The Hard Bounce

Chapter Twelve

It was the spring of 1994, Opening Day at Fenway, when we first officially met Ollie. All the kids at The Home were buzzing with the welcome distraction from our shitty day-to-days. At St. Gabe’s, you found hope wherever you could, even as misplaced a hope as the Red Sox might provide.

Having a regular broadcast game was a treat, an event. But our one TV in the rec room was always flipping between light snow and blizzard conditions. Not blessed with cable or a serviceable antenna, we’d pocketed enough tinfoil from the dining common to wrap the television like a cocoon. The only parts visible were the knobs and screen. Problem was, the night before, the TV decided to shit the bed all the way. Most of us had spent a large part of the day figuring out what the fuck we were going to do come game time.

After lunch, a large group of us headed to the rec room, tinfoil in pockets, hoping to wrestle some life, if not reception, into the old Zenith. We would suffer reprimands and punishment for cutting classes, but fuck it. Hope had a price, and we were willing to pay it.

We walked into the rec room, then stopped short enough to get nearly knocked over by the kids behind us. Mouths hung open in shock at what lay before us. The kids in the back swept around us, all trying to see what had stopped us in our tracks.

Somebody said, “The fuck?”

A lanky new kid named Ollie had not only unwrapped years’ worth of carefully calibrated foil, but also managed to get the TV apart. We all stood there, gobsmacked at the sight of our beloved television, its parts laid out like chess pieces on the checkered linoleum. Ollie only looked up at us briefly, adjusted his Coke-bottle glasses, and furiously went back to his task.

Grumbling began to well up from the stunned mob. Grumbling that ran along the lines of how to make the new kid’s head fit up his ass. It may have been a shitty TV, but it was ours. We didn’t have many things we could call ours.

The threats grew louder and more ominous. One boy picked up a folding chair, tested its heft, and made his way over to Ollie in order to brain him properly. As the chair was raised overhead, Ollie plugged in the set. The screen lit up on Roger Clemens warming up in the bullpen. The grumblings erupted into cheers and handshakes. Ollie was smiling nervously and sweating through his shirt in a dozen places. He had to know how close he’d come to getting crippled. The kid ready to do the crippling lowered the chair and opened it front and center, a seat of honor for Ollie. Ollie watched the entire game seated in the chair that almost caved in his skull.

The Red Sox won the game, 9-8.

At St. Gabe’s there were only two ways to insure your safety: be dangerous or be useful.

Ollie became one of the strays who wandered in with me and Junior’s crew. He may not have been a brawler, but he earned his keep. And those smarts had brought him a lot of cash since his days at The Home. He wasn’t a complete flake job like Twitch, but he was koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs in his own fashion. If the Unabomber was pro-technology rather than anti, he might have been Ollie.

Ollie’s basement apartment looked like a utility closet on the Death Star. The walls were painted sterile white, all four layered with computers, pieces of electronics, and what looked like miles and miles of wires twisting around themselves in a three-dimensional Jackson Pollack.

“You guys gotta see this,” Ollie said, leading us to one of the many screens posted along one wall. “I can’t tell you guys which, but one of the major airlines just dropped a chunk of cash in my hands to test their electronic defense systems. Look.”

On the screen was a radar layout. Little dots slowly moved around the screen, identifying numbers beneath the dots.

“That’s the system?” I asked.

“Nah, it’s a simulation program they’ve linked me into. Basically identical to the real OS they use, same security and whatnot.”

“Solid system?” I asked, as though I had any idea what we were talking about.

“This?” Ollie huffed at me like I’d just defended the Ewoks. “This is shit work. Any hack with half a brain, half a system, and a little bit of patience can break into it.” Then Ollie smiled and held his hands apart like a magician about to yank a rabbit out of a hat. “Ever see a man crack a Federal Black Ice firewall in under a minute?”

“Uh… No?”

“Watch this.” Ollie went to work. He leaned forward in his chair as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Numbers that were meaningless to me raced down the bottom of the monitor. Junior gaped at the screen like a chimp forced to translate ancient Egyptian. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and popped open his Zippo.

Ollie whipped a pointed finger at Junior. “Do not light a cigarette in here. These machines are exceptionally sensitive.” His eyes never moved off the dancing numbers. The hand remaining on the keyboard picked up speed, as if to compensate for its missing brother. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see smoke curling off Ollie’s fingertips.

Junior frowned and flipped off the back of Ollie’s head. He tucked the cigarette into his T-shirt pocket.

