Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best thriller novels of all time .txt) 📗
- Author: Cory Doctorow
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Krishna gnawed on his neatly trimmed soul patch. “Let go of me, Andrew,” he said, almost too softly to be heard over the rain.
“Tell me what you saw,” Alan said. “Tell me, and I’ll let you go.” His other hand balled into a fist. “Goddammit, tell me!” Alan yelled, and twisted Krishna’s arm behind his back.
“I called the cops,” Krishna said. “I called them again and they’re on their way. Let me go, freak show.”
“I don’t like you, either, Krishna,” Alan said, twisting the arm higher. He let go suddenly, then stumbled back as Krishna scraped the heel of his motorcycle boot down his shin and hammered it into the top of his foot.
He dropped to one knee and grabbed his foot while Krishna slipped into the house and shot the lock. Then he hobbled home as quickly as he could. He tried to pace off the ache in his foot, but the throbbing got worse, so he made himself a drippy ice pack and sat on the sofa in the immaculate living room and rocked back and forth, holding the ice to his bare foot.
At five, Davey graduated from torturing animals to beating up on smaller children. Alan took him down to the school on the day after Labor Day, to sign him up for kindergarten. He was wearing his stiff new blue jeans and sneakers, his knapsack stuffed with fresh binders and pencils. Finding out about these things had been Alan’s first experience with the wide world, a kindergartner sizing up his surroundings at speed so that he could try to fit in. David was a cute kid and had the benefit of Alan’s experience. He had a foxy little face and shaggy blond hair, all clever smiles and awkward winks, and for all that he was still a monster.
They came and got Alan twenty minutes after classes started, when his new home-room teacher was still briefing them on the rules and regulations for junior high students. He was painfully aware of all the eyes on his back as he followed the office lady out of the portable and into the old school building where the kindergarten and the administration was housed.
“We need to reach your parents,” the office lady said, once they were alone in the empty hallways of the old building.
“You can’t,” Alan said. “They don’t have a phone.”
“Then we can drive out to see them,” the office lady said. She smelled of artificial floral scent and Ivory soap, like the female hygiene aisle at the drugstore.
“Mom’s still real sick,” Alan said, sticking to his traditional story.
“Your father, then,” the office lady said. He’d had variations on this conversation with every office lady at the school, and he knew he’d win it in the end. Meantime, what did they want?
“My dad’s, you know, gone,” he said. “Since I was a little kid.” That line always got the office ladies, “since I was a little kid,” made them want to write it down for their family Christmas newsletters.
The office lady smiled a powdery smile and put her hand on his shoulder. “All right, Alan, come with me.”
Davey was sitting on the dusty sofa in the vice principal’s office. He punched the sofa cushion rhythmically. “Alan,” he said when the office lady led him in.
“Hi, Dave,” Alan said. “What’s going on?”
“They’re stupid here. I hate them.” He gave the sofa a particularly vicious punch.
“I’ll get Mr Davenport,” the office lady said, and closed the door behind her.
“What did you do?” Alan asked.
“She wouldn’t let me play!” David said, glaring at him.
“Who wouldn’t?”
“A girl! She had the blocks and I wanted to play with them and she wouldn’t let me!”
“What did you hit her with?” Alan asked, dreading the answer.
“A block,” David said, suddenly and murderously cheerful. “I hit her in the eye!”
Alan groaned. The door opened and the vice principal, Mr. Davenport, came in and sat behind his desk. He was the punishment man, the one that no one wanted to be sent in to see.
“Hello, Alan,” he said gravely. Alan hadn’t ever been personally called before Mr. Davenport, but Billy got into some spot of precognitive trouble from time to time, rushing out of class to stop some disaster at home or somewhere else in the school. Mr. Davenport knew that Alan was a straight arrow, not someone he’d ever need to personally take an interest in.
He crouched down next to Darren, hitching up his slacks. “You must be David,” he said, ducking down low to meet Davey’s downcast gaze.
Davey punched the sofa.
“I’m Mr. Davenport,” he said, and extended a hand with a big class ring on it and a smaller wedding band.
Davey kicked him in the nose, and the vice principal toppled over backward, whacking his head on the sharp corner of his desk. He tumbled over onto his side and clutched his head. “Motherfucker!” he gasped, and Davey giggled maniacally.
Alan grabbed Davey’s wrist and bent his arm behind his back, shoving him across his knee. He swatted the little boy on the ass as hard as he could, three times. “Don’t you ever—” Alan began.
The vice principal sat up, still clutching his head. “That’s enough!” he said, catching Alan’s arm.
“Sorry,” Alan said. “And David’s sorry, too, right?” He glared at David.
“You’re a stupid motherfucker!” David said, and squirmed off of Alan’s lap.
The vice principal’s lips tightened. “Alan,” he said quietly, “take your brother into the hallway. I am going to write a note that your mother will have to sign before David comes back to school, after his two-week suspension.”
David glared at them each in turn. “I’m not coming back to this motherfucker place!” he said.
He didn’t.
The rain let up by afternoon, leaving a crystalline, fresh-mown air hanging over the Market.
