Take One With You (18 page)

NSA Data Center – Outside Bluffdale, Utah

“Freddie!”

Fred Dean’s head popped up out of his cubicle like a gopher. Some of his co-workers had taken to calling him Flower behind his back, which was one of the stars of Meerkat Manor, a popular animal reality show that had been on the air a few years back.

Being that Flower was apparently a female meerkat that had been pushed around and eventually died during the course of the program, Freddie was none too pleased when he found out about it.

He mostly watched porn and illegally downloaded spy movies and surfed the Internet in his spare time, but had he seen the animal, which had black markings around it’s eyes, it could have resembled someone who stayed up all night, as he usually did. He might have understood the humor, and even appreciated it, except for the barely concealed disdain beneath it. Freddie was a funny guy once you got to know him.

However, he wasn’t feeling particularly appreciated at that moment.

Freddie rushed into this new supervisor’s office, his third in the last six months, and closed the door behind him before being reminded to do so.

“What is this goddamn memo about?”

Freddie blinked. He knew he was about to get chewed out again, and he braced himself for the inevitable.

“I think I can find patient zero.”

Like Freddie’s previous eye-rolling supervisor and most of his co-workers, this one had had an immediate dislike of him, and had never attempted to hide it.

“I got that,” the man sighed. “Look, Freddie, you know the heat we’ve been taking for things like this, don’t you?”

“Yes sir, but – ”

“You understand English, right? I mean, it is your first language, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I told you to end it.”

“I was just requesting an extension. Sixty days.”

“No.”

“Thirty?”

His supervisor looked like he wanted to reach across the desk and throttle him, which wasn’t that far from the truth.

“Who approved this, initially?”

“It was – ”

“Never mind!” the supervisor said quickly. “I don’t want to know. Just end it. I’m pulling your authorization. Effective immediately.”

“Yes, sir,” Freddie said glumly.

“Now get out.”

Freddie left his office and went back to his cubicle. He hated this job. Nobody had any respect for his work.

He’d show them. He’d find the fucker on his own, and when the shit went down, he’d make sure to grab the credit.

***

Thane picked up his rental car at LAX and drove straight to the convalescent hospital in Compton. It was just about the most depressing place he’d ever seen, which was saying a lot for a police detective.

He’d been shocked as hell to get the call from the kid who claimed to work for the NSA, something that he hadn’t been able to verify, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. Thane had had his fill of the Feds with the task force, and certainly didn’t want to be associated with some domestic spying bullshit. But the guy, who sounded like he was sixteen and insisted on being referred to as Mister Flowers, had only given him good information thus far, so he’d gotten the Captain to spring for his ticket.

The whole TOWY thing had gotten out of hand pretty quickly, and even though he sensed the Captain was still out to get him, if he came up with something big Thane was sure he’d forget all about the old beef as long as he could claim a hefty share of the credit.

He went to the nurses’ station, where a bored product of the inner city’s dearth of quality grocery stores led him to a room with peeling paint and four quads, all in various stages of what he imagined was a slow and painful descent into death or madness, or probably both.

He stopped her at the door, and motioned for the nurse to step back into the hall out of earshot of the guy he’d come to see.

“Just how aware is this guy?” Thane asked. “Does he know what the hell is going on around him?”

Nurse Ratched looked at him for a moment and popped her gum.

“He can hear. Sometimes he’ll squeeze a hunk a sheet when I say something. Blink at me. Course he might be takin’ a shit in his pants, too. I just call the orderly for that. ‘Bout it.”

“Will he understand what I say?”

“Couldn’t tell you. But he don’t react much.” She laughed and told Thane a story about an earthquake that knocked all three of his roommates out of bed. All this guy did was ‘squeeze a hunk a sheet’ and stare at an aerobics show on the TV. “Probably starin’ at that ass, know what I’m sayin’?”

Thane nodded ruefully and walked back in the room. He went over to the third bed and checked the name on the chart.

Phillip
Maxwell Cody.
Known to friends and foes alike as Big Max.

The living skeleton in the bed didn’t look much like he was ever very big, let alone possessed a criminal record as long as three arms, but Thane supposed a lot had changed for the son of a bitch since the accident.

From what he knew about the guy, Thane wasn’t at all sympathetic.

***

Anita didn’t stand up when the Captain walked in, nor would he have expected her to. There was no more informality between them; now it was all business.

“We got a warrant for his apartment, computer, all of it. I want you to take Manish over there.”

“Who’s Manish?” Anita asked. She didn’t like the idea of snooping around Thane’s apartment while the Captain had him out of town on some wild goose chase.

“New kid. I can’t pronounce his last name. IT guy. He’ll put a little…hell, I don’t know what it is. Something on his computer. So you can watch what he does. Keystroke something-or-other.”

“Is this really necessary?”

The Captain leaned across his desk. “You haven’t exactly gotten me anything I can use,” he said sarcastically. “So yeah, it’s necessary.” He pulled a file from his inbox and leaned back to shuffle through it, ignoring her. Anita considered waiting him out, but instead she got up to leave.

At the door, she had an impulse, and turned to face him.

“Got a copy of the warrant?” she asked.

