So Yesterday (7 page)

"Amazing? Define."

"Can you keep a secret?" I said.

"Sure."

"I mean,
really
keep a secret."

"Hunter, I got the script for. . ." (she
named the third movie of a
franchise in which a certain weight-lifting governor
plays an unsmiling robot who shoots
things)"...
a year before it came out. And I didn't leak
a single plot point."

"That's because there weren't any," I said.
"Just don't tell anyone about this, okay? Go one picture back."

She clicked, and Mandy's picture of the shoe filled
the screen, Lexa blinked, uncrossed her arms, and took a drink of her coffee.
Stoking the machine.

It was grainy, jagged, the colors blotchy, but it was
still the shoe.

"Wow, the client did
that?
Didn't know they had it in
them."

"We're not sure," Jen said. "It's
either a bootleg or some radical new marketing concept. You can't tell from
this picture, but the logo has a bar sinister through it."

"It's the anti-client," I said.

Lexa smiled and gave a slow nod. The Nod.
"Cool."

"Cool enough to kidnap someone over?" I
asked.

"Sure, Hunter." Lexa stepped back, squinting
now, blurring the jagged picture with her eyelashes. "Cool is money, and
money can be worth anything. That's money's job."

It was a way that only computer geeks talked, but it
made sense. Jen gave Lexa the Nod.

************************************

We sucked the memory out of
Mandy's phone and made some calls.

Her office phone went to a
machine, and we left the obvious "Where are you?" message.
Cassandra's cell phone did likewise, and I explained that Mandy had missed a
meeting and could Cassandra please call Lexa. When Mandy's home machine
answered, I just hung up, not wanting to leave multiple messages all smelling
of fear. Until we had something more solid, I didn't see the point in worrying
Cassandra about her missing roommate/girlfriend.

Then we looked at Mandy's outgoing numbers. The last
place Mandy had called was a car service, which was how she traveled since
going full-time. The other outgoing calls led to the client's massive switchboards,
nonspecific numbers that ended in three zeros—probably Mandy conferring with
her bosses about "Don't Walk." The only other call in memory was one
to her home the night before. There were no clues that she had arranged to meet
anyone else besides us this morning.

But
someone
had told Mandy about the building and its mysterious
contents. At least one of the client's countless execs knew more than we did.

I looked at the phone. Having just had my cell phone
ripped from my life, I knew how much information was trapped inside in the tiny
plastic wafer of circuitry, but there was no easy way to get it out. Machines
don't give up their secrets easily.

Human beings, on the other hand, love to spill the beans.
One by one, I went through the client's numbers that Mandy had stored, skipping
straight past phone trees to human receptionists. Eventually one made the
connection for me.

"Hello, I'm making a call on behalf of Mandy
Wilkins."

"Oh, do you want Mr. Harper?"

"Uh, yes. Please."

"I'll connect you."

I waited for a moment on hold, listening to custom
rap-Muzak exalting the latest big sports name who'd signed on the client's
dotted line. It sucked me in just far enough that my brain got a jolt when the
exec came on.

"Greg Harper. Who is this?"

"My name is Hunter Braque. I work with Mandy
Wilkins. I was supposed to meet her this morning at Lispenard and Church
...
about the shoes."

"The shoes, yeah." His voice was slow,
cautious. "I think she told me about bringing you in. Outside consultant,
right?"

"Exactly."

"Right, I remember now. Hunter." His voice
changed, sharpened by recognition. "You focused on 'Don't Walk,' didn't
you? Caused all that trouble?"

"Uh, I guess that was me. Anyway, she didn't make
the meeting—"

"Maybe she had second thoughts."

"Actually, I'm a bit worried. She didn't show for
our meeting, but we found her phone. She's missing, sort of, and we were
wondering what this was all about. The shoes, I mean."

"I can't comment about the shoes. We do a lot of
shoes. This is a shoe company. I don't even know what shoes you mean."

"Listen, Mr. Harper, I saw them—"

"Saw what? You should have Mandy call me."

"But I don't know where she—"

"Have Mandy call me."

The line went dead. No Muzak, nothing. Somewhere
during the call Jen and Lexa had stopped playing with the photo of the shoe to
listen.

When I dropped the phone from my ear, Jen said,
"What was that about?"

I'd heard many forms of corporate desperation before,
the frantic tones of lost market share, crumbling stock prices,
multimillion-dollar contracts with college hoop stars who weren't cutting it in
the pros, the horrifying realization of not knowing what those damn kids wanted
anymore. But nothing quite as panicked as Greg Harper's last words.

"I think the client is in a state of
denial," I said. "But one thing's for certain: The shoes didn't come
from them."

"So where did they come from?" Lexa asked.

I looked at Jen; she looked at me.

We shrugged.

Chapter
10

ONE THING
ABOUT BEING A COOL HUNTER, YOU REALIZE ONE
simple fact: Everything has a
beginning.

Nothing always existed. Everything had an Innovator.

