So Yesterday

Chapter 7

"MY PHONE!"

The usual panic reaction: as if electrocuted, my body stiffened in the back of the cab, hands plunging farther into my pockets, down to the domain of lint and pennies.

But the marvelous Finnish phone didn't magically reappear down there in the fluff. It was gone.

"You dropped it?"

"Yeah." I remembered scrambling in the dark, using my hands to claw myself up the stairs. I'd never put it back into my pocket.

"Damn. I was hoping you got a picture of that guy."

I looked at Jen in disbelief. "Not quite. I was more focused on the running away."

"Well, sure. The running away was a priority." She grinned. "The running away was cool."

My face may have indicated disagreement.

"Come on, Hunter. You don't mind a little running, do you?"

"I don't mind running, Jen. I do mind running for my life. Next time we break into some place, let's just—"

"What? Take a vote first?"

I took a deep breath, letting the sway of the taxi calm me.

"Let's just not." Then another groan. "I had a picture of the shoes."

"Damn," she agreed.

We were silent for a moment, thinking of that perfect balance of understated style, slow-burning desirability, and coffee-spitting, jaw-dropping eye candy that was the shoes.

"They can't be as good as we remember," I said.

"Nice try. They were."

"Crap." I checked my pockets again. Still empty. "No phone, no shoes, no Mandy. This is a total disaster."

"Not quite, Hunter."

Jen held up what looked like my phone, except it was the wrong color.

Of course. It was Mandy's. She had the same model as I did (but with the red translucent clip-on cover). She was a fierce Early Adopter, and, like me, she used the phone for business. Just the day before, I'd phoned her my picture of Jen's shoelaces.

"Well, that's something."

Jen nodded. There's a lot you can find out from someone's phone.

She began to poke her way through the menu, squinting at the glowing screen. The little beeps gave me a creepy feeling, like going through someone's pockets.

"Shouldn't we call the police or something?"

"And tell them what?" Jen said. "That Mandy missed an appointment? Don't you watch cop shows? She's an adult. She can't be a missing person for twenty-four hours."

"But we found her phone. Isn't that suspicious?"

"Maybe she dropped it."

"But what about the guy who chased us? What about the shoes?"

"Yeah, we could tell the cops about that. About how we broke into an abandoned building and saw the world's most amazing shoes. And then a crazy bald guy appeared, and we ran away. That story should do wonders for our credibility."

I was silent for a moment, out of arguments but still not comfortable. "Jen, Mandy's my friend."

She turned to me, thought for a moment, then nodded.

"You're right. We should try the cops. But if they do listen to us, they'll take Mandy's phone away."

"So?"

Jen turned back to the little screen. "Maybe she took some pictures."

We stopped the cab, paid for it, and found a coffee shop of the musty-living-room variety: old couches, high-speed Internet access, and strong coffee, which came in cups the size of bowls.

Even before we walked through the door, I noticed Jen's bracelet sparkling.

"What's that?"

She smiled. "It's a Wi-Fi detector. You know, so you don't have to boot up your computer to see if there's wireless in the house."

I gave the Nod. I'd seen them in magazines, useful for detecting which coffee shops and hotels offered wireless service, but wearing the gadget as jewelry was pure Innovator.

We claimed a couch and huddled over Mandy's phone, our heads almost touching to align our eyes to the pixels of its little screen. Not really designed for two viewers, that phone, but I wasn't complaining. That close, I could smell Jen's hair stuff, a hint of vanilla cutting through the musty couch and ground coffee. Her shoulder was warm against mine.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

"Uh, no." Memo to self: It's uncool to be overwhelmed by casual contact.

I brought up the camera software, my fingers gliding over the cruelly familiar interface. (Maybe the Finlanders would send me another one.) The menu showed five pictures, displayed in the order they were taken. One thumb click later, a fuzzy orange face filled the screen.

"That's Mandy's cat, Muffin. He eats cockroaches."

"Useful beast."

Next click a young Latina woman appeared, smiling and fending off the camera, breakfast in the lower third of the screen.

"Cassandra, her roommate. Or girlfriend—no one's sure."

"That would be girlfriend," Jen said. "No one bothers to take a picture of their roommate."

"Maybe not, but when I first got my phone, I was taking pictures of my sock drawer."

She gripped my arm. "How will you live without it?"

"I don't call it living."

I clicked again. A guy wearing a black beret, maybe a little floppier than the last beret craze. A cool-hunting picture.

