Server Down

by J. M. Hayes

The professional switched the scoop for a slender, serrated blade. “Or, that the average human has between twenty and thirty feet of intestines?” He glanced up at the bedroom ceiling. “Enough to loop over your ceiling fan. I wonder what would happen if we did that and then turned the fan on.”

  “Why?” It was closer to a sob than a question, but it was a wonderful place to begin exchanging information.

  “You recall our meeting earlier today.”

  Clearly, the man did. His eyes had gleamed with abject terror from the moment he woke to find himself helplessly attached to his own bed.

  “I was sent to deliver a message. To advise you to remain silent, in spite of your inclination to cut a deal and tell the authorities everything you know.”

  The man started to nod but the cleaver persuaded him otherwise.

  “Then,” the professional continued, “I didn’t need to know what the message meant or who sent it.” He showed the guy another blade, multi-tipped. The professional couldn’t imagine what one might do with those tips. His victim apparently could. “But things have changed. Now, I need to know all of that. If you tell me, clearly and concisely, I’ll leave you bound to this bed but otherwise unharmed. Do you believe me?”

  “Votes,” the man whispered.

  Obviously, his victim believed. Or hoped. Certainly, he believed the professional wanted to use those knives. And the professional was curious about the fan. But he had no intention of hurting the man unless he lied. The victim appeared to understand that.

  “Votes?”

  “I work for the elections department. Run the elections computer.”

  “Ah! So you fixed an election? For whom?”

  “Bond issue.” His victim was trying to get it out as fast as possible. “For the growth lobby. More profits for developers.”

  “I don’t care about why. I just want to know who. Who paid you?”

  “No money.” The man winced because the professional didn’t believe that and must have pushed a little harder on the cleaver.

  “Really,” the man said. “Just favors. Investment advice. You know.”

  The professional did. His victim might have convinced himself he hadn’t been bribed, that he’d just done a favor for people who were doing him favors in return. The professional didn’t care how someone squared things with their conscience. A payoff was a payoff.

  “Names?”

  “Tucson Management Alliance. They’re a bunch of….”

  “Who specifically? Who hired you? Who are you getting favors and advice from?”

  “It’s never that clear. Really!” The man was desperate to be believed. Desperate enough to give the professional a complex answer because it was true.

  “Even when kings gather, there’s only one emperor. I think I already know this one’s name.”

  “Bobby Earl Macklin,” the man said. “Yeah. He would have called the shots. But I never met him. Just talked to people that work for him.”

  “I suppose the precise question is who would hire me to pay you a visit this afternoon?”

  “Macklin, I guess. But I’d have to say the guys at that internet tech company were probably in on it.”

  That took the professional by surprise. “Fick’s?”

  “Yeah. Fick’s Internet Technologies. They’re the ones who hacked the election. I just followed their instructions. Copied an early ballot count. Took it home. Loaded it on my machine so they could do their fix.”

  “You know Fick’s? You know who they are? You know where I can find them?”

  The professional must have pushed on the cleaver again because his victim’s voice was harsh when he moaned, “No. Just on the phone. Just internet connections.”

  “Will Bobby Earl Macklin know how to find Fick’s?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure of it.”

  The professional stuffed the sock back in the man’s mouth and duct-taped it in place. “I believe you. And I hope you’re right. I don’t think anyone will find you before I pay a visit to Macklin. If he can’t tell me what I require, I’ll be back to experiment with my knives.”

  The man nodded. He wasn’t lying. He believed Bobby Earl Macklin would know about Fick’s, but he wasn’t sure of it. The professional could tell by the way the man kept glancing at the ceiling. But he’d told all he knew without inventing anything. It was enough. If Macklin couldn’t tell the professional how to get to Fick’s, he would know who could. This guy might be able to give the professional more names, but none who were equal to Macklin. There would be no point coming back here, except self indulgence.

  The professional packed up his knives. They might be useful on Macklin. On his way out the door, the professional flicked a switch. The overhead fan hummed as it began to circle and engage his victim’s imagination in a way that could make it impossible to ever sleep beneath one again.

