David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“I just know it, Dad. Don’t ever have a sliver of doubt that I know that, okay?”

“Not a sliver,” he said, and then he looked like he might start to cry, but then he saw, through the large den window, that his wife had arrived home.

Mariam Majnoun was getting out of Peggy Pilkerson’s (actually, her ex-husband Pete Pilkerson’s) sparkly brown Corvette, which was of an era when Corvettes had ludicrously long and potent hoods. Wafting from the Corvette, across the tiny garden and through the window, came the tinkle of her mom’s pretty laugh, unrestrained, and a guffaw from Peggy, deep in the penile car. Mariam swung the big car door closed — she was almost unbalanced by the force she had to summon for the task — and crossed the lawn to the front door, with the extra-intentional gait of the still slightly drunk.

It wasn’t until her mother had come inside and click-click-click ed straight upstairs and Leila had turned to watch Peggy’s Corvette growl away that she noticed that her Dear Diary loaner car was gone.

“So, you left with the impression that these Dear Diary people could, like, unframe Dad?” said Dylan. He was skateboarding beside her as she ran. It was the second morning since she’d returned. She wanted to do at least five miles, but after two she was hurting and was considering a tighter loop; if she cut over behind the place that used to be the Noodle House but was now Cell Phone Depot, she could pick up Valley Drive and go back home that way. That might also be a way to lose Dylan, whose pointed questions over the first two miles had caused her to realize that she didn’t know enough about Dear Diary’s aims and methods.

“Yeah. That’s what they said.” Leila was not a talk-while-you-run type, so she did not expand on the answer.

“But you didn’t get from the rehab guy what they wanted you to get from him, right?”

“I did not.” They were on a slight downhill incline here, so Dylan was cutting the pretty, slacker-y arcs of the expert skateboarder. Leila liked that part of skateboarding, but the noise of the wheels she found grating. “I’m just saying,” he said over the noise, “you got a big song and dance from these people who claim they can ignore borders and hack the state and rescue Dad”—he carved a lacy arc—“but that also just makes them hackers and human traffickers, and I haven’t seen any letup in the pressure on Dad. You say they whisked you around Dublin and lavished all this hot spy attention on you”—another lacy arc—“but they could have been guerrilla theater, for all you know. All you got out of it was a broken Nokia.” He terminated another lacy arc in front of his sister. She was retying her laces and shifting the Dear Diary phone, which was an annoying lump beneath her sweaty waistband.

The phone hadn’t pipped since Portland, since it told her to leave Leo behind. She had tried to send messages to Sarah asking for updates, instructions. But No secure path available was all that displayed on its little visage.

“Though I guess the fake-documents thing takes them out of the class of theater,” Dylan allowed. He did that scrape-kick-catch move that skateboarders do to come to an unbothered and indolent stop.

And the eye test, thought Leila. But she hadn’t told Dylan about the eye test. “You should take better care of your board,” she said.

Dylan looked at her like she was thick. “No, I shouldn’t. It’s a skateboard. You NGO people are such dorks.”

This would be a good time to ask him. She’d have the rest of the run to think on his answer.

“Hey, D, did you go with Kramer and his forensics guy when they examined Dad’s computer?” Kramer was one of the lawyers. Dylan said he seemed to be the one most behind them.

“Oh hell, yeah. We had to report to a creepy, bunkerized office building in Long Beach. The Regional Interagency Technical Services Facility. But those guys are so juiced on power, they insist on calling it the RITSerF. And I thought our forensics guy was going to be able to examine Dad’s computer. But he didn’t actually get to touch or even see the computer or the hard drive. They gave him access to what they call a mirror image of the hard drive. I know, right? In America. It’s like the state says to the defendant, No, you can’t see the evidence we have against you, but here, we’ll draw you a nice picture of it.”

“That sounds like bullshit.”

“Well, that’s how it is now. And yes, we sat there and looked at all this nasty porn that was allegedly on the so-called mirror image of Dad’s hard drive.”

“Was it that nasty?”

“You want to know this?”

Leila nodded.

Dylan shrugged. “I’ve seen worse. It was mainly pictures, static images. Nothing violent. But the girls were totally girls. I mean, they were young .” Dylan dropped his eyes to the ground. “And then there were also these PowerPoint presentations. Shitty porn, no alleged minors evident, but with heads cropped from pictures of students from the school. It was revolting, especially because whoever did it didn’t scale the heads right.”

Leila exhaled. “Students from the school?”

“Yeah. See, that’s why it’s so bad, Leila. If they have any chance to get this before a jury, you just know they could select the kind of jury that would take one look at Dad and see a principal cutting and pasting their daughters’ faces into porn collages.”

Fuck. He was right, she thought. “But couldn’t they have shown you anything? Come on. I mean, the mirror image of the hard drive?”

“I agree with you, sister, but read your Patriot Act. I told you that you shoulda voted for Nader.”

“He was a spoiler.”

“Well. We’re supposed to accept this mirror-image business because all the metadata on all the images is consistent with their having been downloaded to that computer, that ISP, on dates between eighteen months ago and four weeks ago. You know what metadata is?”

“I think so. Time stamps and stuff.”

“Yeah. And then there’s this elaborately attested to chain-of-custody protocol — a big sheaf of papers tied in a folder, with affidavits and thumbprints that swear, Here are the technicians who handled the evidence; here is the date at which it was moved from the middle school to the RITSerF. You even get to see a little photograph of the computer itself, sitting on a shelf in a room in the building you are in. But you cannot go to that room.”

“Motherfuckers,” said Leila.

“Indeedium, sisbag.”

“I’m gonna cut up here,” said Leila, indicating a long flight of cracked steps. Dylan wouldn’t want to take her shortcut. It would mean scrabbling across a scrub lot, and unlike his skateboard, his sneakers were precious to him; his shoe-care regimen was a family joke. She started up the stairs at a rapid clip, with taut fists, like Rocky.

Dylan called after her. “I hope you didn’t give those Diary people anything. What if they were a cult? Or an Armenian ID thievery ring?” It was annoying that Dylan was getting to be the sensible one here, he who had once styled himself a didgeridoo musician.

But why had her phone gone comatose? And the way the Toyota had been repoed. That felt like evidence disappearing. She still had her Lola Montes papers. Was she supposed to destroy them? Or would they self-destruct? She moved them from beneath her mattress, lest she be engulfed in flames, and put them into a plastic envelope and then under the large pot of the struggling lemon tree on the tiny back patio.

That afternoon in Costco, Leila had a fight with her mom about the type of T-shirt they would buy for Cyrus. Mariam had selected for her husband another five-pack of white V-necks, the same shirt she had been buying for her husband for thirty years.