“Like who?”
“The widow Stomarti springs to mind. Young Evan’s going to do some sniffing around.”
Emma emits a worried peep. “Evan? Our Evan?”
20
The kid’s name is Dominic Dominguez but he goes by Dommie. His mother leads us to the inner sanctum.
“G’bye,” Dommie calls out, having heard us coming down the hall.
His mother knocks lightly. “It’s Juan Rodriguez, honey. He had an appointment, remember?”
“What’s he got on?” Dommie inquires from behind the door.
Juan has forewarned me that the kid is quirky and short-fused, so I should lay off the wisecracks.
“A Ralph Lauren shirt,” Dommie’s mother reports, “a nice pale blue. And no neckwear, sweetheart.”
The kid has a healthy phobia about grownups in neckties. My Jack Webb model is at the cleaner’s. Juan removed his in the car.
“Come on in,” Dommie says.
Before slipping away, his mother touches Juan’s sleeve. “Would you mind asking if he’s ready for din-din?”
Inside Dommie’s room it feels about ninety-seven degrees because of all the electronics. There’s a low-grade static hum that sounds like one of those coin-operated bed vibrators. I know next to nothing about computers but clearly Dommie is loaded for bear. Walled in by hardware, he toils intently at one of several PCs, his bony back to die door.
Juan says, “Hey, buddy.”
The kid doesn’t turn around. “Gimme a minute,” he mumbles. “Who’s that with you?”
“My friend Jack. The one I told you about on the phone.”
“Yojack.”
“Hi, Dommie.”
The kid’s speed-shifting a joystick for a video game: dueling skateboarders, set to the vocal stylings of Anthrax. Juan glances my way and shrugs. There’s no place to sit. The bed is littered with open boxes: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple. I’m sweating like a stevedore.
Juan says, “Your mom wanted to know if you’d like some dinner.”
“Not now!” The skateboarders on the kid’s monitor are battling each other on a half-pipe, twirling and seesawing in midair. “Kill him!” Dommie rasps at the animated characters. “Kill that little bastard, Tony!”
I nudge Juan, whose face registers concern.
“Get outta here! Seriously, dudes!” Dommie screeches, apparently at us.
We retreat into the hallway. “You neglected to mention he was a psychopath,” I whisper to Juan.
“He’s just a little high-strung.”
From inside the kid’s bedroom we hear a feral yelp, then a sharp crack that sounds like a gun. I lunge for the doorknob but Juan snags my arm. Moments later Dommie’s standing there, cool as ice. Now I can see he’s wearing Oakley cutaways, baggy surf shorts and an oversized Ken Griffey Jr. jersey. His black hair is buzzed in wedding-cake layers, and a gold stud glints in one pale nostril. He weighs all of eighty-five pounds. He motions us back into his bedroom, where I notice a chemical tinge in the air. Dommie has shot out the tube of his PC with a Daisy pellet rifle. For now he seems at peace.
He glides his chair over to a working monitor, a raspberry-colored Mac. “Dudes,” he says, “it’s your lucky day.”
Juan smiles hopefully. “You cracked the hard drive?”
“Like an egg. But everything was passworded, yo, so it took a while.”
“And what was the secret word?”
” ‘Detox’!” Dommie chirps. “Now pay attention”—the kid’s fingers are flying over the keyboard—”here’s a directory of all the files. I’ll open one so you can see what it looks like.”
The screen brightens with several rows of oscillating waves.
“They’re all like that?” I ask.
“What else,” says the kid.
“Can’t you convert it to text?”
The kid looks at Juan as if to ask: How’d you hook up with this imbecile?
Juan says, “Jack can barely work a car radio. You’ve got to make things real simple for him, Dommie.”
The kid is holding both hands in the air, like a doctor scrubbed for surgery. His fingers haven’t quit moving, though, flitting across invisible keys.
“Okay,” he says, “in the beginning was Pro Tools. That’s software, dudes. High-end software. Lucky I had it, otherwise I couldn’t read what’s on this drive.”
I say, “Dommie, please. Tell me what we’re looking at.”
The kid reaches for the mouse and guides the arrow to one of the wavy horizontal bands. Then he double-clicks and leans back, pointing to a speaker. “Listen tight,” he says.