing.” He raised his beer can in salute.

  Misty marched down the dock past the big white yachts and the long sleek sailboats. She was almost to the end of the dock, starting to think she’d taken the wrong entrance after all, when she saw Randall Keller sitting on a bench in front of an open slip. He was plinking rocks into the water.

  She walked up behind him and looked down at the top of his head. His blond hair was thick and uncombed. He was wearing a blue-and-white-checked shirt and blue jeans and black basketball shoes. She caught a hint of his shampoo, something with a strawberry flavor. A cute kid. Cuter up close than he’d seemed at a distance when she’d followed him home from school those times.

  He was drawing back his hand to toss another pebble into the harbor when Misty spoke.

  “You do your homework, Randall?”

  He stopped his toss, then slowly craned around and looked at her.

  “You get that photo I sent?”

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Think hard. You’ll probably be able to figure it out, Rando.”

  The boy swallowed. The rock fell from his hand onto the dock.

  “Barbie-girl?”

  Misty came around the bench and sat down beside him.

  He gave her a stiff smile and inched away.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “I thought it looked like a nice day for a boat ride.”

  “You have a boat here?”

  “No, but I understood your friend does. The one your mother dumps you with when she wants to be alone. Dark hair, a little pudgy.”

  “You know Gisela?”

  “No, but I’d like to. Which boat is hers?”

  Randall looked across at a red and yellow houseboat with several purple life preservers hooked along its rail.

  “The Margaritaville, huh? You think she’d mind if I came aboard?”

  Randall swallowed again and said nothing.

  “Oh, come on, Randall. Why’re you being so shy? You’re not shy on the computer.”

  “Gisela’s getting dressed,” he said, “then we have to go to school. I don’t think it’s a good time right now.”

  “What’s wrong, Randall? You don’t seem pleased to see me. After all the intimate conversations we’ve had, you’re so cold. Do I scare you?”

  The boy frowned and looked down at the water.

  Misty said, “I’m really hurt, Randall. I thought we had something nice. Is that the kind of little boy you are? Rude, unkind?”

  “What do you want?” His voice was meek. “Why are you here?”

  “I told you. I want to go on a boat ride. It’s such a pretty day. Don’t you think it’s a pretty day?”

  Randall looked up at the empty blue sky, then turned his gaze back toward the houseboat.

  “I have to go,” he said. He rose and started around the bench.

  Misty hopped to her feet and followed him. Down the dock Ernest Hemingway was coughing loudly as he popped open another beer.

  At the ramp that led to the Margaritaville, Misty reached into her straw bag and chose one of the derringers at random. The .38 Mighty Midget. She kept her hand inside the purse, taking a firm grip on the pistol.

  She stepped onto the deck of the houseboat, a couple of paces behind Randall. The boy shot a quick look back at her, then headed for the door.

  He was in the main cabin only a step ahead of Misty.

  She shut the door behind her and turned just as the small dark-haired woman came out of the other cabin. She was running a brush through her hair when she saw Misty.

  Randall dropped down on a small couch and hunched his head low like a turtle trying to disappear into its shell.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Gisela pointed the hairbrush at her as if it were loaded.

  “Hey, I know you,” Misty said. “You’re the one from TV, the cop lady who’s always in an uproar about some 7-Eleven robbery or something. That’s you, isn’t it? The TV cop lady?”

  “That’s right, I’m a police officer. And who are you? And what the hell do you think you’re doing in here?”

  Gisela took a half step to her right. Closer to the little kitchen with its drawers full of knives. Maybe even a gun hidden in there somewhere.

  Misty withdrew the derringer from her purse and showed it to Gisela.

  Randall looked up, saw the gun, and sank lower on the couch.

  “Okay,” Misty said. “So let’s crank this baby up, see what she’ll do. The three of us, we’re going for a little boat ride.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  At just after eight Hannah swung her Porsche off the Julia Tuttle Causeway onto Star Island. The sky was polished a milky blue, with a strong breeze off the water, traffic inexplicably light.

  Almost a century earlier Star Island and several other perfectly oval dollops of land had been scooped from the bay bottom and distributed along the edge of the causeway to Miami Beach so that the moderately rich might have a waterfront way station to enjoy until they amassed sufficient wealth and could afford to move an hour north to the true luxury of Palm Beach.

  It took her only a few minutes to locate the correct gold numerals on the stucco column. Behind the heavy brass bars of the front gate, the house was a three-story sprawling Mediterranean mansion that confronted a blue expanse of Biscayne Bay like a fortress of culture and good taste. It was protected from drive-by gawkers by a high pink stucco rampart backed by a fifteen-foot sculptured hedge.

