Into the Fire(72)
Joey kept on at the keyboard resting in her lap, her shoulders rippling beneath a wife-beater tank top. “God, you two,” she said. “Get a room.”
Evan returned his attention to the monitors rising three high around the circular pod. Joey had hacked into reverse directories to source the 213 phone number Detective Nu?ez had dialed. It belonged to a preloaded SIM card that had been bundled with a batch bulk-sold to an LAX shop three months prior. Now she was backtracking to see which cell towers had been pinged during the call, hoping to approximate a location for the recipient.
Petting the dog, Evan did his best to quell his impatience. The mission had turned into a game of Follow the Turing Phones. Terzian’s had led to Petro’s had led to Nu?ez’s, each electronic slab a nerve-racking blank slate that held the promise of worse to come. Bathed in the unstirred heat of the apartment and the steady clacking of Joey’s progress, Evan felt a familiar unease. Like they were reeling up a lure from the shadowy depths, unsure of what was tugging on the line.
The slats of the vertical blinds were angled skinny. Wee-hours blackness blanketed the panes, pinpricked by a few streetlamps. The room had the sticky-sweet smell of convenience-store food—candy bars, Red Vines, Dr Pepper—with an overlay of canine funk. Evan was debating how to extract himself from Dog to open a window when Joey said, “I can’t believe you busted into a police station.” She shook her head and grinned, that hair-thin gap in her front teeth making her look once again like a goofy kid instead of the young woman she was slowly, relentlessly becoming. “Damn, you a maniac, X.”
“That’s the job,” he said.
“To boldly go where no man has gone.” Joey looked at him over a shoulder sculpted with muscle, still typing away. He wondered how she ate the way she did and maintained her rock-solid form, and then he remembered she was sixteen. The rat-a-tat-tat of the keys took on an aggressive edge. “To do anything for your clients. To go anywhere.”
The caustic note caught Evan off guard. “Sure,” he said.
Her left cheek tightened, a lopsided scowl. “And if you die?”
Joey armored over her vulnerability with anger. He knew this. And yet the quickness of it surprised him every time.
“If I die,” he said, “take care of Dog.”
Joey turned away from him. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
But this earned no response. She was lost again to the myriad screens, leaning forward, chewing her lip. And then she stiffened. “Goddamn it.” She flopped the keyboard onto the stretch of curved desk before her. At the clatter, Dog the dog tucked his tail and scurried out of the pod. She glared after him. “Some lion hunter you turned out to be.”
Evan gestured at the inscrutable wall of code on the monitor. “What’s wrong?”
“First of all, you’re pointing at the wrong monitor.” She grabbed his wrist and swung his finger to the adjacent screen, which contained an equally inscrutable wall of code.
Feigning forbearance, he waited for her to explain.
She didn’t disappoint. “The shitty SIM outfit leases their cell towers from real companies. Which means they can’t keep location logs—no access. So I can’t pin down where the caller is.” She rocked back in her gamer chair so far that he thought she might topple over. “Incompetence can be an infuriatingly effective defense.”
Sometimes she was almost as quotable as Jack.
He could sense her magnificent brain powering away, could practically feel the heat rising from her head. He knew to keep his mouth shut and let the engines churn.
Scrunching her eyes tight, she flipped her mane of brown-black hair to one side, revealing the shaved strip above her right ear. Ten seconds passed, and then ten more. He was about to clear his throat pointedly when she said, “Unless.”
“Unless what?”
She bounced forward, her hands locking back onto the keyboard as if magnetized. “We do it in real time.”
“Track the call.”
“Yeah,” she said. “If you make a live call, I can capture the IMEI with my Stingray.”
“And triangulate the cell towers.”
“More like advanced forward link trilateration,” she said. “But we can’t expect the mouth breathers to grasp the difference.” She held up her fist.
He bumped it. “Indeed not.”
“If it’s an urban area with denser cell towers, I can pin him within fifty meters. Rural could be a miles-wide zone, which is tougher. But also easier ’cuz, like, fewer buildings.”
“I know, Joey. Even the mouth breathers can grasp—”
She plucked the Turing off the desktop, a cord swaying beneath like the tail of a kite. She shoved it at Evan. “Go. Talk.”
“Do I have to keep him on the line for a certain amount of time?”
“Yeah,” she said, “especially if you teleport into a movie from 1987.” She spun around on the chair, and Evan had to lean back to avoid getting kneecapped by the armrest. Tucking into another section of her circular desk, she cluttered the screens with windows that, he gleaned, showed the inner workings of several telephone networks. “Just do your whole Nowhere Man thing. You know”—now a self-important frownie face with a husky voice—“‘Do you need my help?’ ‘How did you get this number?’ ‘Hold on, I have to crack some walnuts between my buttocks.’”