  ***

  The cop really was going to shoot him. Mad Dog realized his case of the giggles had taken on a touch of hysteria. He tried to look the officer in the eyes and stop laughing long enough to make a rational plea for his life. He didn’t get the chance.

  “Yeah! Blow his ass away.” The male half of the domestic violence team shouted.

  “Fucker needs to be killed for attacking my sweet man,” the woman said.

  And, just like that, the officer changed his mind. There would be no shooting here—not in front of witnesses. It wasn’t the kind of miracle Mad Dog had in mind, but he’d take it.

  “On the ground,” the cop said. Other than trying to take the man’s gun away from him, Mad Dog didn’t think he had any options. He grabbed dirt and dry grass and the cop put a knee in his back, a gun in his ear, and a pair of steel handcuffs on Mad Dog’s wrists—tight against the back of his neck. Then some kind of plastic band secured his ankles. It was all done, slick as a calf roper at a rodeo. Mad Dog half expected the guy to jump to his feet, throw his arms in the air, and wait to hear his time announced. It didn’t happen, of course. Instead, the cop patted him down hard enough to make the giggles go away. There was nothing to find, except a billfold, a little change, and a miniature Swiss Army knife.

  “Where’s the gun, asshole?”

  “Their gun?”

  “The gun you were holding on this lady. Where’d you stash it?”

  “It really is their gun. He was threatening to shoot her and I took it away….”

  The cop didn’t care. “Where?” He punctuated his question with a short kick to a kidney and Mad Dog decided to tell him.

  That didn’t win Mad Dog any sympathy, either. The cop shone his flashlight into the veil of thorns and couldn’t see it. He didn’t seem much inclined to stick a hand in there and feel around. Instead, he ordered Mad Dog to get up. Cuffed and bound, that was easier said than done. Eventually, Mad Dog tottered to an upright position. His feet were too close together for much stability, but he stood there.

  The cop backed away into the street and pulled open the back door on his cruiser. “In here.”

  Mad Dog considered asking how, and then thought better of it. He was alive by the slimmest of threads. This wasn’t the moment to argue. So he hopped. The cop grabbed him by an arm and made sure he went through the door head first, half on the floor, half on the back seat. Before Mad Dog could even begin to right himself, the officer used another of those plastic cuffs to pin Mad Dog’s ankles to some kind of eye bolt in the floor. The cop slammed the door behind Mad Dog, circled his cruiser, opened the other back door, and did the same for Mad Dog’s wrists. That left Mad Dog kneeling awkwardly on the floor as the second door slammed, just after the officer advised him not to bleed on the seats.

  That was followed by a confusing time in which Mad Dog discovered he could closely examine a door without a handle or window control or, if he stretched a little, could peer out the side glass at a dark lawn and a big house across the street. A few night lights glowed softly inside and Mad Dog thought about how much he’d rather be there than here. Or, he could listen to the baffli
ng chatter of the blue and white’s radio—codes and addresses that meant nothing to Mad Dog. Farther away and muffled, he made out the voices of the young lovers whose affair had been on the verge of coming to a messy end. He picked up just enough to realize they were reinventing the morning’s events, winging it and doing a clumsy job of making their stories match. Not that the cop cared. He was just getting the minimum he needed so he could get back to Mad Dog and….

  Mad Dog didn’t know the answer to that one, but he doubted this couple would wonder, even if they never heard what happened to the guy who’d “assaulted” them on their front porch this morning. Unless they had a reason.

  “So sue me,” Mad Dog shouted. “No way you’ll get more’n a million out of me.”

  That brought the cop back, and in a worse mood than when he’d left.

  “Shut up,” he said. And then Mad Dog felt like he’d somehow been beaten on every inch of his body. He had just a moment to wonder if he’d been tasered. Then he was tasered again. Repeatedly.

