Psycho Save Us (21 page)

                                              6

Though
Spencer would never know it, the flaming car that he passed by on Dixon Avenue
was just one more cog in the machine of tonight that would bring about so much
death.  This particular cog happened to buy him the time he would need to
escape.

The car-b-que
was off to one side of the road, popping like fireworks.  Red lights flashed
behind him.  The fire trucks were already on the scene, as was a HERO truck. 
Spencer’s minivan was one of the last vehicles to get through before the
roadblock was set up, and pedestrians from the nearby crack houses and
apartments were gathering either beside or in the streets, despite warnings
from a man with a bullhorn.

If anybody’s in
there, sucks to be you
, Spencer thought as he coasted past the smoking
vehicle and delivered a salute.  It was a yellow Eclipse.  Fire licked out of
each window and smoke plumed from the slightly parted hood.  There was no sign
of an accident.  No other car was nearby.  Spencer concluded that either
someone was ditching a body or ditching a car they needed to get clean of. 
Dangerous
night to be out
, he thought.  But maybe this was normal for the Bluff.

He turned down
two more streets before he finally made it to Maple Street, which was as far as
most white folks ever got to Hillside Apartments, and cruised right on over to the
complex where a couple of late-night get-togethers were going on.  A few young
black youths were sitting on a second-storey balcony while their music blasted
from a stereo system inside.  Another small assembly, this one peppered with a
few females, was outside of one of the terraces.  Again, music boomed from an
open door, and the thrumming bass drowned out all other instrumental nuances.

Spencer found the
apartment building labeled
APARTMENTS
0400-0500
, and slid into
the only available parking spot.  He hopped out of the van.  Two older black
guys were stepping out of their apartment and Spencer lifted his chin at them
by way of greeting.  One of them mumbled “S’up,” and they kept on towards their
car.

He wasted no
time at 448.  He didn’t knock with his knuckles, he pounded with his fist on
the door with its peeling white paint and faded number 8.  “Yo, Basil!  It’s
Spence!  Open up, assfuck!” he shouted.  Ten seconds went by.  Nothing.

A group of four
guys in their early twenties scooted by, hollering and laughing.  One of them
chucked a bottle into some bushes.  Another glanced in Spencer’s direction,
fixed him with a look, then turned away.

He banged on the
door again.  “Yo, Basil!  Open up!”

Again nothing.

Behind him, a
door opened.  Spencer turned reflexively to touch the Glock tucked and hidden
at his waistband.  A Hispanic woman was stepping out of 449 across the hall. 
She wore stockings and a garter, along with an oversized fake fur coat.  As she
walked past, Spencer noticed that a price tag still hung from the coat’s left
sleeve.  She lit a cigarette and gave him the briefest of appraisals, gauging
his interest, and then discounted him when she saw he had none.

Spencer took in
the narrow corridor he was in.  He heard shouting from behind closed doors down
the hall.  A man and woman kind of fight.  There was the sound of something
hitting the wall. 
That’s about to get bad
, he thought, and hammered on
448’s door again.  “Basil!  I’m gonna kick this door in, man!  You wanna lose
your deposit?”  Spencer took a step back, and slammed his right Converse hard
near the doorframe.  “I’m comin’ in!”

“Hold on!  Fuck
me! 
Hold on
!” someone called from inside.

Spencer jiggled
the doorknob.  “You got maybe five seconds, Yeti. 
Maybe
.”

“I said
hold
on
, man!”  There was the sound of a chain rattling on the other side of the
door.  Spencer touched the Glock again, just in case there was a surprise
waiting for him.  When the door parted, it did so slowly.  A tall, anorexic
sasquatch stood on the other side.  At least 6 ½ feet tall, the sasquatch had
been shaved only around his eyes and some of his forehead.  There was gnarled
brown hair that descended from his head and merged with a scraggly beard, which
created a great mane that captured the occasional crumb.  The top of his head
had random bald patches.  Where you could see skin, it was red, like a dog with
the mange.  The sasquatch wore a black robe that hung from its skinny body like
a long coat would hang from a coat rack; it had no form, wasn’t filled out at
all.  Besides the robe, which he wore open, the sasquatch had only a pair of
white briefs.  “The fuck, Spence?  Man, it’s like, after one o’clock an’ shit. 
Almost one-thirty.”

