“I get around,” Thomas said. I didn’t know whether he meant to be amusing, but I laughed. “You see anything weird?” he asked.
I looked. People, their faces blurred—that seemed to be a Whirl360 protocol, to blur faces that could be seen head-on, as well as license plates—were walking along the street. There were cars. Some street signs I couldn’t make out.
“No,” I said.
“See this silver SUV here?” He pointed. It was visible on the right screen, a profile shot.
“Yeah, I see it.”
“Look what he’s done. He’s backed into this car, this blue one. You can just see where he’s hit the blue car’s headlight.”
“Can you magnify it?” I asked.
Thomas clicked a couple of times. The image of the SUV’s rear bumper and the blue car’s front end got bigger, but blurrier.
“I think you might be right,” I said.
“You can see it, right?”
“Yeah. So just at the moment the Whirl360 people were driving around with their picture car, they got a shot of this guy backing into the blue car. Son of a gun. They caught an accident in progress, and you just found it. That it?”
“I bet the SUV driver didn’t even know he did it,” Thomas said, spooning some ice cream into his mouth.
“Maybe not,” I said. “I’m gonna watch some TV. Want to join me? We’ll order up a movie or something. Something with authentic locations that won’t annoy you.”
“We need to report this,” Thomas said. “The owner of the blue car needs to know who did this.”
“Thomas, honestly. First of all, they blur all the license plates, so there’s no way you could ever find out who owns the SUV, or the blue car. And second, this picture, this image of this street, has probably been up here for months, even a couple of years. I mean, you’re talking about some minor damage that happened God knows how long ago. The blue car’s owner got that fixed a year back, for all we know. He might not even own that car anymore. This is not some live stream, you know. These are snapshots in time.”
Thomas didn’t say anything.
“What?” I said. “Talk to me.”
“It’s not right to stand by and do nothing,” he said.
“We’re not—Jesus, it’s not like you just saw the SUV run some guy down. This is exactly what I’m talking about, Thomas. You’re spending too much time up here. You need to get out. Come down and watch a movie. Dad got this great TV. Wide screen, HD. It’s going to waste down there.”
“You go,” he said. “I’ll be down in a little while. You pick a movie and we’ll watch it.”
I went downstairs and turned on the television, then hit the right buttons on the collection of remotes so I could connect to a movie service.
I came across a film, only a couple of years old, made in New Zealand, called The Map Reader.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Hey, Thomas! There’s a movie here you’ll love. About a kid who loves maps!”
“Sure thing,” he said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
He didn’t come down. After waiting fifteen minutes, I turned off the TV without watching anything, went into the kitchen, and drank Dad’s very last beer.
SIX
NINE months earlier, Allison Fitch lifts her head an inch off the pillow on her pullout couch and looks at the digital clock readout on the DVD player on the other side of the small living room. Nearly noon. She tries to remember to close the blinds when she gets home from a late shift so the sun won’t wake her in the morning, but unless you tape black paper to the entire window, or got some of those heavy curtains that block out everything, you really can’t keep the rays out.
God, it’s a sunny day out there today. She pulls the covers up over her head.
She’s pretty sure she’s alone right now in the apartment she shares with Courtney Walmers, who has the bedroom. Unless you found some place that was rent-controlled, there was no way you could live in this city by yourself, certainly not on what a waitress made. Courtney has an office job, down on Wall Street, so she’s out of the apartment by eight. Allison usually starts her shift around five. Sometimes, if Courtney’s able to sneak home from work early, they’ll actually see each other for five minutes.
Allison hopes this isn’t one of those days. Seeing Courtney is not something she looks forward to. She knows Courtney wants to have a talk with her—a real, serious talk—and it is a conversation Allison does not want to have. Because she knows exactly what it’s about.