Redheads (34 page)

“My fingers look bent out of shape, you know?” he said to his new friend. He held up his hand. Moving his right hand made his left hand sting around the wrist. That didn’t make much sense either.

“Don’t worry about that,” his friend said. “You look okay to me.”

“Okay.”

The Jack Daniel’s was warm and sharp, the only truly familiar thing in this whole place. He couldn’t remember coming in here. What city was this?

He must have said it out loud because his new friend answered.

“Galveston, Aaron.”

He tried to remember how he got in here and couldn’t. He could remember Galveston. He remembered some flashes of a different bar. A girl in leather chaps and nothing else, dancing against a polished brass pole. His new friend was shouting and trying to wave her over with a handful of hundred dollar bills. Had they really been in a strip club? He tried to think of it and just had that one flash, the whole memory a scene about a second long: the girl dancing against the pole, his friend shouting, the glare of the spotlight. He couldn’t see her face. Her head was turned away from him and he could just see the way her flaming red hair spun through the air as she moved. That was all. He remembered walking down the street, afterwards. This man, who was his new friend, was propping him up at the elbow and telling him he shouldn’t have grabbed at the girl that way. That it was okay to look but not to touch. That he’d take him somewhere quieter to get a drink and then maybe they could try another place after he calmed down a little. But that memory swam in and out and he wasn’t sure if he was looking at it straight on, or if he was just seeing its reflection on the surface of his drink. That didn’t make sense, but he thought for a second he was on to something. It slipped away. The man was talking again and he looked up.

“I asked you if you remembered what Chris and Julissa were going to do when they left the hotel.”

“Julissa went home. Chris went to Boston, and then they both met in Hawaii.”

“Why?”

He remembered the man picking him up off the sidewalk when he’d tried to stop. He’d wanted to just lie down on the sidewalk and sleep on warm concrete, but the man helped him up, told him that the cops would come and put him in the drunk tank if he did that. And he didn’t want to end up in a drunk tank in this town, the man promised him.
You want to land in a drunk tank in Texas? Are you kidding me?
But that memory was as hollow as the strip club.

“Why?” the man asked again. “Why’d they meet in Hawaii?”

“We were looking for the guy.”

“What guy? The killer?”

“No, not the killer, the other guy. Look, you need another drink. I need another drink. Let’s get another drink.”

“We just got this one,” his friend said.

He looked around and saw the drink. That’s right. Jack Daniel’s, neat. Two fingers’ worth.

“Then let’s drink it.”

“Okay.”

Westfield picked up his drink with both hands and finished it in one long, burning swallow. As he did so, his sleeve fell down on his left wrist and he saw a handcuff there. No chain, just the cuff. There was a pair of tweezers jammed under the cuff, so tight against his skin that the sharp tips were drawing blood. When the whiskey wore off a day or two from now he was going to have a lot of questions about tonight. That struck him as funny and he laughed.

“What?” the man said.

“Nothing.”

“C’mon, don’t hold back on me. I’m your buddy. Who else pulled you off a sidewalk tonight? Or got you out of the way before bouncers beat the shit out of you?”

“I was just thinking this is gonna seem pretty fucked up tomorrow when I get up.”

“I’ll say.”

Westfield looked down at the bar again. His glass was full to the brim now. The bartender must have come up behind him and filled it, but he’d never seen any bartender fill a tumbler level full with whiskey.

“Who were they looking for?”

“The computer guy, you know, whoever’s changing the VICAP data on the dead girls.
 
I talked to Julissa before she got on the plane in Austin.”

“You think they can find him?”

“Julissa? Sure. She’s dangerous. Did I say that already?”

“When they track him down, what are they going to do?”

“Ask him questions.”

“In person?”

“What, do you think we’re going to call him up on the phone? Ask him to take a survey? We’ll go in person. All of us.”

“Let’s drink on it.”

They raised their glasses and drank. Whiskey sloshed over the sides of Westfield’s glass and ran down his fingers and wrists and burned the cuts and broken bones like boiling acid, but he held on to the glass and drank it dry. The room was spinning, the good way it did when he was all the way down in the deep well of Jack Daniel’s.

He looked at the man, his new friend, and saw him do a strange thing. He reached into the pocket of his black pants and took out a phone. It was big for a cell phone these days, its antenna thick and boxy. Westfield recognized it for what it was: a satellite phone. The man dialed a number, put the phone to his ear and waited. He locked his eyes on Westfield’s.

“It’s Kent,” he said. “The girl’s looking for our technician. Wilcox is following her. They’ll be in San Francisco, if she’s any good.” He listened for a while longer and then put the phone back into his pocket. Then he stood, turned around, and walked away from the bar. He passed the jukebox, and headed towards the door.

“Hey!” Westfield said.

The man didn’t turn around.

“Hey!”

He opened the heavy steel door by turning a wheel and pushing with his shoulder. Then he stepped out onto the street, straightening his clothes. The sound of traffic roared into the bar and then quieted again when the door slammed shut. Westfield watched the wheel spin as the man sealed bar’s door from the other side. That had to be the craziest bar door he’d ever seen. He sat on his barstool and tried again to piece this night together. He tried to remember what had led him into a strip club, but now he could only remember the idea he’d been in a strip club. It was all words. His friend explaining how the girl was dancing on the pole, explaining how he’d been right there next to him, shouting and waving the cash. Explaining how the bouncers came running when Westfield had tried to grab the dancer. That’s all he had now, just the memory of the words.
Like he was feeding me
, Westfield thought. He pushed up his sleeve and looked at the cuff on his left wrist. It was so tight it was cutting the circulation to his fingers.
I’m going to need to get that thing off pretty soon
, he thought.