"Logo's too big, band's too tight," Jen said. "And no berets in summer."

"And that shirt looks way Uptown," I said. "Not the sort of thing you'd see in Chinatown." I checked the picture's time stamp. "She took it yesterday."

The next picture brought a small gasp from Jen. It was a shoe, Jen's shoe, the rising-sun laces instantly recognizable. I could even see the hexagonal pattern of the East River Park promenade.

"Is that…? That's the picture you—"

"Uh, yeah, I sent it to Mandy," I confessed.

She pulled away, turned to me with narrowed eyes. I felt the musty-couch intimacy that had built up between us swirling away.

"You're not still confused about what I do for a living, are you?"

"No. But it's just sinking in." She looked down at her laces. "I'm trying to figure out if I feel violated."

"Uh, try flattered, maybe?"

"Hang on—what exactly was Mandy going to do with it?"

"Take a look at it? Maybe pass it up the food chain." I cleared my throat, deciding to go for broke. "Possibly use it in an ad or two. Put it into mass production. Make it available in every mall in America. Run your laces into the ground, basically."

I saw questions crossing Jen's face, the familiar ones: Am I being ripped off? Is this a compliment? Am I secretly famous? When do I get my percentage?

And of course: Is this guy an asshole or what?

"Wow," she said, after a long, awkward moment. "I always wondered how that happened."

"How what happened?"

"How cool stuff became uncool so fast. Like one day I see a couple of cholos wearing aprons on the street. Then ten minutes later they're in Kmart. But I guess I didn't realize what an industry it was. I figured at least some of it happened naturally."

I sighed. "It does, sometimes. But usually nature gets a helping hand."

"Right. Like sunsets with lots of pollution."

"Or genetically engineered bananas."

She laughed, glancing at her laces again. "Okay, I'll get over it. You sure know how to flatter a girl."

I grinned happily—with that sudden and complete failure of irony detection that occurs when irony most needs to be detected—while questions rattled through my brain: Was she really flattered? Was I a fraud? Had I blown everything? What was "everything," anyway?

To cover my confusion, I clicked to the next picture.

The shoe.

My brain settled, focused by the beauty. We huddled again, pressed close for the best view on the little screen. The picture was minuscule, badly lit, agonizingly blurry, but the elegant lines and textures were somehow still there.

We sat for a solid minute, sucking in the beauty, while around us trancy coffee shop music played, cappuccinos roared into being, and would-be writers wrote novels set in coffee shops. In the bliss our shoulders practically melted together, and I felt forgiven for stealing Jen's shoelace mojo. The bootleg-or-maybe-not shoe was just that good.

Finally we pulled away from each other, blinking and breathless, as if we'd shared a kiss instead of a cell-phone screen.

"When did she take that?" Jen asked.

I checked the time stamp. "Yesterday. A couple of hours before the tasting."

"They look like they're on a desk."

"That's her office, I think." The shoe was sitting on a paper-strewn expanse not unlike Mandy's desk up in the client's Midtown tower.

"Which means… What does it mean?"

"Search me. Last picture?"

She looked at the screen for another greedy moment before nodding.

I clicked. It was a picture of nothing. Or something terrible.

Dark and blurry, an abstract gash of light across one corner. Shades of grays all mottled together like a camo pattern. It was either an accidental photo from the bottom of Mandy's pocket, the visual equivalent of those random calls your phone makes when it gets bored, or it was a picture of Mandy being mugged, kidnapped, or worse. Maybe she'd tried to record what had happened to her, then thrown the phone away, hoping someone would find it.

But I couldn't make much out.

"Hang on." Jen pulled my hand closer, the phone almost to her eye. "There's a face…." She turned away, shaking her head. "Maybe. You try."

1 took a closer look. Somewhere in the swirl of indifferent grays, there was something recognizable. A thing that my brain would, if I let it, twist slowly into a face.

Which freaked me out and also gave me a headache.

I checked the time stamp. "This was taken about an hour ago."

"A little before eleven? That's about when I showed up."

"But you didn't see anything?"

Jen shook her head and stared at the tiny screen again.

"You can get these pictures onto a computer, right? Maybe there's some kind of software we can run to make this clearer."

I nodded. "I've got a friend. She does special effects."

"What about the cops, Hunter?"

I took a deep breath. Lexa lived only two blocks away. It wouldn't take long.

"They can wait."