Blvd. of Blood

Book 2, chapters 9–11

Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.

(The story so far: Respectable actuary Colin Lang’s plan something horrible is complicated by a new relationship with co-worker Carol. A suspicious policeman (John Oberman) has tasked his mediocre hacker friend (known as Sp!der) with figuring out what the something horrible might be. Sp!der’s only clue is the Twitter feed of @CottinendKing, who appears to be local sap, Colin’s stooge, Bernie the pizza delivery guy.)

9.

Bernie smoked in the Pizza King parking lot. It was funny: He never really craved a cigarette when he wasn’t at work. He never smoked on his days off.

Actually, this was one of his days off, but he’d had nothing to do, so he’d come back to the restaurant and joked around with the waitstaff until Mr. Prishtine had told him to get lost. Now he stood in the parking lot, mostly out of view, shivering in the night air, gazing through the window. It looked so warm and bright inside. One of the waitresses, Amber, was holding a pie on a silver tray up above her head, and she looked so impossibly beautiful when she laughed.

Maybe the people at the table were funny. He hoped they enjoyed their pizza.

10.

The Sp!der sat in the basement, his mother’s basement, drinking his thinking drink: diet Coke with a packet of grape Kool-Aid powder mixed in.

So John wanted to find out who this @CottinendKing was. Sp!der had said he’d get the dirt, of course, figuring it would be easy. @CottinendKing on Twitter was probably CottinendKing on some other network; find that email address on Facebook, say, and bingo! the job would be done.

But searching for CottinendKing brought up nothing. Emailcheckster.com said there was no email registered to CottiendKing at gmail, at hotmail, at aol. Sp!der brought up a tweet aggregator, loaded up every tweet CottinendKing had ever penned—there were only seventy-five of them—and searched in vain for the @ symbol, for the word email, even for the words dot and com. Finally he even read them all.

“Mickey! Your dinner’s getting cold!”

“I’ll be up soon, ma! Jeez!”

If Sp!der had been a real hacker, doubtless there would have been some back door he could have sashayed through. But Sp!der was a poser, and one dangerously close to being exposed, at least to John Oberman. He remembered the old techie motto: hack the meatware. It meant when you couldn’t get in through computer tricks you could use human tricks. Figure out enough about someone and you’d know his password, which was inevitably a birthday or a kid’s name.

But @CottinendKing was a cipher. There was nothing to latch onto. His bio on twitter just read “fuck all yall.”

The only clues, then, were what he had tweeted about, and these Sp!der pored over, looking for any information. @CottinendKing liked wrestling, especially someone named Organ Grinder. He liked threatening violence. Said violence was going to go down in two months. He was not a skilled speller.

“Mickey! I’m not waiting any longer!”

All through his mother’s famous spaghetti, Sp!der fumed. His mother clucked and fussed around him and that wasn’t helping either.

He wanted to feel like he had left no stone unturned, but actually he had only turned over a couple of stones. It was like a labyrinth with only two or three short corridors, all dead ends. There wasn’t even the satisfaction of getting lost in it!

Organ Grinder. Violence. Bad speller. Sp!der read the collection of tweets over again. “…body parts flin then whose sory…”

“This guy is an idiot,” thought the Sp!der.

And some time the next night, around three in the morning, Sp!der had an idea. He made a new Twitter account, @WinFatBux4Life.

Would he have to lay down a series of false tweets to make his scam more plausible?

Nah, the guy was an idiot.

“@CottinendKing,” Sp!der typed; “We are pleased to inform you that you have won…”

11.

Carol had been afraid it might be awkward, seeing someone from work. They weren’t in the same department, so it wasn’t against any official rules, but maybe it would be—frowned upon?

But no one cared. In the morning Colin came by her desk on the third floor and kissed her hello, or brought her coffee. They didn’t come in to work together—that might have been a little much. The one time he’d slept over on a weeknight—it had been raining so hard that night—they’d driven in in separate cars. Fortunately Colin had had a spare set of work clothes in his trunk; he said he always kept it there, for emergencies. He seemed like a man prepared for emergencies.

He wasn’t secretive—Colin, she meant. He was open about everything except one thing, which appeared to be the core thing. When his mother called while Carol was over, he made introductions and passed her the phone. He made no secret of their relationship. He kissed her on the street, as well as at work. He was far from controlling. She wandered around his house freely; the only request he had made was that she not go in the basement, which, he said, was embarrassingly filthy. She tried the door once, and it was locked. Anyway, the rest of the house was pristine.

She’d known, in the past, her share of terrible boyfriends—not the cruel kind, but the kind who had no inner life, nothing but a few football teams and a brand of beer. Their idea of sex was indistinguishable from a TV show about sex. They talked about boobs but they never understood them. They barely even qualified as human, although they had a glib ability to ape the species, at least in the short term.

And Colin could look at first like he was waving a series of similar red flags. He didn’t own a single book. He approached the more accessible arts—music, film—with an ironic detachment that made in unclear whether he actually enjoyed even the media owned. When he spoke about himself it was probably to tell an amusing anecdote from his childhood—the teen summer he’d spilled gasoline on the lawnmower and then went to mow the lawn anyway, and the heat of the sun on the metal lawnmower casing hit the gasoline flashpoint and the whole machine erupted into flames etc.—that kind of thing.

But he lacked the terrible boyfriend’s triviality. He clearly had great ambition, although he never revealed what the ambition was. He might have been an Emily Dickinson, his dresser drawers filled up with a secret poetic oeuvre; he might have been studying Fremat’s Last Theorem; like some nineteenth century German Romantic genius, he was looking deeper into things—or something—than the rest of us rabble.

He reminded Carol of herself if she had not been such a failure.

(Continued next week.)