Nick Stephenson - Eight the Hard Way

I sighed. Men.

Taking off my classic-cut gray blazer, I hiked the automatic holstered at my left hip so it didn’t catch on the arm of the old captain’s chair behind my oaken desk. I tossed the jacket on the sofa to my left and reached for the phone on my desk.

When I was in my office, I used my landline as much as possible. It had certain advantages, one of which was the custom-made device it sat on that recorded everything—incoming, outgoing, voice, numbers dialed, messages, the works.

My tech guy Mickey says by 2010 everyone was going to ditch their landlines in favor of wireless, but that was a handful of years away, and I didn’t believe it anyway. He still thinks flying cars are just around the corner. I chalked that up to the same fantasy that promised honest politicians and cheap gas.

I dialed the number on the card.

“Good morning, Ms. Sorkin. This is Cal Corwin of California Investigations,” I said as soon as I heard a woman’s voice on the other end. “You said Cole Sage referred me? How may I help you?”

Silence. Then, “I thought Cole said you were...”

“A man? It’s all right. I get that all the time.” I had a dozen different responses to that reaction ranging from polite to withering. With potential clients, I played nice. “Is that an issue? I have men among my employees, fit for any necessary role.” Not strictly true—the employee part, that was. More like regular freelancers.

“Yes, uh...I have a serious problem, and I need your help.” The woman sounded mid-young, thirties perhaps, like me.

“I’m in my office. Come on by.”

“Ms. Corwin—”

“California. Just call me Cal. Everyone does.”

“All right, uh...Cal. Call me Mira. I thought this was going to be discreet, and I can’t leave my home.”

Thought it was going to be discreet? What is that supposed to mean? And it sounded like she didn’t believe Cal was my real name. What did Cole tell Mira about me? I brushed my dark brown bob back behind my left ear, a nervous habit, and asked, “Can you explain what this is about?”

“Not over the phone. This is a prepaid cell but I want to talk face to face. I want to see what kind of person you are.”

I shrugged mentally. Clients were quirky sometimes, but as long as they paid... “All right. Where are you?”

Mira gave a Mill Valley address and then said, “I’m not entirely sure they aren’t watching the house. I’ll leave the back gate open and you can come in there if you don’t mind.”

I paused a moment as I wrote it down, long enough for Mira to ask, “Did you hear?”

“Yes. I’ll do my best to be discreet . See you within an hour.” I put the phone down, and rather than leaping up to go, let myself think for a few minutes.

A house in Marin County’s Mill Valley meant upper middle class, except for a few older folks that bought long ago and didn’t sell out to the yuppies. Across the Golden Gate Bridge from the City, Marin was upscale for even its downscale residents, rivalled only by San Francisco proper in the price of housing. Mira’s accent had been pure West Coast, though without the stereotypical Valley-hippie-airhead tones the rest of the country associated with California.

The state, not me.

Someone was watching, Mira seemed to think, perhaps tapping her phone or the house itself, and she worried enough to try a bit of cloak and dagger. I tried to tease out more observations, Sherlock Holmes style, but couldn’t come up with anything. I was throwing on my blazer when I heard the groan.

Instinctively my left hand dropped to the butt of my automatic, right reaching for the phone again. That was another reason I like the hard line—911 had a much better response time. “Mickey?” I called, easing over toward the open door at the top of the stairs leading to the floor below.

A strained voice drifted up. “Yeah, boss. Sorry.”

I took my hand off the weapon and descended the steps quickly. On the lower level—technically not a basement, as it walked out the back into a common courtyard-cum-private-parking-lot—I flipped on the light.

“Ow, ow, please, Cal.”

I picked my way across the floor cluttered with computer gear and rotated the blinds open, then turned the ceiling light back off from the nearest switch. The overcast of a Bay Area October provided soft but sufficient illumination to reveal the corpulent body of Mickey Tucker, my—well, it was hard to say just what he was. Lost soul, hacker extraordinaire, sloppy puppy, champion online gamer, research assistant. Mickey was all of those things, and often put his considerable talents to work for the relatively cheap price of computer gear, crash space and food money.

“Mickey, how many times have I asked you to just close the door at the top of the stairs and move the little slider to ‘ The Wizard is IN .’ Someday I’ll end up shooting your sorry ass.”

“Some days I wish you would.” Mickey sat up on the old overstuffed sofa that served him as a crash couch and rubbed his eyes with the back of his pudgy hands. He reached for a half-empty thousand-pill bottle of generic aspirin sitting on the subwoofer and palmed a handful into his mouth, following it up with a swig from one of the dozen half-filled plastic bottles of flat diet soda scattered around the place.

“All-nighter?”

“A double. Been here since Saturday, trying to beat the boss on Level 666. No cheats.”

“Did you?”

Mickey shook his head. “No. Think I passed out. Woke up on the floor. Crawled to the couch...”

I sniffed. “At least you still have something to look forward to.”

“Got any food?” he asked hopefully.

“No, but I have a case, which means you have a job and you can buy yourself breakfast. Stay near your gear, all right? I need you to actually work today.”

Mickey licked his lips and put on puppy eyes above his scraggly beard. “Umm...”

Understanding perfectly, I took out a money clip from my front jeans pocket and peeled off a twenty. “That’ll get you something from Ritual. Here.” I photocopied the business card, back and front, on the all-in-one printer, and then handed it to Mickey, taking the copy for myself. “See if you can lift the original number from under that scribble, and then find out all you can about Miranda Sorkin, pharmacist.”

“Above or below the line?”

I chewed my inner lip. “Above, for now. I’ll let you know when to start tunneling.” I could afford to hire Mickey as a researcher, but didn’t want to promise him a lot more for hacking until I found out what this job would pay. While I wasn’t behind on my bills right now, I detested a negative cash flow like Mickey hated losing his T1 line.

“You got a working sniffer?” I went on.

“Sure...around here somewhere.” Mickey rooted among some equipment and came up with a box the size of an old transistor radio. I took it, checked the battery, and thanked him with a nod, sliding it into my blazer pocket.

Exiting the walkout, I approached Molly, my royal blue Subaru Impreza, parked in the courtyard. Her parking space was part of the office building deed, and of my two cars, Molly was the more practical and could stand the weather best. I preferred to walk the couple of blocks from where I lived at Mother’s house to work, and keep Molly handy here.

I gave the car a once-over by habit and then slid behind the steering wheel with a contented sigh. Something about the driver’s seat of a rally car felt like home. No, not home . It felt like where I belonged .

Molly’s supercharged two-liter screamed and her grippy rain tires would have squealed if the pavement hadn’t been wet. While I had foregone all of the external markers of a hot rally ride when my girl had been customized, on the inside the car was a regionals-class racer. I indulged my rally hobby whenever I had both time and money to spare, which meant not often enough.