Mike’s hands go into a frenzy as the man’s fists pound again at the door. Firewalls get closed, feeds get killed, and he disconnects from the online file server. This pig can take every piece of his computer and it’ll be months before they realize half the stuff they don’t have. He locks down the computer and moves to the door, getting to the handle just as a third set of knocks begins.
The door swings casually beneath his hand, his features relaxed, a friendly grin hiding the acceleration of his heart. His mouth curves more naturally into amusement as the man’s eyes drop, surprised, to his face. There is a moment of hesitation in the stranger’s face and then he smiles. Smiles. An unexpected response, one that puts a seed of fear in his stomach that feels unnatural. Despite his life, his situation, fear is an unfamiliar emotion. Mike reaches for the door, filled with the sudden and unexplainable urge to slam it in the man’s face and flip the dead bolt.
“Can I help you?” His eyes pick up on the stranger’s details. His shoes, black and shiny, with little tassels on the front. Dark gray slacks. A black sweater that looks too expensive for a Fed. A briefcase in hand, which fits every stereotype he would have envisioned. Keeping his face bland, Mike’s examination continues. A wiry build and hard face, one that a smile does nothing to soften. Smaller and shorter than the security cam indicated, the man’s strong posture making him appear bigger. Midforties. With eyes that are pure bad news. A cop he wouldn’t trust to watch a dog.
“May I come in?”
“You got a warrant?” It is the wrong thing to say, a comment that screams I’ve got something to hide. But the man only smiles wider, and Mike feels the prickle of unease return.
“I’m not a cop. Why don’t you let me in? I think you’d rather we have this conversation in private.”
Not a cop. Right. Just a random stranger who feels the need to stop by at ten o’clock at night. Everyone knows you shouldn’t let a stranger in. Knows you should refuse entry, close the door with a polite but firm rebuke. But most people haven’t broken enough laws to earn them a lifetime behind bars. Mike has waited for this knock since he was thirteen, and hacked into the Ask Jeeves search database, causing every search query to return images of giant penises. He moves aside and lets the man enter, shoving at the door with his hand until it clicks fully closed.
CHAPTER 58
“WHAT’CHA DOING OUT here, white girl?”
The man is young, the sideways cap proclaiming his love for the Lakers while housing a forest of kinked hair. LoveLakers2Death looks toward the street for a quick moment before his gaze returns to me, his free hand stopping midhitch of his pants as he catches sight of the gun.
“Now? Hunting,” I reply. I press the 9mm into his stomach, staring into his face as my mouth curls into a smile. This idiot. So helpful, bringing us both to a private location. Had I known it would be this easy, I’da left my apartment earlier. I will not kill anyone. I hear my conscience and grip the gun tighter, fighting a losing battle against ignoring it.
The man releases my left arm, and I shake it out, the imprint of his fingers no doubt having left a bruise. Raising both hands, he glances back to the street, this time for a different reason.
I watch him with interest, wondering at the man I have the ability to kill. His mouth chews at something, his eyes dart with manic regularity from me to the street, yet he is silent. I expected protesting. Begs. I dream of begs in the dark of night. Begs and screams. Yet here, it appears this man will die silently. It’s quite disappointing, if I’m to be entirely honest.
“On your knees,” I order. “Open your mouth.”
I watched a show four years ago, back when I lived in the decadent world of cable television, a Forensic Files episode, where they showed a collection of crime scene photos. One was from a suicide where the man shot himself through the mouth. The blood spatter was spectacular, painting the wall behind him with splatter and gore. If LoveLakers2Death is going to go silently, it may as well be pretty. I wonder at the hat, if it will fly off or if brain matter will hit and be contained in its yellow and purple cavity.
The man doesn’t move. His eyes flick to the gun, then to my face.
