James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

Sergeant Vince Paulo stared at the text message on his smart phone and didn’t have a clue.

In many respects, Vince was at the top of his game. Good looking and full of confidence, he’d come to the city of Miami police force straight out of the marines after a tour of duty in the Gulf War. He was born to be a cop, and a college degree in psychology combined with his battle-tested coolness under pressure made him a natural for crisis management. Five years as lead negotiator had earned him the reputation of a risk taker who didn’t always follow the conventional wisdom of other trained negotiators. His critics said that his unorthodox style would eventually catch up with him. The prediction only made Vince bolder.

But this texting bullshit made him feel impotent. New acronyms popped up every hour. The coffeehouse had free Wi-Fi, so Vince put down his latte and Googled the definition of “KUTGW.”

Keep up the good work.

Benign enough, especially from a sixteen-year-old girl.

Intercepting text messages between teenagers wasn’t Vince’s regular duty, but there was little he wouldn’t do for his best friend, Chuck Mays. For years now, Chuck had partnered with Vince on a number of high-tech law enforcement projects. He was currently in Asia looking to outsource the collection of personal information on millions of consumers and globalize his company’s data mining services. His wife Shada and their daughter McKenna had stayed behind in Miami. It was an important trip, but Chuck had almost canceled it. Shada was that concerned about their daughter’s ex-boyfriend. It was while Vince was giving his friend a lift to the airport that Chuck had flashed a deadly serious expression and uttered the ominous words that Vince would never forget:

“I don’t know the whole story, but I’m telling you, Vince: Shada is convinced that the son of a bitch is going to hurt McKenna if she doesn’t stay away from him.”

As a cop, Vince had seen plenty of restraining orders ignored, so he didn’t even suggest that the Mays family seek one. McKenna wasn’t exactly cooperative anyway. She refused to let her parents monitor her cell or computer, and to Chuck’s dismay, her mother had sided with McKenna. Chuck was standing on the curb outside the international terminal, two hours away from boarding the Miami-London leg of his flight to Mumbai, when he persuaded Vince that this was a potential safety issue that transcended teen privacy concerns. But he didn’t want “just anybody” looking over McKenna’s shoulder. Chuck provided the spy software-rudimentary stuff for a self-taught computer genius who was pioneering the personal information business. Vince agreed to review McKenna’s text messages from three P.M. to nine P.M. Eastern time, hours that Chuck spent sleeping on the other side of the world. Chuck would cover the rest of the day.

Vince removed the plastic lid from his tall paper cup and grimaced. More foam than fuel. That would teach him to order something other than his usual straight cup of joe. No wonder customers felt entitled to monopolize a table for hours on end-just them, their laptops, and five-dollar cups of no coffee.

TFANC. Time for a new coffeehouse.

Vince spooned away the foam as McKenna’s text messages continued to load on his smart phone. The wireless transfer from McKenna’s memory card to his occurred in seconds, no way for McKenna to know what had hit her. Message after message, line after line, nothing but teenage babble. Vince was actually feeling pretty fortunate to be single.

How do parents keep up with this insanity?

Vince scrolled through McKenna’s messages, coffee in one hand and his cell in the other. Reading this stuff was downright painful. OMG. LOL. CU L8R. It was the endless electronic version of Exhibit A in the case against the existence of intelligent life on Earth. One last swig of coffee-and then he froze. The most recent message hit him like a 5 iron to the forehead. It was thirty-five minutes old. McKenna had sent it to Jamal-the ex-boyfriend.

FMLTWIA.

It was alphabet soup to just about anyone who wasn’t in high school, but Vince had seen the Miami Police Department’s crib sheet on teenage sex and texting-“sexting.” FMLTWIA had stuck in his mind only because it was among the most vulgar. He had known and loved McKenna since she was a ponytailed little girl with half of her teeth missing, so it shocked him that she would even know what it meant. The thought of her actually sending such a message to her ex-supposedly ex-boyfriend made him sick to his stomach. Vince suddenly felt an avuncular need to intercede, to step in where his friend Chuck would if he weren’t eight thousand miles away.

Vince dialed McKenna’s cell. There was no answer, but Chuck’s spyware also had GPS tracking ability. A simple punch of a button on Vince’s cell would reveal the exact location of McKenna’s phone, which 99.9 percent of the time meant the exact location of McKenna. It wasn’t something he did lightly, but this kind of sexting wasn’t just the high-tech version of the “truth or dare” games that kids used to play when Vince was in school. The on-screen coordinates told him that McKenna was at home. Vince dialed the landline for the Mays residence. No answer, which didn’t mean that McKenna wasn’t there-but it did mean that McKenna’s mother wasn’t. McKenna was home alone. Alone with Jamal.

FMLTWIA. Fuck Me Like the Whore I Am.

Vince didn’t shock easily; and yes, it was a different world now. But if Chuck was right-if seeing Jamal was playing with fire-then this was gasoline. His hand was shaking as he dialed McKenna’s mother on her cell.

Shada didn’t answer. Now what?

Vince had no specific instructions from Chuck on what to do if Jamal came around while Dad was out of the country. But his friend’s words came back to Vince-that son of a bitch is going to hurt McKenna-and the FMLTWIA text message hardly bespoke a teenage girl with healthy self-esteem. He knew he had to do something-fast.

Vince bolted from his chair, hurried to his car, and burned rubber out of the parking lot. Steering through traffic with one hand, he speed-dialed McKenna again and again. He could tell that her phone was powered on-it took five rings before going to voice mail, not the instant transfer that indicated a cell was off-but she didn’t answer. Another call to her mother also went unanswered. He dialed Chuck in Mumbai, even though it was four A.M. there. The call immediately went to voice mail, and Vince stammered at the beep, not sure what to say. He settled on something vague but urgent.

“Chuck, we’ve got a bit of a situation here. Call me immediately.”

One hell of a message to wake up to.

Vince put the cell in the console and focused on driving. It was early evening, but it felt much later. Sunset came early in January, and the junglelike canopy over Coconut Grove blocked the famous Miami moonlight, making for dark residential streets. Cyclists and joggers were out with their blinking safety lights and reflective tape. Vince was careful to avoid them as he overtook slower moving vehicles, his car racing well above the twenty-five-mile-per-hour limit on the winding two-lane road to the Mays house. He pulled into the driveway and stopped so quickly that the front bumper nearly kissed the Chicago bricks. There wasn’t even time to slam the car door shut as he sprinted up the walkway to the front door.

He rang the bell and waited, catching his breath as he surveyed things with a cop’s eye. McKenna’s car was parked in the driveway. No others were in sight, except for Vince’s. Jamal’s could have been in the garage, he supposed, beside Chuck’s.