Burning Blue

episodes of The Shield.

I was standing in front of the car, penning her in. “Maybe this isn’t your car.”

She turned over the ignition.

“Okay, so it is your car,” I said. Which meant that Cherry DiBenneditto was not the Recluse. This also meant maybe the driver of the black Civic was. Were Detective Barrone and Schmidt right? Was the acid thrower a woman after all? Any male on my suspect list-Kerns, Dave Bendix-was if not absolutely safe, then safer. Or maybe the woman in the car really was working for Shane Puglisi or another gossip rag, stalking Nicole for a picture. Or maybe she wasn’t connected to Nicole at all. She hadn’t followed Nicole out of the lot. She’d gone the opposite direction. Then again, if I didn’t check her out, and she was the Recluse, I would have to hold myself responsible for anything that might happen to Nicole.

A flicker zigzagged in my peripheral vision. I sat on the hood of Cherry’s Civic to catch my breath. She came out brandishing the Club, but when she saw I was kind of out of it, she lowered her weapon. “Jay?”

“Cherry, I’m sorry. I had you mixed up with the spider.”

“Happens all the time. The spider. Sure. What are you on?”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“Are you trying to be a jerk?”

“What’d I say?”

“Hello, you know where I work?” Her eyes softened. “You can buy me a slice.”

“Pizza’s great,” I said, even though my stomach was twisting to accommodate the ever-expanding, four- pound-ball of cheese there after my pizza slam with Nicole.

“Sbarro?” she said.

“Hardy har.”

She had no idea what I was talking about. “Dude, what is your problem?”

“Where do you want me to start?”

I ended up forgetting my wallet, and she had to pay. Not that I touched my slice. I told her why I hadn’t texted her back, that I was crushing on Nicole.

“I figured,” she said. “What’s she like?”

I told her.

She’d heard about the attack. She rolled her eyes. “You know, of course, that this only makes me like you more. Crushing on a disfigured girl? That’s like an OWN movie waiting to happen. You really think somebody’s spying on you guys?”

“I’m somewhere between possibly and probably. Her engine coughed before it rolled over. Means it was cold. Means she was sitting there for a while, watching.”

“Or talking on the phone. Or taking a nap because she’d worked a double and started to fall asleep at the wheel on her way home. Or you’re totally paranoid. I actually do need coffee now. You?”

“Definitely.”

She headed for the counter. I pulled my Nokia to see if Angela had run down the license plate, but my battery was dead. Cherry had left her phone on the table. I messed with it to make it untraceable. She’d notice next month when her data bill was zero.

“Jay?” Cherry was looking over my shoulder.

“What the hell are you doing, sneaking up on me like that?” I said.

“Getting my wallet, which, as you can see, I left next to my brand-new phone that cost me thirty hours worth of slinging lattes. What the hell are you doing? My poor Droid. What’d you do to her?”

My head was pounding. “You’ll get much better reception now.”

“You’re the dude who asked me for help texting Dad, right? Wait, you’re a hacker.”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is bad!”

I needed sleep. I was really losing it. I had willingly let Nicole know I was a hacker, and Angela had found me out on her own, but getting caught by Cherry was just sloppy. Too late now. “I have to use your phone.”

“I don’t have a ton of minutes.”

“You won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

“How did you get into the DMV? You know that says Restricted Access, right?”

“I’m a member.”

“Of what?”

I ran the plates I’d seen on the black Civic. Sure enough, they tracked back to a red RAV4 that reported its plates stolen that afternoon. “She boosted somebody’s tags,” I said. “She tacks them onto her car when she wants to be anonymous. She can’t be driving around in her real plates in case a street camera picks her up doing the loitering thing. If the cops pull her over for speeding or whatever with the bad plates, she plays dumb. ‘What? Those aren’t my license plates.’”

“I think I might have seen something like this on-”

“The Shield?”

“Except on The Shield, they need court orders to do what you’re doing.”

“I know, so lame. Want to know how many older model black Civics there are in the tri-state area?”

“I think I may just need to kill myself if I don’t have that information. This is crazy, that you can get into government institutions like this. Imagine if you could hack into the Department of Defense?”

“Imagine.” I ran the search command into the DMV database.

“I had you pegged for stoner sexy, but you’re actually geeky sexy. Um, why is my phone flashing red?”

“Eight thousand, two hundred and twenty-two 1990s model Civics, black, are puttering around New Jersey. That’s too big a list for me to go through on my own. You’d need industrial computing power to work up owner profiles, and then you’d have to cross-reference the potentials with information only the investigating officers have. Cherry, I was right. Somebody’s stalking her.”

“Or you.”

“This was so much easier when I thought you were stalking me.”

“I’ll stalk you, if you want.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to catch this freak.”

“You’re not,” she said. “You have to call the cops.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Because?”

“They’d want to know how we got our information about the bad plates.”

“How you got the information. I just watched you break my phone.” She frowned. “I could do it. Let the cops know, I mean.”

“No, I don’t want to get you involved.”

“Not me. My father. He knows a lot of detectives. He could drop a tip about the Civic, and if he asked them to keep it anonymous, they would.”

“Okay, you couldn’t tell me your dad’s a cop before I hacked the DMV in front of you?”

“He’s an undertaker, but the funeral home has a contract with the state, special discounts for civil servants, their families. They do a ton of business with the police. What do you want me to tell him to do?”

“Ask him to give the cops the plate number and tell them that the driver of this vehicle, a black Civic, was acting suspiciously in the environs of Valedale Boulevard.”

“Acting suspiciously how?”

“Driving around parking lots, checking out parked cars or something. The anonymous witness said the driver was probably a woman. Have your dad say she was particularly interested in cars with baby seats. Actually, that’s pretty good. The kidnapping thing always gets the cops hopping. They’ll check all the local security cameras, maybe get a picture of the woman’s face, run it against the mug-shot database with face recognition software. You never