The Hard Bounce - [40]

“Uh, I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly. And neither do they.”

“Where’d the planes go?” Junior asked.

“Oh, they’re still up there. I haven’t hacked into their individual systems, but their ground control is completely blind. About eighteen hundred tons of airplanes are about to go crash kaboom.”

“Well,” Junior clapped his hands. “I’m not getting on a plane again. Ever.”

“Man, the boys monitoring these boards must be shitting their pants right now.” Ollie wiggled with pleasure in his seat. It was the way he laughed. He never made a sound, just wiggled happily.

Like most things Ollie, the humor was lost on me. “I thought you said this was a simulation.”

“It is. But they still have guys monitoring the boards to see if we can whack ’em.” Ollie leaned back in his chair and groaned, as though he’d just finished a hugely satisfying meal. “So, what’s this video thingy?”

“We need to get a closer look at one part of a frame. Can you do something like that?”

“Can Captain Kirk bang a green chick?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I’ll just drop the DVD into the ’puter and rip the file. I’m pretty sure I can jury rig some sort of video capture/enhancement program. It might take me a couple hours to convert the hardware and then render the MPEG into a negotiable file. Is MPEG an okay format? I know it’s almost archaic at this point, but so is the vid software I have.”

I recognized enough English in the sentence to feel retarded. “Whatever works for you, Ollie. The stuff on the DVD… it’s some messed up shit. It’s really important that you forget what’s on it, okay?”

“Gotcha. Can you give me a rough idea of where?”

“At three minutes, thirteen seconds, a curtain gets knocked aside. That’s what we need. We need to see better what’s outside that window.”

Ollie sucked in his upper lip and chewed on it, thinking. “Can do. Gonna take me about an hour or so. You wanna pick up some lunch?”

“Anyplace good around here?”

“Grinder shop down the street. Grab me a meatball parm?” Ollie began flipping through disks of software. “Just think. A couple years ago, I probably would have had to run a firewire through an AVID system to get this kind of video editing. Now it’s all inside here.” Ollie patted his computer like it was an old family pet.

“And you’d have to frammajamma interface with the hibbity-dibbity,” Junior said with a chuff.

Ollie found the right software and placed the CD into the computer tray. “Wouldn’t need a hibbity-dibbity for this.” Junior’s smile fell. Ollie shot Junior a wink, then reached behind the table and started reconfiguring wires.

An hour later, our stomachs full of greasy meatballs, we returned to Ollie’s. The door to his studio was open when we returned. He was nowhere in sight.

“Ollie?” I called out. No answer. I looked at Junior. He shrugged. I called again. “Oliver? You here?” A horrible sound came muffled from behind one of the wired walls.

Junior and I ran over to the wall. “Ollie? You all right?” The strangled choke came again. It was definitely behind the wall. I looked for a convenient place to put down the grease-soaked bag with Ollie’s grinder in it, but was afraid the wrong spot could cause a fire.

I dropped the bag on his desk chair, and Junior and I started moving sophisticated boards of God-knows-what and tangles of wire along the wall. About halfway down, under yet another colorful tangle, was a white doorknob. I pulled it and the thin door covered in shelves and bric-a-brac opened. Behind was a small bathroom. Ollie was sprawled on the tiled floor, face in the toilet. The horrible sound we heard was him emptying his stomach into the bowl.

“Ollie? You all right, man?”

“Jesus Christ, Boo!” was all he managed to say before his body spasmed over the toilet twice more. “You could have warned me a little more about what was on that fucking DVD before you left!”

I found a glass next to the computer and filled it up in the sink beside the toilet. I held it out to Ollie. He took it in a trembling hand.

Ollie was right. I should have given him a more specific warning regarding content. There’s tough and there’s hard. The Home made Ollie tougher than his exterior indicated. But he wasn’t ever going to be hard.

“Ollie, I’m sorry, man. I didn’t think. Junior and I have been looking for this girl and I just figured it was hard for us to watch, because, well… I dunno.” I did know. I couldn’t say it was because we knew her, because we didn’t. I couldn’t say it was because we cared about her, because as objective tough guys, we shouldn’t.

But I did. Or I was at least starting to, and that thought bothered me, because I knew why.

Unsteadily, Ollie got to his feet. “Boo, that video would have given Jeffrey Dahmer a nervous breakdown.” He walked over to his computer, typed for a second, and the screen shot appeared. The falling Cassandra. The pulled curtain. The sign.

“I still can’t make it out,” Junior said.

“I haven’t done the pixel rendering yet,” Ollie said, a little snippily. He looked at the bag on his chair. “What is that?”

“Your sandwich.”

Ollie’s gullet lurched audibly. “Ugh. Take it away.” I picked up the bag and stashed it in the mini fridge to the left.