  At the head of the driveway Hannah spoke her name into the speaker box, prepared to give a long explanation about the E-mail relationship between her son and the boy who lived behind those walls, but only a second after she’d uttered her name, the heavy gate rolled open.

  A slim Japanese wom
an in a white dress and white leather shoes greeted her at the front door and admitted her into a cool, shadowy foyer. To the right a small waterfall rustled inside a screened atrium. Two garish parrots squawked and fluttered their wings. On the whitewashed wall to the left hung a small dark painting signed by Marc Chagall.

  The slim woman waited serenely for Hannah to take in the surroundings.

  When Hannah turned back, the woman’s slender hand fluttered up toward the stairway.

  “Stevie is expecting you, Ms. Keller. He’s in the studio.”

  “Are you Stevie’s mother?”

  “No. Mr. and Mrs. Brockman are in Provence for the week, buying wine. I am Yoshia, Stevie’s nurse.”

  “The boy’s ill?”

  The woman smiled graciously.

  “I’ll let you be the judge of that.”

  Hannah followed Yoshia up a wide spiral stairway flanked by narrow slotted windows that looked out on the rose garden and pool and clay tennis court and a pool house that was a small replica of the main house.

  Stevie Brockman’s bedroom was as spacious as the lobby of a fine hotel. From what Hannah could see, the room occupied most of the third floor. A single bed was stashed in one corner of the room, but the rest of the space was taken up by long benches heaped with electronic paraphernalia. Several units with small screens filled by pulsing green lines like a dozen heart monitors lined up side by side. Meters and motherboards and soldering irons and pliers and screwdrivers were scattered across the workbenches. Two TVs sat in the far corner, both on, both tuned to the same channel. One was in black-and-white, the other color. Hovering in the background was an insistent hum that sounded like the drone of an overturned hive.

  The boy sat in a black leather swivel chair in front of a sleek computer terminal. He was wearing khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt, like a prep-school uniform. He had curly black hair and round cheeks and chubby arms and his shoes didn’t reach the floor. He glanced over his shoulder, nodded a quick hello, then went back to his screen.

  Yoshia moved up beside him and stood with reverential stillness as if the boy were performing the last difficult passages of a piano sonata.

  Hannah stepped closer and leaned in to see the screen.

  Stevie Brockman was using his mouse to scroll through columns of computer language. Line after line of hieroglyphs rolled past so quickly Hannah couldn’t catch a single letter. She watched him click the mouse, apparently inserting lines of code into the streaming list.

  “Hannah’s a writer. She writes mystery novels,” Stevie explained to Yoshia. “They’re good. A little gory in places, but I like all the whackos. My favorite was Third Time Out. Very lyrical nature descriptions. And I liked the baseball stuff. That Erin Barkley is one tough lady.”

  “You seem a little young for my books.”

  “I’m twelve, almost thirteen,” he said. And continued to speed through the column of runic symbols, adding here, subtracting there. “I’m allowed to read anything I want. Last week I read Ulysses. Do you know Ulysses?”

  “I know it,” she said.

  “I liked that woman. Molly Bloom. I liked how it ended, that long sentence, it went on for twenty pages or something. The sex was good, too. I like sex in a book.”

  “Stevie’s quite a reader,” Yoshia said.

  “I’m very interested in sex,” he said. “Of course I’m too young for it in real life, but what the heck, I can read about it, can’t I?”

  Yoshia gave Hannah an indulgent smile.

  “I’m trying to learn to write,” Stevie said. “But it’s tough. Getting it all down, making sense. Something can be clear in my mind, but as I start to put it into words, it just seems to go away.”

  “I know the feeling,” Hannah said. “It’s like telling a dream. No matter how vivid it is when you wake up in the morning, as soon as you begin to tell it, the images seem to decay.”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s good,” Stevie said. “Have you read Robert Frost?”

  Hannah smiled. Grilled by a twelve-year-old.

  The kid was clicking the mouse, using the pointer, cutting and pasting large sections of computer code, doing it all with effortless speed and certainty.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know a little Frost.”

  “What I like is how he can change tone so quickly, go from humorous banter to passionate expressions of tragic feelings.”

  “You have a good English teacher.”

