Twenty-four

“You know how many useless UHF antennas and first-gen satellite TV dishes are sitting on top of houses and apartment buildings and office buildings in Detroit?”

I was sitting on my sofa staring at the small black safe from Taffy’s on the Lake on my coffee table.

I’ve done a lot of things in my life.

Cracking a safe is not one of them.

Lucy sat on the granite work surface of my kitchen island eating from a bag of tortilla chips. An open jar of my salsa was next to her.

“Sit on a chair,” I said still staring at the safe. “Don’t sit on my island. I prepare food there.”

“Well, I don’t know exactly how many UHF antennas and TV dishes there are on buildings in Detroit,” she continued unabated. “But I’m guessing a shitload. Just sitting there being nests for pigeons and hawks and falcons.”

I sighed and flopped back on the sofa. “Is there a point, Lucy? Or is this just you free associating?”

“Oh, there’s a point, big guy,” she said, hopping down from the kitchen counter. She took a seat next to me. “Okay, so I couldn’t figure out who spoofed your phone besides me. I mean, I can usually trace a piggyback in my sleep. I wouldn’t be much of a digital-diva if I couldn’t do that, right? But this one? Pure freakin’ genius!” She paused. Then she said, “You want me to open that for you? I mean ’cause it ain’t gonna open itself.”

“You can crack this?” I said.

“Oh, my God!” she laughed. “A five-year-old could crack that! Move.”

I slid down the sofa a bit and Lucy took my position.

“It’s an old Nationwide Class B combination safe,” she said, staring at the metal box on my coffee table. “Thicker metal makes hearing the tumblers a little harder.”

“You’ve really had a misspent youth, haven’t you?” I said.

Lucy slid off the sofa and, on her knees in front of the safe, gently placed an ear against the door of the safe.

No sooner had she done this, Jimmy knocked on the door. As usual, he entered without waiting for an invitation. Seeing me on the sofa and Lucy with her ear against the metal door of an office safe, Jimmy said, “Uh—bad time?”

“Hi, Jimmy!” Lucy said without taking her ear from the safe door.

Jimmy was carrying a deep purple Club Brutus gym bag and wearing a white gi—the uniform used in the practice of jujitsu—tied at the waist was a yellow belt.

“Holy shit,” I said. “You’ve already earned your yellow belt?”

Jimmy stood a little taller. He smoothed his gi with a hand. “Yessir. Mr. Brutus says I’m a fast learner.”

“And Brutus doesn’t just hand out compliments,” I said.

Lucy pulled away from the safe and turned to look at Jimmy.

“Wow,” she said. “Ain’t you a sexy beast?”

Had Jimmy’s skin tone been a bit lighter, his blushing would have been very apparent.

“I, uh—I’s just wondering if everything was all right,” Jimmy said. “Mr. Ogilvy said you had some trouble the other night? Something about the shed?”

“Just a couple rats, Jimmy,” I said. “We shooed ’em away.”

“Okay. Cool,” Jimmy said, his eyes darting from me to Lucy and back again.

“Something else?”

“Uh, yeah—” he said. “Miss Three Rivers?”

“Jimmy,” she said with disappointment in her voice. “If we’re ever to be friends and lovers, you’re just gonna have to call me Lucy. Or Snuggle Muffin.”

“Yeah, okay, uh—listen,” Jimmy stammered, “Miss Carmela and Miss Sylvia, they really like you. I just want to make sure you treatin’ ’em right, okay? I mean ’cause sometimes I walk past they house and all I can hear is your music—”

“EDM and techno. You like EDM and techno?”

“I’m just saying I know they can’t half hear,” Jimmy said, “but you might want to turn the music down a bit. And they got used to me cooking for ’em once or twice a week. If you could do that, I’m sure they’d appreciate it. Maybe trim they toenails once a month or so—”

“Their—toenails?”

“And paint ’em,” Jimmy said. “They like that Sally Hansen Sonic Boom color in the summer. Number 226. You can get it at Walgreens or CVS.”

“Anything else?”

“Them ladies will take good care of you, even if you don’t care about ’em,” Jimmy said. “I’m kinda hopin’ you learn to care about them.” Then he looked at me and said, “Anything I can do, Mr. Snow, you let me know, okay?”

“Thanks, Jimmy,” I said. “Now go kick Brutus’s ass.”

Jimmy nodded to me. Then he nodded to Lucy and said, “Miss Three Rivers.”

“Snuggle Muffin,” Lucy said.

After Jimmy closed my front door behind him, Lucy looked at me and said, “Is Gomer for real?”

“He’s as real as they come, Lucy,” I said. “Be nice to him or you and me are gonna have problems. In fact, just stop all this hard-case bullshit, awright? It’s exhausting.”

Lucy put her ear back against the square black safe door. Slowly, she put her hand on the combination dial and began turning it one click at a time. Four numbers later, she gently took the handle, pushed it down and cautiously pulled the door open a half-inch or so.

“Sometimes, dudes booby-trap these things,” she said, opening the door completely. She turned to me and said, “Ta-daa!”

Wearing rubber kitchen gloves, I removed a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver from the safe. It was secured in a plastic bag with three spent shells. There was about five grand in cash, all tens and twenties, and files stuffed with neo-Nazi flyers, propaganda, agendas, and phone numbers. There were four DVDs with the initials “BO” and dates over a two-year period. There was a thick file which held some very damning information on some very interesting people, including Barney Olsen, Esq. And there were three burner phones, one in a plastic bag with dried blood on it, and a digital recorder.

Finally, there were photos.

Young girls in various stages of undress and looking drugged to their eyeballs. Young girls gagged and chained over the bar in the secret room at Barney Olsen’s house. Each photo had numbers written on back. Three of the numbers corresponded with the names in the files. The fourth set of numbers proved to be a coded mystery.

“What’s all this shit?” Lucy said craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the photos. “What are those pictures of?”

“Nothing you should know about. Ever,” I said, quickly stuffing the photos back into a file folder. “You were saying something earlier about a pterodactyl and a warp engine?”

“Yeah,” Lucy said peering deeper into the safe. “Holy shit! How much money is that?”

“Don’t touch anything!” I said, swatting her hand away from a stack of cash. “Warp engine, Lucy. Focus!”

“Okay, so all communications these days is high frequency digital, right?”

“If you say so.”

“Awright, so imagine having your own private cell phone network run on old analog equipment at a low frequency. So low people think it’s just background noise. Nobody cares about monitoring that end of the spectrum anymore. Whoever spoofed your phone is using re-tasked UHF antennas and twenty-year-old satellite TV dishes. And that junk is everywhere!”

“Can you locate the source?”

“I’m Lucy Three Rivers,” she said. “The Original Digital-Diva! The Queen of Code! But you have to do something for me first, slick.”

I felt my eyebrows furrow. “And that would be?”