Housebroken (17 page)

“Oh, uh, three. Two. Six . . . or seven.”

Dr. Cheverou’s face back in Blake’s. Their eyes met, and in the doctor’s Blake saw pity. Then the doctor slapped him across the face, hard—jolting.

“You bring me here? To these monsters?”

Another slap, Blake too slow to stop it or move out of its way.

Maybe it hadn’t been pity.

“Whoa, whoa, Doc!” Joje was suddenly there, grabbing the doctor’s upraised hand and saving Blake from . . . what? Shame?

Dr. Cheverou spat in Blake’s face, then glared at Joje. “Let me go. No one will know about this. I know to keep secrets.”

Blake watched as the doctor’s face turned from a grimace of hate to pain. He bent downward, Joje no longer holding his hand, but squeezing it—crushing it.

“I don’t want to hear you asking to leave again, Doc. Understand?” Joje said.

Dr. Cheverou nodded through welling eyes.

Joje stood over the now-kneeling doctor, not an edge of menace in his voice despite his vice-like grip on Dr. Cheverou’s hand. “You’re a guest and this . . . is like a vacation. Well, more like a staycation. I’m going to need the password to your phone as well as your e-mail so we can make sure your staff knows you left town.” Dr. Cheverou nodded. “Now how’s our boy doing? Is he okay?”

“Is poor light . . . difficult without tools,” the doctor said.

“You’re not getting your tools,” Joje said.

Dr. Cheverou snorted. “He has concussion.”

“Will he be okay?” Joje asked.

“Please. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Joje twisted the doctor’s hand so abruptly the string of bones snapping sounded more like a line of firecrackers, one going off after another. He released the hand, and the doctor crumbled to the floor, weeping.

“Thank you, Doc,” Joje said. “And remember our rules.”

“You are a small man with small dreams,” the doctor said, spit flying with his words.

Joje’s tic was back, his right eye blinking, mouth twitching in spasms. “This, Bwake, is the kind of fight I had hoped you would have.” He spun on the doctor with such speed, foot rising to Dr. Cheverou’s chest, it lifted the doctor almost completely from the floor as he barreled into the wall, wheezing.

The doctor reached for his fallen glasses with his good hand, bringing them slowly to his face, hand trembling. He had barely caught his breath when he looked back up at Joje. “I was wrong, not small man. Puny.”

Joje just smiled. “Tie him back up, Dwew. And mind the doc’s hand. Bwake and I need to do some planning.”

There were two main warehouses where Symbio housed servers in California, one in Lancaster, the other in Indio, and while they were only separated by about 150 miles, the amount of time to cross that distance in traffic would be more akin to six hours. Give or take an hour. Add the fact that if the files had been requested, they’d already be in someone’s hard drive in the Westlake office, and they needed to be in three places at once. Salvaging what remained of Joje’s “pwoject” would be more difficult than resuscitating Betti on Blake’s shattered Cyborg phone.

He shared with Joje his honest opinion: they were too late. There was no way to know where the information was being housed, at whose terminal, on which server or location. They were looking for a needle in the sewage tunnels of Los Angeles, and in the sewers of LA, there was an abundance of discarded needles.

“If you can’t find a way, we’re going to need a larger trunk,” Joje said, arms folded as he sat across from Blake at his office desk. “Are we clear?”

Yeah, we’re queer
, Blake thought.

He had a way, it just wasn’t one he was comfortable employing. But it wouldn’t be the first time he had been left with no options. “I’ve got a guy,” he said.

“How long will it take?”

“Depends. On what he wants.”

Joje’s mouth began to twitch, his lip riding down the side of his face. “Whatever you need can be arranged. Your money’s safe.”

It was Blake’s turn to smile. “It won’t be that easy.”

Rory Shepherd was the Neo of hackers. In the early 2000s, he had hacked his way into the top ten companies of the Fortune 100, sending the CEO of each company an interoffice e-mail from the former CEO demanding their immediate resignation. A third of those e-mails had been sent from the grave. In ’06 he breached the security of the top twenty universities, lowering tuitions by sliding a decimal point one step to the left. In the twenty-four to forty-eight hours it took for the universities to become aware, there was a combined total of over fourteen million in lost revenues, though most universities had gone back and successfully litigated the difference from those enrolling. In 2009 Rory stormed the gates of Google, sending, albeit for a brief minute and six seconds, users of the one box search engine giant to an “under construction” page. Rumors abounded that Mark Zuckerberg had sent the request to Rory as a dare, one to which Rory responded by simultaneously sending Facebook users to the almost-abandoned wastelands of Myspace. To Zuckerberg’s credit, the lapse in time of that leap was a fraction of Google’s, lasting just under twenty-four seconds.

