“I’ll have to check it out,” said Patrick.
“How’s the case?”
A pause. “Honestly, the farther we move into this thing, the more tangled up it gets.”
“Well, at least it’s interesting, though.” Tessa thought she knew which image she liked best, but she scrolled through one more Edgar Allan Poe site just to make sure.
“That’s not exactly the word I would use. People’s lives are in danger.”
“No, that part’s horrible. It’s just, I mean, pain-that’s what’s interesting.”
“What are you talking about, Tessa?”
How to put this without sounding unfeeling?… “I mean, think of a good story. It’s only interesting if something goes wrong. No one wants to read a story about someone who always does what she should and gets what she wants. So like, Poe’s stories are interesting because all sorts of bad things happen. In The Pit and the Pendulum, things just get worse and worse all the way through right up till the end, so it’s great.”
“I could deal with things not always getting worse and worse.”
“It’s not that I mean I want people to get hurt…” She scrolled past Poe’s short stories to his poems. She knew what she was looking for, but the setup of the website was lame. Very twentieth century.
Hard to find stuff. “It’s just when you read a story you want to worry about the main character. You want to wonder if he’ll catch the bad guys, if he’ll get the girl, if he’ll survive at the end of the book. It doesn’t always happen, you know. The more danger the more interesting the story. We want things to keep getting worse.”
She thought about that for a second. “Maybe we like stories so much because there’s something in us that just wants to see other people suffer.”
Patrick was slow in responding. “That’s a very troubling thought.
Let’s hope you’re not right.” He took a breath. “I’m sorry I have to change the subject, but I don’t have a lot of time here. I’m wondering, when do you want to meet for supper?”
She paused the cursor in the middle of the page. “Um… yeah
… Could we, like, make it late? I wanna go for a walk, maybe visit Balboa Park or something.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. She did want to go on a walk and she did want to visit Balboa Park before leaving San Diego; it just wasn’t all she wanted to do.
“Balboa Park, huh? That’s where I’m meeting Dr. Werjonic tomorrow morning.”
“Dr. Calvin Werjonic?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“You wrote about him in your books. In the parts where I…”
“Didn’t fall asleep.”
“Right. Maybe I could meet him too. If it’s OK.”
“Well, we’ll be talking about…” Patrick paused and then must have decided to change what he was going to say because he actually agreed to her request. “Yeah. That would be good. I’m sure he’d like to meet you too. So you’re going to go on a walk this afternoon, then?”
She decided on the tattoo she wanted. There. Yes. It was perfect, really, for a bunch of reasons. Tessa sent it to print and started gathering up her things. “Yeah, or maybe check out some stuff downtown. Then we’ll have supper.”
Silence. A bit too long. “OK. That’ll work. I’ll call you later to figure out a time.”
“OK.”
“Have fun. And be careful.”
Tessa’s friends had told her that in the last couple years tattoo studios were getting all uptight about making kids get their parents’ permission before letting them get inked. Someone’s mom must have freaked out and sued a tattoo parlor somewhere because her kid came home all tatted up. Because of that, and since Tessa wasn’t eighteen yet, she’d need to go to a certain kind of tattoo studio-the kind that wouldn’t require a parent’s signature; the kind of tattoo place that definitely wouldn’t take checks or credit cards. So, the first thing she needed was cash. A couple hundred dollars probably.
She stopped by the counter. Waited for the printout.
She’d saved up almost two hundred dollars from helping edit other kids’ term papers back home-three dollars per page to clean up the manuscripts. Not cheating or anything, just helping them make their writing sound halfway intelligent. It was amazing how bad most of the kids in her class were at writing-and how willing they were to pay someone to fix it. Anyway, if she worked at it, she could probably make back the money in two or three weeks.
OK, so visit an ATM.
She paid for the printout, the coffee, and the computer time and stepped outside.
An hour ago when she’d entered the cafe, she’d seen a bank halfway down the block. They should have an ATM machine. She started for the bank and peered up between two towering buildings at the narrow strip of Southern California sky above her. Then she pulled out her notebook and wrote, “Strands of future rain scratch at the sky as the concrete rises up to meet my feet.”
Yes. She could tinker with the wording later, but it wasn’t bad for a first draft.
Tessa found the ATM machine, slipped her card in, punched a few numbers, and retrieved her cash.
OK. Time to cover up some corrupted soil.
43
3:51 p.m.
4 hours 9 minutes until Cassandra’s deadline After calling Tessa, I returned to the conference room. As I waited for the team to gather, I couldn’t help but think about the video.
I hated to admit it, but this video wasn’t as unique as I wished it was. Videos of torture and abuse have become disturbingly popular among people who think it’s cool to see others getting mutilated, raped, or killed, and who just can’t get enough of it from the torture porn websites and the new torrent of shock-and-awe splatter movies.
But these days, special effects aren’t enough. Now, viewers want to see the real thing.
And finally, technology has advanced enough to let them.
With the click of a mouse you can watch footage of terrorists beheading American hostages, of young children getting sodom-ized in a pedophile’s basement, of women in northern India being gang-raped by dacoit bandits, of Burmese political prisoners being tortured and then assassinated. Any time of day you can watch the most horrifying things humans do to each other from the comfort of your living room. Just boot up a computer, surf to your favorite video sharing site, and watch other human beings suffer and die.
I could only hope that the video of Cassandra hadn’t been posted yet.
In 2006, after the death of the “Crocodile Hunter,” Steve Irwin, the footage of him being killed by the stingray was stolen from the police storage facility in Queensland, Australia, and posted on the web. Within hours, it shot to the top of all the major video viewing sites and stayed there for months. Even now, two and a half years later, it still receives thousands of views every day.
I remember Ralph talking to me about all this a few months ago.
“Twenty-first-century rubbernecking,” he said with a profound sadness. “Everyone wants to peek over the yellow crime scene tape, see if there’s a body in the wreck on the other side of the road. It used to be just from your car. Now, it’s from your laptop computer, your cubicle, your cell phone.”
I shook my head. “Isn’t there enough pain in the world already?
Enough death to satisfy people?”
“I guess not,” he said.
Nope.
I guess there isn’t.
Maybe Tessa was right. Maybe humans do find pain interesting. Maybe there is something in us that wants to see other people suffer. I hoped not, but the evidence from real life made me think she might be right.
Creighton Melice caught sight of movement in the video monitor of the camera he’d set up outside the warehouse’s south side entrance.
A police car.
He grabbed his gun and watched as the car pulled to a stop in the warehouse’s parking lot.
An officer stepped out of the car, and then, so did someone else.
Randi.