Point of Impact

23

Drayne couldn’t remember the last time he had been so pissed off. He pounded the steering wheel of the Mercedes hard enough to crack it, and he wished it was fucking Tad’s head!

Jesus Christ!

By the time he got home, however, he had calmed down somewhat. He was almost detached, almost fatalistic about it when he pulled into the garage and shut the engine off. He had always known this was a possibility, though he hadn’t expected it would ever really happen. He was too smart to be caught by the plodders; he’d been giving them fucking clues and they couldn’t do it. Only, Tad wasn’t. And the boy had stepped in it good this time.

Tad was out cold on the couch, and even the pitcher full of ice water hardly roused him. He mumbled something.

Drayne started slapping his face. Eventually, his hand got sore and tired, but Tad came awake, sort of.

“What?”

“You idiot! You don’t have any idea what you did, do you?”

“What?”

“The gym! You trashed the gym! I stopped by there to work out, and that was all anybody was talking about! Even if I hadn’t sent you, I could recognize you from their descriptions! You moron!”

Groggy, Tad sat up. He rubbed at his face. “I’m all wet,” he said.

“You got that right. Christ on a pogo stick, Tad!”

“I don’t understand, Bobby. I got the disk from the security drive, the job’s done, we’re free and clear, nobody has anything to link us to Zeigler. There’s no proof of anything.”

“You really don’t see it, do you?” Drayne sat heavily on the couch next to his partner. Of a moment, he felt sorry for Tad. He kept forgetting most people didn’t have his horsepower when it came to cranking up the mental engines. “Obviously, the smart drugs hadn’t kicked in when you decided to feel up Atlas’s sister. Think about it.”

Tad shook his head, still not tracking.

“Look, I know you’re tired and stoned, and ordinarily I’d let you sleep it off, but time just got to be a problem. You made a mistake.”

“I don’t see it. They don’t know who I am. No way.”

“Okay. Let me explain it to you.” He looked at Tad, who made death warmed over seem the picture of health, and realized he had to take it slow for him to keep up with it. He eased off his anger a little. “Let me tell you a story. Just sit back and listen carefully, okay?”

Tad nodded.

“When I was in middle school, they had us in an arts and crafts track. We got three months each of music, art, and speech in one bundle, and three months of drafting, shop, and home arts in another.

“So the first day I show up in music class, and sweet little old Mrs. Greentree, had to be about a hundred and fifty or so, has us all sitting there, and she says, ‘What is the universal language?’ And of course, none of us have a clue. And she says, ‘Music. Music is the universal language. The notes are the same in Germany as they are in France or America.’

“Right, okay, so we got it. Music is the universal language.

“So later that day, we get to to the first section of second bundle, which turns out to be drafting class. This is taught by Coach. Back then, every other male teacher in the school was Coach.

“So we’re sitting there, and Coach says, ‘Okay, what is the universal language?’

“So anyway, being as how I am newly educated and eager to impress, I shoot my hand up and Coach grins at me. ‘Yeah?’

‘Music, Coach,’ I say. ‘Music is the universal language!’

“Coach just about kills himself laughing. ’Music?! Haw! Music ain’t the universal language, you dip, pictures are the universal language! You in China and you run into some Chinaman and you want to ask him where the toilet is, what are you gonna do, sing to him? ”Oh, mister Chinaman, please tell me, where is the toilet, la la la…?”

“ ‘Jesus, get your head out of your butt, son! You draw him a picture! Music! Haw!’

“A couple years later, that same question came up in math class, and guess what? I kept my hand down and my mouth shut. Same thing happened when I got to basic computer class. Music, pictures, mathematics, binaries, they are all considered universal languages.”

Drayne shut up and looked at Tad, who shook his head.

“Okay, so what’s the point?”

“Context is my point, Tad. Context.” He spoke slowly, as if talking to a retarded child. “Not just what gets said or done, but where and when it happens is critically important.”

Tad frowned, and Drayne could see that he still didn’t get it.

“Let me tell you another story.”

“Jesus, Bobby, okay, I get it that you’re pissed—”

“Shut up, Tad. Once upon a time I knew a guy who was a bouncer at a titty bar. One night, he and some of his friends went to a heavy metal rock concert, you know the kind, head-bangers, primal rock, big crowds standing on the floor screaming to the music, half of them stoned or drunk. So in the middle of the concert, a girl who is sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders decides to pull off her top and flash the crowd, or the band, or whoever.”

“I’ve seen that a few times,” Tad said, trying to follow him.

“Right. So’d my bouncer friend, and no big deal. And normally, the way it works is, the girl waves her hooters around, then puts her top back on, a fine time is had by all, and that’s that. But this time, while she was unbound and waving in the breeze, her boyfriend reaches up and grabs her breasts, starts rubbing them. Now, she doesn’t slap his hands away, she laughs, and next thing you know, she’s pulled off her steed and felt up by thirty or forty heavy metal fans. We’re talking mob mentality here, and the atmosphere is ripe for trouble. My friend the bouncer is too jammed in to help, and the crowd is so thick that concert security can’t get there, either. The girl vanishes.

