“The regular internet?”
He glanced over his shoulder, shooting me a smile. “I kind of used to be a hacker? When I was younger, I mean. I pretty much just do stuff for work now, but I still, you know…”
“Know how to hack?”
“Yup,” he said, his fingers flying across the keyboard again.
I thought about it for a second. “Fucking cool.”
I watched him work for a minute until a few windows popped up on the screen, including some news articles and photographs. “It looks like his ex-wife and teenage son moved to Seattle after they got divorced a few years ago. The court battle was pretty ugly and public, as you could imagine with a guy like him, but he still has partial custody, and his son goes back to Philadelphia a few times a year. It says here that Justin Frisk makes a trip to Seattle in the late summer every year, too. They generally don’t put pictures of children in the news, but the kid turned eighteen a couple of years ago. Is this him?”
A picture of a teenager popped up on the screen. He looked like pretty much any other teenage guy, except for the fact that he was hurrying out of a courthouse with a couple of bodyguards on either side.
“I’m not sure. I think the guy at the shop said something about his father, so it’s probably him, but I couldn’t get a good luck.”
Irving thought for a second, picking up a pen and tapping it against the desk. “There’s a convenience store across from the shop still, is that right?”
“Yeah, why?”
Irving frowned, and the screen I couldn’t understand filled with text again. “This is the kind of thing I don’t really do anymore, but it’s actually pretty easy. Most of those convenience stores use a surveillance monitoring system that has a really simple backdoor, and they upload to a central database with an archive that goes back a couple of months before being deleted. I’m surprised they haven’t fixed the backdoor yet, although I guess the cameras are about deterrence more than anything else.”
I felt dizzy with how smart he sounded. “Say that again?”
Irving clicked a button, and a fuzzy video image popped up on the screen. It showed the comic book store, but viewed from the other side of the street.
“Oh my god,” I said, holding a hand to my face. “You hacked the camera at the slushie shop!”
Irving shrugged. “Just promise me you’ll never tell anyone, okay? I could get in a ton of trouble. Once we’re in, though, it’s pretty easy. I’ll just scroll through the evenings until we find a clear shot of the vandals, and we can confirm whether it’s that crime guy’s son. If it is, the shop might be mixed up in something bigger than we can handle, and you’ll know to figure out a way to stay safe going forward.” He paused, then glanced at me over his shoulder. “I need distance from Brick, but if you and the shop are in any risk, that’s a lot more important.”
Black-and-white video images filled the screen while Irving sped through them, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth and his foot tapping along to the music on the record player. Every now and then he would stop when some figure emerged in the darkness.
“Is this it?”
I squinted at the screen, then realized what was going on. “No, but keep playing! That’s the stranger who came and cleaned up the graffiti for us.”
“I’m not sure. It looks like that’s Brick, actually.”
Sure enough, it was Brick. I recognized the way his body sauntered and the thick muscles of his arms. But the other thing was true, too.
“Oh my god, Brick cleaned up the graffiti for us!”
Irving fell back against his chair, the image frozen on Brick as he swiped at the window with a rag, a bucket of water sitting by his side. “Holy shit, he really did.”
“Why would he do that?”
“It wasn’t part of your deal?”
“Hell no. I just didn’t take him for the kind of guy who cleaned windows, I guess.”
Irving stood up, then paced over to his row of records again. I stayed behind the desk, tapping my fingers against the chair and staring at Brick.
“That’s a pretty nice thing to do,” he finally said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“And he didn’t even take credit for it.”
“What a confusing guy,” I grumbled.
