Michael Connelly - Chasing the Dime

He went onto the balcony and stared out at the cold blue ocean. He was twelve floors up.

The view stretched from Venice on the south side to the ridge of the mountains sliding into the sea off Malibu to the north. The sun was gone but there were violent slashes of orange and purple still in the sky. This high up, the sea breeze was cold and bracing. He put his hands in the pockets of his pants. The fingers of his left hand closed around a coin and he brought it out. A dime. Another reminder of what his life had become.

The neon lights on the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier were on and flashing a repetitive pattern. It made him remember a time two years earlier when the company had rented the pier's entire amusement park for a private party celebrating the approval of the company's first batch of patents on molecular memory architecture. No tickets, no lines, no getting off a ride if you were having fun. He and Nicole had stayed in one of the open yellow gondolas of the Ferris wheel for at least a half hour. It had been cold that night, too, and they huddled against each other. They'd watched the sun go down. Now he couldn't look at the pier or even a sunset without thinking about her.

In acknowledging this about himself, he realized he had rented an apartment with views of the very things that would remind him of Nicole. There was a subliminal pathology there that he didn't want to explore.

He put the dime on his thumbnail and flipped it into the air. He watched it disappear into the darkness. There was a park below, a strip of green between the building and the beach. He had already noticed that homeless people snuck in at night and slept in sleeping bags under the trees. Maybe one of them would find the fallen dime.

The phone rang. He went back into the living room and saw the tiny LED screen glowing in the darkness. He picked up the phone and read the screen. The call was coming from the Century Plaza Hotel. He thought about it for two more rings and then answered without saying hello.

"Are you calling for Lilly?" he asked.

A long moment of silence went by but Pierce knew someone was there. He could hear television sounds in the background.

"Hello? Is this call for Lilly?"

Finally a man's voice answered.

"Yes, is she there?"

"She's not here at the moment. Can I ask how you got this number?"

"From the site."

"What site?"

The caller hung up. Pierce held the phone to his ear for a moment and then clicked it off.

He walked across the room to return the phone to its cradle when it rang again. Pierce hit the talk button without looking at the caller ID display.

"You've got the wrong number," he said.

"Wait, Einstein, is that you?"

Pierce smiled. It wasn't a wrong number. He recognized the voice of Cody Zeller, one of the A-list recipients of his new number. Zeller often called him Einstein, one of the college nicknames Pierce still endured. Zeller was a friend first and a business associate second. He was a computer security consultant who had designed numerous systems for Pierce over the years as his company grew and moved to larger and larger spaces.

"Sorry, Code," Pierce said. "I thought you were somebody else. This new number is getting a lot of calls for somebody else."

"New number, new place, does this mean you're free, white and single again?"

"I guess so."

"Man, what happened with Nicki?"

"I don't know. I don't want to talk about it."

He knew talking about it with friends would add a permanency to the end of their relationship.

"I'll tell you what happened," Zeller said. "Too much time in the lab and not enough between the sheets. I warned you about that, man."

Zeller laughed. He'd always had a way of looking at a situation or set of facts and cutting away the bullshit. And his laughter told Pierce he was not overly sympathetic to his plight. Zeller was unmarried and Pierce could never remember him in a long-term relationship. As far back as college he promised Pierce and their friends he would never practice monogamy in his lifetime. He also knew the woman in question. In his capacity as a security expert he also handled online backgrounding of employment applicants and investors for Pierce. In that role he worked closely at times with Nicole James, the company's intelligence officer. Make that former intelligence officer.

"Yeah, I know," Pierce said, though he didn't want to talk about this with Zeller. "I should've listened."

"Well, maybe this means you'll be able to take your spoon out of retirement and meet me out at Zuma one of these mornings."

Zeller lived in Malibu and surfed every morning. It had been nearly ten years since Pierce had been a regular on the waves with him. In fact, he had not even taken his board with him when he moved out of the house on Amalfi. It was up on the rafters in the garage.

"I don't know, Code. I've still got the project, you know. I don't think my time is going to change much just because she-"

"That's right, she was only your fiancée, not the project."

"I don't mean it like that. I just don't think I'm-"

"What about tonight? I'll come down. We'll hit the town like the old days. Put on your black jeans, baby."

Zeller laughed in encouragement. Pierce didn't. There had never been old days like that.

Pierce had never been a player. He was blue jeans, not black jeans. He'd always preferred to spend the night in the lab looking into a scanning tunneling microscope than pursuing sex in a club with an engine fueled by alcohol.

"I think I'm going to pass, man. I've got a lot of stuff to do and I need to go back to the lab tonight."

"Hank, man, you've got to give the molecules a rest. One night out. Come on, it will straighten you out, shake up your own molecules for once. You can tell me all about what happened with you and Nicki, and I'll pretend to feel sorry for you. I promise."

Zeller was the only one on the planet who called him Hank, a name Pierce hated. But Pierce was smart enough to know that telling Zeller to stop was out of the question, because it would prompt his friend to use the name at all times.

"Call me next time, all right?"

Zeller reluctantly backed off and Pierce promised to keep the next weekend open for a night out. He made no promises about surfing. They hung up and Pierce put the phone in its cradle. He picked up his backpack and headed for the apartment door.

Pierce used his scramble card to enter the garage attached to Amedeo Technologies and parked his 540 in his assigned space. The entrance to the building came open as he approached, the approval coming from the night man at the dais behind the double glass doors.

"Thanks, Rudolpho," Pierce said as he went by.

He used his electronic key to take the elevator to the third floor, where the administrative offices were located. He looked up at the camera in the corner and nodded, though he doubted Rudolpho was watching him. It was all being digitized and recorded for later. If ever needed.

In the third-floor hallway he worked the combo lock on his office door and went in.

"Lights," he said as he went behind his desk.

The overhead lights came on. He turned on his computer and entered the passwords after it booted up. He plugged in the phone line so he could quickly check his e-mail messages before going to work. It was 8 P.M. He liked working at night, having the lab to himself.

For security reasons he never left the computer on or attached to a phone line when he wasn't working on it. For the same reason he carried no cell phone, pager or personal digital assistant. Though he had one, he rarely carried a laptop computer, either. Pierce was paranoid by nature-just a gene splice away from schizophrenia, according to Nicole-but also a cautious and practical researcher. He knew that every time he plugged an outside line into his computer or opened a cellular transmission, it was as dangerous as sticking a needle into his arm or having sex with a stranger. You never knew what you might be bringing into the pipeline. For some people, that was probably part of the thrill of sex. But it wasn't part of the thrill of chasing the dime.