The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (14 page)

He meant the terror plot.

She made no answer. He
shrugged.

I wouldn’t put it past her.

Now that he had time to actually
comprehend it, there was a hot roast beef submarine in the bag as
well—and going by that smell, she had remembered to load it up with
extra onions and the juice, that thin, runny pale juice that the
Greek boys always squirted on there just before they were
done.

Everybody liked the juice. They never
would tell you what was in it. Scott hadn’t seen it lately, nor
even tasted such a thing in years.

He heaved a deep sigh and reached for
the bag.

Who knows, maybe it was all worth
it.

Up until then, he’d never really
thought his life worth risking for anything. Anything at
all.

Or anyone. Maybe that was what he
meant to say.

This was a whole new way of looking at
things.

Scary shit.

He turned to face Betty for a
moment.

“
My life is worth risking.
That means something, Betty.” Then he turned away. “It means
something.”

Throw that into the mix.

She gave him a look, of which he was
distinctly oblivious.

He snapped the can open.

“
Oh, Lord.” He slugged it
back, almost half a can on the first drink.

He thought about it for a
minute.

She obviously thought there was
something worth risking. There was something worth running away
for. Or maybe he meant to say there was something worth running
away from. Not that that made any sense at all.

It was all he could do, just to try
and gag down that first bite, and maybe try and get some kind of a
handle on all of these sudden and rapid mood-swings.

“
Hold onto your sandwich
there, Scott. We’re entering the traffic stream.”

“
What kind of a car is
this, anyway?” There was a crack of thunder and then another sound,
a distinct roar, drumming on the roof of the vehicle.

Their timing would appear to be
impeccable. She turned down the radio a bit. It was raining heavily
now, and their faces would be obscured for the traffic cams. As for
the vehicle, he was afraid to ask, although he certainly meant
to.

They had about twelve minutes on the
freeway going by the weather radar, and then she had another place
to go to ground all picked out. She took it up to
one-thirty-five.

“
It’s a Ford, a station
wagon. A nice medium blue colour—there are a million of them out
there, and that’s just this model year.”

“
Station wagon? When did
they come back?”

“
Yeah. They’ve been
popular for four or five years now, Scott.”

“
Well, you learn something
new every day. So…ah, what else? It’s obviously stolen, right? I
mean, you didn’t use my credit card…?”

She snickered.

“
No, you’d never get that
paid off, would you?” She went on. “It’s a stolen car,
Scott.”

“
See, I knew
that.”

There was a long silence.

“
There’s more.”

“
Really?”

“
Yes.”

Scott slumped up against the window.
After sleeping on the ground, and going hungry for eighteen solid
hours, all he wanted was to feel safe, to be in a room. To be
indoors.

“
There are fifteen Filter
King vacuum cleaners in the back, Scott.”

He snorted.

Scott reached over and gave Betty’s
knee a squeeze.

“
I sense a
story.”

“
Well, I saw a guy
stealing it, and then I kind of took it off of him.” Her voice was
warm and mellow. “He was very good with security systems. I’ll give
him that much.”

“
Well. That
sucks.”

Her laugh made up for one or two
things.

Maybe not everything, but one or two
things.

Chapter Ten

At one time Gene and Francine had been
as thick as thieves. That was before his promotion and the pull of
higher administrative duties. They had gone through a lot of doors
together, and while the bond was still strong, as friends they had
drifted apart.

The conversation was lagging. She
looked tired more than anything, although there was still a chance
she could get home by six-thirty or so.

In which case, why call a babysitter
at all? Gene could sympathize, but no real harm done.

“
The chief thinks I’m sort
of dispensable.” Gene chuckled self-consciously. “It’s like, you’re
just sitting there watching the people work. I swear, it was on the
tip of his tongue.”

The chief wasn’t exactly known for
tact in the department, and all press announcements were carefully
crafted. All but the most sensational announcements were made by
junior press officers, but every once in a while a hostile
journalist got the chance to ask the wrong question of Old Blood
and Guts. It didn’t take too much to set him off.

“
Yeah. I wondered about
that.”

“
The damned thing is worth
millions. What interests me is key words.” He blinked, thinking
back on their visit to SimTech. “For one thing, we were presented
with three, pretty heavy hitters if I am not mistaken. And then
they really didn’t say much, did they.”

They wanted a good long look at
us.

Her eyebrows rose, although normally
she was the patient sort and a good listener. Her thoughts were on
home and a couple of energetic teeny-boppers who could get in all
sorts of trouble without ever leaving their bedrooms.

“
No, seriously. What were
their key words? I mean, specifically…that crazy old
man.”

“
Who? You mean, Doctor
Piqua?”

“
Yeah—the
doctor.”

She stretched out her spine, rising up
in the seat. Two more hours to go.

She looked over.

“
Shit. He said this is
their first major malfunction.”

“
Uh-huh.”

She stared at Gene.

“
Well. That’s just
bullshit…right?”

His eyebrows went up.

“
What do you think,
Francine?”

She gave a sardonic, quirky twitch of
her mouth.

“
Hah.”

She thought some more.

“
So where’s the key
word?”

