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I start upstairs.
“You two have fun. I’ll be back in a little while.”
CANDY IS ON the sofa. A laptop sits on the coffee table, photos scattered around it. I recognize some as the Three Stooges from the other night. Others are new. There’s one of a dour-faced, doughy guy with dark, wavy hair and the White Light insignia on his crisp white shirt. I pick it up.
“Don’t lose that,” says Candy witho
ut looking up.
“Who is it?”
“Edison Elijah McCarthy.”
“Our favorite fascist.”
“That’s him at the height of the White Light Legion’s popularity, in the early fifties. Julie gave me this laptop to do some research for her.”
I sit down next to her on the sofa.
“What happened to kicking down doors with me?”
“I like that, but I like this too. It’s different. I’m learning a lot.”
“Promise you’ll come out and break things with me sometime. I don’t want to be jealous of a machine.”
“I promise,” she says.
I move more of the photos around and she gives my hand a smack.
“Don’t mess those up,” she says. “I need them. Julie has access to all kinds of crazy law enforcement intel.”
“What are you looking at now?”
“A few minutes ago I was in NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Now I’m in the NCIC. National Crime Information Center. It’s an FBI site, but Julie can get into crazy Golden Vigil sites too. Not just DNA and fingerprints, but auras, drone Lurker surveillance, Power Spot monitoring. Congregations of ghosts. There’s even a huge database called ‘Soul Viability.’ ”
“That one’s easy to figure out.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Some kind of computer program that runs odds on if you’re going to Heaven or Hell. Like guys at racetracks set the odds for horses.”
“Cool,” she says. “Who should we look for?”
“Am I in one of those databases?”
She laughs at the screen.
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“Meaning?”
“In Homeland Security’s Extranatural Cryptologic Register—sort of their fanboy Pokémon card collection—there’s two files with a million times more security than the others. Guess who.”
“Karl Marx and Patty Duke.”
“Lucifer and Sandman Slim.”
“Does mine have pictures? I need new head shots for my movie auditions.”
