The Inner Circle (24 page)

“Come here,” the father shouted. Naked, he extended his step and grabbed hold of Carver, threw him to the floor. “You just don’t learn, do you?”
 

Carver scrambled to his feet. He ran straight for the couch. The father’s long legs helped him reach Carver almost immediately. He grabbed him again, but this time it wasn’t fast enough. By then Carver had reached down between the cushions and grasped the revolver he had hidden there that afternoon and pulled it back out.
 

“Stop!” Carver shouted, aiming the gun at the father.
 

The father was less than ten feet away. “Come on, sport, you don’t want to do that. Guns are dangerous.”
 

“
You’re
dangerous,” Carver said.
 

“Now, now, sport. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
 

The father, smiling sweetly, took a step toward Carver.
 

The gun shook in Carver’s hands. He said, “You’re a bad man.”
 

The smile faded. The father’s eyes went cold. He growled, “And you’re a nosy little nigger.”
 

It was the very first time Carver had ever been called that name.
 

The father took another step toward Carver.
 

Carver pulled the trigger.
 

Obviously, Carver had never fired a gun before. While he’d aimed it at the father’s chest, nervousness caused his hands to shake and the shot went wide, shattering one of the living room windows.
 

The father laughed. “And you’re stupid, too.”
 

No, he wasn’t stupid. If he was stupid, he would have shot the father back upstairs, when the father had opened the bedroom door. But Carver didn’t want to take the chance of shooting one of the girls in the process. He wanted to make sure they were safe. He even wanted to make sure his two stepbrothers were safe. He wanted to make sure everyone was safe.
 

So Carver readjusted, aimed again, and fired once more.
 

The bullet struck the father in the chest.
 

The father stumbled backward. He tripped over his own feet, went sprawling to the floor.
 

Carver kept the gun aimed until he knew the father was dead. He watched the blood soak into the carpet. Then he set the gun down on the floor and sat on the couch and waited for the police.

34

Not only did the Kid drive a Dodge Neon, but he lived in a small house located back on a county road a half mile off the main highway. It was a one-story ranch style, a single car garage attached to the side. It was painted blue with red trim along its shutters and window frames. Many of its roof shingles were worn and faded. The front lawn featured a stone birdbath, circled by a miniature white picket fence. The grass looked an inch too long.
 

As the Kid pulled into the driveway and pressed the button to open the garage door, I said, “Huh.”
 

He stopped the car right in front of the garage, waiting for the slow creak of the door as it lifted. “Go ahead,” he said. “Say it.”
 

“What do you mean?”
 

He gave me a blank look.
 

“I just”—I glanced at the house, at the lawn, back at the Kid—“I was expecting something different.”
 

“Yeah, Ben,” the Kid said. The garage door had lifted the entire way and he drove the Neon forward. “Fuck you too.”
 

When we got out of the car, the garage door already creaking shut, the Kid made me carry the box that contained Carver’s hard drive.
 

“We’re going to head straight down to the basement,” he said.
 

“What, I don’t get the bachelor pad tour?”
 

The Kid ignored me and walked inside. We passed the laundry room, started toward what appeared to be the kitchen, but the Kid stopped and opened a door. Flicked on the light switch just inside and motioned for me to head down.
 

The steps were carpeted a yellowish-orange. The walls had a fake wood paneling motif. I had been expecting a lot of computers and wasn’t disappointed. There were eight of them, all spread out around the carpeted basement.
 

The Kid went immediately to one of the tables and turned on the monitor. He waved at me to bring over Carver’s hard drive.
 

“Huh,” I said again.
 

The Kid sat down on a large leather office chair and started typing. “What now?”
 

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just ... it’s not like I’d pictured.”
 

“Yeah? And how did you picture it?”
 

“I don’t know.” I pointed at a microwave in the corner. “Is that where you make all of your infamous popcorn?”
 

“Actually, I’ve been trying to keep away from popcorn this past year. I only use that to make tea.”
 

“
Tea?
”
 

“Herbal tea’s good for you, in case you weren’t aware.”
 

“But ... where are all the movie posters? I thought Carver said your basement was covered in Terry Gilliam film posters.”
 

“Yeah,” the Kid said. “
Was
.”
 

He continued typing for another couple of moments. Paused and swiveled around in his chair, grabbed the box from my hands and set it on the ground.
 

“What are you talking about—
was
?”
 

The Kid took the hard drive out of the box, set it on the table. He produced some wires out of nowhere and started connecting the hard drive to his computer.
 

“Like I said,
was
. Thanks to you, I had to move.”
 

“What?”
 

“Two years ago, after you wrote that thing and I posted it? I realized too late you kind of identified me. Not entirely, but enough that if the wrong people wanted to look in the right places, they could figure it out. It was too late to go in and change the records and still stay where I was, so I changed the records and got the hell out of there.”
 

Another leather office chair, not as large as the one the Kid currently used, was by another table. I pulled it over and sat down.
 

“What are you saying?”
 

The Kid was still busy connecting the hard drive and computer. He paused momentarily, glanced at me, shook his head.
 

“Nothing. But it’s just—all of you guys think I’m made of money.”
 

“You’re not?”
 

This time he glared at me. “It’s not even worth saying ‘fuck you’ to you anymore, is it?”
 

He turned back to the computers, talking as he worked.
 

