Authors: Tod Goldberg
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Suspense, #Thrillers, #Crime
The Reformed (10 page)
It sure did. The house in question was fully illuminated, which made it odd, as the other houses on the block were completely dark. I guess people in Cheyenne Lakes didn’t bother to watch the late-night news, either. The house was pointed at a diagonal from the entrance to Acuera Street, which was where Junior’s house was located. We were coming up from the right side of the lit house, and I could see through the cheap blinds that there wasn’t any furniture in the room, which could mean nothing. Plenty of banks keep the lights on inside foreclosed homes to discourage squatters and the like. But this house didn’t look like it was foreclosed upon, especially not with the two Honda Accords parked in the driveway.
The rocks, however, were the giveaway: They were fake rocks with security cameras installed inside them ... and not very well. They were the kind of fake-rocks-with-a-security-camera-in-them that anyone can buy at Target, and so the neighbors probably paid no mind to them, not even when the cameras pointed away from the house. I looked up toward the roof and noticed a satellite dish, which was probably just the wireless receiver for the cameras. Junior was beaming security footage from down the block directly to his house. Smart.
But not smart enough. Fi and I stepped back around the corner and found a park bench beneath an old-style lamp. It sure was a charming place for a gang leader to live.
I handed Fiona two cell phones. “Take these apart,” I said.
“How romantic,” she said. “What are we building?”
“Jamming device,” I said.
“Michael, you know I love the dirty talk,” she said.
Blocking a standard, unencrypted, wireless video signal requires only two things: another video signal and enough battery power to cause an alteration to the electromagnetic waves. Three cell phones with video capability can achieve this without much problem. If you have an old cell phone, it’s much more difficult than if you have the new 4G phones, which generate more power than was originally used to run NORAD. If you have three 4G phones, all you need to do is wire the batteries together so that they feed into a single phone and then begin shooting video. Place the phones next to the video source, and all that will be transmitted is blackness.
If you have the proper tools—in this case, Fiona’s earring studs, a paper clip from my pocket and a credit card—you can build this device in about five minutes. It won’t last very long, since the batteries will cook the master phone in about thirty minutes, but if you need to jam a signal longer than thirty minutes, you’d have better tools and material from the get-go.
When we finished up, we walked back toward the house with the cameras, this time from the opposite side of the street. From this vantage point, I was able to get a better view of the rock camera. It was fixed in position and wasn’t motion activated, which told me there were probably another three or four cameras catching other angles from the illuminated windows.
I circled back on the street and came up along the side of the house again, so that I was diagonal to the first rock. It wouldn’t be able to catch me because it was fixed, so I simply removed the back of the rock—they come with a handsome tab latch and several arrows to indicate just how to disable the device, which is nice—and placed the wired phones directly atop the electrical pack. I would have just unplugged the entire device, which would have been simple enough, but I saw that there were cables running the length of the house and up into the roof, which meant that it was all circuited together. This would jam the entire transmission, not just one camera.
I walked back around and met Fiona on the sidewalk.
“Sophisticated?” she said.
“No,” I said. “A good idea. Bad execution. Someone has given him good advice, but there’s a serious lack of skill involved here.”
As we passed the driveway, I knelt down to scratch my foot, but also to get a look at the space beneath the Hondas I’d noticed earlier. There wasn’t a single spot of oil I could see, and the tires on both cars were only slightly worn. The cars also had dealer plates, which I suspected meant that they’d been stolen.
If you’re going to steal a car, steal a car with dealer plates. Dealers move their plates from automobile to automobile, so it’s impossible to track them down to a specific car. Police also don’t care about a car with dealer plates—it’s a car that no one owns yet, so there’s nothing of criminal note for them to pay attention to.
In this case, the cars were probably stolen and the plates were probably stolen, but not stolen together. It was a perfect (and easy) crime to pull off in a community like this, where you could set off a nuclear bomb at 11:00 P.M. and no one would realize there was a problem until the next morning, when they stepped outside to fetch the newspaper. It was unlikely that anyone paid any attention to anything unless it directly violated the HOA’s codes.
