'— more like an hour and a half—'
'— we're hopping through COSMOS, or maybe it was MIZAR—'
'— no, it was COSMOS—'
'— and we're changing one pay phone after another, liberating it, setting it free—'
'— and Hong's really getting into it, like 'Power to the People' and everything—'
'— and I don't know how many phones we switched by the time we were done.' He looked up. 'You know something? Sometimes I can see why NYNEX wants to nail our hides to the wall. If you look at it in a certain way, we're sort of a major pain in the ass to them.'
'So?'
'So you've got to see their point of view, that's all.'
'No you don't,' David King said. 'The last thing you have to do is see their point of view. That's about as smart as playing PacMan and feeling sorry for the blue meanies.'
Jimmy Hong argued the point, and while they kicked it back and forth I cracked a fresh Coke. When I got back where the action was Jimmy said, 'All right, we're in the Brooklyn circuits. Give me that number again.'
I looked it up and read it off and he fed it to the computer. More letters and numbers, meaningless to me, appeared on the screen. His fingers danced on the keys, and my client's name and address showed up.
'That your friend?' Jimmy wanted to know. I said it was. 'He's not talking on the phone,' he said.
'You can tell that?'
'Sure. We could listen in if he was. You can just drop in and listen to anybody.'
'Except it's so boring.'
'Yeah, we used to do it sometimes. You think maybe you'll hear something hot, or people talking about a crime or spy stuff. But all you really get to hear is this remarkably tedious crap. 'Pick up a quart of milk on your way home, darling.' Really boring.'
'And so many people are so inarticulate. They just stutter and stammer along and you want to tell 'em to spit it out or forget about it.'
'Of course there's always phone sex.'
'Don't remind me.'
'That's King's favorite. Three dollars a minute billed to your home phone, but if you've got a pay phone that you taught not to be a pay phone, then it's free.'
'It feels creepy, though. What we did once, though, we just dropped in and listened on some of those lines.'
'And then cut in and made comments, which really freaked this one guy. He was paying to talk one-on-one to this woman with this incredible voice—'
'— who probably had a face like Godzilla, but nobody could tell—'
'— and here's King dropping in on him in the middle of a sentence and trashing his fantasy.'
'The girl was freaking, too.'
'Girl, she was probably a grandmother.'
'She's going like, 'Who said that? Where are you? How did you get on this line?' '
Throughout this exchange Jimmy Hong had been participating in another dialogue as well, this one with the computer. Now he held up a hand for silence and hit keys with the other. 'Okay,' he said. 'Gimme the date. It was in March, right?'
'The twenty-eighth.'
'Month three, date two-eight. And we want calls to 04-053-904.'
'No, his number is—'
'That's his line number, Matt. Remember the difference? Uh, what I figured. Data not available.'
'What does that mean?'
'Means we were smart to bring in a lot of food. Could somebody bring me some of those Doritos?
We're going to be here awhile, that's all. You interested in calls he made from his phone, while we're in this part of the system? Seems a shame to waste it.'
'Might as well.'
'See what we get. Look at that, it doesn't want to tell me a thing.
Okay, let's try this. Uh-huh. Okay, now—'
Then the system began spitting out a record of calls, reeling them off chronologically starting a few minutes after midnight. There were two calls before one in the morning, then nothing until 8:47, when the system logged a thirty-second call to a 212 number. There was one other call in the morning and several in the early afternoon, and none at all between 2:51 and 5:18, when he had been on the phone for a minute and a half with his brother. I recognized Peter Khoury's number.
Then nothing else that night.
'Anything you want to copy, Matt?'
