Chapter 2

When you work the lobster shift you sleep in when you get home. I did. I tossed back a solid slug of scotch as soon as I hit my front door—OK, it was 8:30 in the morning, but what the hell, it was the end of my work day—and grabbed a quick snack of crackers and cheese, and then I hit the rack, hard.

And, usually, long; I was ordinarily not up until 4:00 or so. But with the memory of last night I was awake at 12:30 and by 1:00 I gave up on sleeping and got my butt out of bed.

I didn't take a newspaper; my weird hours didn't cater to it. So my usual routine was to run a cup of coffee, look at a little TV while I drank it, do the three esses—shit, shower and shave—and then log on to the national news on my laptop. Which I did. Some asshole killed himself along with his wife and three kids, some other asshole detonated a suicide bomb in the middle east and wasted himself along with a couple of civilians, a third asshole ... oh, hell, the same crap as usual. The weather was OK, early fall and nice for a change, politicians were passing their usual hot air, some damn fourth-generation repeat of a movie that came out of a cartoon was tops on the charts, and who cared about any of it?

But I couldn't rid myself of last night. Suppose— well, just suppose.

Most days, once I'd waked up enough and had at least one cup of coffee, I'd get on the horn to Lisa, my girlfriend. Sometimes she'd answer, sometimes she was in class—unlike me she'd gone back for her masters—but at least I'd get her voice mail and hear the reassuring sound of her voice. It was the best part of my wake-up routine.

Not today. I had to know. It was silly but...

I went to the location bar and typed in "Spook2589844640321." No "http://", no "www", nothing else. That should put paid to this silliness I'd dreamed up.

The display went black. Then—

Hello, Jack. Thank you for contacting so promptly. I surmise you have had little sleep.

Oh, shit. Almost reflexively my finger went to the power button, and I held it down long enough to shut the laptop off.

I needed to think. If last night was weird, this was plain crazy. What in holy hell was going on?

My laptop made very little noise, as long as I kept the speaker off—as I usually did—but ordinarily I left the system itself on, and now I noticed the dead silence. I could hear the traffic outside my apartment, the soft rustle of my clothes as I moved, but that oddly comforting, almost inaudible hum wasn't there.

For a long time—it must have been four or five minutes—I just sat there and stared at my now-dead screen. Finally I looked over at my phone. Time for a little normalcy, as long-dead President Warren Harding had called it.

She picked up on the second ring. "Hey, Jackie, you're up early," she said affectionately.

"Yeah. Hey, Lee. I love you."