“Now,” Ollie said, “watch this.” With the last few flicks of his fingers, the dots on the screen disappeared. It looked like the computer had shut off.

“Taa-daa!” Ollie sure was excited by the blank screen.

“Uh, I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly. And neither do they.”

“Where’d the planes go?” Junior asked.

“Oh, they’re still up there. I haven’t hacked into their individual systems, but their ground control is completely blind. About eighteen hundred tons of airplanes are about to go crash kaboom.”

“Well,” Junior clapped his hands. “I’m not getting on a plane again. Ever.”

“Man, the boys monitoring these boards must be shitting their pants right now.” Ollie wiggled with pleasure in his seat. It was the way he laughed. He never made a sound, just wiggled happily.

Like most things Ollie, the humor was lost on me. “I thought you said this was a simulation.”

“It is. But they still have guys monitoring the boards to see if we can whack ’em.” Ollie leaned back in his chair and groaned, as though he’d just finished a hugely satisfying meal. “So, what’s this video thingy?”

“We need to get a closer look at one part of a frame. Can you do something like that?”

“Can Captain Kirk bang a green chick?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I’ll just drop the DVD into the ’puter and rip the file. I’m pretty sure I can jury rig some sort of video capture/enhancement program. It might take me a couple hours to convert the hardware and then render the MPEG into a negotiable file. Is MPEG an okay format? I know it’s almost archaic at this point, but so is the vid software I have.”

I recognized enough English in the sentence to feel retarded. “Whatever works for you, Ollie. The stuff on the DVD… it’s some messed up shit. It’s really important that you forget what’s on it, okay?”

“Gotcha. Can you give me a rough idea of where?”

“At three minutes, thirteen seconds, a curtain gets knocked aside. That’s what we need. We need to see better what’s outside that window.”

Ollie sucked in his upper lip and chewed on it, thinking. “Can do. Gonna take me about an hour or so. You wanna pick up some lunch?”

“Anyplace good around here?”

“Grinder shop down the street. Grab me a meatball parm?” Ollie began flipping through disks of software. “Just think. A couple years ago, I probably would have had to run a firewire through an AVID system to get this kind of video editing. Now it’s all inside here.” Ollie patted his computer like it was an old family pet.

“And you’d have to frammajamma interface with the hibbity-dibbity,” Junior said with a chuff.

Ollie found the right software and placed the CD into the computer tray. “Wouldn’t need a hibbity-dibbity for this.” Junior’s smile fell. Ollie shot Junior a wink, then reached behind the table and started reconfiguring wires.

An hour later, our stomachs full of greasy meatballs, we returned to Ollie’s. The door to his studio was open when we returned. He was nowhere in sight.

“Ollie?” I called out. No answer. I looked at Junior. He shrugged. I called again. “Oliver? You here?” A horrible sound came muffled from behind one of the wired walls.

Junior and I ran over to the wall. “Ollie? You all right?” The strangled choke came again. It was definitely behind the wall. I looked for a convenient place to put down the grease-soaked bag with Ollie’s grinder in it, but was afraid the wrong spot could cause a fire.

I dropped the bag on his desk chair, and Junior and I started moving sophisticated boards of God-knows-what and tangles of wire along the wall. About halfway down, under yet another colorful tangle, was a white doorknob. I pulled it and the thin door covered in shelves and bric-a-brac opened. Behind was a small bathroom. Ollie was sprawled on the tiled floor, face in the toilet. The horrible sound we heard was him emptying his stomach into the bowl.

“Ollie? You all right, man?”

“Jesus Christ, Boo!” was all he managed to say before his body spasmed over the toilet twice more. “You could have warned me a little more about what was on that fucking DVD before you left!”

I found a glass next to the computer and filled it up in the sink beside the toilet. I held it out to Ollie. He took it in a trembling hand.

Ollie was right. I should have given him a more specific warning regarding content. There’s tough and there’s hard. The Home made Ollie tougher than his exterior indicated. But he wasn’t ever going to be hard.

“Ollie, I’m sorry, man. I didn’t think. Junior and I have been looking for this girl and I just figured it was hard for us to watch, because, well… I dunno.” I did know. I couldn’t say it was because we knew her, because we didn’t. I couldn’t say it was because we cared about her, because as objective tough guys, we shouldn’t.

But I did. Or I was at least starting to, and that thought bothered me, because I knew why.

