“I don’t know, baby. I told you I’m not going to check those.”
But I should. What the hell?
Ping!
She moved again, then suddenly squirmed out from under him.
“Well,” she said, “if you’re not, I sure as hell am.”
She reached down the side of the bed and grabbed the waistband of the khakis, tugging hard when she felt the weight of Luna on them.
“Sorry, girl,” Amanda said as she dug in the pocket and pulled out the phone.
Luna slinked across the room and went into her crate in the master bath. It sounded as if she threw herself down onto the hard plastic liner. Then Luna gave a heavy sigh.
Amanda looked at the phone’s screen.
She said, “Three from Tony-”
“What the hell?” he said, sitting up and adjusting the pillow to lean back on.
“-one from Kerry, and the last one’s from Denny.”
“Denny?” he said.
She held the phone out to him.
“That can’t be good,” Matt said. “He doesn’t like texting and only does it out of necessity. Wonder why he didn’t just call.”
He glanced at them, then saw that the time stamps of the various messages were not all from the last few minutes, as the multiple ping-pings would have suggested. Instead, the first one, from Harris, went back almost an hour. That suggested the messages had been stacked up somewhere, unable to get through. He then looked at his signal-strength icon, and it was flickering from the weakest signal to the icon that read: NO SIGNAL.
Payne shook his head, then read the first message from Tony Harris:
– ANTHONY HARRIS-
YO, MATTY. TURN ON KEYCOM CABLE CHANNEL 555 amp; BACK IT UP TO THE TOP OF THE HOUR. TROUBLE BREWING…
When Hops Haus Tower had been built, the entire property had been wired, so to speak, with super-high- speed KeyCom plastic fiber-optic digital transmission cables. The lines allowed for the advanced technology of KeyCom’s various communications packages-telephone, Internet, television-to be exclusively provided by KeyCom to the residents and the retailers.
There was a simple reason for this select relationship: KeyProperties was heavily invested financially in the complex. And while some complained that such a noncompetitive environment effectively violated at least a dozen antitrust laws in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania alone, the man who controlled both companies argued differently.
Frances Franklin Fuller the Fifth said that everyone did indeed have other options: “They are free to choose to live anywhere else and purchase the inferior communications packages offered there.”
Matt looked at Amanda and said, “Tony says I need to see something on channel 555 real quick.”
She nodded. “But be aware: If you run out the door on me two nights in a row…”
Matt smiled, then picked up the remote control, turned on the sixty-inch flat-screen television mounted on the wall, and hit the 5 button on the keypad three times.
Because the high-speed system was all digital, the control box for the television had a function that allowed any recorded program to be replayed or fast-forwarded for up to two hours. The fast-forward mode did not, of course, work for anything that was airing live. (“Now, that’d be revolutionary,” Payne had said when an installation tech was showing him all the system’s bells and whistles, “because if it could do that, it’d be tantamount to looking into the future.”) But a live newscast, once recorded on Key-Com’s massive servers, could be replayed.
“Hey,” Matt said, “this is the cable channel for the live streaming news from Mickey O’Hara’s CrimeFreePhilly website.”
The news live stream looked exactly like any conventional television network newscast. It had a slick “News Center,” a studio set that consisted of a brightly lit anchor desk, behind which sat a pair of young, perky, and polished talking heads. On the wall behind them, CRIMEFREEPHILLY. COM NEWSCAST was spelled out in gleaming chrome letters that were splashed with various colors from filters on unseen klieg carbon arc lamps that hung from the studio ceiling. Below the chrome letters, the wall held a bank of four giant flat-screen studio monitors, each showing some working news story.
Matt hit the button on the remote control that restarted the newscast at its beginning.
“Good evening,” said the good-looking male talking head with dark hair and a bright smile. “Welcome to the nine-o’clock edition of tonight’s newscast at CrimeFreePhilly-dot-com. I’m Dusty Meyers.”
“And I’m Jessi Sabatini,” said the attractive redhead with a dazzling display of teeth who was sitting beside him. “Tonight’s top news: This weekend’s Halloween Homicides continue to mount in Philadelphia.”
Matt saw that the image behind her on the upper-right flat-screen studio monitor was of Francis Fuller standing at a lectern.
Matt hit the FAST FORWARD button, causing the audio to go temporarily silent and the two talking heads to begin bobbing as if on coil springs. They made very fast gestures.
Then the camera zoomed in on Jessi Sabatini. As she jabbered, a box popped up beside her bobbing head. In the box appeared a progression of photographs, mostly mug shots, of all the pop-and-drops with their names shown beneath them. Then there was a picture of Francis Fuller with his name underneath, and Payne hit the NORMAL PLAY button on the remote.
Jessi Sabatini was saying: “Corporate titan Frances Fuller, whose Lex Talionis has been very busy this weekend, gave a press conference earlier at which he presented ten-thousand-dollar rewards to some heroic citizens of Philadelphia. Our own Michael J. O’Hara was there and has the story.”
The image of Fuller filled the entire television screen.
“And so the circus continues,” Matt said to Amanda. “Hell, it was inevitable Five-Eff, my favorite Puritan, would make an appearance.”
There was a text box to the right of Fuller’s head reading:
FRANCIS FULLER, C.E.O. LEX TALIONIS, DISTRIBUTES $10,000 REWARDS.
Along the bottom of the screen was a line of text that moved from right to left reading: BREAKING NEWS… MAYOR CARLUCCI ANNOUNCES POLICE DEPARTMENT EMERGENCY TASK FORCE AS HALLOWEEN HOMICIDES CONTINUE TO RISE… BODY COUNT IN OLD CITY NOW UP TO FIVE…
The voice of O’Hara, who was off-screen, came from the television speakers: “This is Michael J. O’Hara reporting from Lex Talionis in Old City, where Frank Fuller has just made some Philly residents much richer for having helped make the city much safer.”
The camera pulled back and showed more of the room.
Francis Franklin Fuller the Fifth was in what appeared to be a conference room of his Richard Saunders Holdings office building. The short, portly forty-four-year-old, wearing his customary Benjamin Franklin outfit, stood behind a solid black lectern, both hands gripping its top. The front of the black lectern had a bronze plaque bearing the Lex Talionis logotype with the stylized-eyeball “o.”
The camera then pulled farther back and showed a line of people standing to the side. Between them they held three ceremonial bank checks fashioned from heavy white plastic sheeting three feet high and six feet long. Each had in the upper left-hand corner a large red representation of the Lex Talionis logotype. And each had been filled out in handwritten lettering with a fat-tipped black permanent marker.
Payne immediately recognized one of the women who held the reward checks. She was the first on the left, closest to the lectern.
“And look who he’s with,” Matt said. “That’s the mother of one of the dead pop-and-drops.”
It was confirmed by the name written in her check’s payee field: Shauna Mays.
Matt added: “We think that my mystery shooter popped her son, and then she and a gypsy cabbie dropped the body at Five-Eff’s.”
Matt thought: Women really can be the more ruthless of our species.
Despite her face and hand being deeply bruised, and still looking malnourished and dirty in the torn clothing she’d been wearing when Payne interviewed her earlier in the day, Shauna Mays stood there beaming.
She held-barely, as it was bigger than she was-a ceremonial check made out in the amount of ten thousand
