Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

“I know,” I say, squinting through the scattered sunlight bounced off the sea of buildings around us.

“They don’t know what they’re missing,” Toto says. “But you know what, I got something for you.”

“No,” I tell him. “I just want to go back to my apartment.” Get back to my job searches, hang the suit up in the bag and seal it up until I could try again.

“Look, what happened in Florida: That shit wasn’t your fault. That was on me. That was on him . You can’t let it get to you.”

I don’t reply, just lean tiredly back into the seat.

“I got a good one, Charlie. It’s right by you.”

Toto’s from Kansas. And he’s loyal. Knew him from a message board where he sold stolen credit card numbers online. That was back in high school, when I first dipped my toe into the other side of the internet. He takes to wearing cut-off shirts and ironic trucker hats, which is doubly ironic given that he calls himself trailer-trash-reared and city-ambitious. He likes layered jokes like that.

Back then we’d both been illegitimate. I used the cards to get some equipment shipped to a dead drop in a nearby county, then had a fifth grader bicycle to the mailbox center to pick the stuff up. He would hand it off to another kid, and once I was sure that kid hadn’t been followed, I was rocking some serious gigaflops for my part-time, personal server farm.

Every kid needs a hobby, right?

Most others liked creating botnets, but I had a soft spot for my own gear. It made me feel in control.

Toto moved out to the city when I told him where I lived. “You need muscle,” he had said.

And he was that. Spent most of his spare time in the gym, though I didn’t think he stuck himself with any needles to get that kind of beef.

He odd-jobbed. Wheelman, dealer, enforcer, but for the last couple years we’d been working together. Skiptracing. Like he’d always wanted. Toto couldn’t get a license as a bounty hunter—his record was shit—but I’d always kept my fingers clean. Toto knew the shit-side of the city; he grabbed the runaways, the strays, while I sat in the Corolla. I was the one that hunted them down. Sniffing through their digital scat, spotting the broken twig here and there, or the absence of a bark, and then putting the clues together.

Felt good.

Until Florida.

The kid we hunted down in Florida was a straight-up runaway. Toto said finding him was a paid favor for an old friend. Child services was worried about the kid.

We drove all the way to Florida—that retired syphilitic wang of the country—trading places every couple hours at the wheel, then found him in a shelter in Boca Raton. We were tired. Which is why neither of us noticed that we’d been followed.

Kid’s name was Ryan. His biological father, Emry, came after us in a damn parking lot with a giant fucking pistol and a ski mask. Cameras didn’t have anything on him, and the car he used was stolen. But Toto recognized the voice and stature. Emry had dragged the kid away from us. Shot him four times and left him for dead in a ditch in Georgia.

Kid was ten.

Ten years old.

Can you imagine?

“Look,” Toto’s saying. “I fucked us both up on that. I feel your pain. It’s been keeping me up all night, trying to think about how I can make it right.”

“You can’t,” I tell him. He grimaces, holds the wheel tight. Corded arms flex as he bites his lip to stop the snarl.

“I got a job for you.” He’s excited, because he thinks he’s got everything fixed. And that it’s going to go back to the way it was between us. “A job that’s right . No, it’s better than right. It’s righteous .”

“I’m done,” I tell him for the hundredth time this week. Toto comes to a stop in front of my building, puts the car into park.

He sighs. “You sure?”

“I can’t fucking sleep without pills,” I tell him as I open the door, kicking it out with my gleaming dress shoes. “I’m out.”

“Hundred grand,” Toto says.

I’m unbuckled and half out of the car. But I stop. “What…”

He pulls a folded up printed sheet of paper from his back pocket. “I was at the post office, right? And I’m looking at these ‘most wanted’ posters. So I get online, and I find out they’re hot for some guy they think is the new Unabomber. Only he’s a hacker type. And the reward is—well, it’s not just the reward.”

Toto shoves the paper at me. I unfold it, sitting in the barrier between the cold air of the Corolla and the muggy, garbage-reeking heat of the sidewalk

“You want to get right with the universe after Florida, this is how you do it.”

Toto’s at the wheel, his natural element, pointing us out West toward the last place I sniffed out a trace of our quarry. There’s something Zen in the long drive for him. His hands rest at a perfect ten and two on the wheel; he almost never lets go. He refuses to eat while driving, and has a camelback filled with purified water and the straw dangling over his left shoulder.

He doesn’t expect the same of me, but he only ever hands over the wheel when he believes his reflexes are in danger and can’t be complemented with those uppers they hand out to Air Force pilots for extended missions.

A year ago, I offered him some pretzel rods after he took a fierce nap, aided by downers, but he shook his head. “You know how you pass out after Thanksgiving? Ain’t tryptophan, that’s bullshit. It’s the blood sugar crash that comes from eating so much stuffing, potatoes, and pie—shit like that.”

On trips like this, he mainlines protein bars and nuts.

“This guy,” Toto says. “I spent two days on background before I came out for you. I wanted to make sure this wasn’t some kind of thing where this guy is just getting sit on by the feds because he’s digging up stuff they don’t like.”

I’ve got a palm-sized WiFi hotspot plugged into the lighter and stuck to the dashboard with double-sided tape. My go-laptop is cradled between my thighs as I fight motion sickness. I’m using it to monitor active search results and IM pings from people on the dark net I’m using to help my hunt.

Of course, they don’t know how they’re actually helping me. They think they’re hacking a bank for numbers; I just want to know if there’s activity in any of our quarry’s false personas.

“I read his manifesto,” I tell Toto. “You’re right. He sounds like a real asshole.”

“I was worried. At first, he sounded kinda like you when you would talk about Snowden, how the whistleblowers and leakers were genuine heroes. You know, how it’s bullshit that the hacker who exposed the Steubenville rapists is being charged with more jail time than the actual rapists? This guy seems cut from darker shit, though.”

“Yeah.”

Norton Haswell. Born in California. Nice, sunny suburbs. School with a nice computer lab. Honor student. Rich parents. His choice of colleges. Companies lined up to show off their pool tables and “alternate” working environments.

“You’d think, the sort of life he had,” Toto says, “that he’d relax and enjoy it.”

I snort. “He thinks he’s an original thinker, but the stuff he posts is all the usual techno-libertarian talking points. Until he invested in that offshore floating haven cruise ship—some kind of techno-utopia away from ‘interference and regulation’—he was safe and comfy in his nice offices. But after he lost all his money, he blamed anything else but his own dumb decisions.”

“Well, he didn’t have to bother mixing with riffraff like me on public transportation. Had a company shuttle pick him up at his sidewalk every day so he could code on his way to work.” Toto sounds bitter. “Someone like me says the things he does with a drawl—drives a pickup and stocks up too many guns—you get raided. For sure. But you nerd up and say the same anti-government shit, and people toss venture capital at you.”