“Fuck you,”
Spencer said, stepping inside uninvited.  He paused at the threshold for a
second, holding his breath against the smell.

The apartment
was a landfill, just like every other place that Spencer had known the Yeti to reside. 
Styrofoam containers, mostly empty, lay atop balsawood tables that looked ready
to buckle.  Black curtains clung to one window while bed sheets blocked out the
light from others.  There were various pillows and blankets on the floor to
indicate someone slept there, but it was questionable who and how many.  An N64
and a PS2 lay with wires strewn across the floor almost like trip wires. 
Replica paintings were stacked by the dozens against a wall, but none appeared
to adorn the walls themselves.  Though it was hard to tell, between the
mountains of refuse and a carefully arranged stack of cereal boxes, there was
little wall to see.  There was a similar stack for
Motor Trend
magazines
against another wall.  There was a pile of clothes in the shape of a couch at
the center of the room, and a variegated assortment of stains across these
clothes.  Bits of carpet could be seen here and there, but the floor was mostly
covered by cardboard boxes, empty water bottles, Sprite cans, old newspapers, Japanese
swords (lying on the floor without much care), chewing gum wrappers, four of
the seven Harry Potter novels, eight broken lamps, six car stereos, a toolbox
(opened and with most of the contents strewn about), a Bowflex with a food tray
balanced on it, and perhaps most dubious of all, forty or so empty tampon boxes
arranged neatly beside the door.  There were medical dictionaries and college
study books collected in one corner, along with folders bursting with papers
and CD cases of Rosetta Stone’s series “How to Speak Mandarin.”  There was a
20-inch TV sitting atop an old box of a 52-inch TV (presumably broken and now
serving as a table), and all around that there was a smattering of keyboards,
computer monitors, CDs, printers, copiers, fax machines and scanners.  A radio
played a familiar Fiona Apple hit from the late 90’s.

“God damn,
Basil.”

“I know, man. 
Sorry about the mess.”

“Mess doesn’t
begin to…you got my shit or not?” he said, deciding not to get sidetracked.

“Um, yeah. 
Yeah, let me just…”  The Yeti now started frenetically digging around the room
seemingly at random.

Once a computer
engineer and then an investigator at a bank’s fraud department, Basil O’Connor had
become what he had become for very simple reasons: he preferred to work from home,
and at his own pace.  At least, that’s what he’d told Spencer almost a decade
ago when they first met.  Spencer had just been getting his feet wet back then,
had happened upon a couple of people who introduced him to some rather
influential members of Atlanta’s seedier side.  Knowing the good contacts from
the bullshitters, Spencer had thrown away the useless ones and maintained
relationships with those who were worth the time.  Basil was one of those worth
the time.Basil the Yeti, master forger and counterfeiter, who so far had never
been caught, was worth the time.  He’d gotten his nickname not just because of
his appearance, but because he was so elusive.  Constantly moving, constantly
changing cell phones, e-mails and IP addresses, one only knew how to find him
if one knew others who knew him that could arrange introductions.

“This is a, uh,
surprise visit,” said Basil.

“I paid you
months ago, Yeti.  You said they’d be ready next time I rolled through,”
Spencer said, shutting the door behind him with his foot.  “Well, here I am.”

“I know, I know,
man,” Basil said, his high-pitched voice nowhere near as fearsome as one would
suspect from a sasquatch.  He scratched at a red bald spot on his scalp, and
the muscles around his neck spasmed.  He’d been hitting the pipe recently, and like
all addicts was trying (fruitlessly) to conceal the fact.  “I got ’em all, too. 
You know me.  They’re right here.”

Spencer snapped
his fingers twice and waved his fingers towards him, a sign of gimme.