The bar was empty now. Closed, in fact. The only light came from the red glow of a neon Budweiser sign the bartender neglected to switch off. It was reflected in the mirror and the shuttered windows and a hundred more times in the bottles lining the back wall. Westfield thought about going around the bar and pouring himself another drink, but instead, he pushed off his stool and tottered carefully to the pool table. Its felt was protected by a faux-leather cover that was probably blue but looked black in the red light. He climbed up onto the table, lay on his back, and passed out.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The device took shape faster than she’d expected.

When Chris came back from Berkeley, he stood on the bed with masking tape and a shower cap from the bathroom to seal off the smoke detector so she could use the soldering iron without setting off an alarm. Then he’d gotten out of her way, walking into Chinatown. They decided there was too much risk buying a gun in a store, because of the background checks. Getting something on the street, or stealing guns from an empty police car, were out of the question. Julissa didn’t need to point out if he got arrested, and disappeared to jail along with his access to safe sources of funds, she would only last about as long as the cash in her purse. So they decided Chris would see what he could buy just by asking around in shops.

When he left, she kept working, but it was harder when she was alone. At every sound in the hallway, she stopped and stared at the door, expecting it to be kicked in. There were the usual hotel noises, like the soft whir of the elevators running up the central atrium, and the rattle of a housekeeping cart. She was listening for padded footsteps that stopped outside her door, and she was thinking of men in cheap suits who had killed for their countries and who now killed in the name of the thing. She was thinking of the thing itself, wondering how it might come at her. Maybe it could slide through the air vents and spill onto the floor like an uncoiling snake; maybe it would come through the twentieth-floor window after scurrying up the wall like a spider. She thought of picking up the phone to call Chris on his satellite phone, but stopped herself. She had work to do.

And in spite of her fears, she got it done. She had a polished version of the software by the time Chris came back with a black duffel bag, which he unzipped and unpacked on the bedspread. He’d found two Tasers, four bottles of pepper spray, and half a dozen stainless steel throwing knives in leather sheaths. The knives were serrated and heavy, and reminded her of the kind of junk they sold in border towns along the Rio Grande. Chris shrugged, embarrassed. He said he’d found this cache in the back room of a basement-level Chinatown shop that sold pirated pornographic DVDs. It wasn’t much of a defense against the thing hunting them, and she could tell by his face he knew it. She took him and held him close. His hands slipped low onto her back and she kissed him.

“We’ll just have to be extra careful,” she said, close to his neck. “Anyway, it’s not like we’re in Texas. I didn’t expect you to come back with a machine gun.”

When he went out an hour later to bring back coffee and food, she had started assembling the device. On the beach in Boracay, she had come up with a simple and elegant solution to a hard problem. The problem was this: she had the unique device identification number for the hacker’s computer because it had been logged on the FBI server along with the router addresses he’d used to access the system. But a laptop only transmits its device ID while establishing a connection with a new system, so even if she could somehow listen to every wireless transmission in San Francisco, she wouldn’t be able to unwind the right stream of data from that tangled web unless she caught the hacker’s computer at the exact moment it connected with a wireless router and broadcast its ID. So her solution was to build a device that could tackle two jobs, one after the other. The first was to transmit a disruptive signal that would knock offline every wireless device on every channel within its radius. Then its antenna would switch to receiver mode, to scan all sixteen channels and listen as every computer tried to reestablish a connection with its router. If she could get close enough to the hacker’s computer to knock it offline, she would pick up its unique device ID as the wireless card automatically tried to reconnect to the router. The transmitter would disrupt every wireless signal within three hundred feet, and her receiver would pick up every computer trying to reconnect within the same radius. After she narrowed it to three hundred feet, which could still be a couple of thousand apartments in a city as dense as San Francisco, they could sift it further by isolating the signal, reducing the antenna’s reception quality, and rotating the receiver dish to see when the signal faded or strengthened.

She’d thought it through on the beach, watching a storm blow toward their island, a little girl racing along the beach gathering shells in hope of getting pesos. She’d perfected it and mapped the circuitry in her bungalow, listening to the geckos in the ceiling and trying to stop herself from going to Chris’s bed. Drawing it on the airplane and in the hotel room had been easy, and when Chris came back with the parts and she already had a working version of the software, the pieces fit together perfectly. Her laptop’s network window showed twenty wireless networks within reach of her room. With that many access points, there would surely be a few computers actually logged in. She’d be able to test her creation without even leaving the hotel.

A few hours later, Chris came in with two cups of coffee he’d bought in the shop across the street from the hotel. He handed one to her and sat on the foot of the bed. It was six in the evening, but there was still plenty of light. From one of the windows in the corner suite, Julissa could see the Transamerica Pyramid. Through the other window she could see one of the upright supports of the Golden Gate Bridge. She watched a ship disappear behind the cityscape as it steamed towards the bridge. With water on three sides, and wharves along the entire bay side, the thing would be comfortable almost anywhere in San Francisco.

“How’s it coming?” Chris asked.

“It’s done.”

She sipped her coffee and looked at the device. It had been a while since she’d built anything from scratch, but she’d done a good job. She’d stripped apart sixteen wireless routers and run them on parallel circuits through a handmade motherboard that would control the interference burst and then coordinate a scan for Internet devices trying to log back onto the net. A USB cable led from this to her laptop, so she could control everything from its keyboard. At the moment, her creation was spread all over the hotel desk in a mess of wires and green printed circuit boards.

“I can pack it all into one of the cardboard boxes you brought from the store. It’ll fit on the backseat. You can drive and I’ll control it from the passenger seat.”