Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

“Okay.” I folded my arms across my chest. “He told me he was investigating a murder-”

“Whose murder?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Which was the truth.

“Who was the lady?”

“I don’t know that either,” I said. Which was a lie.

“C’mon, Rosen-”

“All I know was that he was supposed to meet someone here at eight o’clock, and it had to do with the story he was doing.” I shrugged, gazing back at him. “That’s all I know … but I’m telling you, whoever she was, it wasn’t a girlfriend. John didn’t cheat on his wife. That’s a fact.”

Farrentino’s dark eyes searched my face. He said nothing for a few moments. He knew that I hadn’t told him everything I knew about the circumstances leading up to John’s murder, and I knew that he wasn’t playing entirely fair with me either. In John’s memory, we were playing one final game of quid pro quo, and this round had just reached a stalemate.

I glanced toward the entrance to the beer garden. A couple of cops were holding open the gate; I could hear the ponderous clank of the stretcher’s wheels as the parameds carefully inched it down the stairs from the balcony. In a few moments there would be nothing left of my buddy except a yellow chalk mark on a wooden floor.

“Lemme tell you something,” Farrentino said at last. “You may think you know a lot about this, but I know more than you do. John was a friend of mine …”

“Yeah?” John had plenty of friends on the force. For all I knew, Farrentino could have been a deep-throat source, but I had no way of proving that. “I’m sure he would have been glad to see you down here for him.”

Farrentino ignored the dig. “And he would have wanted us to work together to nail the guy who killed him. So if you want to come clean and tell me everything you know …”

The noise from the stairs stopped. The stretcher was on the ground. “I’ll keep it in mind, Lieutenant,” I said as I stood up again. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to go see John off.”

He started to say something else, but before he could stop me, I edged my way around the table and headed for the other side of the beer garden.

I stood on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes, watching John’s body as it was wheeled away. A white sheet had been pulled over the corpse, with three straps holding it down on the stretcher, but for some damn reason I kept expecting him to sit up, reach into his pocket, and ask if I wanted some gum.

The paramedics stopped the stretcher behind the ambulance’s rear fender, folded the stretcher’s wheels, then picked it up. I remembered us getting drunk together at college parties and going out for double dates with Marianne and Sandy. Standing in line before the graduation platform, waiting to get our diplomas while making whispered jokes about the pontifical commencement speech Sam Donaldson had just delivered. The letters and postcards he had sent me while we were living on opposite sides of the country, the absurd wedding presents we had sent to each other when we had married our girlfriends, the long-distance phone calls when our kids had been born.

Now it all came down to this: one guy watching the other being loaded into the back of a meat wagon, down here in the scuzzy part of town. I had always thought he was going to outlive me …

“Helluva shame, isn’t it?” Mike Farrentino said from behind me.

I jerked involuntarily. I hadn’t realized that he had been at my back the entire time. “Yeah,” I mumbled, not looking around at him. “Helluva shame.”

As the stretcher was pushed into the back of the ambulance and its doors slammed closed, I eased my way out of the crowd and began to walk, not too quickly, up the street away from Clancy’s. With each step I took, I expected someone to yell “Hey you!” and then ten cops would be climbing all over me again.

That instant never came. I was a block away when I heard the ambulance drive away from the curb. By then I was in the darkened doorway of the Big Muddy offices, reaching into my pocket to make sure I still had the mini-disk I had stolen from Dingbat.

It was still there, a little silver disk about the size of an antique fifty-cent piece. I looked down the street, but the detective was nowhere in sight among the blue leather jackets still clustered around the front of Clancy’s. I shoved the disk back in my pocket and ducked around the corner of the building, heading for the fire escape ladder.

There would be plenty of time for mourning later. Right now, all I wanted to do was find a killer.

(Thursday, 10:52 P.M.)

As soon as I crawled through my apartment window, I switched on my computer and booted up the mini-disk I had taken from John’s PT, and the first thing I did was make a backup copy.

Call it paranoia, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before the cops discovered that the evidence bag had been unsealed; even though I had fooled Farrentino once, I wasn’t going to count on his remaining stupid. The police could be here by morning with a search warrant. When the copy was made, I slipped it into a plastic case and took it into the bathroom, where I hid it beneath the toilet tank with a strip of electrical tape.

Back at my desk again, I rebooted the original disk and copied it onto the hard drive; once it was loaded into my system, I tried to punch up the root directory, only to find that I needed a password to get in. No problem there; not long ago, shortly after I had gone to work at the Big Muddy, John and I had agreed to share our passwords with each other, in case I ever needed to hack into his PT or vice versa. Being a faithful University of Missouri alumnus, his password was “Mizzou”; mine was “chickenlegs,” for no other reason than I happened to be dining upon an Extra Crispy Recipe snack box from the Colonel at the time. I typed in “Mizzou,” the system cleared me through, and I got my first peek at whatever had been contained in Dingbat’s memory.

I let out a low whistle as the screen was immediately filled by a directory as long as a small-town phone book. A bar at the top of the screen told me that almost 100 megabytes of information had been copied into my system, leaving less than 50 kilobytes free on the disk. As I ran the cursor down the screen, a seemingly endless list of filenames scrolled upward, many of them suffixed as BAT or EXEC commands, none of them immediately recognizable.

An extremely complex program of some sort had been loaded into Dingbat’s floptical drive shortly before John’s death. Tiernan had no business carrying around something like this unless Beryl Hinckley had downloaded it into his PT during their encounter at the bar … but exactly what it was, I hadn’t the foggiest idea. Cyberpunk, I am not; my hacking skills were only those of the average computer-literate college grad, and I didn’t have the knowledge necessary to understand a program of this complexity.

One thing for damn sure: my best friend had been shot through the head with a laser beam shortly after receiving this program. And despite what Farrentino had said about his murder resembling the “Dark Jedi” killings, I had the gut feeling that John’s death had not been a random shooting.

What if John had been assassinated?

And, to take this supposition one step further: what if John had been assassinated because of the contents of this very disk?

I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down. Don’t get panicky. I leaned forward again and began to run further down the directory, trying to find something that looked like a main menu or even a README file. I was like a blind man thrown into a large and unfamiliar room, but if I could just get hold of something I could use as a white cane, I might be able to …