The Phone Company
Page 28
“A2, play back the shooter recreation.”
A ghostly figure appeared on his glasses, standing at the base of the mountain of coins where Bill had just stood.
Make-believe casings flew out of the make-believe gun, and Bill followed one. He hadn’t noticed it before, because the metal jacket had blended in with the quarters, but, yep, there it was. Bill plucked up the casing.
9mm.
Gold Dot.
Also standard issue.
Perkins? Bill thought.
The sheriff was the only other officer as tall as Bill, with basically the same shoe size. Everyone else—Caruthers, Goff, and all the other deputies—didn’t come close to filling the sheriff’s gunboats.
Perkins had been acting funny about the whole Martian situation, for sure—he’d nearly fired Bill for poking around—but what was his motive? Why assassinate the Martian?
Aaron 2 said.
“Yes,” Bill said. She didn’t even have to say it this time. “You have my consent.”
Something in Bill’s skull broke open like an egg, and he shouted, gripping the sides of his head. His infrared came on for a second, but then went away as columnar data streamed past his eyes. Pop-ups flashed on and off.
He saw a weird golden arrow hovering in front of him, pointing at the Martian, saw a huge icon of a golden coin next to an impossible number, as if it accounted for every coin in the trove, but those elements disintegrated on his lenses.
Warnings and indicators flared to life like idiot lights, but then disappeared, buried under more data, under lists and lists citing each owner of each and every coin; under an analysis of the boot tread, stating exact shoe size and brand name, including the name of the wholesaler where the boots had been bought.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Bill said, reeling from the info dump. “What is this?”
Bill staggered back and watched as all the ballistics reports, blood spatter analyses, and crime recreations of Marvin’s homicide zipped off to the sheriff’s office in an official report.
An image of the murder weapon flashed up, and an adjacent panel sped through a list of suspects until it matched the gun with Bill’s face.
“Hey, hey, hey!”
Dragnet didn’t listen.
It issued a BOLO on Bill.
* * *
JJ pulled open the door into the school, focused entirely on the Rorschach of the Dick’s face, imprinted onto his eyes as bright as the sun, focused entirely on the weight of Bill’s gun. He heard an engine and looked up.
Floating, fluffy, and whiter than the dead skin of the sky, the mile-high heart ended with a little flourish of airplane exhaust, depicting the feathers of an arrow.
JJ thought about how this heart was much better than the first one he’d seen. Then the airplane was ripping through the roof of HMS.
PARTY LINE
“There were pin codes, numbers for my automatic front gate where I lived and the feeling that, according to these notes, I was definitely being watched . . . I really felt very sick . . . somebody’s been watching, or certainly somebody’s been listening to my life.”
—Ulrika Jonsson
“Technology is best when it brings people together.”
CHAPTER 27
“It’s me,” Bill said, turning the shell casing over in his hand; he’d already scanned it for prints and had found his own whorls on the jacket. “The Martian, he’s, uh . . .” Bill cast a glance toward the caldera of cars. “Look, there’s been a murder. At the junkyard. Marvin is dead.”
Aaron was quiet for a tic. “I already know that.”
“What?”
“Listen, Bill, I found your gun.”
His eyes flicked around Dragnet. “Dust it. Run it for prints.”
“I’ve already done that.”
“You? Why’d you run them?”
“Listen, Bill, it doesn’t matter what happens at HMS.”
“HMS?” Bill shook his head, trying to break up more of his hangover. He was finding it extremely difficult to think right now. He felt weird, almost drunk, but better than drunk. “Aaron, whose prints—”
Somewhere, a dog barked a second before Bill could finish, a second before an explosion shook the mountain. As if the dog had known something was about to explode.
Bill flinched and looked up. He couldn’t see past the ridge of aspens, but Dragnet analyzed and measured the sound, positioning it globally.
“Aaron, what hap—”
“The school doesn’t matter right now. You have to find the moving van.”
Now over the gilded ridge, Bill could see smoke. He didn’t need Dragnet to know where it was coming from.
The citadel.
HMS.
Someone had blown it up.
“We don’t have time for this,” Aaron said, and a map unfurled before Bill’s eyes.
It was a treasure map, but transparent. The kind of map Bill and Steve used to draw of the Martian’s junkyard maze, except this one was digital, as if someone had found a piece of their childhood and had scanned it in.
There, sketched out and scribbled in the same pencil or pen or whatever else the boys would use, Marvin’s fortune was x-ed out in red. The X moved.
Away from HMS.
“Go to the X, Bill.”
The school; he could still see smoke from the school, a pillar holding up the flat ash of the sky.
Bill could also hear sirens.
Sheriff.
Fire department.
He took a few steps toward his car, but stopped, shaking his head and trying to think.
If he went to the school, maybe he could help out with whatever disaster had happened there. But then what would happen with the bomb?
Marvin was dead, but that didn’t mean his co-conspirators weren’t lurking around in the trash. Rat and whoever else.