God, I wish I had my knife. A stupid oversight on my part, one that made no sense. With a gun, there is only threat, then action. And action is loud and attention getting, especially from an unsilenced 9mm. I study the man and try to think, my brain sluggish when competing with the hum of need in my head. I push the gun deeper into the man’s ribs. “On your knees or I’ll shoot you in the side and then in the mouth. Look in my eyes and decide if I’m fucking with you.”
Maybe it is the tone in my voice. Or the smile on my face. Whatever it is, the man obediently drops to his knees before me. And I’ve never felt stronger. I am fine without my knife. My kill can still be beautiful. I don’t know this man, he may not deserve to die, but I need this, my four-month hiatus from murder a lifetime long. I lift the gun to his mouth and push it against his stubborn lips.
“Open.”
At the moment he complies, his eyes pleading as his lips shake, my cell rings.
CHAPTER 59
WHEN I ANSWER the phone I hear people in the background and I feel a pang of jealousy that cuts through my bloodlust. Maybe that’s all I need to solve my condition. The jealous distraction of another life. A life where I am out of this skin, surrounded by laughing people. Living my life.
“Just a minute.” His voice is low and seductive, as if I am important and worth answering the phone for, worth stepping away for. As if he and I share a secret, and he is pausing his life to focus on me.
The voices muffle and fade, and I look at the 9mm against white teeth, then the man’s eyes, which dart from me to the phone then the gun, the eye contact turning cross-eyed at the end. His tongue moves, and the gun shifts slightly in my hand. I smile at him and wonder how far the sound of the gunshot will travel. Try to remember how much this gun kicks and if I should use both hands.
“Deanna.” I love when Derek says my name. I feel high on it, or maybe it is just the fact that I am seconds away from killing. Whatever the reason, right now I am un-fucking-stoppable.
“Derek.” I hope he likes when I say his name.
“Is everything okay?”
His question breaks me in a way that shouldn’t happen. Maybe it was fingers of concern that lace his words. Someone cares. Someone, in some form, loves me. The real me. A girl who is very broken inside. A different someone, in another form, loves this man before me. A mother. A prostitute. A child.
“I’m in a bad place.” I speak quickly, watching the man’s eyes before me catch. LoveLakers2Death is listening. Interested. I push the gun harder into his mouth and glare. Try to focus on him, but Derek is speaking and this situation is, with his one short question, falling apart.
“Tell me.”
“Simon… he didn’t lock the door.” My voice is not my voice. It hitches when it speaks. It is weak, it trembles. It is the side of me that is scared of the side of me that is about to break open my world and destroy it. It is a voice that breathes hard and not calm.
“Where are you?”
I don’t answer. If I speak, my voice may wobble. If my voice wobbles, the man before me may move. I suddenly don’t know why I am here or what I am doing. I wanted ice cream and lotto. Wanted to prove that I could handle the night. That I didn’t need a druggie to lock me in at night like a caged animal. Wanted to exist as someone other than myself. How did those wants become this situation? My fingers moments away from taking a stranger’s life? I hang up the phone and shove it, with trembling fingers, into my pocket.
“Lie faceup on the fucking ground,” I bark, my voice behaving. “If you do anything other than what I say, I will kill you.” I step backward once, just out of reach of the stranger who likes the Lakers, whose life I almost took.
Muffled by fabric, my cell rings. I watch the man sit back, his hands up as he lies back on the dirty ground, his eyes on the gun, which I now handle wi
th both hands.
“Bye, motherfucker.” I step back, the gun on him for seven full steps, until the ground beneath my bare feet changes and I am back on the street, my gun slipping back into the pocket of my sweatshirt. Then, with my cell buzzing against my stomach, I run home like the scared white girl that I am.
When I get home, I can’t open the door. Simon has motherfucking locked it.
CHAPTER 60
MIKE USHERS THE guest into the living room, his worn furnishings consisting of a couch, recliner, and coffee table. The furniture had been left by the previous tenant, someone with cats, and white hairs still litter the surface, any rough movement creating a snow effect in which the hairs float up, irritate any available allergies, and then rehide, waiting patiently for their next opportunity to invade.
