Page 34 of The Grave Artist
Without, of course, explaining. Sanchez knew the answer to Tandy’s question. His brother knew. A few other people.
He heard the words he thought about maybe once a week and had for many years.
It’s a big day. A special day! Everybody up!
The story was not for Frank Tandy, though.
The man, clearly a natural detective, continued to be curious, it was obvious. He’d sensed something evasive about Jake’s answer.
One of the best shields against intrusion is to deflect. Jake had learned that it took very little to change the course of conversation. People—whether egotistical or modest—tended to talk about themselves if given just a pinch of encouragement.
“How about you, Detective?”
“Make it ‘Frank,’ okay? That way I don’t have to call you Intrusionist Heron.”
“All right. Frank. And you? Why’d you become a cop?”
“Fell into it.”
Both men laughed.
Tandy continued, “High school. Junior year. A buddy of mine was driving like an asshole. Impressing girls, what else? By doing the one thing guaranteed tonotimpress girls. Anyway, Jimmy was my bad boy homie. We all had one, right?”
Jake didn’t. But then he had very few homies, good or bad, at that or any other age.
“I told him to cool it, but he wouldn’t. Laying donuts, solo drag racing. The more I told him to stop, the worse he got. You can guess what happened.”
Jake foresaw several outcomes.
“We went off a bridge, but the axle got caught in a guy wire. That was just dumb luck. Dangling thirty feet over a canal. It had flooded and the current was moving pretty fast. My friend begged me to switch places. He had a suspended license because of a DUI I hadn’t known about. He was crying—orseemedto be crying. You could never quite tell with him. I was a soft touch then. Maybe still am ... ha! So I said, ‘Oh, hell,’ and agreed. A patrol car comes up and this cop gets out. He’s a big beefy guy. He gets a rope from the trunk and rappels down and saves us.”
Jake had to ask, “Did the car fall dramatically the instant you two were safe? Thriller movie cliché number ten?”
“Nope. It just hung there until they winched it off. So after he pulls us up, we’re standing on the bridge and he’s looking us over and asking what happened and before I can say I was driving and I lost control—what I’d promised Jimmy I’d say—he says to me, ‘Lying to police is obstruction of justice. And you can go to jail for that. I hope nobody’s going to lie about who was driving. Because modern cars have cameras in them—to tell if drivers are nodding off. So there’s a video of who was in the driver’s seat.’ I just look at Jimmy, and don’t say anything, and he confesses.
“The cop writes him up and is going to drive us to the station so our parents can come get us. And I ask the cop if he’s going to get thetape out of the car, but he says, ‘Oh, there’s no camera.’ Jimmy looks all shocked, but the cop says, ‘I saidmoderncars have cameras. That piece of crap isn’t modern.’
“I knew that minute I was going to be a cop. Saving lives. And fucking around with people to get to the truth. The best job ever.” Another laugh. “So. See, Iliterallyfell into it.”
The men stopped at an intersection of a major road.
“Which way?” Tandy asked. There were stores and parking lots in all three directions.
Jake noted no street cams, but he saw a camera in the window of a warehouse. It was closed for the day. He looked up the company. They weren’t part of the city’s voluntary surveillance system.
Though they were about to be. Even if they didn’t know it.
Jake didn’t need any of Aruba’s savvy or some supercomputer’s muscles. He ran the hack himself and in ten seconds he was inside. The system’s security software was based on Windows Vista, a dinosaur of operating systems, which was still common, shockingly, in many modern smart appliances—like internet-enabled refrigerators and stoves. The owners of those clever machines, which could tell you when you were low on milk and if your stove needed cleaning, had no idea that those very same devices could be hacked with a few keystrokes and used as portals to inundate the world with spam and phishing scams that originated in Nigeria and Russia.
But sloppy security was all to the good for Jake, since he now had eyes on the intersection.
He nodded to an image. “She went thataway,” he said, pointing west.
“Yep, pahdner,” said Tandy, slipping into a bad Texas drawl.
Jake laughed. He eyed all the stores and restaurants spreading out away from them.
“A lot to canvass,” Tandy said. “Feels like a StaleState.”