“But here’s the thing—I make good money doing my white hat stuff. Pull in a nice yearly salary, even though it’s spec work. But keeping myself covered, and making sure all of you out there at Graham’s stay covered too? That nearly puts me in the red.”
 

“You never mentioned this before.”
 

“And what good would it have done had I said anything? I’m not bitching about it, you know, but it just seems you all take it for granted. Like when we pulled that switch on them two years ago, the jet that flew you and Carver to California? When all was said and done, that whole operation, just with getting the jet alone to fly where we wanted and in the time frame we needed, that cost about forty grand.”
 

I leaned forward in the chair, tried to make sense of what wires he was putting where.
 

“Well, you’re a hacker,” I said. “Why can’t you just, I don’t know, hack into some company’s money and siphon out some funds? You know, like they did in
Office Space
. A hundredth of a penny or something like that.”
 

The Kid shot me another glare. “I’m not a thief, Ben.”
 

“I never said you were.”
 

“I’ve never stolen anything a day in my life.”
 

“Kid, I was just joking. Don’t—”
 

“All the money I ever had I’ve earned legitimately. Got it?”
 

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, Kid. I got it.”
 

The Kid continued glaring at me another moment or so, then got back to work.
 

“And if I need money real bad, you know who I ask? My boy Titus. I can always trust on him to help me out.”
 

“Speaking of Titus,” I said, “how much do you know about him?”
 

The cables now connected, the Kid turned on Carver’s hard drive and waited for it to warm up. “What do you mean?”
 

“Like do you ...”
 

“Know he’s a dwarf?” He tilted his head, cocked an eye at me, before he started typing. “Yeah, I know everything there is to know about him. I’m not stupid, Ben. I might have no friends except for you guys, but I’m not starved for attention. I know where Titus lives—which is not in Immokalee, like he says. I know about his trailer, about his pet raccoon, about how his parents fucked him over when he was a kid. Yeah, Ben, I know all of that. Most importantly, I know he’s a good guy. He’s got heart. I check into people before I trust them one hundred and ten percent.”
 

“Really,” I said. “Does that include all your friends in
World of Warcraft
?”
 

Besides our voices, the only sound filling the basement was the typing of the keyboard. Now that stopped.
 

The Kid glanced at me, his mouth slightly opened.
 

I smiled. “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.”
 

“
Any
way,” the Kid said, “Titus is really good at what he does. Like,
really
good. He’s probably a better hacker than me, to be honest.”
 

“Coming from an egomaniac like you, that’s impressive.”
 

“I never wanted to tell him about the games and Simon and all that shit. But he found it first, even brought it to my attention. I tried to play it off like I had no idea what he was talking about, but I got scared for him, you know?”
 

I nodded. “He told me that.”
 

“Did he tell you about his map?”
 

“What map?”
 

The Kid paused, moved and clicked his mouse. A new window filled the screen. It showed the continental United States. Different colored lines crisscrossed the map.
 

“What are all those?”
 

“Every game I had saved—and believe me, I have a shitload—I sent to him. For each game he determined the location of where each player wakes up in the country, the route they take, where they eventually end up. He mapped it all out, each and every game.”
 

“How many games?”
 

“Nearly one hundred. See these dots here and here?” The Kid made circles with the cursor. “The bigger ones are the starting and ending points of each game. The smaller dots are the stops each player makes along the way. You know, the shit Simon makes people do. Here’s your route.”
 

He clicked on a line that began near the top of California and traveled halfway down the state, then started west, all the way into Indiana, where I had turned around and headed back to the Chicago.
 

“Obviously your game was one of the anomalies, but it should still give you an idea.”
 

I stared at the map. All the different dots and lines. They nearly covered the entire thing. Some states had more dots and lines than other states. A few states only had lines, no dots.
 

“The Midwest doesn’t seem to be too popular,” I said. “Look at Kansas and Missouri. Just a few lines, no dots.”
 

“Shit, dude, is that surprising? There ain’t
nothing
to do in Kansas and Missouri.” He closed out the window and brought back up the window he was working on. He typed some more, then pushed away from the table, started cracking his knuckles and fingers. “There.”
 

On the screen now was a box with rapidly moving words and numbers. The words and numbers were coming so fast it was impossible to make any sense of them.
 

“What is it exactly?”
 

“The key inside Carver’s email program.”
 

“How long will it take?”
 

“Shouldn’t be too long. Maybe five minutes, maybe ten.”
 

“And then?”
 

“And then you’re one step closer to getting the fuck out of my house.”
 

I smiled, started to say something else, but a noise upstairs stopped me. It was the noise of a door opening and closing, of footsteps tramping over the floor above our heads.
 

I looked at the Kid.
 

The Kid looked at me. His face had paled a little, his eyes had widened.
 

“Who’s this?” I said. “Your girlfriend?”
 

“No, Ben, don’t—” the Kid began, but I was already up and out of my chair, striding across the yellowish-orange carpet to the stairs. Hurrying up the steps, opening the door, then taking a left into the kitchen.
 

And stopping at once.
 

There were two people there. A young Hispanic woman and an old white woman. The old woman was being supported by a metal walker and the Hispanic girl who held onto her arm.
 

The Hispanic woman was startled by my presence. When she first glanced up there was a familiarity in her face, like she knew just who I was, but then when she realized I wasn’t who she had expected, that familiarity turned to shock.