We all know who invented telephones and lightbulbs,
but the humbler innovations are made anonymously. But there was a first paper
airplane, a first pair of jeans cut off into shorts, a first paper-clip
necklace. And traveling back in time: a first back scratcher, a first birthday
present, a first hole designated as the one to throw garbage in.

Once a good idea spreads, however, it's hard to believe
it didn't always exist.

Take detective stories. The first was written by Edgar
Allan Poe in 1841. (Spoiler alert: The monkey did it.) Over the next 163 years
Poe's innovation infected countless books, films, plays, and TV shows. And like
most rampant viruses, the detective character has mutated into every imaginable
form: little old ladies who solve crimes, medieval monks who solve crimes, cats
who solve crimes, even criminals who solve crimes.

My dad used to devour mystery novels (about
epidemiologists who solve crimes, I'm sure) until one day he read an interview
with a real homicide detective in Los Angeles. The guy had been on the force
for over forty years, and in all that time not a single major crime had ever
been solved by an amateur detective.

Not one.

With that in mind,
we took
Mandy
's phone
to the
cops.

************************************

"Relationship to the
missing person?"

"Uh, co-worker? I mean,
she gets
me jobs."

"And where do you work,
Hunter?"

"Nowhere in particular. I'm a . . . consultant.
A shoe
consultant.
Mostly
shoes."

Detective Machal Johnson
looked me up and down.

"Shoe consultant? Good
money in that?"

"I mostly get paid in
shoes."

One eyebrow was slowly rising. "Okay. Shoe
consultant." The detective typed as he talked: sleepily. I could have
input
the
letters faster into my cell phone (if I'd had one).
Johnson's ancient computer looked equally slow. The screen was all one greenish
color—the glowing letters fireflies trapped in mint toothpaste. "So this
Mandy Jenkins is also a
...
shoe
consultant?"

"Yeah, I guess that's
what you'd call her."

"And when do you guess
you last saw her?"

"Yesterday, about
five."

"Less than twenty-four
hours ago?"

Jen nudged me, and Detective Johnson looked like he
was
about to take his hands off the
keyboard, but I didn't let him. It had taken us an hour to get to this point,
past desk sergeants, metal detectors, and a wide variety of unimpressed
expressions.

"She was supposed to meet us this morning,"
I said. "At Lispenard and Church."

He sighed and typed, mouthing
the
street names. "Any
evidence of foul play?"

"Yes. We found her phone." I placed it on
the detective's desk.

He turned it over once in his hand. "That's all?
No purse? No wallet?"

"That's it."

"Where?"

"Where we were supposed to meet her. It was just
inside this abandoned building."

He put the phone down. "You were supposed to meet
her inside an abandoned building?"

"No, on the corner. But the phone was inside,
nearby. And there's a picture on it."

"A picture on the building?"

"No, on the phone. It's also a camera. That's the
picture on the screen."

Putting on half-lens glasses that seemed to suddenly
age him, the detective peered at the phone. "Huh. What do you know."
He took in the tiny lens next to the antenna, squinted at the screen, and gave
it a New York cop's version of the Nod. "And what exactly is that a
picture of?"

"A face in the dark. We saw that guy."

"What guy?"

"The guy in the picture."

"There's a guy in the picture?"

"You have to use wax paper to see it."

"He chased us," Jen said.

Detective Johnson looked at
her, then his eyes swept back and forth across the space between us a few
times, an alien watching a tennis ' match and trying to grasp the rules.
"Have you tried calling your friend?"

"We can't. That's her phone."

"At her office? At her
home?"
               

"Sure, her roommate too. But we just got
machines."

"Okay." Detective Johnson pushed his glasses
up higher onto his nose and settled back from the rigors of typing into the
creaky comfort of his office chair. "I know you're concerned about your
friend, but let me tell you this about missing people: Ninety-nine out of
hundred aren't missing. They had a personal emergency, or got stuck on a
train, or went out of town and forgot to tell you. With adults we don't even
start looking for twenty-four hours unless there's a reason to believe foul
play was involved."

I felt Jen twitching next to me. She was dying to get
out of the cop shop, back to her new job as an Innovator who solves crimes.

"Now, you did find her phone, which you are
sure
is hers
..."
(I nodded like a
puppy)"...
but that's not really a sign of foul play. Until she's been missing for
twenty-four hours, it's just a lost phone. At which point you should have her
roommate or a relative or some other adult call me if she's still missing. I'll
keep your information on file."

I could tell from his tone it was useless arguing.
"Oh. Thanks."

"So, do you want to turn in this phone as lost
property, or would you like to save your friend some paperwork when she
reappears and hold on to it?" He held out the phone, making it clear who
was being saved from paperwork.

"Sure," Jen said eagerly. "We can give
it to her. No trouble."

Detective Machal Johnson nodded slowly, ceremoniously
handing the phone back to me.

"Your public-spiritedness is appreciated, I
assure you."