The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(85)

“Just stopping to get a bite. Did you call the babysitter about tonight?”

“Every piece of network traffic that passes through our little cell tower—incoming and outgoing—is now being copied to your phone,” Pixie said. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Hold up,” I said. “So you can take this thing and spy on anyone’s cell phone? Anywhere? And it’s that easy?”

“Yep. As long as they’re within ten meters, no biggie.”

I peered at the box in my lap. “So this is like, super-secret tech, right? Like some kind of stolen military prototype?”

“Two hundred bucks over the counter, totally legal, no questions asked. Like I said, I’ve done some tinkering with mine, but it wasn’t too hard.”

I watched messages scroll across the screen, fleeting glimpses into the lives of complete strangers.

“Sometimes, Pix,” I told her, “I think you’re scarier than I am.”





45.




Isolating Cesar’s phone amid the digital noise was a problem. Every piece of data that passed through the femtocell had a number attached, but we couldn’t tell which one was his; people didn’t usually sign their names to text messages.

“If we could only make him call somebody,” Pixie said.

I grinned as an idea hit me. “We can. Can I make an outgoing call on this thing?”

She rapped a few keys on her laptop.

“Go for it.”

I rang up Detective Kemper. His voice was low, furtive.

“You coming or what?”

“Already there,” I said. “Question for you: you ever rumble these guys? Just throw your weight around a little and let them know you’ve got your eye on them?”

“Sure, all the time. Easiest way to clear ’em off a street corner.”

“I need you to rattle Cesar’s cage. Go over there and tell him Gabriel’s in custody, and that he’s already talking about making a deal.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to spook these guys.”

“This is the right kind of spooky,” I said. “Trust me.”

To his credit, he didn’t laugh. I hung up the phone and waited.

Sure enough, barely five minutes had passed before a flurry of text messages hit my screen. All in Spanish, though. I gave Pixie a helpless look.

“I took two years in high school,” she said. “Lemme see. Yep, that’s him! Cesar’s trying to get ahold of Gabriel and find out if he’s really in jail. And…there’s Gabriel, telling him not to be so gullible and—whoa. Those are some words I did not learn in class. Hold on, now that we know which phone is his, I’m isolating the feed and digging up his number.”

I tilted my head at her while she typed up a storm. “We have his number,” I said, tapping the phone.

“Not his phone number. Every phone also has an ESN—an electronic serial number—that interfaces with the network. Be quiet a second. I’m busy being awesome.”

I waited, as patiently as I could, while she did what looked like backward calculus on her laptop.

“Boom, headshot,” she suddenly chirped, pumping a fist. “We can turn off the femtocell now. Don’t need it anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Cesar’s phone. I cloned that sucker. As far as the network is concerned, your phone is his phone. Everything that comes into his phone comes into yours too, and everything that goes out from your phone looks like it’s coming from his number. Gets billed to his account, too.”

Before long, a new message pinged across, this time in English.

“Writing to confirm tonight’s appointment. The Doctor is eager to meet his patient.”

I squeezed the phone until my knuckles turned white.

“Seven pm,” came Cesar’s response. “Rockahoola.”

“Rockahoola?” Pixie said. “That’s…not Spanish, I’m pretty sure.”

I glanced at the time. It was five minutes past eleven. We had just under eight hours to save Jennifer’s life.

*

“Rock-A-Hoola,” Bentley said, leaning against the counter at the Scrivener’s Nook. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. Remember, Cormie? It was called Lake Dolores, back in the day.”

“Yep,” Corman said. “Stupidest damn thing I ever saw.”

Bentley looked my way. “It was a water park, just off Interstate 15, between here and Los Angeles.”

“I-15 goes through the Mojave,” I said.

“Correct.”

Pixie squinted at him. “Somebody built a freakin’ water park in the middle of the desert?”

“That’s what I said the first time I saw it,” Corman told her.

“It was first built in the fifties,” Bentley said. “Then it closed. Reopened. Closed again. Last time it shut its doors was…ten years ago, perhaps? It’s just a ruin now, sitting dry in the Mojave.”

“In the middle of nowhere,” I mused. “The perfect place for what they’ve got planned. All right. We’ve got a few hours. Jennifer’s safe until the Outfit’s thugs get there. Which means we need to make sure they don’t get there. Pix, you said any call from this phone will look like it’s coming from Cesar?”