Andrew sat in his office by his laptop and watched the sun come out. He needed to find Ed, needed to find Frank, needed to find Grant, but he was out of practice when it came to the ways of the mountain and its sons. Whenever he tried to imagine a thing to do next, his mind spun and the worldless howling thing inside him stirred. The more he tried to remember what it was like to be a son of the mountain, the more he felt something he’d worked very hard for, his delicate normalcy, slipping away.
So he put his soaked clothes in the dryer, clamped his laptop under his arm, and went out. He moped around the park and the fountain, but the stroller moms whose tots were splashing in the wading pool gave him sufficient dirty looks that he walked up to the Greek’s, took a table on the patio, and ordered a murderously strong cup of coffee.
He opened up the screen and rotated around the little café table until the screen was in the shade and his wireless card was aligned for best reception from the yagi antenna poking out of his back window. He opened up a browser and hit MapQuest, then brought up a street-detailed map of the Market. He pasted it into his CAD app and started to mark it up, noting all the different approaches to his house that Davey might take the next time he came. The maps soothed him, made him feel like a part of the known world.
Augusta Avenue and Oxford were both out; even after midnight, when the stores were all shuttered, there was far too much foot traffic for Davey to pass by unnoticed. But the alleys that mazed the back ways were ideal. Some were fenced off, some were too narrow to pass, but most of them—he’d tried to navigate them by bicycle once and found himself utterly lost. He’d had to turn around slowly until he spotted the CN Tower and use it to get his bearings.
He poked at the map, sipping the coffee, then ordering another from the Greek’s son, who hadn’t yet figured out that he was a regular and so sneered at his laptop with undisguised contempt. “Computers, huh?” he said. “Doesn’t anyone just read a book anymore?”
“I used to own a bookstore,” Alan said, then held up a finger and moused over to his photo album and brought up the thumbnails of his old bookstore. “See?”
The Greek’s son, thirty with a paunch and sweat-rings under the pits of his white “The Greek’s” T-shirt, sat down and looked at the photos. “I remember that place, on Harbord Street, right?”
Alan smiled. “Yup. We lost the store when they blew up the abortion clinic next door,” he said. “Insurance paid out, but I wasn’t ready to start over with another bookstore.”
The Greek’s son shook his head. “Another coffee, right?”
“Right,” Alan said.
Alan went back to the map, realigning the laptop for optimal reception again.
“You got a wireless card in that?” a young guy at the next table asked. He was dressed in Kensington Market crusty-punk chic, tatts and facial piercings, filth-gray bunchoffuckinggoofs tee, cutoffs, and sweaty high boots draped with chains.
“Yeah,” Alan said. He sighed and closed the map window. He wasn’t getting anywhere, anyway.
“And you get service here? Where’s your access point?” Crusty-punk or no, he sounded as nerdy as any of the Web-heads you’d find shopping for bargains on CD blanks on College Street.
“Three blocks that way,” Alan said, pointing. “Hanging off my house. The network name is ‘walesave.’”
“Shit, that’s you?” the kid said. “Goddammit, you’re clobbering our access points!”
“What access point?”
“Access points. ParasiteNet.” He indicated a peeling sticker on the lapel of his cut-down leather jacket showing a skull with crossed radio towers underneath it. “I’m trying to get a mesh-net running though all of the Market, and you’re hammering me. Jesus, I was ready to rat you out to the radio cops at the Canadian Radio and Television Commission. Dude, you’ve got to turn down the freaking gain on those things.”
“What’s a mesh-net?”
The kid moved his beer over to Alan’s table and sat down. “Okay, so pretend that your laptop is the access point. It radiates more or less equally in all directions, depending on your antenna characteristics and leaving out the RF shadows that microwaves and stucco and cordless phones generate.” He arranged the coffee cup and the beer at equal distances from the laptop, then moved them around to demonstrate the coverage area. “Right, so what happens if I’m out of range, over here—” he put his beer back on his own table—"and you want to reach me? Well, you could just turn up the gain on your access point, either by increasing the power so that it radiates farther in all directions, or by focusing the transmissions so they travel farther in a line of sight.”
“Right,” Alan said, sipping his coffee.
“Right. So both of those approaches suck. If you turn up the power, you radiate over everyone else’s signal, so if I’ve got an access point here"—he held his fist between their tables—"no one can hear it because you’re drowning it out. It’s like you’re shouting so loud that no one else can carry on a conversation.”
“So why don’t you just use my network? I want to be able to get online anywhere in the Market, but that means that anyone can, right?”
The crusty-punk waved his hand dismissively. “Sure, whatever. But what happens if your network gets shut down? Or if you decide to start eavesdropping on other people? Or if someone wants to get to the printer in her living room? It’s no good.”
“So, what, you want me to switch to focused antennae?”
“That’s no good. If you used a focused signal, you’re going to have to be perfectly aligned if you’re going to talk back to your base, so unless you want to provide a connection to one tiny pinpoint somewhere a couple kilometers away, it won’t do you any good.”
“There’s no solution, then? I should just give up?”
The crusty-punk held up his
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