The Yeti nodded
distractedly and moved about with renewed quickness.  For all his disgusting
habits, the man had a certain organization in his brain that only he
understood.  He pushed aside a few pizza boxes, two pairs of pants (Spencer had
never once seen him wear pants) and six empty Mountain Dew bottles to reveal a
small end table.  This place reminded Spencer of that incident in Manhattan
back in 1947 with those
Collyer Brothers, Langley and
Homer.  Homer, who was blind, had been seen to by Langley, an engineer who designed
their house to be filled with tripwires, traps, and a maze of trash, all to
keep people from getting into their home and taking his brother away from him. 
Eventually, Langley had been crushed by his own trash and Homer, unable to help
himself, had died of thirst and starvation.

Maybe
that’ll be the end o’ the Yeti, too
, Spencer thought.  He
snapped his fingers impatiently. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, I got work to do
tonight.”

“Yeah? 
Did you see Pat?  He get you some work?”

“Yeah,
that’s what I’m working on.  I gotta get moving.”

Basil
nodded jerkily.  Long ago his central nervous system had lost the war against
all the H he was putting in his system.  These days it was so bad he could
barely stand up straight.  “You couldn’t wait on these, Spence?” he said,
handing over the packet of fake IDs.  He bent over against his will, then
straightened up against his will.  The H was wracking his body.  He scratched
at his skin and winced.  “Like, I dunno, until morning?”

“Naw,
I might not be stayin’ in the A-T-L too long.  Might have to fly fast.  Never
know.  So, I’ll be needin’ these.”  He opened it up, checked them out.  He
glanced up at the Yeti.

“Yo,
man, they’re all cool.  You paid for the best and you got it.”

Spencer
had no doubt about that, really.  Basil wasn’t just some moron who threw
together a few pieces of paper with a new name on it and laminated the shit at
Kinko’s.  No, he was one of those rare and beautiful types in the criminal
underworld, completely indispensible to all of the major players because he
didn’t just invent IDs, he grew them. 

Anybody
could go to a cemetery and find the name of a child who’d died soon after
birth, then go to the courthouse and look at their records to get the dead
infant’s social security number and start using it.  That was probably the
oldest trick in the proverbial book.  But the feds were onto that trick, and
modern computer systems had made it easier to check and double-check the
background of an SSN.  So gathering SSNs were only good if a person grew them. 
This meant that a professional forger like the Yeti had to keep his records
regularly updated, and by whatever means.  The old cemetery trick was sometimes
good, but these days the best thing to do was steal someone’s ID from the
Internet.  A number of confidence scams made it easy to get people to hand that
information over, even the information of a dead infant.

Once
the Yeti had this info, he grew the ID, used it to open a credit line with a
bank, maybe just a hundred bucks, maybe a thousand, and then quickly paid it
off.  Then he might enroll this fake person in a school system.  Doesn’t matter
that they don’t show up, especially if it’s an inner city school where the
attendance was always shoddy anyway.  This all cost money, of course, and the
more cultivated you wanted an ID to be, the more you had to pay.  For instance,
enrolling this fake person in college would be a little more costly, because for
Basil, this meant spending his time filling out documents for online courses,
maybe even completing a degree in the liberal arts if the client wanted
something impenetrable.

Some
clients even wanted a picture ID of themselves from their early years placed
into various databases to make it appear as though they had carried this
identity for all their lives.  This might entail taking their childhood school
photos and placing them into old newspaper clippings that were now kept online,
which required hacking, of course.  This way, a person could appear to have
been enrolled in, say, a chess club when they were twelve, and then a swim team
competition when they were eighteen, and so on.  All of this helped fill out an
identity so much that it would take a superhuman feat to unravel it and
determine it was 100% fake.

Basil
kept this information in reams of folders, probably the folders strewn all
around the apartment.  He stored it for years, gathering new identities while
simultaneously cultivating old ones.  He waited until they ripened, held onto
them for prospective customers, and then finally attached the necessary faces
and finalized a few things.  It was a full-time job that allowed him to work at
home and at his own pace doing something he loved—hacking and research, both of
which provided a creative outlet for his talents.