ZerOes (3 page)

SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA

D
eAndre presses the earbuds into his ears with two pokes of his long fingers, swings his legs out of a Honda Accord that's not his, and walks over to the gas pump. He tells his jailbroken iPhone to play some music. Chiddy Bang queues up. He thumps drums on his chest with one hand as he pumps gas.

Then he holds his phone over the card reader for five seconds.

He feels the phone vibrate as it finds the Bluetooth signal. It starts the download. Credit card numbers—hundreds of them, digits and mag stripe data from all the people who used this pump over the past week—zip into his phone. It vibrates again when it's done.

DeAndre pockets the phone. Bobs his head to the music. Slaps an open-palm drumbeat against his thighs. Then he stops pumping gas—just six bucks worth, not even two gallons—and gets back in the car and drives away.

He'll sell 90 percent of these credit card numbers. The carder markets online always have scammers looking for fresh dumps of digits. At ten bucks a pop, that makes today a three-thousand-dollar day. And this ain't the only place he's running skimmers. He's got devices at the
Valero off 82, at the Sev on Shoreline, at the Safeway on Marina. After a couple of weeks he'll move 'em to new locations. Cycle 'em around.

He'll turn the other numbers into plastic. He's got a top-shelf card printer, spits them out fast. He gets a refresh of cards, can use them quick, then toss them.

All that will come later. Right now, it's time to go see his moms.

This is going to be a good day
, he thinks.

And it will be. Until it's not.

MARIN CITY, CALIFORNIA

The houses on Nogales Street aren't much to look at. Like a bunch of shoeboxes sitting next to one another in an ugly line. The hedges between them are dead or overgrown.

DeAndre parks the car, gives the side-eye to the housing project across the street—the Olima Apartments, where a bunch of reedy, weedy gangbangers mill around mismatched lawn furniture in the middle of the apartment courtyard. A few whoop and yell as he gets out—they don't know him and he doesn't know them, but that's how they are.

DeAndre could have been one of them. Thinking he's a little Tupac in the making—so proud they all come from the same town as the long-dead rapper—slinging drugs and packing a nine. But his moms kept him straight. She made DeAndre do his time at the library. At the comic book store. At the two-dollar movie theater. Most important of all, in the computer lab at the library. He did anything to get out of that house. Anything to get away from those bangers and slangers across the street.

Miss Livinia pokes around the front lawn of the little lemon-yellow house next door to the one he grew up in. She's all hunched over, a little pile of raisin-wrinkled lady squinting from behind praying-mantis eyeglasses. She's picking pieces of mailbox out of the overgrown grass, setting them on a flattened cardboard box to collect them.

That's when DeAndre sees—it's not just the mailbox. The house is all shot up. Windows broken. Bullet holes in moldy siding. A gutter hangs loose. He hurries over, calling, “Miss Livinia, hey.”

The old woman lifts her head—a small act that seems to take a lot of
effort. Her pinched eyes search him up and down. Finally she adjusts her glasses and laughs. “That you, Stringbean?”

“Yeah. It's DeAndre, Miss Livinia.”

“All right, all right, I'm sure I got some candy in the house for you. Got some M&Ms, the kind with the peanuts in 'em—but they're getting harder to find, you believe that? Those chocolates are a
classic
and nobody seems to want 'em anymore. But that's the way with old, good things—”

He laughs and stops her from going inside the house. “No, Miss Livinia, I don't need any candy. I'm good.”

She looks him up and down behind the lenses of her bug-out spectacles. “You need to eat something, boy. You skinnier than a cat's tail. I'll make you some chicken and rice.”

“I gotta get to my moms,” he says. “But yo, what happened to your house?”

“Those dopeheads came by and shot it up. They musta thought Demetrius was back in town, but he ain't even out of jail yet, those donkeys.”

“Damn! You okay?” Demetrius, her grandson. Always used to push DeAndre around, beat him up after school, steal his shit.

She waves him on. “I'm fine, Stringbean. I'm fine. God ain't seen fit to take me yet and no dopeheads spraying my gutters with bullets are gonna be the ones who do it.” She sighs and
hmm
s. “Guess I do need a new mailbox, though.”

He grabs Livinia's hand. It's dry and papery, like the pages of a Bible. DeAndre makes sure to turn his back to the slingers across the street. He presses a handful of money into her palm: just shy of five hundred bucks. She peers down at it like she's trying to read the fine print on a newspaper ad—then her eyes go big enough to match those glasses of hers. “This what I think it is?”

“Take it, Miss Livinia. Buy what you need.”

“Boy, whatchoo been up to lately?”

“I got a job.”

“It a good job?”

“It's a real good job.”