“Fortunately, aside from getting passed around and fondled against her will, it didn’t go any further. They let her go, she gets her clothes back, her nipples are sore, end of event.

“So, whose fault was it she got mauled, Tad?”

“Hers. She should have kept her top on.”

“Yes. And people shouldn’t get drunk or do drugs and go to rock concerts, and we should always look both ways before crossing the street. No, it’s the boyfriend who set it off, and the girl, who could have stopped it, made it worse. See, soon as he laid a hand on her boob, she should have slapped the shit out of him. The implied message when somebody flashes in such a situation is ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ When the boyfriend broke the implied rule, the others assumed that a girl who’d do that in public, who was willing to allow touch along with the looking, well, she might be willing to let somebody else play, too, so they helped themselves.”

“Not right.”

“Nope, it wasn’t. But given the circumstances, a bunch of stoned mouthbreathing head-bangers, you can understand how it might progress to that, or worse. There’s the way things should be, and the way things are. You might not like it, but you ignore the way things are at your peril.”

“And you are saying that I fucked up even though I got rid of the evidence. That it is going to progress to something else?”

“That is exactly what I am saying. See if you can stay with me here: The police and the feds will know you were on the Hammer, because nothing else can explain a burned-out matchstick like you kicking major steroid ass like you did. And the bust at Zeigler’s was a major deal and on the minds of the cops. And if they dig just a little, they’ll come up with the Zee-ster working out at Steve‘s, and zap! A light will flash over their heads and they’ll think, ‘Hmm. Big movie star shoots it out with the DEA, and they find this superguy drug in his house. Then, within a real short time, somebody trashes a gym where the big movie star works out, obviously on the same superguy drug. Say… isn’t that a funny coincidence?’ And somebody… somebody in the FBI or the local police. . they are gonna ask themselves the big question: Why? Why’d the guy — that’s you — why’d the guy come in and steal the security cam’s recording device? Other than coming in to feel up Brunhilda and kicking the crap out of a few bodybuilders, that’s all you did. And they are gonna come up with, ’Hey, maybe there is something on that disk the guy doesn’t want us to see. What could it be?’ And somebody is gonna take it one step further and make an assumption, since they know the Zee-ster worked out there, and that somebody is gonna say, ‘mm. Maybe because the big movie star was there with somebody who really doesn’t want to be seen?’ ”

“But the recording is gone—” Tad began.

Drayne cut him off, but his voice was quiet. “So it is. But the people who work there aren’t. I know Steve, the owner, and he might remember that a couple of times when Zeigler was there, he and I came or went together. And if Steve or Tom or Dick or Harry or anybody else in the place remembers that, then my name is gonna come up in a conversation with the feds or cops. And even if Steve doesn’t remember, the cops will get a list of members and go looking for a connection. This is a cop lesson I learned at my daddy’s knee: When you don’t have anything, you check everything. And sooner or later, they are gonna send somebody out to talk to folks on the list, just routine, and there will be a knock on our door. And I have a nice made-up job that fortunately I didn’t mention on my application at the gym, one that’s all nice and electronically vouched for, so maybe they can poke at it a little and it might even hold up, but… What is the fucking job, Tad?”

“Oh, shit.”

“Oh, shit, yeah. I’m a chemist. Think that’ll, you know, raise any red flags or ring any bells? Illicit drugs and a chemist? There are millions of test tube jockeys in the world, but how many of us working out at the same gym as the dead guy they are investigating up the wazoo? Even the stupidest cop alive could run with that one.

“The feds might not be the fastest mill wheels in the world, but they grind exceedingly fine. They are plodders, but that’s what they do best, and if they get this far, we are fucked. Even if the house is as clean as a wetware assembly room. If they can’t prove anything, they’ll know who I am, and that will throw a big rock into the gears. I won’t be able to go pee from now on without seeing an underwater camera lens in the toilet bowl looking up at me.”

Tad shook his head. “I’m sorry, man.”

Drayne shook his head in response. “I know, Tad, I know. And it’s done. Now, we have to see if we can manage some kind of damage control.”

“How?”

Drayne looked at him. “You know the guy in Texas, down in Austin?”

“The programmer who buys two caps every three or four weeks, for him and his girlfriend.”

“Yeah, him. I read about him in Time. He’s supposed to be a genius, supposed to be able to make a computer sit up and bark like a dog, if he wants. Got his start hacking into secure systems just for the fun of it.”

“So?”

“So, we make him a deal. He does us a favor, we supply him with whatever rings his bell, for free.”

“Dude is richer than Midas, he doesn’t need the money.”

“But I know how geniuses think,” Drayne said. “Especially outlaw geniuses. He’ll do it so we’ll owe him, and in the doing, he can prove he’s still got the chops he started out with. He gets to exercise the old muscles and feel like a badass outlaw again.”

“What is he gonna do that’ll help?”

“He’s going to make us invisible. Get ahold of him.”

“Now?”

“Right now.”

The more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea. It could work. If they moved fast enough, it definitely could work.