  ***

  “Don’t worry,” Ms. Jardine told Heather. “We’re going to find Mad Dog and he’ll be okay.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do. From the things your mother told me about Mad Dog and Hailey, I can’t imagine him being in serious trouble if she’s here with us. Besides, Mad Dog has a way with people. And he’s cute. I had quite a crush on him at one time.”

  “Really?” Heather was trying to pay attention and be polite, but she had a bad feeling about Mad Dog right now.

  “Do you remember the Bull Creek Skinny Dipper?” Ms. Jardine said. “That was me.”

  That got Heather’s attention. The Bull Creek Skinny Dipper had been quite the local scandal for a little while one summer. When Heather was between fourth and fifth grade, she thought.

  “You?”

  Ms. Jardine laughed as she worked her basketball shoes over the pedals and put the VW through its gears. “I was kind of wild then, or wanted to be. Still had my figure and liked to flaunt it. I was trying to catch your uncle’s attention, but it was always somebody else who’d drive by and get an eye full.”

  “Nobody dreamed it was you,” Heather said. Most people thought it was one of the high school girls on a dare. But no one was ever sure. “Nobody could positively identify you.”

  “Yeah. Well, those who saw me weren’t really looking at my face.”

  “Did you and Uncle Mad Dog…?”

  The woman really laughed this time. “Oh, no Heather. He was so wrapped in learning Cheyenne Shamanism then. I think I could have stood on his door step in the altogether and he still wouldn’t have noticed me. In fact, I tried that one time. Went to Bertha’s Café and picked up some of their fresh sweet rolls. Then I drove out to Mad Dog’s wearing nothing but a rain coat and carrying a basket of goodies. I was going to knock on his door and ask him if he’d like some buns, then drop the coat and give him a choice, mine or Bertha’s. Only I lost my nerve. Never tried again because he got involved with that widow.”

  This was fascinating stuff, but it wasn’t solving Heather’s problems. She knew she should get word to TPD about the psycho. Or to Parker, the way her dad wanted. Then Parker could share what Heather knew with local law enforcement.

  “I need to call someone,” Heather explained, flipping out her cell phone and punching the number her father had given her. Nothing happened. She checked to see how many bars she had, and whether her battery might be getting low. The battery was at about half staff, which meant she wouldn’t be able to talk long. The bars came and went, as if they were weaving through mountain passes instead of rolling straight down a major thoroughfare in the middle of Tucson. Well, crawling, really, since the bus seemed to have problems topping thirty.

  “Can’t trust electronic things here,” Ms. Jardine said. “Even the best technology can’t handle the psychic forces around Tucson.”

  Heather must have given her an odd look.

  “There’s magic in these desert mountains. Lots of it spills down into the city. That’s why there are so many artists here. And why I chose Tucson to open my crystal business.”

  Heather wasn’t beyond considering supernatural explanations, not with an uncle like Mad Dog, but the phone had been working well enough earlier. She’d exaggerated the problem of hearing her dad. Now, she thought it really might be the battery.

  “Where do you want to go?” Ms. Jardine asked.

  They were headed west, back toward downtown Tucson. It was the direction the psycho had taken. That had been good enough for Heather until now. But it really was something she needed to decide.

  “Actually, I don’t know,” Heather admitted.

  “Well, I don’t think that’s a problem. You may not know where he is. But Hailey surely does.”

  As if to confirm that, Hailey stuck her head out the window beside Heather’s head and let loose a series of yips.

  “See?” Ms. Jardine worked her shiny shoes and down shifted. Gears clashing, they edged around the next corner. Heather recognized the street name—Kino. If you went north from here, Kino would turn into Campbell. The university and Ms. Jardine’s neighborhood bordered the street. And the University Medical Center was just beyond. That was the last place she’d seen Mad Dog and a reasonable location from which to start looking. And, maybe Ms. Jardine was right. Maybe Hailey knew where Mad Dog was and would lead them there.

  Heather decided to do as her dad had asked and check in with Parker. She might get a lead there. She tried the cell phone again. It showed lots of bars as they stopped for the light at Broadway. But her call failed to go through again, and the battery indicator moved down another notch, just from the effort of trying.