His moms answers the door. She looks him up and down with an eyebrow cocked so high he thinks it might float up above her head and take off like a spaceship. Then she laughs and gives him a big hug and tells him to come inside, get something to eat, he's too skinny. She turns and sways those big hips, sashaying to the kitchen.

But DeAndre doesn't go inside. Instead he calls after her.

“Moms,” he says. “Let's take a ride. I got something to show you.”

“What are
you
gonna show
me
?” she says with a wry smile.

He winks and waves her on.

MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

“Whose house is this?” his moms asks, again with the arched eyebrow. “This is a richie-rich house. You got business here?”

The house is—what did the real estate agent call it? Mission style. Three bed, two bath. Couple of palm trees out front. Privacy fence with pretty flowers climbing all over it. Little fountain burbling and gurgling. Pool in the back. Golf course across the street.

“This ain't business, Moms,” DeAndre says, laughing. Then he fishes into his pocket, past his phone, and fetches a set of keys. He dangles them in front of her.

“What the hell is this?”

“They're keys.”

“You're a smart-ass, you know that?”

It's a familiar refrain, and DeAndre has a familiar response: “Smart-ass is better than a dumb-ass.”

“Yeah, yeah. You still didn't answer the question. Why you dangling a set of keys in front of my eyes like I'm a little kitty cat? I don't care much for shiny things.”

“You oughta start.”

She sits there, quiet for a second. Finally, she says, “You're telling me this is your house. That what you're telling me?”

“I'm telling you this is
your
house.”

Blink, blink. “What'd you just say?”

He drops the keys in her lap and claps his hands, thrilled by having taken her by surprise. The woman's a rock. She isn't surprised
by
anything
. All his life she's been five steps ahead of him. But not this time.

He hops out of the car and yells for her to follow after.

Inside the house. Big foyer. Spanish tile. Steps made of some kind of redwood going up to the second floor. He takes her right to her favorite place: the kitchen. This one has granite countertops, stainless steel appliances. DeAndre doesn't know much about that, but the real estate agent said that's what everybody wants. He understands why. It looks nice. Feels nice, too—the counters are cool to the touch, clean and smooth. Like he could lay his head on one after a hot day.

Moms walks through real slow, real cautious, like she's afraid if she moves too fast the whole thing will come down around her ears like it's made of playing cards. “This is an expensive house,” she says.

“You don't know that.”

“I
do
know that. I know who lives in Mill Valley. Rich white people.”

“Middle-class white people, Moms.”

“They're rich to me. And I thought rich to you, too.”

“I got money now, Moms.” He figured this conversation would come. He swallows a hard knot and steadies himself. “I got a good job now.”

“What kinda job?” Now she's studying him real good. Way a cat studies a mouse. That's how he feels, too—like a mouse pinned by a heavy paw.

“I work with computers.”

Now her hands are on her hips. “What kinda computers?”

“The kind with a keyboard and a monitor.” Before she can say it, “I know, I know, smart-ass. I'm doing some programming, okay? It's good money. Shoot, good money doesn't even cover it.” He sees her suspicious look, pulls it back a little. “I got a good deal on the house. Foreclosure-type deal. A . . . a . . . whadda they call it? Short sale. Low interest and all that.”

DeAndre neglects to mention that he's got the kind of money you could spread out on a bed and roll around in the way a dog rolls around in its own mess. Enough money that if he ever lost any of it, he could be like,
Yo, whatever, I'll just go buy more
.

She's still got that look. Like she doesn't believe him. Like she's picking him apart with a fork and tongs the way you shred meat.

But then her expression softens and a big goofy smile spreads across her face and she crashes into him with a big hug. “I always knew you'd make something of yourself,” she says.

He kisses her brow. “Come on, Moms. Let's go upstairs, check out the bedrooms.”

The master bedroom's damn near as big as the whole downstairs of the house on Nogales Street. His moms does a slow orbit of the room, whistling low and slow like she's seeing something she just can't believe. Each whistle followed up by a little
mm-mm-mmm
.

DeAndre laughs.

But his laugh gets cut short.

Out the window, he sees something that doesn't make sense. Past the pool, past the patio furniture and the built-in Weber grill, he sees a black round something. Like a bowling ball covered in fabric. Hiding in the shrubs and vines next to the pretty purple flowers.

A radio squelches outside.

DeAndre's palms glisten with cold sweat. It's five-oh. The cops.
It's the cops
. That's no bowling ball. It's someone's
head
. A helmeted head. A cop in SWAT armor.

“Hey, Moms,” he says, trying to stop his voice from cracking, trying to stop the panic from leaching out. “You, uh, you hang here for a minute. I gotta run out, meet the real estate agent for, ah, a quick thing at the corner diner.”

He ducks into the bathroom. Travertine tile. Shower big enough to have a party inside. A shower with a
window
. A window that looks out over the neighbor's house.