“I’ve got a shotgun,” Amber shouted. “And a phone! I already called the police!”
He holstered his pistol. Then he wandered to the kitchen counter, gingerly stepping over Ducky’s legs. A knife block sat on the counter, most of the slots empty, the knives lost to damage and time. A stout handle caught his eye and he took hold of it. A nine-inch fillet knife, steel tarnished with neglect, hissed from the wood.
He ran his thumb across the blade, testing the edge, and nodded his mild approval.
“I would like to speak with you,” he said, strolling back to the bedroom door, “about your friend.”
9.
Seelie wasn’t sure if this place even had a name. Ducky’s tip had led her to a shoebox of a storefront, squeezed between a Starbucks and a ramen-noodle shop, and dirty neon in the window just said Cameras – Security – Photography. Every other inch of the glass was plastered with old magazine ads from Kodak and Nikon.
She wondered if he dealt in Polaroids. She pushed through the doorway.
She was the only customer, not that there would be much room for more than one to browse at a time. Wire racks on her left and right cradled a baffling array of film stock, countless manufacturers and serial numbers, and the front counter was dead ahead. Camera boxes and unlabeled cardboard crates sat piled high on the shelves in back.
The clerk looked a few years older than Seelie, with a quaff of greasy hair and greasier lips, right above the scruff of a soul patch on his chin. He was thumbing through an old issue of some glossy monster-movie magazine, lingering over a special-effects shot of a dismembered corpse. The rubber limbs and too-bright stage blood left the taste of bile in the back of Seelie’s throat. She couldn’t stop seeing the real thing, Arthur’s dead and glassy eyes captured in the flash-pop of a vintage camera.
“Hey,” she said, getting a barely interested glance out of him. “Are you Brett? I’m Seelie. Ducky sent me.”
He sighed like he resented having to interact with other human beings. “Yeah, he said you’re cool. You cool, Seelie?”
“I try to be. Did he tell you what I need?”
Brett held out his cupped hands. “Toss it here.”
She handed the phone over instead of tossing it. He turned it in his hands, noting the model, and pursed his lips.
“It’s doable. I can flash the ROM, reset the passcode without losing any data. Can you afford it?”
“How much?”
“Fifty,” he said.
The corners of Seelie’s mouth tensed up as she took a mental inventory. Fifty bucks was almost the last of her spending cash. It’d be tight going after that, the skipping-meals kind of tight. Then again, could she afford to say no? Arthur valued that phone more than he valued his own life. She needed to know why.
She counted off a pair of twenties and ten rumpled singles. Brett stuffed them in his shirt pocket, not the till, and told her to give him fifteen minutes. Then he disappeared in back.
“You,” he said when he finally returned, “are now the proud owner of an unlocked phone. Kind of an old and cheap one, but hey, none of my business. I reset the passcode to zero-zero-zero-zero.”
Seelie’s pulse quickened. She took the phone from him, nestling it tight in her curled fingers, and tapped in the code. The screen came alive, revealing…
Nothing.
Almost nothing. Arthur’s directory was empty, no texts, no voicemails. His log showed a string of incoming calls, as recently as last night, all from a blocked number. No outgoing calls at all.
The default suite of apps had never been used. Icons for Twitter and Facebook just prompted her to set up a new account, and the built-in email system did the same. The only icon she didn’t recognize was a scarlet W. She tilted the screen to show Brett.
“Any idea what this is?”
“WhisperMe. It’s a secure text-messaging application. You can set it to automatically erase incoming texts once you’ve read ’em.” He pantomimed typing on an invisible keyboard. “No paper trail in case you’re doing something naughty.”
Like cheating on your wife, Seelie thought, but Arthur’s hidden sins had to be more serious than that. She tapped the icon. A window bloomed, a prompt for her to enter a password.
“Can you get it open?” she asked.
Brett sat back on his stool and picked up his magazine. “Cracking a phone is a matter of fooling the hardware. That’s easy if you know how, but security is the whole point of an app like that. You want to read those messages, you’ve got to have the password.”
She thanked him anyway, shouldered her bulky backpack, and headed out. Aimless now, trying to keep her heart from sinking into the pavement. She’d spent the last of her rainy-day cash chasing a dead end. Now she was at loose ends with nowhere to go, and being thrust into a murder mystery didn’t change the basic realities of life. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since dinner with Arthur last night.
Her gaze darted to a vendor’s cart, selling halal food under a green plastic awning at the sidewalk’s edge. The scent of spiced lamb made her mouth water. Quick street math: spend a few bucks on a meal that would keep her fueled and moving, but risk not having the cash when she needed it later, or press on without?
She passed the cart by. She’d been a lot hungrier than this before. She could stay hungry.
She put Arthur’s encrypted treasure aside for the moment, stuffing it in a snug pocket, and got her own phone out. The sun had started its slide, angling toward the jagged skyscraper horizon. She could go without food, but spending another night sleepless and wandering wasn’t an option. If she didn’t want to end up in a doorway somewhere, using her backpack for a pillow, she needed to line up a place to crash.
“Hey, Seelie,” said the first friendly voice she could get on the line. “Yeah, sorry, we lost the apartment.”
“Lost it? Lost-lost it?”
“I mean, we know where it is. It’s more of an unpaid-rent kinda thing.”
Her next call was to a friend of a friend with a sofa he usually didn’t mind sharing. Usually.
“Marguerite’s being weird,” he said.
“She’s always weird, what else is new?”
“She did a tarot reading this morning and freaked out. She’s very not cool with letting anyone come over right now. She’s worried somebody’s gonna bring the shadow of death to our doorstep.”
“The shadow of death,” Seelie echoed, voice flat.
“You know how she gets. Call me in a couple of days if you still need a place. She’ll probably chill out by then.”
Her wanderings pulled her past a construction site, another old brownstone halfway between being battered down and built up again, its torn-open face draped in great bandages of nightingale-blue tarp. A jackhammer rattled the streets, making the pavement thrum under the soles of her sneakers.
A car idled at the curb just ahead, illegally snug alongside a stripe-marked loading zone. It was a boat of a Pontiac, front grille thick with dead bugs and road dust. A curly-haired woman sat slouched behind the wheel, big cheap sunglasses shrouding her eyes. She looked familiar, and Seelie was just starting to register why when a man stepped out to block her path.