“
What if it’s
major?”

Francine’s dark eyes glazed slightly
and her gaze drifted to the window behind Gene’s
profile.

Thin scrub, brightening up nicely with
mid-spring temperatures and all the rain, sped by in a
blur.

“
A major malfunction? What
else did he say, in terms of key words.”

“
He said it was their
first. He said they’re eager to get her back.”

Gene’s voice was soft and far
away.

“
Would I ever like to be a
bug on the wall in one of their meetings…”

He chewed on his lower lip. A hand
came up and stroked the bristles on the chin.

“
And that Burch character
mentioned public safety and liabilities.”

“
I suppose I can see their
point. I mean, they must have all the usual problems with anything
wireless and computer-based these days. Constant upgrades to beat
the constant attempts at hacking. A constant stream of
cyber-attacks from overseas…bugs, glitches, viruses, and there were
the recalls of the early household models.” Francine really only
knew what she had been told, read or seen on TV. “No doubt they
have to be careful what they say.”

“
Yes.” The trouble was
they did say it, and they weren’t real shy about it, either.
“Exactly. But they have to say something.”

He thought about that for a while:
they were stating the obvious.

They were being helpful, and
cooperative, which was a wise policy, if it was real.

His earpiece vibrated.

Francine ignored him, sagging further
in the seat and with her chin lowering perceptibly by the
second.

Gene touched the tit on the side of
it.

“
Hello.”

He kept his voice low. A nap on
company time might do her a bit of good.

Gene wasn’t wearing the Googgs as he
wanted to relax. They were away from work and in an unfamiliar
environment. Just this once, there was time to think. This was
often conducive to some kind of inspiration, although there was
little sign of it yet.

There was a bit of a crackle in the
earpieces.

“
Who is this,
please?”

“
This is Patrol Sergeant
Parsons. Eighth Precinct.”

Gene’s voice picked up in
volume.

“
Yes.”

He sat up a little straighter,
reaching for his briefcase and his notepad.

“
We have a sighting of
Mister Scott Nettles. He took a taxi, and it’s only about three
kilometres from where our mystery couple disappeared.”

Francine made a sound Gene associated
with sleep apnea and her chin bobbed up and down.

Her eyes opened, and she looked up in
apparent confusion.

“
Hold on, please.” He
nodded at Francine. “We’ve had another sighting of Mister
Nettles.”

She nodded, sitting up and mouth
working.

To no one’s surprise, she looked at
her phone and uttered a deep sigh.

***

Images appeared on Gene’s large
tablet.

“
Mister
Nettles.”

Gene and Francine took a good look at
the man in the back of the taxi. The sound came up and then they
heard the machine ask for a destination.

Their jaws dropped when Nettles gave a
series of coordinates.

“
What?” Francine was alert
now.

“
It’s okay. It’s just GPS.
We’ve located that, and it’s only about sixteen k’s up the road.
They, or I should say he, headed almost due west from a rave party
that was going on at that location.”

The interesting thing was that it
wasn’t an address in the conventional sense. Why not just say drop
me at the Seven-Eleven on Twenty-Seven Mile Road? Whatever. It
meant something special.

Gene just didn’t know what.

Point A to Point B. Nettles got out of
the car at an intersection, and as soon as the car moved on, he
went out of the field of view of the rear-view camera. The car had
turned left to make another pickup.

“
That’s it?” Gene’s voice
rose slightly in dismay.

“
There were no live
cameras at the intersection at the time. There still aren’t,
incidentally. Those ones have been out for a while.” Parson’s dry
voice came after he cleared his throat. “They’ve been having pretty
good luck with that.”

At this stage of the game, Gene
wondered if there was any real significance in Mister Nettles’
movements.

“
What’s important here is
that they’re not together.”

“
There’s another
thing.”

“
What’s that?”

“
The probability has
dropped on our identification.”

Gene studied the readout as Francine
tried to find it on her own device. Like Gene, she’d taken the
Googgs off and was reluctant to put them back on as they (or
something) had been giving her migraines lately.

“
Sixty-seven
percent.”

“
What do you
mean?”

Parsons hastened to explain.

“
Huh! This guy hasn’t been
seen in years, literally years, without the ball cap. He left the
house without his dark glasses exactly two days in a row, eight and
a half years ago. That was the end of February, and he must have
replaced them—broken, probably, on cheque day.”

To the blind, it was part of the
uniform. It made people aware of them, and drivers needed to see
the white stick and the dark glasses. It opened up all sorts of
doors in the pedestrian sense. It made things easier for those
around them. While the stick was also practical, the white colour
was a universal symbol.

Parsons went on to explain that every
person’s behaviour generated a digital fingerprint. While the
Nettles profile was a little sketchier than most, a regular
assortment of passive sightings and archived recordings indicated
that he lived his life, all of it, within a radius of less than a
kilometre and a half.

He was out of his usual neighbourhood,
and therefore out of character. It was akin to a person in medieval
times, living barely at subsistence level, with the whole family
working six and a half days a week, picking beans and dragging a
plow behind an ox, and then suddenly taking a vacation at the
beach.

There must be a reason for this
behaviour.