That Rory and Blake were on a first-name basis was something Blake both was proud of and despised. It also meant Blake’s chances of getting his help would be next to impossible.

A paranoid recluse, Rory had a system that prevented him from being discovered by authorities and those who would have loved to extradite him, among other things. He only worked with a client once. No exceptions.

And somehow Blake needed to change his mind.

“I’m going to need to break some of your rules for this to work,” Blake said.

Joje looked at Blake with skepticism. “Go on.”

“There’s only one person I know who could get what we want out of Symbio. The problem is, I don’t think he’ll do it.”

“Unless?”

“I tell him what’s really happening,” Blake said. “I don’t think he’ll do anything about it, like calling the cops. I’d stake my life on it. This guy—he’s . . . disconnected from the world in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s like everything to him is a big video game. People’s lives—they’re just actors, mannequins. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything.”

“So why would he care about you?” Joje asked.

“He won’t. But maybe he’ll be fascinated enough to want to watch, to be a part of it, and that’s what we need. He doesn’t do jobs for money. What he requests, it’s . . . well, it’s always something you’ll regret giving. He wants people to pay for his service. And the people that know him or how to reach him? Let’s just say money would be too easy.”

“I like this guy already,” Joje said. “What do we need to do?”

“Send a fax.”

Joje picked up a small shard of the crystal globe, barely recognizable. He turned it over in his hand. “I’d have no idea who you’re sending it to.”

“Neither would I,” Blake said. “That’s just the way it works.”

Blake could see Joje’s mind tearing the idea apart. “Joje, I will do anything to keep my family alive, and this is the only way I can think to keep those files from JT’s hands.”

“There are other ways to destroy files than over the Internet,” Joje said.

“Not at three locations. Say you blow up one. The cops will be all over Symbio so fast we’d never reach the parking lot of the others. This is the best I’ve got. It’s all I’ve got.”

The fax had just gone through when Drew broke into the room, double doors splitting apart and banging against either wall.

“Adam’s gone.”

The front yard was empty, the only motion on the street from a few errant seagulls circling overhead. In the rear of the house, a discarded shirt, still inside out, lay on the patio, the only sign Adam had been there.

He did it
.

A quiet calm filled Blake as he watched the waves tumble in below the edge of their backyard. That feeling, that things could only get worse, was a sailboat set to sea, so small he could barely make it out. Adam was safe. The rest, well, it no longer mattered.

Joje ordered Blake back inside. He carried a chair from the kitchen, placing it next to the bound doctor, telling Blake to sit. Dr. Cheverou’s hand had turned a blistering purple, beads of sweat dripping from his forehead onto the fresh duct tape covering his mouth.

“Where is he?” Joje asked.

“How the hell should I know? I was unconscious,” Blake said.

“You’re the one who said he could go without me,” Drew quipped, wanting to avoid whatever outburst was about to happen.

“So where would he go?” Joje asked.

“The police?” Blake said.

“No. He’s having too much fun for that.” The certainty in Joje’s words was frightening. He pushed aside one of the metal racks and pressed his hand to Jenna’s face. Then slapped her.

Jenna opened her eyes wide, the memory of her whereabouts seeming to slowly sink back in. Blake felt his heart racing. He also found himself unable to lift a finger to stop him.

“Adam’s gone,” Joje said. “Did he tell you where he was going? Did he say anything?”

Jenna arched her back, repositioning her body on the couch without moving her legs. After a long moment she responded. “He said good-bye.”

She looked at Blake with a heaviness he hadn’t seen in years. Suddenly he wasn’t so certain about Adam’s escape.

“I haven’t given him enough attention. I’ve been so preoccupied,” Joje said. The sincerity and hurt on his face was at odds with everything Blake thought he had known about Joje. “Will you help me look for him?” he asked.

