Jericho Iteration

“This is a helluva time for you to go shacking up with your old lady. Now you tell me what the …”

I sighed as I peered out the living room window. There were no cars parked on the street in front of the house, but that didn’t mean anything. “Look, Earl-”

“I ain’t looking at anything, Rosen, except for a pink slip with your name written on it unless you tell me right now what the-”

“Earl, shut the fuck up.”

That did the trick, at least for a moment. I took a deep breath. “I know what’s going on,” I continued, “but this phone isn’t plugged in, y’know what I mean?”

There was silence from the other end of the line. Pearl had a bad temper, and he sometimes ate more brains than he seemed to carry between his ears, but he knew how to take a hint. He knew that anyone with a two-bit scanner could eavesdrop on a conversation carried out on a cordless phone. Even if my neighbors didn’t indulge in such skulduggery, there was no guarantee that the police or ERA would not.

“I know what’s going on,” I repeated. “We can’t talk about it right now, but a big load of shit hit the fan last night. John’s getting killed is only part of it.”

I heard a slow exhalation. “Are you serious?”

“Like a heart attack,” I said as another thought occurred to me. “Have you heard from Sandy Tiernan yet?”

“Yeah. She’s pretty shook. She called me at around six, said that she got the call from some guy at homicide-”

“Mike Farrentino?”

“Yeah, that’s him, and when I phoned his office, he said that he’d seen you last night at Clancy’s.” His tone of voice had changed from belligerence to confusion. “What’s the scoop here, Ger?”

“I’ll tell you when I get downtown,” I said. “I’ll be there soon as I can swing a ride. But for right now …”

I hesitated, trying to think of a way I could phrase the notion that had just occurred to me. “Umm … you think you could call an exterminator this morning?”

“Huh? An exterminator?”

“Yeah.” I rubbed at the knot left in the back of my neck from sleeping on the narrow couch. I could no longer hear running water from the upstairs bathroom. “Those roaches up in the loft are getting pretty hairy, pal. Might have crawled downstairs into the office. I think you should check it out real soon.”

Another long silence, then: “Yeah, I think so too. Maybe it’s time to call Orkin, see if they can send someone down here this morning.”

Bailey had gotten the hint. Cockroaches in the loft, bugs in the office: he knew what I was talking about. If anyone was indeed eavesdropping on our conversation, it would be painfully obvious what we were discussing, but it was better that he was forewarned of the threat before he made any more phone calls or put anything sensitive into the office computers.

The only misunderstanding between us was that he thought I was hinting at the feds or the police as being the prime suspects. I wasn’t so sure if ERA or the SLPD were the only ones we had to worry about. Somebody out there was capable of hacking into even encrypted PTs like Joker; they had put the voodoo on me with that faux Jamie phone call last night. Until I had a clue as to who they were, I wasn’t taking any chances.

“Good deal,” I said. “I’ll get downtown as soon as I can.”

I clicked off, pushed away the blanket, and swung my legs off the couch. No time for sweet rolls and coffee; all I wanted to do now was get dressed and get out of here. I was reaching for where I had dumped my trousers on the floor when I heard the familiar creak of the stairs.

I looked up to see Marianne sitting on the landing, wearing her robe again, her hair pulled up in a damp towel. No telling how long she had been there, listening to my side of the conversation.

“Hi,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

Lame question. She didn’t bother to answer. Mari simply stared at me, her chin cupped in her hands. “You’re going to want a ride downtown, right?”

I hesitated, then slowly nodded my head. It was a long walk from here to the nearest MetroLink station, and despite last night’s promise to call a cab first thing in the morning, she knew I didn’t have enough cash on me to cover the fare all the way down to Soulard.

She briefly closed her eyes. “And you’re going to want money, too, right?”

“Hey, I didn’t say-”

“I can spare you fifty dollars,” she replied, “and if you’ll let me get dressed, I can get you down to the paper in about a half-hour. Okay?”

I nodded again. We gazed at each other for a few moments, each of us remembering all the shit we had put the other through during our years as a couple. Moving in together for the first time. Burned breakfasts, forgotten dinners. Underwear on the floor, unpaid bills. Two or three lost jobs, bouts of morning sickness announcing the arrival of a child neither of us had planned on raising but decided to have anyway. Engagement and marriage. Death and insecurity. Separation on its way to becoming formalized as a divorce.

An old TV commercial had a punch line that had enraged feminists: my wife … I think I’ll keep her. Mari should have written a comeback: my husband … I think I’ll ditch him.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’ll be great.”

Marianne stood up, absently running her hand down the front of her robe so that I couldn’t catch a glimpse of her thighs. “Sure,” she said. “If it’ll get you out of here, I’d be happy to do it.”

“Mari-”

“Whatever you’re mixed up in,” she said, “I hope it works out … but I don’t want to get involved. You’ve done enough to me already.”

Then she trod upstairs to the bedroom and slammed the door.

Marianne dropped me off in front of the newspaper office; I was almost as glad to be rid of her as she was of me.

The trip downtown had been taken without any words spoken between us; only the morning news on NPR had broken the cold silence in her car. U.S. Army troops were still being airlifted to the Oregon border as Cascadia continued its Mexican standoff with the White House, and the crew of the Endeavour had succeeded in rendezvousing with Sentinel 1 and linking the final module to the antimissile satellite. And some lady in Atlanta was attracting massive crowds to her house after she claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in a pot roast.

Whoopee. I would rather have been in Birmingham, Seattle, outer space … anywhere, in fact, but St. Louis.

Everyone stared as I entered the newsroom, but no one said anything to me as I walked straight to Bailey’s office. Not surprisingly, he had already taken the cover off his IBM and was peering into its electronic guts with a penlight; Pearl was nothing if not paranoid.

“Close the door and sit down,” he said without glancing up from his work. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

I shut the door and found a chair that wasn’t buried beneath galley proofs and contact sheets. He patiently continued to poke through the breadboards and chips until he was satisfied, then he slid the cover shut and turned around in his swivel chair to gaze at me.

“Look, Earl,” I began, “I’m really sorry about-”

“Y’know what this is?” He picked up a large, flat case that lay atop the usual paperwork heaped on his desk. It had a pair of headphones jacked into one end, and one side was covered with knobs and digital meters; a slender spiral cord led to a long, needle-tipped wand. “Of course you know what it is,” he went on, “because you must have known I had one when I called you.”

“It’s an electronic surveillance detector,” I said. “You showed it to me once. Remember?”

“That’s right,” he replied, nodding his head. “Mr. Orkin Man himself. It can scan everything we use in this office and locate virtually any RF or VLF signal imaginable. Infinity bugs, hook-switch bypasses, modem or fax machine taps … you name it, this sucker can sniff it out. Put me back three grand, but hey, I’ve always considered it