Page 75

CHAPTER 75

BABY HAD A NEW plan of attack.

She had never been to Jamie’s apartment before, and seeing it now, Baby thought it was probably dirt cheap, being only a few inches of concrete away from one of Skid Row’s busiest nightspots. It had taken some work to get the surly bartender to put down his paperwork and give her access to the place. She crossed the empty nightclub, her boots crunching on shards of fluorescent-colored plastic shot glasses and making tacky sounds on years of spilled liquor. She went up a dark flight of musty carpeted stairs, found a door, and banged on it. Then she banged again.

When Jamie opened it, she saw that his Afro was crushed on one side and there was drool shining on the cheek on the same side.

“What in the World of Warcraft is this? It’s a home visit, that’s what. I’m here for an in-person consult,” Baby announced before Jamie could say anything. “I need help and it’s more than I care to put in a text message or say over the phone.” She nudged the door with her boot. “Let me in.”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait.” Jamie held his head. “There ain’t no in-person consults. That’s not a service I provide. To anyone. Ever.”

“Things change,” she said, and she slapped three thousand dollars cash against his chest as she barged in. It was from her personal savings. “Get some caffeine, get on the computer, and do your thing.”

Five minutes later, her personal hacker was seated in his elaborate gaming rig in his dark, cluttered den of an apartment while Baby perched nearby, sipping the energy drink he’d offered her and marveling at the perfect half-moon shape of his hair. Jamie tapped and dragged and clicked, doing things on a bunch of screens, grumbling about it being the middle of the night in his universe.

Baby looked around. The apartment was nice under the sea of garbage, but Jamie had decorated it like a teenage boy’s bedroom, not the space of a guy in his mid-twenties. There were heaps of clothes in the corners, an unmade bed, nudie pictures of manga women on the walls. Baby needed to use the bathroom but didn’t dare.

“Why are all hackers such clichés?” she asked, wiping unidentified stickiness from her palms onto her jeans. “Aren’t there any online weirdos with nice, neat houses and families and dogs running around the yard?”

“Your creative space is supposed to be a physical representation of your mind,” Jamie said. “Welcome to my nightmare. I hope you get out alive.”

“Ugh.”

“So you want me to hollow out these Enorme creeps.” He sighed, bringing up a blank screen. “Tell me what to look for and I’ll find it faster. You think they’re into corporate fraud? Money laundering? Have they got shady investors?”

“Probably all of the above,” Baby said. “But I don’t want you to target the whole company. I want you to look into one woman specifically. Her name is Su Lim Marshall.”

“Ah.” Jamie smiled. “It’s personal.”

“It’s strategic,” Baby said. “Enorme is a global corporation, okay? It’s everywhere. Even if I bring what Marshall is doing to the executives’ attention or dangle some of their own illegal practices in front of them, they’re big enough to claim they had no idea it was happening, and they’ll just move her to the other side of the country, where she’ll do what she’s doing now to someone else. If I go to the media, the best I can hope for is an exposé in the Times that fifty people will read. And that’s assuming the Times is even brave enough to face the lawsuits.”

“If you say so.” Jamie slurped his energy drink.

“The only way to stop Marshall is to attack Marshall,” Baby said. “Tell me who she is. Get me some juice. Everybody’s got a deep, dark secret, and finding deep, dark stuff seems to be your talent.”

Jamie tapped. White text that meant nothing to Baby skittered across the dark screen. Her phone rang, and she frowned when she saw it was Dave Summerly but answered anyway.

“If you’re calling to ask me what kind of flowers Rhonda likes,” Baby said, “she doesn’t like flowers. You want to make up with that woman, you gotta get her a case of beer and a pepperoni pizza.”

“It’s ... ” Summerly began. “It’s not that, exactly. Where are you?”

“Skid Row.”

“Can I get an exact address? I’m not that far away. I need to run something by you.”

She hung up and sent him a pin. Jamie had filled two screens with ones and zeros and weirdness.

“That better not be a cop you just invited here,” he said.

“Why not?”

Jamie’s elaborate gaming chair creaked and hummed as he swiveled to face her. “I’m a hacker, Baby. I make my living breaking into virtual lockboxes. I’m like those guys from that old movie Heat, only it’s firewalls I’m blasting through, not bank vaults.”

“If you say so.” Baby hid a tiny smile.

“Everything you see here?” He spread his arms wide, indicating the machines that covered the desks around him. “This is all hot. You can’t even get this kind of stuff in the States. Not legally.”

“Dave Summerly is an old-school police officer,” Baby said. “Until last year he used a flip phone. He can’t tell a router from a toaster.”

Jamie huffed but went back to his tapping.

Ten minutes later, Summerly arrived. It was a challenge for him to squeeze his bulky body into the tiny room crammed with devices, crates of wires, and humming, bleeping, whirring boxes making a city skyline in the dark.

“Here’s the thing,” he said when he had found a crate to sit on. “I might have failed to take Rhonda seriously on something that was maybe ... uh ... serious. I think she might be in trouble, and I’ve let her down.”