The New York City Police Department was beyond Artis Roop’s usual scope of things. He had started with directory assistance and been bounced from Midtown North Precinct to the Rape Hotline to the Crack Hotline to the College Point Auto Pound and finally to a property clerk in Queens who gave him a number for the radio room. From there, Roop was able, by lying, to get Sergeant Mazzonelli to talk to him.
‘Yeah, I know what COMSTAT is. Who you think started it?’ Mazzonelli was saying.
‘Of course, I know you guys did,’ said Roop from his cluttered desk inside the Richmond Times-Dispatch newsroom.
‘You’re damn right we did.’
‘We’re having a problem in the mapping center,’ Roop said.
‘What mapping center? I ain’t heard nothing about no mapping center.’
‘At NIJ.’
‘In New Jersey?’
‘NIJ. Not NJ,’ Roop corrected Mazzonelli.
‘So where the hell are you calling from?’ Mazzonelli asked. He put his hand over the phone. ‘Yo! Landsberger! You going out to Hop Shing’s?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Your mother.’
‘Yeah? What’s she want? Fish?’
Roop got excited.
‘Hey! That ain’t even funny,’ another cop said.
‘Stromboli. Provolone, extra onions. The usual,’ Mazzonelli said.
He took his hand off the mouthpiece and was back. ‘So you was saying?’ he said to Roop.
‘We’re showing a problem with the COMSTAT computer network.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Look, this is Washington, we’ve got a problem.’ Roop said it the way he’d heard it in the movies. ‘A possible virus has infected the network and we want to know how extensive it is.’
Silence.
‘It may show up as fish,’ Roop added.
‘Shit,’ Mazzonelli barely said. ‘So youze guys got it in D.C., too, the same thing? All these goddamn little blue fish swimming around in 219, wherever the hell that is?’
‘Richmond, Virginia,’ Roop informed him. ‘We believe that’s the wormhole the virus entered through. The carrier, in other words.’
‘Richmond is?’
‘We think so, sergeant. This is worse than I feared. If your COMSTAT telecommunications system is locked out as well,’ Roop went on, writing furiously, ‘then everybody’s down.”
‘Shit. It’s the weirdest friggin’ thing I ever seen. We got three experts up here right now trying to get the damn thing off the screen, but we’re totally down. Now, I don’t do the computer shit myself, you know? But I got eyes and ears and know when something’s real bad. From what they’re saying, we can’t find hot spots or patterns at all.’
‘Exactly.’ Roop flipped a page. ‘Apparently no one can.’
Roop’s editor Clara Outlaw stopped by his desk to see what was going on and if he planned on making the last edition deadline. He gave her a big thumbs-up. She started to say something. He scowled and put his finger to his lips. She tapped her watch. He nodded and gave her an okay sign. She didn’t believe him. She tapped her watch again. He shook his head and motioned her to hold on a minute.
‘It was early afternoon, so I hear, and all a sudden this fish map flashed on the screen and we can’t get it off. It just came outta friggin’ nowhere,’ Mazzonelli went on and on.
Roop scrawled Fishsteria on a piece of notepaper. He ripped it off and handed it to Outlaw. She frowned and wrote Pfiesteria? Roop shook his head. This was not to be confused with the microbe responsible for massive fish kills on the East Coast, or was it? What did anybody know right now? Roop grabbed the piece of paper back from her and underlined Fishsteria four times.
At ten minutes to three in the morning, Weed crept out of his bedroom, pausing before his mother’s shut door, hoping she was snoring. She was, as loud as ever. Weed left the house and waited on the street corner where Smoke had told him to be.
Minutes later, the Lemans sounded in the distance and Weed was reminded of his nightmare about the garbage truck. His hands started shaking so badly he worried he wouldn’t be able to paint. He started feeling sick again, and he was tempted to run back inside the house and call the police or at least grab his acrylics, just in case Smoke figured he’d been tricked.