I stood up awkwardly, just in case anyone was watching, which I doubted. It was so quiet you could hear time.
“Is it your Achilles, darling?” Fiona asked.
“No,” I said, “just a slight irritation, my sweet.”
I didn’t think our voices were being recorded, but as we walked we kept up a running dialogue about the weather, the Johnsons’ new pool, Mr. Jones’ new goiter and our collective desire to spend the next Christmas in Spain. It was the kind of domestic conversation I imagined real people had all the time, but that was about as foreign to my domestic experience as I could possibly get. I tried to remember what my parents used to talk about when they were together, and then I remembered that they didn’t
talk
about anything. They
screamed
a lot, but there wasn’t much in the way of meaningless conversations about the life they were living. Not a great way to prepare young men to grow up into chatty adults, which neither I nor my brother, Nate, really were. Oh, we could talk ... we just didn’t chat very well.
talk
about anything. They
screamed
a lot, but there wasn’t much in the way of meaningless conversations about the life they were living. Not a great way to prepare young men to grow up into chatty adults, which neither I nor my brother, Nate, really were. Oh, we could talk ... we just didn’t chat very well.
As we got closer to Junior’s house, I noticed yet another empty home, this one directly across the street from Junior’s. This one wasn’t lit up like it was on fire, as the house down the block was, but I could see a dipole sound antenna mounted above the storm drain. It wasn’t a complex system Junior had working—in fact, it was about as rudimentary as they come, and could be so easily hacked into that I could see the wheels in Fiona’s mind already turning—but if you’re in a safe area, surrounded by people who mean you no harm, you don’t exactly need satellites sending you the positions of Russian subs every morning.
“Follow my lead,” I said to Fiona, and then turned up Junior Gonzalez’ front walk. His house was modest—a one-story ranch style with a neatly trimmed lawn. A bed of roses was beneath the two picture windows that likely looked into the living room, though the drapes were closed, and there was a wicker basket with fake flowers sitting atop a distressed wood bench in the portico, just adjacent to the ten-foot-high front door.
When we reached the door, I attempted to open it. I could tell immediately from the complete lack of movement that it was secured by more than just a mere dead bolt. That the front door was actually metal overlaid with wood was also a pretty good clue.
If you have a metal front door, it’s because you expect that one day someone is going to try to break it down. If you’re smart enough to build a metal door into your house, you’re probably smart enough to have a camera on the door, too—Junior’s was buried in the fake flowers, another Target special—and maybe you’re even smart enough to not answer the door when a stranger starts kicking it and making a bunch of noise.
“Jeff? Jeff? It’s Marvin! You locked the door! Jeff!” I pounded on the door a few times, which didn’t make much noise on account of the dulling nature of the metal, so I started slapping at the wall. And then Fiona started shouting, too.
“Mary? Mary? I’m freezing out here! It must be seventy degrees out here!”
I stepped back from the portico and slapped at the living room windows. Double paned. Nice. I slapped them again and shouted for Jeff. Fiona stepped out onto the lawn, fished around for a rock and then threw it at the garage door, and screamed some more for Mary.
“More?” she mouthed.
I shrugged. Why the hell not? Fiona picked up another rock, but before she could throw it, the front door opened and an exceptionally large Latino man stepped out. He wore only a robe and shower shoes and a confused look on his face. “Why are you screaming and throwing things at my home?” he asked. It was a rather pleasant entreaty from a man who’d spent twenty-five years in prison and had either killed or ordered the deaths of probably dozens of men.
“Oh, crap,” I said. “All these houses look alike. I thought this was Jeff’s house. We’re visiting him, took a walk down to the gazebo and I guess we got lost. I’m really sorry. I thought this was Jeff and Mary’s place. Honey, do you know what street they live on? This isn’t the right house.”
Fiona, still with a rock clutched in her hand, sat down on Junior’s lawn. “How can you be so stupid?” she said.
