“No, I didn’t buy it here and I don’t want to sell it.” Serge reached in his hip pocket. “I want you to adopt it. His current owner needs parenting classes. He’s passed out in the Firebird right now . . . Oh, and he may have a drug problem.”
“Your friend in the car?”
“The hamster, too. He’s being raised in a toxic environment. And when Coleman lost consciousness a few minutes ago, that was my big chance to save him, so it’s not really a kidnapping, right?”
“But I don’t think—”
Serge set the furry critter on the counter. “His name’s Skippy.”
The clerk looked down, then quickly up again with an odd expression.
“What’s the matter?” asked Serge.
“That’s not a hamster.”
“What is it, then?”
“A mouse.”
“Does that affect the adoption?”
“Well, we can always use mice.”
“Good. Great!” Serge bent down to talk to the rodent. “Hear that? You’ve found a loving new home, where you can get clean and sober.”
“Yeah,” added the clerk. “We feed them to the snakes.”
Serge’s eyes flew wide. He snatched the small animal off the counter and clutched it to his chest. “Not Skippy!”
“But it’s just a mouse.”
Serge crashed backward into a sales display. Tiny aquarium castles plunged to the floor. “What kind of monster are you!”
“Look, they pay me shit.”
Serge ran out the door to a jingle of bells.
Coleman sat up in the backseat when Serge peeled out. “What’s going on?” He looked around the car. “Where’s Skippy?”
“Taken into protective foster care.” Serge skidded around a corner. “And we should probably change his name to Mickey.”
“Why?”
They took off in the Firebird. It was noon along the countless finger canals that characterized the city.
A landscaping crew was putting in yeoman duty. Three trucks with trailers and the heavy rigs. Constant buzzing and sawing and people riding other noisy things around. A tiny one-man tractor grunted to a stop.
A ’78 Firebird pulled up to the curb.
Serge approached the man climbing out of the safety cage. “What are you going to do with that?”
“Probably make mulch.” The man wiped sweat and dirt off his forehead. “Why?”
“How much?” asked Serge.
“You want to buy it?”
Serge nodded.
“Okay, fifty bucks. No, a hundred.”
Serge opened his wallet. “Split the difference at seventy-five, and you help me load it in the car.”
“Cool.”
The yardman deftly maneuvered the tractor into position behind the Firebird. He threw a black-knobbed lever, flipping down the front-loader claw and dropping the item into the trunk. The car’s back end bounced on the suspension. Not a remote chance of closing the hood, so it was tied with twine.
Serge dusted dirt off the top of the fenders. “Got a business card?”
“Sure, it’s somewhere in here”—going through one of those thick hoarding wallets on a chain. “There we go.” He handed it to Serge. “What kind of work are you thinking of having done?”
“Stump removal.”
“Huh?” The landscaper narrowed his eyes, staring at the trunk of the Trans Am and the protruding, recently purchased stump.
Serge grabbed his door handle. “Pleasure doing business.” They drove away from the competing whines of small gas-powered engines.
The phone rang. Serge recognized the number in the caller ID.
“Hey, Mahoney, what’s going on?”
“Mahoney mulled the lowdown he was about to lay on Serge like a dirty ward boss with a case of the crabs and a day-old racing form.”
“Mahoney,” said Serge. “You’re doing third person again.”
“Serge was a sharp cookie, like a broad in a gin joint who sees all the angles, from acute to obtuse—”
“Mahoney, look, if it’s about the cases, we’ve been working round the clock. I just picked up a stump.”
“Serge made as much sense as wearing a belt with suspenders.”
“What I could use is a little help on your end,” said Serge. “Call some of your old contacts and get all the police reports with similar dating-bandit MOs. As for the newest victim who hired you, I already told you I only need—”
“Mahoney was sly to Serge’s jones and ready to roll Romans like loaded crap dice that always come up boxcars.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Serge grabbed a pen. “I’m ready for that phone number.”
Mahoney gave it.
“Thanks, I’ll let you know how it works out.”
“. . . Like a one-legged unicycle jockey . . .”
Serge began closing the phone—“ . . . Scootily-bop . . .”—and hung up. He immediately dialed again.
“Hello?”
“Yes, I’m calling about the yellow Corvette for sale in the paper.”
Chapter Eight
MEANWHILE . . .
Cheeto-encrusted fingers tapped a keyboard in an otherwise sterile cubicle.
A mug shot popped up on the screen.
An e-mail was forwarded.
Another file of random statistics opened.
It was an anonymous cubicle, and it could have been anywhere, but this one was in Tallahassee. The man behind the keyboard had an engraved brass nameplate on his desk: WESLEY CHAPEL. It sat on the front of his desk, which was pressed against one of the walls of the cubicle, and the nameplate could not be seen. But that was okay because Wesley wasn’t a people person, which meant he was perfect for his job.
Here’s what Wesley did: He made sense out of nonsense.
And he was the best the company had, sifting and crunching and correlating the white noise of meaningless numbers and GPS coordinates until patterns emerged. One entire floor of the company housed huge mainframes filled with raw, non sequitur information that had been dragnetted from every corner of the Internet. Some were free public records; others databases purchased from numerous companies who valued their customers’ privacy.
His was one of a growing number of firms in a field that had endless buyers lining up for a geometric progression of knowledge. The nascent industry had plenty of niches in which companies could specialize. They variously offered millions of searchable newspaper and magazine articles, indexed scientific papers from leading research universities dating back to 1888, legal precedents and up-to-the-minute Shepardized case law for all fifty states and the federal districts.
Wesley’s company specialized in prying, and it easily had the longest line of clients clamoring for their product: networks wanting to know the volume of cable subscribers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, test marketers seeking the median age of people who bought laundry detergent with credit cards, municipal planners looking for the neighborhood that voted least so they could locate the new sewage transfer station.
They were like the business world’s version of the Elias Sports Bureau. You know, those people who ESPN quote on SportsCenter when they want to know the last year in which the Red Sox gave up an extra-inning blown save on an inside-the-park homer against a switch-hitting platoon infielder born south of the Mason-Dixon with the nickname “Jukes.”
Wesley never needed to reorder business cards, because he didn’t get out much; his were still tucked neatly in a bottom drawer, embossed with the company’s previous name, Event Horizon, Inc. The moniker was an astrophysics term for the point of no return where all matter and even light itself cannot escape the gravity of a black hole. It was meant as an analogy for the moment when the interstellar nebula dust of Internet gibberish is pulled together to form actionable intelligence. The name was way too highbrow for the buyers, and people kept on driving past the building, having no idea or concern about what was going on inside. So the name was changed to Big Dipper Data Management. All the new clients liked the mental image of a soup ladle. The founder of the company had thought up both names, because he’d recently purchased a telescope.