“He’s my son,” Blake said.

“Dwew, I, uh . . . I’m gonna have to leave you, but I’ll need the gun. Don’t yet trust Bwakey. Will you be okay?”

Drew glanced between his two hostages, an old man with a shattered hand, gagged and tied to a chair, and a crippled woman without the ability to even stand on her own. “Wait here,” he said, disappearing down the hall.

Joje began to pace. “Does he surf?”

Blake shook his head. Not a lot of surfing instructors in West Virginia.

“He asked if he could go for a swim,” Joje continued, his mind keeping pace with his feet. “Bwake, you were out. He wouldn’t have known if you were coming back . . . Jenna immobile . . . it’s the first time he’s been separated from Dwew . . .”

A loud scraping sound echoed from the hall, preceding Drew’s arrival, the sound of a metal cabinet being dragged across the floor. Blake flinched, the grinding noise reminding him of a dentist’s drill. Drew finally appeared, the noise coming to a screeching halt. He lifted the object triumphantly in the air.

It wasn’t nearly as heavy as it had sounded, the metal grinding against wood surprisingly deceptive. In his hands Drew held the katana that had been mounted in the guest room. The Japanese sword. The scabbard’s end was tipped in metal, decorative red and gold lines running down its length. Like the gouged line now running down the grain of the floor to his hall, Blake imagined.

Awkwardly hefting the sheath in the crook of his arm, Drew slid the sword out with his unbandaged right hand. The blade was two and a half feet long and shone like liquid, a long groove running along the upper end of both sides, what Blake had heard referred to as a “blood groove.” Their decorator may have gotten most things wrong, but this blade was without doubt authentic.

The sword swooshed through the air, the sharp whine like three whistles simultaneously blowing. “Who needs a gun?” Drew asked.

Joje only smiled.

Blake drove slowly, riding his brakes as they followed the curve of Vanilla Banks Road toward its eventual dead end. He had only driven past their house the first time they had come to the Cliffs, when it was still one of thirty or so houses they had been looking at. How any house goes from one of thirty to “the one” was still a mystery to him.

The road sank into shadows, the sky at its tipping point, night winning the siege against day. The last of the sun’s rays swabbed at the clouds, pinks and oranges fading into coarser replications only hinting of their former beauty.

“We may need to go door-to-door,” Joje said between yelling Adam’s name. With his lisp it almost sounded like he wanted Blake to dance do-si-do. The top of the convertible was down. Blake wondered if there was anyone on the street to even hear them.

They passed a modern behemoth of a house, its tetragonal center feeding off into castled pillars, at least three stories high. Like lighthouses. The roundabout driveway behind its elaborate gate was empty, not a single light on in the house.

Adam wouldn’t hole up in an abandoned house as empty as his own. With no sirens in the distance or helicopters swirling overhead, Blake was resigned to agree with Joje that his son hadn’t gone to the cops. So where the hell would he have gone?

The paved street dead-ended into a spectacular rock formation, a natural jutting of black stone sticking from the ground as if the gods had hurled down spears that had petrified over the ages. Wisps of sand blew and circled across their tops. Beyond, a gloomy blanket of ocean stretched endlessly, the rotation of waves crashing forward, then drawing back.

Forward and back. Forward and back. An eternity of marching in the same place with only the guise of progress to keep you from stopping.

Blake put the car in park and turned the engine off.

Adam said he was
going for a swim
.

As the colors in the sky bled out their final dribbles, Blake realized how close he was to losing his son for good.

Forward and back. Forward and back.

He hoped he was wrong, but in the mental state his son had left in, he couldn’t imagine any other outcome. Not for a forlorn teenager whose family had just been ripped away in a sweeping moment.

At the cliff’s edge they peered down at the waves crashing against the base. The noise of their breaking was formidable, white froth flying into the air, mist on their faces despite the distance. There would have been a beach there just two hours ago—a small one, granted, but wide enough to trod across for a boy with nowhere to go. Boys with nowhere to go rarely required wide paths.

The cliff curved around a bend moving inland. The dirt at Blake’s feet suddenly crumbled beneath him, a stone dislodging and tumbling down. He took a step back, his foot catching on a rock and sending him reeling forward—his arms flailed. He was going to fall . . .