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“You still got the computer?”
“No. It was a crappy old MacBook Air and I ditched it. I wentout on a different machine to the account and, like, one second later, we were attacked again. I ditched that machine, too, a pretty good Lenovo. Then I did the research I should have done up front.”
“He found out we were probably fucked,” Letty interjected. She was digging through her purse. “You mind if I spark one up?” She held up a joint.
“Not if you share,” Able said. “Though I gotta say, I prefer the edibles. They don’t make the furniture stink.”
“They last too long,” Letty said.
They continued to talk, Baxter reciting the small details of the hospital ransomware attack, passing the joint around, getting high. Letty told Able how she hurt her leg, and about the drum set back at the motel. Able went to his kitchen, opened a cupboard, and produced a Tupperware container with a magic brownie in it. After a while, through a haze of warming vision, Able asked Letty, “You want to sit on my lap?”
“You got twenty bucks?”
They all laughed and Letty passed the last of the brownie to Baxter, got up, and dropped on Able’s lap and put her arm around his neck. His shoulder muscles felt like chunks of wood: free weights. Able said, “What’s that I feel? Is that a gun in your pocket?”
“Yup. Sig 938.”
“Shoot the testicles off a fruit fly,” Baxter said, sounding groggy.
“Bullet flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana,” Able said, and they all laughed immoderately, because it was pretty good dope.
Able asked Letty, “Can I pull up your top? So I can see the wings?”
“Sure.”
She turned and let him pull it up, and he popped her bra straps and pulled them sideways, and he said, “Whoa. That’s outrageous.”
“You want to feel something really stimulating?” Letty asked, as she rehooked the bra and pulled her top down.
“Absolutely.”
He was wearing a thin tee-shirt, and she reached out and pinched one of his nipples as hard as she could, using her nails, and he lurched to his feet, spilling her on the floor, shouting, “Ouch, ouch, ouch.”
Baxter nearly fell off his chair laughing. “She does that to me about once a week. I never see it coming.”
“Goddamnit, that hurt,” Able said, rubbing his nipple. “Goddamnit... it doesn’t stop.”
In the end,Baxter agreed to do some basic, but specific, research on SlapBack’s server farm and the electrical inputs through local substations. He’d come up with a proposal to take the power out, and he’d do the research for free. The attack programming would cost.
“If it looks like it would work... five grand. If we pull it off... another ten,” Able said. “Those fuckers ought to be hanged for treason, in my opinion. Knocking them off the air for a couple of days, that’s nothing like what they should get.”
“If we do it right, we ought to be able to melt the fuckin’ substation, and depending on how the power is routed, we might be able to fry the backups, too,” Baxter said. “They’ll be off for more than a couple of days...” His eyes went to Able’s ceiling for a moment, then he said, “You know, if we come up with the perfect, really quick attack... we could knock them down, disappear, and come back for another bite. Maybe several more bites.”
Able slapped him on the back and said, “Call me when you got it.”
“That’ll be tomorrow,” Baxter said. “This ain’t shit.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Able said.
They got a number for one of Able’s burner phones. As they were going out the door, Able said, “My tit still hurts.”
“Try being a woman. Guys all think it’s hot to take a bite,” Letty said. And she lifted a hand: “Tomorrow.”
When they werein the truck and pointed back to Pasadena, they called Delores Nowak, who picked up the phone and asked, “You know what time it is here?”
Baxter said, “Well, it’s four o’clock in the morning here, so I expect it’s probably seven o’clock there, unless somebody changed the time zones. We need some help. Programming help. And we have two names for you.”
“You sound different,” Nowak said.