No, Bill thought, drying his sweaty palms and trying not to think of Vedder’s splattered brains, the smell of gunpowder, and all those other dead kids. Sheriff’ll handle HMS. Meanwhile, Bill would be preventing another disaster.
He consulted his heads-up display, nodded, and marched toward the X.
* * *
NV Me chimed, and Sarah, in gym shorts, pulled her Tether out of her bra.
“You really ought to stop doing that,” said Lil Debby DeBeers. Her mom was also named “Debbie,” one of the Three. So her daughter was Lil Debby. “Some chicks have gotten breast tumors same shape as their phones.”
She and Sarah stood by the bleachers, talking over the pounding, clapping, echoing, and occasional screech of their classmates scurrying around the court.
The gym teacher, Mr. Bevilacqua, stood on the other side, recording the game with his phone, recording the girls.
“Look,” Sarah said, “a new app.”
Lil Debby leaned in.
An ad had popped up in NV Me, extolling some app called Love Potion 9.1.
“Is that some dating thing?” Debby asked.
“How am I supposed to know?”
According to the ad, a boy in Sarah’s grade had sent her a wink. She had the option to send him a twerk in return—if she downloaded the Love Potion app.
Sarah and Debby looked up as a basketball bounced toward them. It hit the bleachers, and Lil Debby dodged it with a scream.
Showing his winning dimples, Gary Pervier came over and grabbed the ball. “Sorry, girls.” He nodded at Sarah and said, “Princess.”
She blushed and Debby returned Gary’s smile.
They’re lopsided, Sarah thought, scrutinizing Lil Debby’s dimples.
Mr. Bevilacqua blew his whistle, and Gary rejoined the game. He threw in the ball, and the pounding of feet continued.
Lil Debby grinned. Sarah ignored her.
“You’re downloading it?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said, watching Love Potion install.
Debby glanced at Gary, who was doing an alley-oop with his friend Scott, their signature move. “You know, he’s free now that Anastasia’s gone,” Debby said.
“She’s not gone, she’s suspended.”
“Whatever. I’m just glad you did that to her. She so deserved it.”
“She keeps sending me nasty texts,” Sarah said.
“She hates you.”
“Yeah.”
“But everyone hates her back, so it’s okay.”
“Thanks.”
Everyone had been kissing Sarah’s ass ever since she started the fight between Anastasia and Erica Tracy. NV Me had awarded her for it:
Her latest achievement had bumped Sarah up to first place in the popularity poll, where she’d earned a new title. She was no longer Brother Kisser. Now everyone called her Princess. As she had always been proud to proclaim, that’s what “Sarah” meant anyway.
NV Me had rewarded Sarah’s flatterers as well. She half suspected that popularity was the only reason they liked her. It had been great at first, all the attention. Being showered in gifts and jewelry. Now it was kind of annoying.
Love Potion had finished downloading. Not only had Sarah received winks from just about every boy in school, some of the winks had been sent from teachers and Burnt Valley staff. People twice her age.
She opened the message from Gary Pervier:
Sarah blushed again. It was true; her gym clothes still smelled like the O’Donald’s uniform she used to keep in her locker. Gary grinned at her from over by the basketball hoop; he and his team had just scored.
Blushing brighter, Sarah stuck her nose in her Tether and started to reply. Her thumbs felt clumsy, her mind a swirl of chemicals and insanity. She jumped when a voice boomed through everyone’s phone.
The squeaks and footfalls echoed to a stop.
Sarah and Debby shared a horrified glance.
* * *
“How’d you know all this?” Bill asked, staring at Marv’s conspiracy web.
He had found the X on the map. Aaron had led him right to it. She’d known exactly where to find the Shack of Silence, Marv’s hidden shed of lead-acid batteries.
“I should be a detective,” Aaron said. Using Dragnet, she had added digital silk to the web, digital clues she somehow had pieced together, adding to Marvin’s theory.
Information palettes spiked off every article, printout, and photo Bill focused on. If he concentrated, he could bring up additional information.
In the center of the web, a spider had begun to take shape over the picture of Marvin’s son, Chuck. Its body was composed of three pictures: Bill was the cephalothorax, JJ was the biting part, and the abdomen was a glowing green alien head.
Bill shuddered at the extraterrestrial eyes. He could almost hear Vedder’s brains striking the world map, that wet slap, that plop as the matter fell to the floor.
He couldn’t run from it: “Aaron, what the hell happened at the school?”
“It doesn’t matter right now. Look at what I’m trying to show you.”
Threads spread out like legs off of Bill’s photo, landing on four more pictures: one of the Speakeasy, one of Marvin’s corpse, and one of Bill’s gun and thumbprints.
“Aaron, I swear to God it wasn’t m—”
“Look.”
Dragnet highlighted a real photograph of PCo’s data center. Next to it Marv had scribbled, “Where are the bodies?” And underneath he’d added “The Seal” and “The Crack,” a dark area he’d completely colored in.
Off the data center, Dragnet spun its own digital thread, connecting the brick fortress to a picture of the moving van.
