Chasing the Dime (2 page)

The next eight messages were all for Lilly, no last name mentioned. The same woman he had already fielded three calls for. All the messages were from men. Most of them gave hotel names and numbers to call back. A few gave cell numbers or what they said was a private office line. A few mentioned getting her number off the net or the site, without being more specific.

Pierce erased each message after listening to it. He then turned the page on his notebook and wrote down the name Lilly. He underlined it while he thought about things. Lilly — whoever she was — had apparently stopped using the number. It had been dropped back into circulation by the phone company and then reassigned to him. Judging by the all-male caller list, the number of calls from hotels and the tone of trepidation and anticipation in the voices he had listened to, Pierce guessed that Lilly might be a prostitute. Or an escort, if there was a difference. He felt a little thrill of curiosity and intrigue go through him. Like he knew some secret he wasn't supposed to know. Like when he called up the security cameras on his screen at work and surreptitiously watched what was going on in the hallways and common areas of the office.

He wondered how long the phone number would have been out of use before it was reassigned to him. The number of calls to the line in one day indicated that the phone number was still out there — probably on the website mentioned in a few of the messages — and people still believed it was Lilly's valid number.

‘Wrong number,' he said out loud, though he rarely spoke to himself when he wasn't looking at a computer screen or engaged in an experiment in the lab.

He flipped the page back and looked at the information Monica had written down for him. She had included the phone company's customer service number. He could and should call to get the number changed. He also knew it would be an annoying inconvenience to have to resend and receive e-mail notifications correcting the number.

Something else made him hesitate about changing the number. He was intrigued. He admitted it to himself. Who was Lilly? Where was she? Why did she give up the telephone number but leave it on the website? There was a flaw in the logic flow there, and maybe that was what gripped him. How did she maintain her business if the website delivered the wrong number to the client base? The answer was that she didn't. She couldn't. Something was wrong and Pierce wanted to know what and why.

It was Friday evening. He decided to let things stand until Monday. He would call about changing the number then.

Pierce got up from the couch and walked through the empty living room to the master bedroom, where the six cardboard boxes of his clothing were lined against one wall and a sleeping bag was unrolled alongside another. Before moving into the apartment and needing it, he hadn't used the sleeping bag in almost three years — since a trip to Yosemite with Nicole. Back when he had time to do things, before the chase began, before his life became about only one thing.

He went onto the balcony and stared out at the cold blue ocean. He was twelve floors up. The view stretched from Venice on the south side to the ridge of the mountains sliding into the sea off Malibu to the north. The sun was gone but there were violent slashes of orange and purple still in the sky. This high up, the sea breeze was cold and bracing. He put his hands in the pockets of his pants. The fingers of his left hand closed around a coin and he brought it out. A dime. Another reminder of what his life had become.

The neon lights on the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier were on and flashing a repetitive pattern. It made him remember a time two years earlier when the company had rented the pier's entire amusement park for a private party celebrating the approval of the company's first batch of patents on molecular memory architecture. No tickets, no lines, no getting off a ride if you were having fun. He and Nicole had stayed in one of the open yellow gondolas of the Ferris wheel for at least a half hour. It had been cold that night, too, and they huddled against each other. They'd watched the sun go down. Now he couldn't look at the pier or even a sunset without thinking about her.

In acknowledging this about himself, he realized he had rented an apartment with views of the very things that would remind him of Nicole. There was a subliminal pathology there that he didn't want to explore.

He put the dime on his thumbnail and flipped it into the air. He watched it disappear into the darkness. There was a park below, a strip of green between the building and the beach. He had already noticed that homeless people snuck in at night and slept in sleeping bags under the trees. Maybe one of them would find the fallen dime.

The phone rang. He went back into the living room and saw the tiny LED screen glowing in the darkness. He picked up the phone and read the screen. The call was coming from the Century Plaza Hotel. He thought about it for two more rings and then answered without saying hello.

‘Are you calling for Lilly?' he asked.

A long moment of silence went by but Pierce knew someone was there. He could hear television sounds in the background.

‘Hello? Is this call for Lilly?'

Finally a man's voice answered.

‘Yes, is she there?'

‘She's not here at the moment. Can I ask how you got this number?'

‘From the site.'

‘What site?'

The caller hung up. Pierce held the phone to his ear for a moment and then clicked it off. He walked across the room to return the phone to its cradle when it rang again. Pierce hit the talk button without looking at the caller ID display.

‘You've got the wrong number,' he said.

‘Wait, Einstein, is that you?'

Pierce smiled. It wasn't a wrong number. He recognized the voice of Cody Zeller, one of the A-list recipients of his new number. Zeller often called him Einstein, one of the college nicknames Pierce still endured. Zeller was a friend first and a business associate second. He was a computer security consultant who had designed numerous systems for Pierce over the years as his company grew and moved to larger and larger spaces.

‘Sorry, Code,' Pierce said. ‘I thought you were somebody else. This new number is getting a lot of calls for somebody else.'

‘New number, new place, does this mean you're free, white and single again?'

‘I guess so.'

‘Man, what happened with Nicki?'

‘I don't know. I don't want to talk about it.'

He knew talking about it with friends would add a permanency to the end of their relationship.

‘I'll tell you what happened,' Zeller said. ‘Too much time in the lab and not enough between the sheets. I warned you about that, man.'

