“Yes.”
“Well.” He tried to boil it down. “It knows your mood and predicts your patterns before you realize you’re in a mood or have a pattern. It takes in your searches, your social media—everything from the amount of time you scroll, to the pages you pause at, to the speed at which you click. It listens to your conversations, reads your messages. It can tell how much you’ve sat still or stood or walked in a given day. Based on all that data—and it gets smarter over time—it will start sending you messages after about a month of use. If I build it right, it will be like advice from a trusted friend. Don’t have that drink. It’s okay to skip your spin class. Don’t cancel lunch with Becky because you need the social interaction. People will be shocked that the app knows what they’re thinking of doing before they’ve even really admitted it to themselves.”
“You can build something like that?”
“Yeah. I think so. But now the problem is there’s already an app that’s similar. Not quite the same but enough to make me nervous. I’m sure there are more in development. I have to get going on this. Like I said, I need time and I need money. I’ve been thinking about it for about three years now.”
“And that’s where Tripp came in. So he’s in Panama?” Malcolm wished none of it implicated the Half Moon, but his curiosity was too strong. If he was going to lie, he wanted to know what he was lying about.
Roddy hesitated. “Not exactly. But—”
“But?”
“If things go as planned, in about three days there’s going to be a car accident in Panama City. There will be a fire. Charles Waggoner’s body will be so burned up that they’ll have to identify him by the papers left behind at his hotel room.”
Malcolm remembered a late-night documentary he saw once. Part of it was about the black market for dead bodies, how people trying to really disappear could arrange the purchase of a corpse approximately the same size, age, and gender, set things up to look like an accident, and next thing you have a death certificate for a trusted loved one to present to your life insurance carrier.
“Then where is he really?”
“I don’t think I should tell you.”
“You’ve already told me this much.”
Watching Roddy decide, Malcolm saw that he wanted to tell him—that he’d probably been wanting to talk to someone about all of it for a long time.
“You think I’ll get in trouble? Is that it? Don’t worry about me,” Malcolm said.
“He’s in Peru.”
Malcolm slapped the table. “I knew it. He loves that place. He talked about it all the time.”
“He did?” That was the first thing that seemed to alarm Roddy.
“Yes. And I told the cops so. Every time he got lit he’d talk about whatsitcalled. Ollan—”
“—taytambo. Shit. I didn’t know that.”
“So he’s going from Panama to Peru?”
“No. He was never in Panama. Or Toronto for that matter. He flew directly to Lima yesterday morning, just a few hours before the second storm. He used his new passport.” Before Malcolm could ask, Roddy answered the question on his mind. “He stayed upstairs at the bar on Friday night. That’s why no one saw him leave. He just went up through that door by the men’s room. Late Saturday I drove him to a hotel in Secaucus. He stayed there until he left for the airport on Tuesday.”
“So who packed up his stuff from the Half Moon?”
“I did.”
“But the passenger list for that Toronto flight had him on it.”
“Come on, Malcolm. You know that there’s always someone who’ll do what you need them to if you have the money to pay them.”
Malcolm looked at his plate, the food grown cold. He picked up his fork and slowly ate every morsel before he spoke again. He signaled the waitress to refill his coffee.
“Roddy. You know you can’t ever claim that life insurance money. Right now you’re just an accessory to Tripp’s mess, but if you claim that money, you’re as guilty as he is. You get that, right? Stay up in Binghamton with your mom for a while. Get a job there. You were never Mark Duro. You want a bartending job? I have a buddy in Ithaca who’s always looking for help. You want to go down to Miami and bartend there? I have a friend with a place in Coral Gables. I’ll put a word in. But honestly? You’re not a bartender. Get a job at a cool store or something. You’re only twenty-two years old.”
“What would be a cool store?” Roddy looked at him with the same expression he wore the night the urinal got pulled out. Overwhelmed, as if he might cry.
“I don’t know. But you’re a smart kid. Why don’t you go back to school? You can still build the app.”
“What does it matter? Being smart?” Roddy asked. “You need way more than that. My uncle paid the first semester of college and my mother was supposed to take it from there, but she kept trying to get me to ask him for the money and he’d already done so much for me. The bursar was calling me every day. Like, oh sure, I have seventeen thousand dollars rolled up in a coffee can or something. I got a job with a skip tracer to make some cash. When I learned how it worked, I took a few clients of my own. I liked it. I could do the whole job from my dorm room. I once found a guy who was delinquent for child support by tracking down his loyalty card at a tackle shop. All his ex said was that he loved fishing. But then—”
“What?”
“There’s the flip side. You get some really bad guys looking for their wives or girlfriends. And I could find them. You know? I could see how hard a woman tried to cover her tracks, but it was so easy. I didn’t like that. One guy, he just seemed evil. I wanted to reach out to the woman to warn her that she was way too easy to find, and to help her. I never told that guy that I found her.”
They both looked out the window at the dark space under the highway overpass. Kids drank there in the warm months, and there was a collection of broken bottles and crushed cans pushed against one of the pilings. A bright red cardinal alighted on a plow’s blade, and Malcolm watched it look around for a moment before it flew away.
“Are you okay?” Roddy asked.
Malcolm felt so incredibly tired.
“I really don’t know. Are you?”
Roddy shrugged. “Same I guess. The bar’s not doing great, is it?”
“No it isn’t. But promise you’ll drop this thing. Will you? It’s insane.”
“He really talked about Ollantaytambo? How dumb. He never told me that. I told him to go to Cambodia or Vietnam, but he wouldn’t hear it. He said his heart was in Peru.”
“Yes. Even if it takes a little while, I know they’re going to figure that out.”
* * *
When Malcolm got home the house was empty. Jess left a note to say she was at her mother’s but to call her because she wanted to hear what was going on with Roddy. The utility trucks had finally made it to their street; the linemen were up in buckets, working on the wires. Malcolm didn’t want to ask them what everyone else had been asking, but one of them called out his name, took off his hard hat. Malcolm recognized him from the bar.
“Lights on within the hour,” he said.
“Thank God,” Malcolm said. “You guys must be beat.”
“Loving the overtime,” he said. “My wife is already pricing a trip to Turks.”
“Why not,” Malcolm said. “You’ve earned it.”
“Yeah,” the man said as he looked up the street. “Listen, there was a guy parked in your driveway for a bit. Asked if I’d seen you.”
“Okay.”
“He didn’t say who he was or what he wanted.”
Billy, Malcolm knew.
When the power returned, it was a click and then a surge, and everything came alive at once. The microwave clock flashed. The oven showed an error message and the refrigerator started purring. He stood in the kitchen for a minute, and then he turned right around and left.
* * *
“Hey, Ma,” he said, standing at Mr. Sheridan’s door.
His mother invited him in like it was her house.
“I can’t, the car’s running. I just wanted to see if you’re okay.”