“Honey,” I said, “this is not a big deal. We’ll find the house.” I turned to Junior, gave him one in my new series of looks meant to convey instant brotherhood—this one was my “Women, what can you do with them?” smile—and then took a step toward him so that I could give him a loud stage whisper. “There can’t be that many houses in the development, right? I think it was on one of those Indian streets. Apache, maybe?”
“Please, get off my lawn,” Junior said. “I just had it reseeded.”
“No problem,” I said, and then Fiona began to cry.
“Why is she crying?” Junior asked.
“We both had a little to drink tonight,” I said, and then I gave him the “We’re both in this together look” men often share in situations that involve crying females. “I hate to ask this, but would it be possible to come inside and use your phone? It’s awfully dark out, and I don’t feel like there’s a great chance my lady friend and I will ever find Jeff and Mary’s house.”
“No,” he said.
“What?” Fiona said. She was up now and storming toward Junior. “No? What? What kind of person are you? What kind of values do you have? We aren’t going to come inside and steal your plates, you asshole. We just want to use the telephone. And if I don’t get to a restroom in the next five minutes, I’ll be back on your lawn! And then what will you do?”
I caught Fiona in my arms before she could begin doing whatever crazy, drunk, Southern women are prone to do to hulking ex-convicts, which is probably whatever they damn well please. “Easy, honey,” I said. “He doesn’t want us in his home. That’s fine. It’s his right.”
Fiona crumpled down on Junior’s feet and began to sob even more. That probably would have been fine, really, but when she began to wail and lights started turning on down the street—or, well, more lights than our screaming and hurling of rocks had caused to turn on—Junior said, “Fine, fine. Come in.”
The inside of Junior’s house looked like a model home. The front door opened into a wide entry hall that fed directly into a great room combination of kitchen and living room. There was a beige sofa covered in multicolored throw pillows, a chocolate brown coffee table that was scattered with magazines and newspapers, and a leather occasional chair with a chenille blanket slung over one arm.
“Your wife has a beautiful eye for detail,” Fiona said. She wandered about the living room, touching things and, I assumed, pocketing whatever she could. That was her skill set. Unfortunately, her jeans weren’t exactly baggy. She’d find a way to make do, I was sure.
“I don’t have a wife,” Junior said. He walked into the kitchen and picked up a cordless phone and handed it to me. “Make your call.”
I dialed Sam’s cell phone.
“If this is Yvonne,” Sam said, “I’m not in a position to take your call.”
“It’s us,” I said. “We’re lost. But a very nice man let us into his home to use the phone.”
“Mikey,” Sam said. “How did I get to your house? And why is your mother with me?”
“I’ll have to explain that later,” I said. “In the meantime, if you can just give me your address, we’ll get right back over there.”
“Did you go to Junior’s place without me?”
“I did,” I said.
“And this is his phone?”
“It is,” I said.
“Came up blocked on my cell,” Sam said. “Only person who calls me from a blocked number is Yvonne, usually. I don’t think you’ve met her. Great lady. Phone is her thing, if you know what I mean.”
“Great, great,” I said. “Well, let me get this nice gentleman’s phone number in case we get lost again, maybe you can call him and retrace our steps.” I pulled the phone from my ear. “Excuse me, sir, can I get your phone number to give to my friend? He’s worried we’re never going to get back to his place. Apparently, not too long ago there was a gator attack in these parts, so you can imagine his fear.”
Junior stood in the middle of his living room, watching Fiona weave drunkenly about his house. He wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to me, and I couldn’t tell if he thought Fiona was suspicious or if he was worried she’d break something. I also couldn’t believe that the man I’d seen in the photos Father Eduardo showed us was living in this house and that he seemed, oddly, just as professional and put together in only a robe as Father Eduardo had been in his office. Either they’d learned quite a bit from each other, or Junior had realized that in order to make it big, he’d need to clean up. I could still see that he had tattoos on his hands, and though his hair was thick and wavy, every time he ran his hand over his scalp in exasperation as Fi came close to toppling one thing or another, a flash of ink showed on his head. You can only cover so much of your past.
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