“Only my friends,” William said. “People I could trust. People who cared.”
Apollo felt slightly dizzy. “So where is she then?” Had he asked the question out loud? Apollo couldn’t be sure.
“She’s on an island in the East River.”
Suddenly, magically, Apollo was sitting on the sidewalk. He hadn’t actually expected William to say anything so specific. Or for her to be so close. William put out his hand and helped Apollo up. A handful of people passed by but paid them no attention.
“How do I get there?” Apollo said.
“You need a boat,” William said.
“I don’t have a fucking boat.”
William pulled out his phone. He swiped a screen, and another. He tapped the little icon of a dinghy. “There’s an app for that.”
“LET’S GO TO the Bat Cave.”
The Bat Cave was the spare bedroom in Patrice’s basement apartment. The moment after Apollo separated from William Wheeler, he called Patrice and asked to come by. Again, it took almost two hours to get to the apartment. Dana let Apollo in. She seemed skittish, wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“I’m glad you called my mom,” Apollo told her. “I know you were trying to help.”
As soon as he said this, she relaxed and offered to warm up some dinner for him, but Apollo had no appetite. Dana stared into Apollo’s face—his furiously vibrant eyes—and understood something had come up, much bigger than a rare book. Then Patrice led them both to the Bat Cave.
Such a small room, this spare bedroom. It seemed even smaller because of the wood paneling. The dull walls ate the light, leaving the room in gloom. The shaggy brown carpeting didn’t help. It was like being inside a Wookiee’s armpit. And poor Patrice, the ceiling couldn’t have been more than six and a half feet high. If he went on his tiptoes, his head would go through the ceiling panels. With Patrice, Dana, and Apollo all together in here, it felt like they were stuck in a broom closet.
Not to mention the other behemoth lined up against one wall.
“I give you Titan,” Patrice said, with the reverence of a rabbi opening his synagogue’s ark to reveal the Torah scrolls.
“Thirty-two gigabytes of DDR3-1866 RAM, 4.7 gigahertz processing speed, an Intel Core i7-3970x processor, storage capacity of two terabytes, a 16x Asus DVD-RW drive, three 27-inch display monitors, and I even got a mouse that’s shaped like a grenade.”
Dana went to a corner, under the room’s one small window, where they had a space heater. She turned a knob on the edge, and the heater buzzed faintly, and then the coils inside glowed orange.
When Patrice turned the computer on, the three—three!—large monitors burned bright blue for just a moment as the system booted up. It felt as if Apollo was standing behind a military jet and its three engines were about to spit fire. He actually stepped backward.
Dana put one arm out and stopped him from moving any farther. “You don’t want to set your pants on fire, do you?” she asked, pointing down at the space heater, the glowing coils. Then she reached out and took Apollo’s left hand in hers. “What’s this?” She touched his middle finger. A piece of red string had been tied around it.
“It was Emma’s,” Apollo said. “I had time after I called Patrice. I went home. I found this.”
“And you put it on?” Dana asked.
“I tied it on and made a wish,” Apollo told her. “Just one wish.”
Dana scanned up from the finger to Apollo’s eyes. “I don’t want to know what you wished for.”
“No,” Apollo said, pulling his hand free. “You don’t.”
Patrice cleared his throat theatrically so Apollo would turn back to him and his computer.
“You and me are old enough to remember that War Games movie, right? Ferris Bueller was in it. This rack right here is more powerful than that whole fucking supercomputer. That shit was so big, they had to hide it in a mountain! Mine fits in the spare bedroom of a basement apartment in Queens.”
On the center screen, a small box demanded a passcode. Patrice leaned over to type, but before he did, he blocked the keyboard from Apollo and Dana’s view.
Apollo looked to Dana. She leaned close. “I know the password anyway.”
“No you don’t,” Patrice snapped back. “I change it once a week.”
Dana slapped him gently on the head. “But then you have to write it in your phone because you can’t remember it because you change it every week.”
Patrice sat up straight in his chair. “So you saying you go through my phone?”
Dana patted Apollo’s arm. “Let’s stay on topic here. Apollo needs our help.”
Patrice sighed and turned back to the computer. This incredibly powerful system sat on a silver-powder-coated metal computer desk that cost $78.89 at Lowe’s.
Dana got to her feet, holding a serving tray in one hand. She went to Patrice and touched his shoulder gently. He leaned back and puckered his lips; she leaned close and kissed him.
Patrice cleared his throat. “Now, did this dude have any actual proof Emma was alive?” He gestured to a metal folding chair leaning against a wall.
“He sent me a video,” Apollo said, slipping his phone out of his pocket. “But my phone can’t play it.”
Patrice looked at the device with a grimace. “It’s in Flash, I guess. You could download a Puffin Browser to get around that. Or you could just jailbreak your phone.”
While Apollo knew that Patrice had just spoken three sentences in English, there was very little chance he’d understood even one of them. He lifted the phone higher, closer to Patrice’s face. “My phone won’t play it,” he repeated.
“Just forward it to me.”
Patrice watched as Apollo did this. Meanwhile Dana slipped the serving tray under the space heater, a fireguard between the machine and the cheap carpet.
“The good news is that I did my due diligence on William Wheeler before we sold him the book.”
Apollo looked up from his phone. “Like a background check?”
“We were about to sell him the most expensive book either of us will probably ever come across. Damn right I wanted to be sure he was at least using his real name!”
Apollo hit send on the phone. “And?”
“William Webster Wheeler. Owns a house in Forest Hills, on 86th Road. He served in the air force as a programming specialist for two years in the early eighties. After that he worked in Charleston for the Medical University of South Carolina until 1996. Then he started making his way back to the Northeast. He was born in Levittown. And he’s been working as an application developer for a financial services company.”
“Damn,” Apollo said. “You really did snoop.”
Patrice patted his belly with pride. “Want to know how much money he’s got in his checking account?”
“You know that, too?”
“I’m just bullshitting. But if I wanted to find out, I could. Me and the Titan.” He patted his keyboard as if it were a lion’s paw. “But at least the dude is who he says he is. That means something these days. You sent me that video yet?”