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As I looked around, my eyes alighted on the cop’s desk and I scrambled to my feet. There were two monitors side by side and a closed laptop in front of them, currently disconnected to everything except the power. The white light pulsed as I watched and then yanked out the chair, sitting down.
With trembling fingers, I pulled out my phone, opened the app that Sara had walked me through a dozen times and dialed her.
“Holy shit,” she wheezed through the phone. I couldn’t help it but I began to laugh. “Okay, yeah, sure, it’shilarious. That’s what I get for being normal and worried.”
“Believe me, Sara,” I said through gasping breaths. “I almost peed myself a few times.”
“But you’re in?” she asked.
“I’m in,” I said. “Now, walk me through how to hack into this guy’s laptop so I can get the hell out of here.”
“What do you see on the screen?” Sara asked.
I hastily opened the laptop. “Lock screen. Asking for a password.”
“Okay, plug in the flash drive I gave you,” Sara said, and I reached up to my neck, finding the chain of the necklace she had given me — part of Sara’s “nerd glam,” as she termed it. I’d had no idea that her pretty silver charm necklace actually had a high-end flash drive attached to it.
At first, I’d protested but Sara had made me take it, reassuring me that it was easier than carrying it in a pocket or my bag and risk misplacing it. I was grateful at her forethought. Having the flash drive on my necklace had indeed been one less thing I had to worry about.
I stuck the tiny drive into the USB port and breathed, “It’s in,lady hacker.”
“Good,” she said and I watched the light on the drive turn blue. “Gimme a second.”
I watched as the screen flickered, then went blue, then black, and a flash of code before it opened onto a desktop. There was a generic background of a green hill that was almost completed covered by the countless of folders he had.
“Boomers,” Sara scoffed. “Look at this mess.”
But all I cared about was that it had worked. “Oh my god, you’re the best,” I breathed. “Thank you so much! You got me in.”
“No problem,” Sara said, and there was silence in the room. “Should I hang up?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I have it from here. Thank you!”
“Stop saying that, dummy. Anytime. Oh, and just in case, good luck,” Sara said and then added, her voice fervent with promise, “See you soon, right?”
“Of course,” I got out. “See you soon.”
The call disconnected and the phone screen went black, making me feel inexplicably alone. I shivered as a cold breeze snuck in the window and glanced around Mickey’s office.
Unlike the rest of the house, there were picture frames on the walls and a few more general signs of life, including a row of plants under the windows with the heavy-duty protection.
For a moment, I was tempted to get up and look around, to put this off for another minute and collect myself.
Instead, I began the task of digging through all these damn folders. Sara had said she could do that for me, run a program, or dig up the information but then I’d have to give her Tyler Michaelson’s name and I didn’t want to do that.
She was already too far down this path with me. With his name, Sara could potentially get charged as an accessory.
At that, Sara had shrugged. “My program might have made things faster or maybe not. Your mom was a cop. You’ll probably find it on your own, and quicker, too.”
Only, as I hit dead end after dead end, I wondered if I’d need Sara’s help after all. She’d set it up so that I could save the information to the flash drive then drag a file onto the computer, which would wipe everything.
As if I already don’t owe Sara forever. I could have never done this alone.
Hunching forward, I went into another folder and found nothing again. Sitting back, I tilted my head and then pushed the computer chair back further. I only realized that Mickey had a ton of folders at first, but some had been labelled “old CompSTATS” with a year and were not in the pile that was the rest of his desktop.
On a hunch, I opened one and sucked in a breath.
“T_CAN_TORI”read the first one. My eyes flicked to the next, “H_BRO_WN.”