Unsteadily, Ollie got to his feet. “Boo, that video would have given Jeffrey Dahmer a nervous breakdown.” He walked over to his computer, typed for a second, and the screen shot appeared. The falling Cassandra. The pulled curtain. The sign.

“I still can’t make it out,” Junior said.

“I haven’t done the pixel rendering yet,” Ollie said, a little snippily. He looked at the bag on his chair. “What is that?”

“Your sandwich.”

Ollie’s gullet lurched audibly. “Ugh. Take it away.” I picked up the bag and stashed it in the mini fridge to the left.

Ollie sat at the desk. Again, his fingers flew over the keyboard faster than my eyes could follow. The capture focused, then enlarged. Focused and enlarged. A third time. The piece of the sign was clear. Distinctly, I could make out part of two words. They were all in caps, one word atop the other in red and yellow neon. APA above PANA.

Junior cocked his head at the screen. “What the hell does that say?”

“Apa Pana,” said Ollie. “Sounds Spanish. Either of you speak Spanish?”

“Un poquito,” Junior said. Unfortunately, I knew un poquito accounted for about a quarter of the Spanish phrases Junior spoke. The other three were filthy.

“I think it’s parts from two different words,” I said.

Ollie looked at the screen again, head cocked at the same angle as Junior. “Oh. Oh, yeah.”

“Panama?” Junior said. “Japanese?”

“Junior,” I said. “Does Japanese Panama make any goddamn sense to you?”

“Just train of thought, man. Could be a travel agency.”

“Next time you travel, fly Japanese Panama Airlines.”

“Okay, cheesedick. You think of something.”

I couldn’t. “Can you print that out for us, Ollie?”

“Already did.” He handed us both blowups of the picture on the screen. “Listen, Boo. Because I saw that, it doesn’t make me accessory to anything, does it?”

Oh, yeah. Forgot to mention. Ollie’s also one paranoid bastard. He didn’t eat fish for two years because he thought the government was spreading AIDS through seafood. I’m not kidding. He had a reason. It also made sense.

I squeezed his shoulder. “How could you be? You never saw the video, remember?”

“Yeah, yeah. My memory is already hazy. What are you going to do with this guy?”

Junior and I looked at each other. “That all depends on him. We’d love nothing more than to punch him so many times he shits sideways for a few weeks. But our job is to find the girl and get her back to her father. How much pain we inflict is directly in correlation to how much resistance he puts up.”

“I’m gonna fuck him up, either way,” Junior said.

“Aw, who am I kidding? We’re fucking him up either way.”

I looked back to Ollie. I really didn’t like what I saw. The color had run out of his face like rainwater down a drain. I thought he was going to be sick again. Softly, he said, “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Junior asked.

“You guys didn’t watch the whole thing, did you?”

Ollie couldn’t stay. Couldn’t watch it again. He left us to go get some beer from the packie. I’d never known Ollie to touch alcohol before.

Junior and I stared at the monitor, sick dread a lump in my stomach. Or maybe it was just the meatballs. Felt like dread. I hit play.

The scene played out like it had before, but silently. Either Ollie didn’t have speakers connected to the computer or had the sound turned off. For whatever reason, it made the viewing worse. Cassandra’s screaming was still there, but it was inside my head, along with the sound of the blood pounding through my veins. The rage flared red before my eyes.

We reached the point where we’d stopped watching. The video played on. Snake did… things. Things I’m not going to recount. After a minute, Cassie stopped struggling, resigned to the abuse, the humiliation. She just lay there, no fight left in her. Easier to let it happen.

That is, until Snake picked up the knife again.

When she saw the knife in his hand, she bucked underneath him, kicked her legs.

He rode it out, letting his weight keep her pinned. I couldn’t hear it, but I knew he was laughing. He held the knife aloft, letting it catch the light, taunting her with it and his power over her.

A quick flash.

A spray of red along the headboard and wall.

One tiny arm reached up briefly, then fell to the bed. One last spurt of blood arced across the wall. Then the video faded to black.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Junior move to the bathroom. I stared at the black screen.

“You gonna be sick?” I called.

“I dunno.” He made a horrible gassy sound, then, “I think I might be. You?”

“No.” There was surprise in my answer, since a part of me felt like I should be. I wasn’t. Instead, I kept right on looking at the dead monitor. The red haze was gone. Instead, my vision took on a sharp clarity, as though the world had its edges filed to points. I felt no anger. I felt no sadness or pity or revulsion. I felt neither hot nor cold. Even my clenched jaw stopped hurting.

I felt absolutely nothing.