“I said hold it a moment, sir,” said the cop. He had followed him out onto the driveway.
Spurlock whirled around and put on a slightly annoyed look. “Yes?”
“I’d like to meet this mother of yours.”
“Why? Look, if you don’t believe me, that’s fine. I’ll have to find some other way to get there. Here, here’s your wife’s money back.”
The cop looked down at the five in mild surprise. For just a second, Spurlock thought that he had him. Then his pig-instinct took back over and he refused the money. “Let’s go meet mom.”
Spurlock looked at him as if he was a nut. “Look man, I’m really in a hurry here. If you don’t want to help me out, then please take back your money and let me find some other way to solve my problem.”
The cop set his jaw. “I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of it. I don’t recognize you and I know this neighborhood.”
Spurlock laughed in disbelief. “Look man, I’m new here, that’s all. I’m staying with my mom and looking for work, that’s all.”
“Let’s see the address on your ID, then.”
“I told you, man: I’m new here. ”
“I’m off-duty, so I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest here until I can get back up.”
Spurlock argued and reasoned until his throat hurt, but the cop bought none of it. He got the cell phone from his wife’s and called in a car to come pick them up. While they waited Spurlock thought about bashing the guy, but he was pretty tough-looking and he decided that he’d rather take his chances with the system. For exactly this kind of emergency, he had no ID on him, and he had already buried the gun.
With luck, he’d just get released on the street within hours as a transient with a court date for panhandling. Davis was a liberal town. He’d have to trust to his luck.
… 21 Hours and Counting…
“We needed a break, this was a good idea,” sighed Johansen.
Vasquez glanced up at him without moving her head, then returned her attention to the report in her hands. Despite her bad mood, she allowed herself a private smile. Johansen was always complimenting his own ideas. It had been his idea to go to Black Angus for a prime rib dinner and she had consented after token complaints. Underneath it all, of course, she had to admit to herself that he was right. They both needed a break. In police work, you could drive yourself for days and weeks to exhaustion, and it was often counterproductive. Always, she had to remind herself of her instructors’ words in Quantico: “Better to sleep for eight hours and solve the case in one, than to stay up all night and be unable to think at all.”
Around them, the activity in the restaurant was subdued. It was after nine now, and most of the dinner crowd had already left. They sat together in a darkened private booth that would have been romantic if she hadn’t been in such a sour mood. They had lost track of three suspects now-Vance, Ingles and Nog-and still the internet was burning. Johansen ordered two margaritas without asking her if she wanted one. When the drinks arrived, she stared at hers for a moment, then took a gulp. The frozen slush pained her sinuses at first. Then it tasted good.
“This report is grim,” she told him. He watched her expectantly. His margarita was half-gone, but she knew from experience that alcohol had little effect on his bulky body.
She spoke in a hushed tone. “The internet has sustained significant damage. Approximately forty percent of the known servers have suffered some form of attack and it is estimated that most of the rest have a latent form of the virus hiding on disk, waiting to strike.”
Johansen nodded and leaned back a bit in his chair. “It’s like we’re fighting a thousand viruses at once, rather than just the latest one of the month,” he said. His hand slid down to his waist, and-although she couldn’t be sure-probably popped open the top button of his pants. Immediately after this move, he faked a cough and touched his hand to his mouth. There were a lot of large dishes stacked on his side of the table, and he had cleaned them all. Vasquez smiled down at her report.
“Let’s go over tomorrow’s checklist,” she said.
“Again?”
“Again,” she replied firmly.
Nodding, he produced a notepad. Even from across the table, she could see his neat, dark strokes of pen and pencil. The man really knew how to take good notes, and that had always impressed her. Vaguely, she wondered if that made her an obsessive-compulsive. She supposed that it did, but argued with herself that such a trait was often an advantage for a cop.
“Nog has been pinpointed at Brenda’s residence shortly before the police arrived. Witnesses noted his distinctive appearance and his Lincoln Towncar-” Johansen looked up from his notes with a grin, “- a fat guy in a huge white whale of a car must’ve impressed the kids.”
She nodded and smiled vaguely, hinting with the incline of her head that he should keep going. He caught the look and must have realized that she was doing some real thinking, because he snapped back to the notebook and dropped the levity from his voice.
“The presence of the police-band emissions detector-” here he lifted a small black box from his pocket and placed it on the table, “- seems to support the idea that Nog had recently been present,” Johansen paused for a moment to finger the box. “This is a nice piece of homebrew work, the electronics techs told me. It seemed like they were impressed, almost like they wanted to hire this Nog guy when we caught up with him.”
Vasquez nodded. “He’s clearly a genius.”
“It almost lends credibility to Vance’s claims.”
Vasquez looked at him. “You think Nog released the virus?”
“I’m beginning to wonder.”
She nodded. “Pray continue.”
He did, detailing the possible presence of Vance at Brenda’s and ending with their odd collision with Sarah Vance at Ingles place and Ingles’ disappearance.
“We have put an APB out on Ingles now as well, but so far have come up with nothing,” he said, closing the notebook and downing the rest of his margarita. “There’s still no sign of Vance’s kid, either.”
She took another sip of her drink. It was half-gone now, and she was starting to feel the tingling, relaxing effects of the first drink she had had in weeks.
There it was. It was everything and it seemed like a big nothing. She knew now that other teams were on this investigation. There were the national security people, an FBI homicide team and possibly another team from the military. Still, though, she felt the pressure to succeed. It had started out as their case, and they had made progress, but without tangible results. They still had no arrests and they still had done nothing to halt the electronic plague that continued to damage the nation’s newest growth industry.
She closed her eyes and settled back in her chair. She ran the whole story through her head and sought an angle, an answer that might break the case like a magic shoe-size in a Sherlock Holmes story. But there was nothing, or at least she couldn’t see it. She opened her eyes again and found that Johansen watched her intently.
She glanced at him, pursed her lips and shook her head. He sat back in disappointment. He had such faith in her that it hurt to see that she had let him down. She smiled at him. He had actually believed she was about to come up with some stroke of genius, some witty connection that everyone else had missed. Such faith made him more endearing.
She sighed and drank more. The whole thing had grown too big. She had even begun to believe that they themselves were being followed by agents, with orders to jump in when something broke. That was both reassuring and disturbing. It meant the brass trusted them to birddog the quarry, but not to make the collar themselves. She supposed that their superiors were just being cautious, as there was too much at stake to let one team’s pride get in the way.
“You know,” she said, running her finger around the top of her margarita glass and knocking the crust of salt off as she went, “I don’t think we’re going to solve this one tonight.”
He laughed. “In that case, I’ve got just the thing.”
She looked up then, with eyebrows raised. She caught something in his eye-a twinkle you might say, she thought to herself-but then she chided herself for having such ideas. She turned her eyes back down to her drink.