The stranger sits back on the couch. Looks around, his eyes picking up on everything, something akin to confusion in his gaze. What was he expecting? Mike mimics the action, trying to see the room through foreign eyes, not picking up on anything suspicious, no computer equipment in this room, at least none visible at this moment in time.
He waits for him to speak, wondering if he will search the apartment, and if he will find the laptop that sits underneath him, beneath the couch, its battery no doubt dead, its code still fully functioning and incriminating.
The man clears his mouth and asks his first question, one that both calms Mike and introduces an entirely new possibility for his visit.
“You the boyfriend?”
He fights the urge to look around, to see if the uninvited guest is speaking to another individual. “What?”
“Where’s the bitch?”
The bitch. A worrisome title for some poor girl in some place other than here. Mike blinks slowly, hiding the moment of elation at the realization that this man is in the wrong place. “Who?”
“Jess Reilly.” The short man drags out the name, injecting lust and want and disdain, all into the three syllables.
Fuck. He is in the right place. Mike swallows, shrugs his shoulders to the best of his limited ability. “I don’t know who you are talking about.” This is unexpected. He can feel his body tensing, his protective instincts coming forward in one surge. This man, with his shifty eyes and expensive clothes, the darkness that seeps from his skin—he has no good reason to want her, no good reason to be here.
The man scoffs, rolling his thin neck, loose fat still bulging on the sides when his head tilts. “My web guy said this is her address. So where is she?”
“How’d he get this address?” In the horrible moment, the hacker in him is curious about which of the intentionally left rabbit holes was picked up and followed.
The man growls. Physically growls, like a chained dog, a response that doesn’t match his meticulous appearance. “I don’t fucking know. He looked into her website.”
“I work on websites,” Mike responds slowly. “Build them, manage them. Perhaps you’re looking for someone who owns or puts content on one of those websites. But I have thousands of clients, I don’t personally know a Jessica.” Thousands was a gross exaggeration. Hundreds, maybe. If you added up every client he’d ever had. But there was only one Jess. Had been from the first time he had dealt with her.
The man’s face hardens. He holds up a finger, pulls out an old cell phone. Dials a number and waits.
“Tell that tattooed computer prick to call me.”
Then he hangs up, Mike’s eyes picking up on the delicate flaring of the man’s nostrils. The burn of his face. Embarrassment? At being mistaken? The man sets down the phone on the side table. Stares into Mike’s eyes while his left hand fumbles in his pocket, pulling out something. Mike’s palms sweat as the man flips his wrist, and reveals a blade.
“Whoa.” Mike raises his hands. “I just build websites.”
“That’s it? Nothing else? Nothing the FBI would be interested in?”
Mike narrows his eyes and tries to figure out the man’s point. And where he was going with the veiled threat. “I build websites. And write code. I’m a developer.”
“Again, anything the FBI would care about?”
“What’s your point?”
“That answers my question.”
“Good, then you can leave.” Brave words that don’t match the quick thud of his heart as he watches the blade flip through the man’s hands. Open. Closed. Open. Closed. “I build websites,” he repeats, his record set on repeat. “Sorry that I can’t help you more.”
“And I just need to know about hers. Give me her name and address, and I’ll walk out of here and leave you to your next game of Halo.”
He chuckles in response, cursing Deanna’s beautiful face as dread crawls up his uncooperative spine, his mind moving rapidly as he studies the stranger before him and tries to place his connection to her. A client? Has to be. The list of possibilities a hundred names long.
“Sexy jess dot com. That’s the site.”
Mike works his mouth, cultivating a blank look as his mind searches desperately for a plan. “Doesn’t ring a bell. I coulda built it years ago. Chances are, any information I do have is old. I can tell you this. I haven’t heard of the URL or a Jess Reilly. And I don’t have a girlfriend. I don’t even leave this house.”
