MIKE USHERS THE guest into the living room, his worn furnishings consisting of a couch, recliner, and coffee table. The furniture had been left by the previous tenant, someone with cats, and white hairs still litter the surface, any rough movement creating a snow effect in which the hairs float up, irritate any available allergies, and then rehide, waiting patiently for their next opportunity to invade.
The stranger sits back on the couch. Looks around, his eyes picking up on everything, something akin to confusion in his gaze. What was he expecting? Mike mimics the action, trying to see the room through foreign eyes, not picking up on anything suspicious, no computer equipment in this room, at least none visible at this moment in time.
He waits for him to speak, wondering if he will search the apartment, and if he will find the laptop that sits underneath him, beneath the couch, its battery no doubt dead, its code still fully functioning and incriminating.
The man clears his mouth and asks his first question, one that both calms Mike and introduces an entirely new possibility for his visit.
“You the boyfriend?”
He fights the urge to look around, to see if the uninvited guest is speaking to another individual. “What?”
The bitch. A worrisome title for some poor girl in some place other than here. Mike blinks slowly, hiding the moment of elation at the realization that this man is in the wrong place. “Who?”
“Jess Reilly.” The short man drags out the name, injecting lust and want and disdain, all into the three syllables.
Fuck. He is in the right place. Mike swallows, shrugs his shoulders to the best of his limited ability. “I don’t know who you are talking about.” This is unexpected. He can feel his body tensing, his protective instincts coming forward in one surge. This man, with his shifty eyes and expensive clothes, the darkness that seeps from his skin—he has no good reason to want her, no good reason to be here.
The man scoffs, rolling his thin neck, loose fat still bulging on the sides when his head tilts. “My web guy said this is her address. So where is she?”
“How’d he get this address?” In the horrible moment, the hacker in him is curious about which of the intentionally left rabbit holes was picked up and followed.
The man growls. Physically growls, like a chained dog, a response that doesn’t match his meticulous appearance. “I don’t fucking know. He looked into her website.”
“I work on websites,” Mike responds slowly. “Build them, manage them. Perhaps you’re looking for someone who owns or puts content on one of those websites. But I have thousands of clients, I don’t personally know a Jessica.” Thousands was a gross exaggeration. Hundreds, maybe. If you added up every client he’d ever had. But there was only one Jess. Had been from the first time he had dealt with her.
The man’s face hardens. He holds up a finger, pulls out an old cell phone. Dials a number and waits.
“Tell that tattooed computer prick to call me.”
Then he hangs up, Mike’s eyes picking up on the delicate flaring of the man’s nostrils. The burn of his face. Embarrassment? At being mistaken? The man sets down the phone on the side table. Stares into Mike’s eyes while his left hand fumbles in his pocket, pulling out something. Mike’s palms sweat as the man flips his wrist, and reveals a blade.
“Whoa.” Mike raises his hands. “I just build websites.”
“That’s it? Nothing else? Nothing the FBI would be interested in?”
Mike narrows his eyes and tries to figure out the man’s point. And where he was going with the veiled threat. “I build websites. And write code. I’m a developer.”
“Again, anything the FBI would care about?”
“What’s your point?”
“That answers my question.”
“Good, then you can leave.” Brave words that don’t match the quick thud of his heart as he watches the blade flip through the man’s hands. Open. Closed. Open. Closed. “I build websites,” he repeats, his record set on repeat. “Sorry that I can’t help you more.”
“And I just need to know about hers. Give me her name and address, and I’ll walk out of here and leave you to your next game of Halo.”
He chuckles in response, cursing Deanna’s beautiful face as dread crawls up his uncooperative spine, his mind moving rapidly as he studies the stranger before him and tries to place his connection to her. A client? Has to be. The list of possibilities a hundred names long.
“Sexy jess dot com. That’s the site.”
Mike works his mouth, cultivating a blank look as his mind searches desperately for a plan. “Doesn’t ring a bell. I coulda built it years ago. Chances are, any information I do have is old. I can tell you this. I haven’t heard of the URL or a Jess Reilly. And I don’t have a girlfriend. I don’t even leave this house.”
Out of the entire statement, only two of the four sentences are true. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, and he hasn’t, with a few rare exceptions, left this house in the last eight years.