  “I don’t take English,” he said. “I just like to read. Books are old-fashioned, but they make me think about stuff I wouldn’t otherwise. Like just recently I was thinking how there’s a big difference between writing code and writing a book. If you write code all day, and you get it right, you can change how something works. Make it run smoother or quicker. But when you write a book, it’s like you change yourself. Rewire your brain. It’s weird. Like just by telling your story in a certain way, using these words instead of those words, you change how you feel. You understand things in a new way. You can change.”

  “Unless you’re one of those who tell the same story over and over,” Hannah said.

  “Why should anyone do that?”

  “Maybe it’s the only story they know. And until they tell it right, they can’t let go of it.”

  Stevie processed that for a moment. Flicking his mouse, flicking, flicking.

  “Stevie’s trying to write a book about his run-in with the law,” Yoshia said. “The law and the FAA, Federal Aviation Administration.”

  “You hacked into their computers?”

  Stevie stopped. He lifted his hand from the mouse and sat for a moment staring at the screen.

  “I don’t hack,” he said finally. “Hacking is for morons. Time wasters.”

  He turned his head and looked back at her with a disappointed frown.

  “A year ago,” Yoshia said, “when Stevie and the Brockmans flew into LaGuardia, they wound up having to circle the airport for half an hour. A backup on the ground. That’s what got him started. Isn’t that right, Stevie?”

  The boy went back to work. Once again the script flew past.

  “It’s a stupid waste of time, all those people just waiting to land, flying in circles. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “So when Stevie got back home, he went into their computers and fixed things.”

  “Their timetables were completely wrong,” Stevie said. “Paths of descent too moderate. Their tolerances were ten degrees off all the systems they were running. I just streamlined a few things. Cut out the waste, the garbage. Their programmers were like high school dropouts or something. They had absolutely like zero security.”

  “No one even knew he’d been there,” Yoshia said. “Things ran smoothly for a day or two, planes coming in early, getting out right on time, no stack-ups, nothing. Until LaGuardia started to throw things off downstream. Other airports were using the same old systems, a certain percentage of planes leaving late, so eventually LaGuardia started causing synchronization problems all down the line. At one point Denver almost had to shut down.”

  “The unintended effect,” Stevie said. “It’s hard to debug a system so totally botched up.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “So they undid everything,” said Stevie. “Put it all back the way it was. Instead of looking at what I did, seeing how they might apply it to other airports.”

  “People in Washington wanted to talk to him.”

  “I would think so,” said Hannah.

  “Oh, I’m used to it,” Stevie said. “You think you’re doing somebody a favor, the Secret Service gets all bent out of shape because I didn’t use the right protocol. Didn’t say please and thank you. Supposedly I violated Section 1030 of Title 18. An act of computer intrusion.”

  “So Stevie,” said Hannah. “Did you get a chance to look at that thing I told you about?”

  “Deathwatch dot com,” he said. “Yeah, I looked at it.”

  “Can you tell me anything?”

  “
Tell me what you want to know, I’ll tell you if I know it.”

  Hannah said, “I need to know where the broadcast is originating from.”

  “The thing about the Internet,” Stevie said, still pruning the moving lines of code, “it’s just all these billions of connections. It doesn’t really exist as one single unit. Not like the plumbing in your house or something. When somebody ships something over the Internet, it isn’t like water coming through a pipe. You turn on your tap, the water finds the one and only way to fill the vacuum. Point A to Point B.

  “But the Net has a billion ways the water can get from the source to tap. It could’ve come through Asia or Guam or zigzag from one side of America to the other and back again. You send something across the street, it might travel five thousand miles to get there. Whatever works. Whatever’s fastest. The Pentagon designed it that way because they wanted the Net to survive a nuclear war, for people in the military to still be able to communicate even when large parts of the system were down. But it’s a lot more than that now.”

  “So what’re you saying, Stevie, it’s not possible to locate the source?”

  “Sure it’s possible. Every data packet that goes across the Net has a history. An IP return address. Hackers disguise their IPs, or they’ll route them through Australia or China, some country that has no reciprocal agreements with the FBI. So if someone’s backtracking the trail, it’ll stop right there. That foreign country won’t help them.

  “And even if you’re able to finally nail down the service provider, most of the time it’s still a big step to figure out where the personal computer is that’s sending the message in the first place. Someone really paranoid will use cell phones to bounce their signals around, before it gets to the service provider, or multiple modems set up at different locations, or they’ll Telnet to another host, log in there, and then access the Internet from that other host location. That’s a trick called looping and weaving. It can completely confuse anyone trying to get a hard-line trace back to the point of origin.”

  “So you tried and couldn’t do it?”