Theaella

15

“Okay,” Matthew said. “Now you should grab facial recognition and—”

Joey pointed at another monitor behind him.

He turned further.

Panasonic FacePRO was already churning through the Internet, searching for matches of the captured image. It chimed twice, hitting on an i********: profile.

BigggPapa69.

There Big Papa was, taking a selfie with two Budweiser girls at an Irish pub.

Next a posed shot in the gym as he dead-lifted eight plates.

Now behind the wheel of a Maserati, wearing reflective aviator sunglasses.

Matthew said, “Can you slip into the profile to get us a real name?”

“Hang on.” Her hands were a blur. “He’s got double authentication, which is a pain. But wait—wait. Check this out.”

She’d cyberstalked backward in his profile, finding a post from last year. Big Papa on an airplane with a friend, flashing a boarding pass and the hang-ten sign. The caption: HEADING TO MAUI TO SLAY SOME FRESH YOUNG HAWAII ASS!! His tongue was sticking out, his mouth framed with a pencil-thin goatee.

“Look at his dumb sexist face,” Joey said. “I mean, what the actual fuck.”

She clicked the mouse angrily, grabbing the image and whipping it across an arc of monitors until it rested on the screen in front of her. She zoomed in on the boarding pass name: Michael Papazian.

Before Matthew could react, a rap sheet had magically come into being on the monitor at his elbow. Papazian’s priors included violent r**e, battery, possession of illegal firearms. Numerous plead-out charges and a few short prison stints. Current address unknown.

By the time Matthew looked back, Joey had decrypted the barcode image from the ticket, revealing a six-digit number.

Matthew said, “How…?”

Joey shot up her wait-a-sec finger, and he clamped his mouth shut. Now she was using the six-digit passenger ID and Papazian’s last name to log into the airline’s website. All of a sudden, Matthew was looking at Michael Papazian’s frequent-flier number, travel preferences, credit-card information.

And address.

“You’ll find him there.” She flicked a hand at another monitor in the circle that showed Papazian’s Netflix account. He was currently streaming an episode of Luther. “Distracted.”

Matthew shoved up from his lean on the desk. He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Good work.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was.” Her tone was morose, her face sullen.

Like Matthew, she’d come up through a variety of foster homes. It had been harder for her because of assholes like Papazian. She didn’t like to talk about it, and he never pushed her.

She glared at the i********: picture. “Before you kill that predacious douchenozzle,” she said, “tell him that the adjective is ‘Hawaiian.’”

Matthew looked at her blankly.

Her lip curled with disgust. “As in ‘Heading to Maui to slay some fresh young Hawaiian ass.’”

Matthew cleared his throat and said, gently, “I’ll do that.”

System Overload

Michael Papazian nodded off on his couch, his injured arm supported by a pillow. On the TV, Idris Elba stalked through gray London streets.

One room over, the screen door clanged softly in the desert breeze. There was nothing beyond his porch but a dirt driveway and a half mile of dunes leading to a trailer park and the horizontal bar of the 138 Freeway as it cut through Palmdale.

The screen clanged once more, louder than before, straightening Papazian on the couch and tightening his good hand around the Browning P-35 pistol resting on the cushion beside him.

He stared across the unlit stretch toward his front door.

First there was darkness.

Then a pair of hands, pale and floating.

A face.

Two strokes of the shoulders.

A form, advancing. Papazian found his feet, squinting at the man inside his house.

The man stopped in the doorway of the room, his lower half still lost to shadow. The faint glow from the TV played tricks, illuminating edges of his face, a collection of Picasso parts.

“I wanted to resume our interaction,” the man said. “The one we started outside Grant Merriweather’s office. I want to know who the Terror is. I want to know how many of you there are in the money-laundering ring. I want names and addresses.”

Papazian lifted the pistol and aimed it with a shaking fist. He wasn’t used to shooting with his left hand. “You have no idea who you’re f*****g with, chief.”

“Also,” the man said, “the adjective is ‘Hawaiian.’”

Papazian c****d his head. “You cray-cray, b***h?”

“You’re in a heightened state of alert,” the man said calmly. “Your heart rate’s up over a hundred beats a second. Which means your fine motor skills have already deteriorated and your gross motor is compromised.”

Papazian jabbed the gun at the air. “Say what, motherfucker?”

Matthew stepped forward into the room. They faced each other across the couch.

Riding Matthew’s back in a sling, angled like a samurai sword, was a matte black Benelli M1 combat shotgun. He made no move for it.

Instead he studied the pistol aimed at him, the barrel tip three feet from his forehead. The Browning P-35, known more widely as a Hi-Power, was one of the first successful double-stack mag nine mils. The thirteen-round capacity made it a favorite of many of the world’s militaries since World War II, a sidearm of choice from Aussies to Venezuelans. Nonstop production in Belgium and licensed countries for nearly a century had put it so heavily into circulation that it could be considered nontraceable.

As with all self-loading semiautos, the Hi-Power cannot fire when the slide isn’t locked fully forward in battery. A mechanical disconnector prevents the hammer from dropping.

A design element easily exploited when someone held the weapon within reach.

Matthew shot his hand out, cupped the top of the slide, and pushed it back a quarter inch.

Papazian tugged the trigger, but nothing happened. His face frozen with disbelief, he yanked it once more, the pistol bobbing in their shared grip.