  “Told you,” Jardine said as the light changed.

  “Uh, your headlights just went out.”

  “No big deal,” Jardine said. She banged on the dashboard and they came back on. And then she was stomping on the brake to avoid an innocuous gray car that had pulled out of a side street and into their path.

  The headlights on the bus lit just in time to spotlight the driver for the briefest moment. The face he turned their way, as he skillfully avoided a collision, was as innocuous as his car. Heather wouldn’t have been able to describe him, would have hardly noticed him, except she’d fought him once tonight, then joined him for a drive around Tucson while they pumped each other for information.

  “Damn!” Heather said. “It’s the psycho.”

  “Psycho, I’ll say he is,” Jardine agreed, belatedly pounding on her horn, which evidently worked as irregularly as the headlights.

  Hailey added a low growl.

  “Follow that car,” Heather said.

  Jardine laughed. “Sure, as long as he stays in first gear.” The woman jammed her foot onto the accelerator and the bus coughed, lurched, died. It took a while to get it restarted, then it refused to exceed thirty-two on the speedometer. The psycho was long gone by the time they got to the south edge of the U of A. By Speedway, his tail lights had become long-term memories.

  ***

  Sheriff English pulled his black and white to a stop in front of the courthouse. The building was still dark. The crowd had gone home. There was, of course, no sign of Supervisor Macklin’s car. The man must have come only out of curiosity, the sheriff realized. Without power to the building, he couldn’t work and there was nothing to keep him there. English pulled out his cell phone, found the supervisor’s number in his address book, and punched the call button furiously.

  “Macklin,” a voice answered.

  “Mr. Supervisor. This is Sheriff English. I owe you an apology.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I’d like to come deliver it to you, sir. Are you home?”

  “You really have gone bananas, haven’t you sheriff? This is not an appropriate time.”

  “Listen,” the sheriff said. “I need to talk to you and your boys right away. Where are you?”

  “Have you been drinking, man? Never mind. I d
on’t care. I’ll be calling an emergency meeting of the board at ten this morning to consider your behavior and your role in tonight’s catastrophe. Be there. In the meantime, leave me and my sons alone.”

  “Sir, I don’t have that option,” the sheriff began, but he was talking to dead air.

  What to do? The supervisor lived two miles south of town. It could take ten minutes to cross Buffalo Springs and get there, then more time to get back if the Macklins weren’t home. After that, still more time would be required to find another of the kids who might be involved. All of them lived in or near town, but he could waste a lot of precious minutes before he found the right one. Or they might all be involved. But his money was on the Macklins. Especially after Heather told him about the connection with that businessman in Tucson. Maybe Mrs. Kraus could get the man to….His cell rang and he popped it open and found Mrs. Kraus was one step ahead of him.

  “I got him,” she said. “He’s right here.”

  “Got who?

  “Fig Zit,” she said. “He’s standing here, right in front of me.”

  “The Ball kid came back?”

  “No,” she was breathing fast. “The monster in the computer. I’ve got him on my screen right now. He’s telling me what he’s gonna do to me. Got me, my character that is, paralyzed and unable to fight back. Keeping me just barely alive while he tells me how he’s gonna come over here to Doc’s office and rip my heart out.”

  “He knows it’s you, Mrs. Kraus?”

  “Oh, yeah. Says even my Glock won’t be no help against his magic because it doesn’t just live in the computer. Says he’ll be coming through the door any minute….”

  “Does he know I’m not there?”

  “Yes. He’s taking special pleasure in telling me how, when he’s done with me, he’s going after you.”

  “Mrs. Kraus, those boys don’t live where they could have seen me leave Doc’s office. Or seen me between there and the courthouse. So how…?”

  “Hold on. I’m getting one of them whispers down in the corner. It’s that tech at Worldcraft. Hot damn! He’s redefining my character. Replacing my armor with stuff that’s well nigh impervious. Giving me some weapons they haven’t even released into the game yet. And, he says the only user in our area who’s logged on right now is the Miller boy.”