Bill leaned closer to the board, as if that would help. “Holy shit.”
“Do you see the connection?” Aaron said. A new X appeared on the treasure map. “You have to get rid of it. Get rid of it before anyone else can get their hands on it.”
Bill flicked the map aside with his eyes and focused on the board again. He couldn’t believe it.
The fertilizer, the tour bus saboteur, the Martian and Rat—the board was all the evidence Bill needed. Perhaps there was even enough here to prove he’d been framed. And Dragnet was recording everything.
“Go!” Aaron shouted.
Bill nearly brained himself scrambling out of the low doorway of the shed.
The X now marked a spot in the wrecking yard where cubes of junk had been stacked against a deeper heap of scrap. A section of the cubes was highlighted.
“The magnet,” Aaron said, highlighting the crane too.
Bill took a few steps toward the machine.
“Wait, the keys. They aren’t in it.”
“Are they on Marvin? I’ll just—”
“Use your phone. It’s quicker.”
Bill’s Tether chimed. An app had downloaded automatically, some sort of rip off of Tetris. “How’s this supposed to help?” Bill said, but then he remembered something. The app that Candy McCurdy had used to crash her mom’s car.
“Bill—”
“Give me a second.”
Aaron sighed, but Bill didn’t care. He was on the verge of something, some thought that kept trying to form only for the fog to swallow it whole, along with all of last night.
“Bill.”
“I’m going,” he said, opening the Block Mover app. He nearly jumped when the crane powered on in front of him.
Directing the magnet with his thumbs, Bill stacked the cubes off to one side. Behind them, silently rusting, sat the moving van. Bill opened the roll-up door in back.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Motherfu—”
There was a ding from Dragnet. Bill’s eyes snapped to the HUD in his lenses, reading the information alert.
“Graham?” Bill asked.
“Yes, he’ll know what to do with it.”
“No way. This needs to be disposed of right now.”
“Take it to Graham, Bill. He’ll protect you.”
“From what?”
He didn’t like Aaron’s silence.
None of this made sense. If the sheriff had found Bill’s prints on the murder weapon, the deputies would’ve been here already, slapping cuffs on him. Unless Aaron did run the prints herself, and now she was protecting him.
One hole in that theory, Bill thought. Aaron didn’t have the access and know-how to dust and run prints herself. Her Dragnet, a more basic dispatcher’s model, didn’t have that capability.
Wait, Bill thought, and it was like waking up in a cold shower he shrank so much from the chill. “You’re not really Aaron, are you?”
She didn’t speak for several seconds. When she did, Bill could finally hear her voice for what it was.
Bill felt another cold blast. He was right. How he hadn’t heard the difference before, whatever was wrong with his brain after the background check, he had no clue.
Bill marched back to the cache of coins.
“Getting the keys,” he said. “Unless you have an app.”
Bill ignored her.
Twenty minutes later, he was dragging Marvin’s corpse up the ramp into the van.
Bill tucked the Martian in a crevice alongside the drums, then hopped into the driver’s seat and drove out of the junkyard while Dragnet flashed away across his eyes.
CHAPTER 28
Sarah’s phone buzzed and she dropped
her jeans to the locker room floor, digging the Tether out of her sports bra.
The minute she’d heard about the shooting, or bombing—or whatever the hell had happened at HMS—Sarah had called her dad. She’d also texted JJ. Neither of them had returned her messages. Instead, Sarah had received a note in her new Love Potion app.
“That Gary?” Lil Debby asked, applying someone else’s antiperspirant. She tried reading over Sarah’s shoulder, but Sarah pressed the screen flat against her breast.
“A little privacy?”
“Oh,” Lil Debby said. “Of course. Apologies, my liege.” She slammed her locker and shoved on her slip-on shoes.
Sarah glanced at the other girls, each in their own stage of peeling off gym clothes and digging their school outfits out of the lockers. The love note really wasn’t from Gary, but it was okay if Lil Debby went on thinking that.
Sarah set down her phone, and then, one leg at a time, she painted on her jeans. As she was dipping her toes into her second leather boot, her Tether vibrated.
Lil Debby scooped it up off the bench.
“Hey! Give me that!”
“Oh my God,” Debby said. “It’s Mr. Bevilacqua!”
“What?” said Virginia Tate. They called her “Verge” or “Virgee,” sometimes “Taint.” She had a million different names. Lil Debby passed the phone over Sarah’s head, and Verge caught it with natural ease.
Sarah swiped again, but Verge was team captain, tall and talented and all knees. She and her Burnt Valley Squaws passed Sarah’s phone around, and Sarah could do nothing but watch.
“Stop! You’ll drop it!”
“Oh, yes, I love this game!” Lil Debby said. “Spread the Rumor.” She whispered into the mouthpiece of Sarah’s Tether, and the blonde next in line cocked her head, listening as her earpiece delivered the message. Lil Debby passed the phone to the blonde, who used it to whisper something to Virginia Tate.