Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

As she strides by, she says, “I got my eye on you, you spooky-eye motherfucker.”

A Marlowe is orange-red outside but opens pale pink. I clip the rose, trim its stem, then place it in a white bucket I’ve mounted to the fence. I leave roses for anyone in the neighborhood to take. I’ve got no great love of roses — the bushes were planted by the old lady who used to live here. “Missus Roses,” everybody called her. Without National Geographic, I wouldn’t have even figured out which rose varieties were which. But tending them is soothing. Besides, what kind of guy would I be if I let some old lady’s roses die?

I pause to enjoy a carton of milk, a half-pint, the kind kids drink at school. I know most early risers are brewing coffee, but it’s best to limit external stimulation. I toss a few more roses into the bucket, and here is where I see the Tiger’s Mom staggering down the street toward me. She lives in the apartment complex next door and has two daughters, a music blog and a committed relationship with alcohol. She’s out every night on the L.A. band scene, and it’s true that her blog is well regarded, that she’s famous for discovering breakout bands.

The Tiger’s Mom stops right in front of me, her drunken eyes fixed on the bucket of roses. In her attempt to select one, her hand floats like a conjurer’s, and though I’m standing right here, she seems not to see me. The Tiger’s Mom selects two roses, one for each daughter, I assume.

The first jet of the day rises out of Burbank above us. It’s five thirty A.M.

“You look like you could use a carton of milk,” I tell her.

“Mr. Roses,” she says. “Jesus, don’t creep up on people.”

She takes her roses and ambles toward her apartment’s stucco courtyard, trimmed with dwarf palms and painted Hotel California pink.

The Tiger is the older daughter, a sixth-grader responsible enough at twelve to take care of her little sister. I see the Tiger riding her bike to school. She is her school’s mascot — the tiger in question. Some mornings, she pedals past in her tiger costume, its oversize tiger head strapped to the rack on her bike. The Tiger doesn’t activate. The Cub is the younger sister, a ten-year-old. Sometimes she walks to school on her own. The Cub often stops to examine the flowers in my bucket, but she never pulls one out.

I don’t have a dungeon or an ankle monitor. I don’t follow ice-cream trucks. I don’t even have the Internet, which is God’s gift to child sexual exploitation. You have to understand that I have never hurt anyone in my life and that I am the one who gets wounded in this story.

But I’ll admit this now, because this is going to be a certain kind of story: the Cub activates.

—

In the morning, I take Laurel Canyon south to Studio City, where I partition a faulty array of servers — all serving porn, of course. Then in Encino, I hack in to the laptop of an Armenian dude who claimed his daughter password-protected the thing and then forgot the code. For lunch, I stop for Salvadoran on Lankershim Boulevard. I eat outside, under a Los Angeles sky that is blizzard white. The pupusas are good, but I stop here because there is a permanent rainbow overhead, caused by the mist of a car wash next door. Don’t let anyone tell you there are no rainbows in L.A.

I used to eat next to my van to make sure it didn’t get jacked. Ten years ago, when I started my computer-repair business, my van was a crash cart of parts and diagnostic equipment, but these days I do mostly tech security, and a wallet of thumb drives is my only set of tools. Porn is a huge security issue, especially child porn. One employee downloading it can crash an entire network. Just glimpsing it can get you locked up, so nobody’s studying the stuff, which is racked with malware and sinister code. Nobody but me, it seems. Seems like I was the only one in the world when the beacon sent the signal.

In the afternoon, I’m circling the Valley, kicking a few firewalls and doing some general debugging, when I get a text for an old-fashioned repair job, and what the hell. In twenty minutes, I’m knocking on a door in Van Nuys.

The guy answers, but he stands there, staring at me.

I say, “Someone messaged me about a problem with a hard drive?”

“A guy I know said you were cool, ” he tells me.

To the untrained eye, you’d think this was the type of guy you went to Northridge with, the kind whose baby fat, hipster beard and searing irony landed him in a crappy studio apartment like this. But I recognize his kind right away. There are those who are born, those who are made, and then there are ones like this guy, the kind who choose.

I can see the computer, a high-end desktop with a liquid-cooled multicore driving twin cinema displays. It’s a standard movie/animation editing setup.

“The thing suddenly stopped,” he says. “And it won’t turn on. I tried everything.”

“Did the screen flash or go blue?” I ask. “Did you see a cursor blink or hear a ticking noise?”

“I don’t remember,” he says, but he seems to make a decision about me and steps aside.

Inside, I give the computer a quick visual. There’s a bar-coded property sticker, probably from a studio lot. “If this is a work computer, just turn it in,” I say. “Your boss will get it repaired.”

“This guy I know, he said you fixed his computer for three hundred dollars, no questions.” He holds up three one-hundred-dollar bills.

I pull on purple latex gloves and unplug the wireless router.

I drop the desktop’s side panel, pull the fans, then attach an I/O cable and reboot. Soon I get the error codes and kernel logs, and while the system profiles, I insert a thumb drive that I’ve loaded with a few dozen pictures. I command the root system to search for data strings in these pictures, images that would look like nothing special to the average person — a photo of a shoulder, a table, a bedspread, a foot. But they’re really innocent corners of pictures that depict adult sexual encounters with minors. Immediately, the search results appear, and together we see the screen fill with the flashing images of his child porn collection.

“All this stuff was on the computer when I got it,” he says. “I was meaning to get rid of it.”

“I’m sure.”

Then he volunteers, “There are no boys on there.”

“Wonderful,” I say.

I do a quick inventory — it’s all the usual fare. He’s got the Teensy Series, the Fawn Trilogy, Pale Ribbons and so on. A search like this is easy because the vast majority of child porn available to the average Joe consists of a few dozen image sets that are commonly traded back and forth or resold through zombie servers.

I stop on an image. “You see this girl here?”

He says nothing.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

He pauses. “John.”

“You see this girl, John?”

He nods.

“Her name’s not really Sissy. And this guy here, in his socks. That’s the girl’s uncle. He’s doing thirty-five in federal for the extended sexual abuse of a minor.”

“Look,” he says. He holds out the money, but I don’t take it, not yet.

“You wanna know her real name?”

He shakes his head.

“Good,” I say, “because she’s all grown up now, and she has a court order — a blanket judgment against anyone found in possession of these images. That’s how you find out her real name — after your arrest, you get a writ informing you that you owe her a hundred and forty thousand dollars.”

I survey the rest of his directories, but it’s all the standard business.

I ask him, “You know one thing child pornographers always get wrong?”

He eyes me suspiciously.

“The lighting,” I tell him.