The Big Dark Sky (34)
Initially, he’d wondered why these creatures took such intense interest in him. But soon he realized that this was Mother Nature’s way of saluting him for his commitment to her, because no other man or woman has ever made—or ever would make—as profound a sacrifice as Asher has made. As the coyotes are cousins to wolves, so Asher is now a cousin to coyotes, and through them Nature makes clear her approval of his manifesto and his murders.
Some people believe that dogs have a psychic sense, and Asher feels sure that coyotes are greatly gifted in this way, that they can read his intentions, if not his every thought. A few times a week, while under their observation, he loses all sense of purpose for ten minutes or twenty or half an hour, and goes into something like a trance, on some occasions while standing here in the river. When he regains awareness, he can see the coyote pacing back and forth in great agitation, though never with the intent to attack, rather as if the beast is excited by some bonding that occurred between them while Asher was in a fugue state.
This morning, after he wades ashore and towels dry and dresses, just as he is about to turn away from the river and enter the former saloon to continue his work on the manifesto, Asher falls into one of these strange fugues for perhaps ten minutes. When he wakes, he is still standing on the riverbank with his feet planted wide apart and his hands raised, his fingers combing the air as if to harvest something from the golden sunlight. The coyote on the farther shore is in a frenzy, circling on itself and biting at its tail, its ears flat against its skull, making shrill, urgent sounds. It endures in this behavior for a minute, then stops and, panting as if exhausted, gazes at him across the water for a moment before, hackles raised, it sprints north along the grassy strand for about ten yards. Then it vanishes into the shadows among the pines and other evergreens.
26
Kenny Deetle was a white-hat hacker, internet buccaneer, data diver extraordinaire, thirty years old but still as quick of mind as any twenty-year-old punk who’d been steeped in the craft since the cradle. He could backdoor any computer system and worm deep into it and plant a rootkit, giving him easy access and control that no IT-security special forces could detect, although he didn’t do this illegally or for nefarious clients. He was a good guy. He hadn’t always been one of the good guys, but he’d wanted to be one ever since he was twenty-four, when his best friend, Max Gurn, hacked into the computer system of a Dark Web drug operation. Max locked it down and tried to extort four million dollars in Bitcoin in return for allowing cartel jackboots to regain access to their inventory and supply-chain records. Max was the very best at spoofing through a maze of telecom exchanges, a wizard at concealing his identity and true location. He knew the bad guys—or worse guys, if you will—could never find him. But they found him. Max went on the run across three continents, two oceans, and four islands before the cartel caught up with him in Oklahoma, the Sooner State, in the city of Tulsa, where they cut his head down the middle with a chain saw while he was—briefly—alive, then methodically dismembered him, packed him into a hermetically sealed, metal trunk labeled GURN FAMILY MEMENTOS, and had him delivered by FedEx to his mother in Topeka.
Since then, thankful that he hadn’t participated in Max Gurn’s big score, although he’d been invited to assist, Kenny Deetle did white-hat hacking for certain Fortune 500 companies. He also took assignments from Rider Investigations because, five years earlier, when police showed little interest in what they thought was a crank threat, Wyatt Rider identified an anonymous stalker who intended to rape Kenny’s sister, Sandy, and feed her to hogs. Wyatt got evidence on the creep—one Proctor Lash, now serving a life term—who turned out to have done to another woman what he wanted to do to Wendy.
The world got crazier year by year. Nastier, too.
Kenny lived in and worked out of a spacious loft in a Seattle warehouse converted into apartments that were rented mostly by people who thought they were artists of one kind or another. They were painters, sculptors, writers, actors, and YouTube video-star wannabes. Kenny kept his distance from all his neighbors because none seemed to be rich in common sense or to understand that the performance-artist poet next door might possibly have a really bad day with rhyming and might relieve his frustration by stabbing you in the face.
That’s the kind of world it was.
At seven thirty Friday morning, Wyatt Rider called Kenny with an urgent assignment. He had a client in Montana whose home computer system and associated electronics were served by a satellite dish that had apparently been compromised by some hacker who was on the Max Gurn end of the profession. Wyatt provided the dish address, all essential telecom account information, as well as the client’s passwords. Without having to leave his loft in Seattle, Kenny could frontdoor the system in Montana and sleuth through it in search of evidence that a worthless black-hat turd had commandeered the house. He would then follow the data-crumb trail to the culprit, so that Wyatt could break the bastard’s legs, figuratively speaking.
“One question,” Kenny said, taking notes while sitting up in bed with a nude girl named Bruce Ann Leigh, or maybe Leigh Ann Bruce. “This doesn’t involve Dark Web chainsaw goons, does it?”
“I’d bet everything I own that it doesn’t,” Wyatt said.
“Would you bet your cojones?”
“You mean my cantaloupes? Absolutely.”
“All right, then. I’m on it,” Kenny said.