Hideout Jack Heath (reading the story of the .TXT) 📖

He glances at me, checking my reaction to the mention of the assault charge. Then he looks pleased, mistaking my complete lack of surprise for approval.

‘And this makes the news, right?’ he continues. ‘Vigilante Plumber Shot At By Anxious Housewife. So in prison I get a few calls from bloggers, podcasters, whatever. And then, two days after I’m released, I get the call from Fred.’

Donnie’s smile fades as he tells me about that phone call. It was confusing at first. He wasn’t sure how Fred had gotten his number. They had no mutual contacts. Unlike the podcasters, Fred was interested in the assault as well as the water pipe incident. And unlike them, he seemed to appreciate what Donnie had been trying to do.

‘I like a guy who’s willing to go above and beyond,’ Fred told him. ‘To do the right thing, even when the so-called “justice system” says to look the other way. You should be proud, man.’

I’m starting to get a sense of how Fred chooses his staff. He likes practical skills. He likes violence. And he likes crusaders, or at least people inclined to see themselves that way—and inclined to see those with different priorities as enemy combatants.

I give the camera back to Donnie, who reattaches it to the tree.

‘That’s the last one.’ He cracks his knuckles. ‘Let’s go get some lunch.’

‘What happened to the woman whose house you broke into?’ I ask.

‘Oh, she died,’ Donnie says. ‘It turns out that shooting yourself in the foot is pretty serious.’

CHAPTER 27

This building has no lock, no door, no guards. It is easy to enter, yet hard to leave. What is it?

My eighth-grade math teacher was Mrs Jefferson, a chinless woman with a dry sense of humour who wore huge, bright necklaces and liked to put her feet on her desk while we were working. One time she handed out copies of a maze to the whole class and said she’d give a prize to whoever solved it first.

I took one look at mine and decided it was unsolvable. There were dozens of intersections leading to hundreds of dead ends. Mrs Jefferson had obviously printed out the most complicated maze she could find in the hope of keeping us busy all lesson. Looking around, I saw that most of my classmates had come to the same conclusion and were looking out the window or scratching graffiti into their desks. I flipped the paper over and started sketching an enormously fat man. I had little artistic talent and didn’t know why I was doing this. I didn’t yet understand that it was a kind of homemade pornography.

I’d hardly finished his enormous round belly when another student called out, ‘Done!’ and thrust her paper in the air like an Olympic torch. I was suspicious. She must have cheated—there was no way to solve so complex a maze so quickly. It wasn’t as though the student was a genius. I’d once seen her ball up a muffin wrapper and swallow it.

But Mrs Jefferson didn’t look surprised. She got up, walked over, took the sheet and examined it. ‘Well done, Yvette.’

‘It was super easy,’ Yvette said. ‘There were no choices or anything.’

I flipped my sheet over and looked at the maze again. Yvette was right. The correct route was the only route. Starting at either end of the maze lead inexorably to the other, cutting right through the labyrinth of dead ends. None of the intersections were connected to the main path.

‘Your prize is the knowledge that some things look impossible until you try them,’ Mrs Jefferson said. ‘You can share it with the rest of the class.’

She probably thought that was inspiring, but Yvette and the rest of the class just looked annoyed. Most of the kids were like me. Poor, beaten—some literally—and sick of being told that we just had to work harder and believe in ourselves more.

Anyway, that was our introduction to calculus. The way Mrs Jefferson talked, impressed with her own wisdom, reminds me of Cedric a bit.

‘People don’t always know what they want or why they want it,’ Cedric is saying.

We’re in the editing room. Cedric is facing the monitors, a few hundred flash drives piled on the desk in front of him. I’m sitting behind him at a table covered in padded envelopes and small cardboard boxes. Every few seconds, he swivels in his chair to hand me a flash drive and an address label. I put the drive in a box, the box in an envelope and the label on top, before dumping it in a tray under the table. We’re both wearing latex gloves to keep our prints off the packages.

We’ve been packing envelopes all afternoon, and Cedric hasn’t once mentioned the kiss. The bite. He seems to be pretending it never happened. Just like Samson did, after their tryst.

‘We could have more pricing options on the site,’ Cedric continues. ‘Download the videos for fifty dollars per month. Get it mailed to you in a crappy little bag, fifty-five. Or get it mailed to you in a luxurious gift box, sixty. You know what would happen?’

I don’t really care. My mind is on Thistle, chained up in that freezing slaughterhouse waiting for me to save her. Before the new cameras arrive tomorrow.

‘Everyone—well, pretty much everyone—would pick the cheapest option,’ Cedric says, as if I’d responded. ‘Then they’d be unsatisfied, even though they got exactly what they asked for. And sooner or later, they’d unsubscribe. That’s what happened when we ran the site on that model.’ He passes me another flash drive and an address label. ‘But if getting a sexy flash drive in a beautiful box is the only option, they’re happy to pay through the nose for it forever.’

I don’t think Cedric’s definitions of sexy or beautiful overlap with my own. The flash drives are white