Out of the entire statement, only two of the four sentences are true. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, and he hasn’t, with a few rare exceptions, left this house in the last eight years.
CHAPTER 61
AT TEN YEARS of age, any thought of being a physical badass was abandoned. That was the age when Mike Rollins put down a baseball and picked up a keyboard. When his world became smaller and centered on things that required little physical effort. Books on code were read, online chat forums and computer clubs joined. Visions of designing video games or social networking sites became the new fantasy. Hopes focused on becoming the next Internet billionaire, surrounded by women and friends and admiration.
Quick money called, and greedy adolescence listened. Mike pushed aside developmental projects and focused instead on breaking the genetic code that is the Internet. Once you understand it, it’s easy to curtail it. Once you can curtail it, you can start to control it. Build fake trails that will lead your opponents turning in circles until they fall on their ass. Create insurmountable roadblocks that are truly only paper thin. Hide someone so deep that you are the only person who can pull them out.
The truth:
Deanna Madden, aka JessReilly19, is twenty-two years old. She lives on 163 Oakmont Place, Apartment 6E. She has, unfortunately for Mike, a boyfriend, one Jeremy Pacer. She has a net worth of $2.3 million, half of which is hidden away in the Cayman Islands in a place known only to her and Mike. She is an orphan, her parents and younger siblings killed four years ago in a manner one can only describe as brutal.
The appearance:
Jessica Reilly is nineteen years old, a sophomore at the University of Iowa. She lives in an on-campus dorm on a student budget. She is single, widely popular, and, as evidenced by her Facebook wall, hasn’t met a frat party or house party she’ll turn down.
This man will never track her down. It is impossible. The cover was tested recently, just a year ago. After all the groundwork was in place, Mike posted a challenge to Hnet. Offered a thousand of Deanna’s bucks to anyone who could find one hole in her story. A hole that led to something other than a dead end or him. Forty-nine hackers accepted the challenge. Forty-nine who, within three weeks, admitted defeat. This man, with his rudimentary knowledge of the Internet and his Motorola Krzr, doesn’t stand a chance. And his guy in IT either sucks or is on the same side Mike is, which involves keeping this psycho as far from her as possible.
CHAPTER 62
I BANG ON Simon’s door like a madwoman. What if he is not home? What if he locked my door and left? I can’t stay in this hall. I have nowhere else to go.
He opens the door within minutes and I am treated to the sight of Strung Out Simon. It is ugly. In the background is a girl, her body drap
ed across a black leather couch that looks to be a Big Lots special. His jaw works, back and forth, his bloodshot gaze shooting from me to my door, me-to-door, me-to-door, no doubt wondering how in the hell I escaped.
“You were late,” I gasp, my vision blurring, my hands coming up and gripping the door frame. I think I’m crying. How do four sentences with Derek turn me into such a girl?
“I… I’m sorry.” He looks at my door again. And me.
I want to, despite the breaking of my composure, pull out my gun right now. This asshole is a worthy subject. But even I, in my manic state, realize the stupidity of that. Morality and eyewitness aside, Simon is too close, I need him. And what I really don’t need is him, and the crack whore behind him, to know that I am psychotic. “Unlock the fucking door,” I grit.
The idiot looks down, at his own doorknob, which rests, unlocked, in his hand. His cheeks flex as he tries to understand. Behind him, the girl starts to laugh, a pig squeal of a sound. I close my eyes and try not to think of death.
I shouldn’t have left.
I shouldn’t have left.
I should have cammed like a good girl, then went to bed. Simon should have locked me in. I want to kill him so badly, it physically pains me.
“Unlock MY apartment,” I growl, pointing with a hand to my door. “NOW.”
“Oh.” He digs in his pocket, moving through the doorway, too close to me. I don’t like the smell of him, don’t like how his stare brushes up my outfit like he can see through it. I step back and wrap my hands around the two items in my pocket.