Zeller laughed. He'd always had a way of looking at a situation or set of facts and cutting away the bullshit. And his laughter told Pierce he was not overly sympathetic to his plight. Zeller was unmarried and Pierce could never remember him in a long-term relationship. As far back as college he promised Pierce and their friends he would never practice monogamy in his lifetime. He also knew the woman in question. In his capacity as a security expert he also handled online backgrounding of employment applicants and investors for Pierce. In that role he worked closely at times with Nicole James, the company's intelligence officer. Make that former intelligence officer.

‘Yeah, I know,' Pierce said, though he didn't want to talk about this with Zeller. ‘I should've listened.'

‘Well, maybe this means you'll be able to take your spoon out of retirement and meet me out at Zuma one of these mornings.'

Zeller lived in Malibu and surfed every morning. It had been nearly ten years since Pierce had been a regular on the waves with him. In fact, he had not even taken his board with him when he moved out of the house on Amalfi. It was up on the rafters in the garage.

‘I don't know, Code. I've still got the project, you know. I don't think my time is going to change much just because she — '

‘That's right, she was only your fiancée, not the project.'

‘I don't mean it like that. I just don't think I'm — '

‘What about tonight? I'll come down. We'll hit the town like the old days. Put on your black jeans, baby.'

Zeller laughed in encouragement. Pierce didn't. There had never been old days like that. Pierce had never been a player. He was blue jeans, not black jeans. He'd always preferred to spend the night in the lab looking into a scanning tunneling microscope than pursuing sex in a club with an engine fueled by alcohol.

‘I think I'm going to pass, man. I've got a lot of stuff to do and I need to go back to the lab tonight.'

‘Hank, man, you've got to give the molecules a rest. One night out. Come on, it will straighten you out, shake up your own molecules for once. You can tell me all about what happened with you and Nicki, and I'll pretend to feel sorry for you. I promise.'

Zeller was the only one on the planet who called him Hank, a name Pierce hated. But Pierce was smart enough to know that telling Zeller to stop was out of the question, because it would prompt his friend to use the name at all times.

‘Call me next time, all right?'

Zeller reluctantly backed off and Pierce promised to keep the next weekend open for a night out. He made no promises about surfing. They hung up and Pierce put the phone in its cradle. He picked up his backpack and headed for the apartment door.

Pierce used his scramble card to enter the garage attached to Amedeo Technologies and parked his 540 in his assigned space. The entrance to the building came open as he approached, the approval coming from the night man at the dais behind the double glass doors.

‘Thanks, Rudolpho,' Pierce said as he went by.

He used his electronic key to take the elevator to the third floor, where the administrative offices were located. He looked up at the camera in the corner and nodded, though he doubted Rudolpho was watching him. It was all being digitized and recorded for later. If ever needed.

In the third-floor hallway he worked the combo lock on his office door and went in.

‘Lights,' he said as he went behind his desk.

The overhead lights came on. He turned on his computer and entered the passwords after it booted up. He plugged in the phone line so he could quickly check his e-mail messages before going to work. It was 8 p.m. He liked working at night, having the lab to himself.

For security reasons he never left the computer on or attached to a phone line when he wasn't working on it. For the same reason he carried no cell phone, pager or personal digital assistant. Though he had one, he rarely carried a laptop computer, either. Pierce was paranoid by nature — just a gene splice away from schizophrenia, according to Nicole — but also a cautious and practical researcher. He knew that every time he plugged an outside line into his computer or opened a cellular transmission, it was as dangerous as sticking a needle into his arm or having sex with a stranger. You never knew what you might be bringing into the pipeline. For some people, that was probably part of the thrill of sex. But it wasn't part of the thrill of chasing the dime.

He had several messages but only three that he decided to read this night. The first was from Nicole and he opened it immediately, again with a hope in his heart that made him uncomfortable because it verged on being maudlin.

But the message was not what he was looking for. It was short, to the point and so professional that it was devoid of any reference to their ill-fated romance. Just a former employee's last sign-off before moving on to bigger and better things — in career and romance.

 

Pierce stared at the message for a long time. He noted that it had been sent at 4:55 p.m., just a few hours earlier. There was no sense in replying, because her e-mail address would have been wiped from the system at 5 p.m. when she turned in her scramble card. She was gone and there seemed to be nothing so permanent as being wiped from the system.

She had called him Hewlett and he wondered about that for a long moment. In the past she had used the name as an endearment. A secret name only a lover would use. It was based on his initials — HP, as in Hewlett-Packard, the huge computer manufacturer that these days was one of the Goliaths to Pierce's David. She always said it with a sweet smile in her voice. Only she could get away with nicknaming him with a competitor's name. But her using it in this final message, what did it mean? Was she smiling sweetly when she wrote this? Smiling sadly? Was she faltering, changing her mind about them? Was there still a chance, a hope of reconciliation?

Pierce had never been able to judge the motives of Nicole James. He couldn't now. He put his hands back on the keyboard and saved the message, moving it to a file where he kept all her e-mails, going back the entire three years of their relationship. The history of their time together — good and bad, moving from co-workers to lovers — could be read in the messages. Almost a thousand messages from her. He knew keeping them was obsessive but it was a routine for him. He also had files for e-mail storage in regard to a number of his business relationships. The file for Nicole had started out that way, but then they moved from business associates to what he thought would be partners in life.

He scrolled through the e-mail list in the Nicole James file, reading the captions in the subject lines the way a man might look through photos of an old girlfriend. He outright smiled at a few of them. Nicole was always the master of the witty or sarcastic subject line. Later — by necessity, he knew — she mastered the cutting line and then the hurtful line. One line caught his eye during the scroll — ‘Where do you live?' — and he opened the message. It had been sent four months before and was as good a clue as any as to what would become of them. In his mind this message represented the start of the descent for them — the point of no return.