'He was the headline story in the Post again today,' I said, 'and they didn't have any news to back it up, because he hasn't done anything since last week. But they want to keep him on the front page to sell papers, so the story was about how the city's nervous, waiting for something to happen.'
'That's all they wrote?'
'They tried to put it in historical context. Other faceless killers who've caught the public imagination, like Son of Sam.'
'Be a difference,' he said. 'Wasn't nobody cheerin' for Son of Sam.' He flicked a finger at an illustration in the Gehlen catalog. 'I like this here voice-changin' telephone, but you see them all over now. They even got them at Radio Shack. This might be a better one, the price they charge for it. Ones at Radio Shack is cheaper.'
'I'm not surprised.'
'Will could use this here, if he was to start makin' phone calls
'stead of sendin' letters.'
'Next time I see him, I'll pass along the suggestion.'
'I almost bought me one the other day.'
'What for? Haven't you got enough of a repertoire of voices?'
'All I got is accents,' he said. 'What this does is change the pitch.'
'I know what it does.'
'So you can sound like a girl, or a little kid. Or if you was a girl to begin with you can sound like a man so's perverts won't be talkin' dirty to you. Be fun to fool around with somethin' like that, only be like a kid with a toy, wouldn't it? One, two weeks and you used up all the newness out of it and be tossin' it in the closet and askin' your mama to buy you somethin' else.'
'I guess we don't need it.'
He closed the catalog and set it aside. 'Don't need none of this,' he said. 'Far as I can see. You want to know what we need, Reed, I already told you that.'
'More than once.'
'A computer,' he said. 'But you don't want to get one.'
'One of these days.'
'Yeah, right. You just afraid you won't know how to use it.'
'It's the same kind of fear,' I said, 'that keeps men from jumping out of planes without parachutes.'
'First thing,' he said, 'you could learn. You ain't that old.'
'Thanks.'
'Second thing, I could work it for you.'
'A passing ability with video games,' I said, 'is not the same thing as being computer literate.'
'They ain't necessarily that far apart. You 'member the Kongs?
Video games is where they started at, and where they at now?'
'Harvard,' I admitted. The Kongs, their real names David King and Jimmy Hong, were a pair of hackers devoted to probing the innards of the phone company's computer system. They were high school students when TJ introduced them to me, and now they were up in Cambridge , doing God knows what.
'You recall the help they gave us?'
'Vividly.'
'How many times have you said you wished they's still in the city?'
'Once or twice.'
'More'n once or twice, Bryce. Whole lot of times.'
'So?'
'We had us a computer,' he said, 'I could get so I could do the same shit they did. Plus I could do all the legit stuff, diggin' out trash in fifteen minutes that you spend a whole day findin' in the library.'
'How would you know how to do it?'
'They got courses you can take. Not to teach you to do what the Kongs can do, but all the rest of it.
They sit you down at a machine and teach you.'
'Well, one of these days,' I said, 'maybe I'll take a course.'
'No, I'll take a course,' he said, 'an' after I learn I can teach you, if you want to learn. Or I can do the computer part, whichever you say.'
'I get to decide,' I said, 'because I'm the boss.'
'Right.'
I started to say something more, but the veteran fighter picked that moment to connect with an overhand right lead that caught the kid on the button and took his legs away from him. The kid was still unsteady on his pins after an eight count, but there was only half a minute left in the round. The older fighter chased him all around the ring and tagged him a time or two, but the kid managed to stay on his feet and weather the round.