He looked up and she saw it in his eyes. No need to hang around for his bullshit. There wasn’t any warrant. Whatever he held against Thane, Captain Myers wasn’t about to let it go. He was determined to bring him down, no matter what.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

As she opened the door to leave, Anita heard him mumble something about getting her a copy as soon as he could, but she’d already gotten everything she needed.

***

On the flight back, Thane kept thinking about Big Max Cody. For a quadriplegic who’d barely communicated with the outside world since he’d emerged from his coma, he’d displayed a helluva reaction to that picture of Melissa Williamson. And his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree when he showed him the fax of her bloody tattoo. Not like
he’d
killed her, but more like she’d tried to kill
him
.

He wouldn’t swear to it, but the son of a bitch had seemed scared.

Thane wondered if Max knew what the tattoo meant, given the fact he’d done a few months in the Coast Guard back in the day before getting kicked out for dealing smack.
Probably wasn’t sharp enough to learn Morse Code.
Thane suspected what would have scared him more was the arrangement of those dots and dashes, anyway, and the crude picture they formed.

Twin graves.

Take one with you.

Maybe there was something to Mister Flowers’ theory, after all. He’d have to call him again when he landed and brace him a little under the guise of an update on Big Max. Try and get some more background on who really came up with that tat. He didn’t figure it was Melissa. Pretty ingenious, actually.

Flowers liked to talk, and Thane was an expert at getting information from people who don’t know they’re giving it up, but this guy was smart. He insisted on relaying most information by untraceable cell phone, committing nothing too incriminating to emails, and insisting Thane do the same. It was annoying as hell, but effective. But Thane sensed he was just a little too smart for his own good.

If you really work for the NSA, nothing’s untraceable, dumbass.

Thane laughed at the thought of some pimple-faced, overly chatty junior analyst being surprised at his workstation with an arrest warrant and a set of handcuffs, which was how he imagined Flowers ending up if he actually did work for the intelligence service.

Thane ordered another Budweiser from the flight attendant and opened his notebook, going over the list of names he’d gotten from Flowers, some of which were pretty colorful. Jesus Two Bears and El Culo de Arica, in particular, would make for some pretty interesting reading if everything turned out to be true and someone wanted to write a book about it, which he suspected was Flowers’ true motivation.

The names he was most interested in at that moment were the two locals, Charlie Sanderson and Sarah Crane.

***

Charlie couldn’t bear to go back home, so after he left Sarah’s place, he’d checked into a cheap motel near the airport. He figured he’d stay there until his money ran out and then think of what to do.

Right now, thinking was not on the agenda.

He watched TV constantly, leaving it on the cable news stations until it was time for the local news, at which point he’d switch over, waiting for stories about more TOWY deaths, which were now coming more frequently.

He watched in horror as footage of a near riot at a local cemetery was played over and over, until he finally shut off the TV for the first time in days.

A man who worked for a local florist had apparently pulled up in front of his ex-wife’s apartment building with a van full of fresh cut wedding arrangements, left the motor running, and gone inside to slash the throat of his children’s mother before cutting his own wrists and collapsing on top of her.

They remained in that position until their son and daughter came home from school and found their parents stacked up like bloody cordwood.

The couple had been arguing over visitation schedules still lingering from a recent divorce, and even though none of that had anything to do with the website, apparently some neighborhood kids had spray painted the TOWY symbol on the sidewalk in front of the building after the fact.

At first it seemed like just a random event that vandals had corrupted, and Charlie was absurdly relieved by that fact. A few hours later, however, it was discovered that the man had indeed frequented the TOWY website, and even gone into a local tattoo parlor looking to get the TOWY symbol inscribed onto his arm. When the shop owner asked him about it, the man became upset and left. Tattoo artists in the area had been asked to voluntarily report any requests for the symbol, as mandatory reporting had already been nixed after the local chapter of the ACLU threatened a lawsuit.

The results of the police entreaties were mixed.

Some were cooperating, others were advertising. There were even rather tasteless “two-for-one” coupons floating around on underground sites and alternative weeklies.

It really became a circus when the florist’s family showed up to bury him on the same day at the same cemetery as his late ex-wife, which was just a little too much for her brothers. The resulting melee made national news, and was just more publicity for the whole TOWY phenomenon.

The next day there were rumors that two founders of TOWY, supposedly a guy and a girl, were going to show up at a local mall, and several idiotic teenagers showed up and got into a gun battle with local police.

All of this was being watched closely but separately by Charlie and Sarah. Neither one wanted to be apart from the other, but neither one quite knew how to heal the rift that now existed between them.

Most young lovers were tested by petty jealousies and childish misunderstandings; silly texts or whispered gossip. Charlie and Sarah had to figure out how to bridge issues of literal life and death, and it was something neither of them was able to figure out.

Ironically, in the end it was Brad who brought them back together.

***

“I found the girl.”

Brad nearly dropped the phone. “Thank fuck.”

“She and that stepson of yours kinda dropped off the face of the earth while ago, but she’s got an apartment not far from you. Not sure about him, yet.”

Brad frowned. “You mean they’re not together?”

“Not that I can tell.”

“I need them both.”

“I’ll let you know, then.”

Brad hung up the phone after getting the rest of the information that had been obtained. This guy was nowhere near as professional as the man in the windbreaker, but he would have to do. He could still use her to get to him. Maybe this way would even work out better.

One at a time might make things easier.

He picked up the phone and called Sarah.

***