Chuck Hogan - Devils in Exile

The guy was getting pissed. Lash should have stopped there but he couldn’t pull back. This guy in front of him was the embodiment of his own nightmare about raising a son.

“Vengeful little kid cutting up Mommy’s dresses. When you screw out of here, jumping bail and fleeing the country, who’s going to pay? As always, your beautiful, loving parents. Only this time, they’re going to pay in bullets. I’m sure the last thing they’ll be thinking about is their son, whose fat finger is practically pulling the trigger. Thinking that maybe they should have handled you differently. That maybe getting you out of trouble isn’t the same as raising you right.”

Harleton looked as if a stopper in his throat had been pulled, the crust of recalcitrance and malfeasance that clogged his head beginning to drain down. He looked as contrite as he’d ever been in his entire life. And yet Lash knew it wouldn’t last. He’d still go off running with his parents’ lives in his pockets like the gold from their teeth, and crying all the way.

Lash said, as he turned to leave, “Thanks, you’ve been a help.”

Curtiz knocked on Lash’s door, carrying in his background work on Vasco, the Venezuelan they had pulled out of the thawed Charles River. They called this a digital profile, outlining the last days of a dead man via his electronic echo.

Curtiz focused on Vasco’s credit card purchases and mobile phone records.

“We never found the phone,” said Lash.

“Tracked his number via his e-mail account. It was a U.S. phone. GPS triangulation puts the phone at the Sheraton Boston on Dalton Street when it went dead.”

“He was registered at the Boston Harbor Hotel.” Lash turned his Zippo over and over in his hand. The map of Vietnam inscribed on the back had all but worn smooth. “I don’t suppose GPS can give us a room number?”

“Only reads horizontally. But I went in and had them go back through the register for that day, they gave me this printout. See there?”

Curtiz had highlighted the name Maracone, a two-night registration in a junior suite on the twenty-ninth floor.

“No complaints from the hotel that day, nothing logged anyway. But there was a housekeeping note saying that the telephone was gone from the room and had to be replaced. The charge was added to the bill.” Curtiz handed Lash a copy of Maracone’s room bill. “Maybe they cut the room phone and disabled all the mobiles, including Vasco’s. Makes sense, right?”

“Perfect sense,” said Lash.

“Here’s the other peculiar thing. See his call log? It’s summarized there on the first page. His minutes don’t add up. More airtime used than total logged calls.”

Lash flipped through the pages. “Phone company mistake?”

“Could be. They never made a mistake on my bill though. You want to leave it at that?”

Lash shook his head. “I guess I don’t.”

He was looking for a man named Schramm who sold Gothic and Celtic jewelry out of a cart set up near the Cheers bar reproduction at Faneuil Hall. Lash poked around, eating a soft-serve ice cream cone, while Schramm flirted with two truant teens shopping for pewter pendants and sterling-silver belly rings.

The waiting allowed Schramm to make Lash as a cop. Once the girls moved along, Schramm went up to him and said, “Look, man, I’m out of it. I did my bid.”

“I have only come here seeking knowledge. Somebody gave me your name.”

Schramm wore a winged-reaper ring on his middle finger, a death’s-head pin sewn into the skin over his right temple. “Can I see the shield?”

Lash obliged.

“So we’re talking casually here, then?”

“So casual.” Lash showed him the printout with the airtime discrepancy. “What am I looking at, a cloned phone?”

“Nobody clones phones, not anymore. Too traceable now that carriers do radio fingerprinting. It catches clones by picking up the unique rise time signature—”

“If you could,” said Lash, putting up the stop sign, “just put it in layman’s terms, and then maybe step it down another couple of notches. I’m moving through this digital world at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute.”

Schramm made a forget-that motion with his hands. “For the minute numbers to be off, that means somebody had to mess with the internal chip. You do that, you can change a device made for transmitting into an actual broadcaster. A RAT phone, or remote access tool. You control it remotely, usually by sending an SMS — I mean, a text message. You can intercept calls, but more to the point, you can turn a phone into a microphone. Like a bug. You can listen in. Takes a little know-how, but the most important thing is access. Setting up the target phone. You either need to give your mark a tampered phone, or else physically get your hands on theirs for a certain amount of time.”

“Okay, so — somebody close.”

“Somebody close. Or else a real good thief.”

Lash chewed on that. “They use this in law enforcement?”

“You don’t know?”

“Told you, I’m made of vinyl. These lines you see in my face are analog grooves.”

Schramm patted his pocket to show that it was empty. “I don’t carry a phone no more. Such a thing as too much convenience. Too much reliability. Too easy to exploit.”

Lash nodded, wondering what it meant that some of the best advice he’d received in his life, he’d got from thieves.

They broke early from the club, getting back to the Marlborough Street pad a little after one. Royce was still at Precipice, but no Danielle. Maven realized he hadn’t seen her in a few days. Termino stayed out on a midnight rendezvous; Suarez drank too many vodkas and not enough Red Bulls and passed out snoring on the sofa with his hand down his pants; Glade was doing his Glade thing with two legal secretaries, holed up in his and Maven’s room. Glade’s ministrations generally took him into the wee small hours, plying these girls with Midori, getting them used to the camera. The first ten, fifteen, twenty times Maven had watched the resulting video, it was great. Now it was like a porn he’d seen over and over. It had got so that he was blaming the victims for their pliability, rather than his sociopathic roommate, in the same way Maven used to get pissed off at Iraqis for making him shoot at them.

So he was shit out of luck and would have to bunk out here on the opposite end of the sectional from snoring Suarez. Maven wandered to the other end of the apartment, fishing a Red Stripe out of the beverage refrigerator and racking up balls on the pool table. He broke hard, scattering the balls, suspended in the leftover buzz of another lost night. He lined up a few shots, then set down his cue. Even the pool table had lost its allure.

Maven heard creaking above him. He looked up at the high ceiling. Footsteps overhead. Could have been Royce back home, but he didn’t think so. The footsteps moved toward the street, and he moved with them, to the French doors opening onto Marlborough.

He stood out in the night air, knowing she was above him. He was with her and not with her, the story of his life. Across the way, in a large, angled picture window, he saw Danielle’s reflection. Standing out on the top-floor balcony with a drink in her hand, wearing a short robe and not much else. She looked out into the night like a woman in a high castle. A damsel, only not in distress. Just a damsel.

A breeze came up, a whiff of ocean air brushing his cheek at the same time it shifted the hem of her robe around her thighs, and Maven had to turn away. Had to go back inside, and then, once there, had to get out of that place. He took off downstairs, moving to the sidewalk, hitting the chill and not knowing where he was going. He reached the corner before looking back, and when he did, the top-floor balcony was vacant.