Complicated Shadows Read online

  I stripped down to my boxers and climbed into bed. I laid there for a while, throwing myself around the mattress, trying to sleep and failing. Izzy stretched out on top of the covers beside me, because letting her underneath would have been weird, right? She snored, her fat lips flapping and showing off teeth the size of drywall screws. I wondered if I should have the goddamn beast checked for sleep apnea.

  My work uniform rested in a pile in a corner. I stared in its direction and tried to will it to burst into flames. It didn't happen. Pyrokinesis wasn't in the cards for me.

  I hated that uniform. I hated the sewn-on badge, like it made you look official, instead of being a douche with a fabric shield on your chest. I hated how the polyester slacks pulled at my crotch, shifting my junk around and making my balls ache. But more than anything, I hated how it reminded me I wasn't a cop anymore, and now I didn't have a clue who the fuck I was supposed to be, or what the fuck to do with myself anymore.

  I'd worked myself into a fine lather of self-loathing by the time my cell phone rang. It was Pete. I laid there staring at the ceiling as I answered.

  "Hey, boss," I said.

  "Morning there, man. You could return a man's calls, he bothers to look your sorry ass up."

  "Busy social calendar, Pete. So many people, so little time." I sat up in bed. Izzy opened one eye, made sure I wasn't going anywhere, and rolled over on her back. "What the hell are you doing in Serenity? There's no good reason to be here unless you're trapped here like the rest of us."

  "Way to sell the town, Malone. You working for the tourism board now? Maybe the chamber of commerce?"

  "No one comes to Parker County without a motive, Pete."

  "True enough. You feel like breakfast, maybe an early lunch, and we can catch up?"

  My alarm clock read six minutes after 10. I'd been awake since noon the day before. My body ached for sleep, but my brain was too restless to relax, which was funny since no one had ever accused me of thinking too much.

  "Wanna say 11?" I said. "There's a place, O'Dell's, in downtown, or whatever constitutes downtown for Serenity. It's easy to find."

  "Awesome, possum. See you then."

  I hung up the phone and planted my feet on the floor and headed for the bathroom to shower.

  O'Dell's is a sports bar close to the Parker County courthouse. You run across a lot of attorneys and judges and courthouse workers there, especially after work hours, when they throw back a few and find new lies to tell. It gets obnoxious then, with egos knocking against one another, and toxic levels of bullshit spewed. But the cheeseburgers are good, and the waffle fries have bay seasoning on them, so you took the good with the bad.

  I could have met Pete at the Riverside, but Woody would still have an AA crew there, doing one of his epic coffee klatches, and I wasn't in a mood where I wanted my worlds to mix – the cop life I'd had before, and the sober-yet-grumpy-retirement life I had now. A therapist would have said I was compartmentalizing; the therapist would have been correct.

  Pete was sipping a Michelob Ultra when I got there. He got up and gave me a hug so manly it made Chuck Norris look like a crossdresser.

  "Goddamn but you've gotten fatter and uglier since I saw you," he said as he nearly cracked my ribs.

  Pete had bulked up himself, and had gone gray in the process, his bristly crew cut the color of gunmetal. There was a thick wedge of hair shoved beneath a wide, flat nose, and it compounded with the girth to make him look like a friendly walrus.

  Once he let me go, I subtly made sure nothing was broken, and we sat down. The waitress came over and handed me a menu. I ordered a Coke and she left.

  Pete said, "A Coke? I remember days of you doing Jaeger bombs for breakfast. You getting your pussy waxed later, too?"

  I took a deep breath and said, "I quit drinking."

  Pete gave a nod and sipped his beer. "I got ya. I don't drink anymore. Course, I don't drink any less either." He busted out into a huge laugh, since it had to be the first time I'd heard the joke. Then he turned serious. "You serious? You quit drinking?"

  "Serious as a heart attack. I got sober and got into AA."

  His expression said he had nothing to do with this information, so he took another drink of his beer. "Good for you, then. Some friends of mine, they've done AA, and it's good for them. You mind me drinking?"

  "Have at it. I just won't be having any."

  Pete finished the beer and, when the waitress brought me my Coke, he asked for another. He ordered chicken strips, and I got a cheeseburger with jalapeños and fries.

  I drank some Coke. "Life looks like it's treating you well," I said.

  "Can't complain. I retired about a year back. I'd done my time, and I could get out with a full pension. I was tired of sitting at a desk all day anyway, figured I’d find something else to get into."

  There was a wedding ring on his left hand. Pete's hands were huge, rough, and dark from time in the sun. The ring was simple, a gold band bought when he'd been a few pounds lighter, and now it was tight around the digit, and not going to go anywhere.

  "You get married?" I said. "I'd figured you for the lifelong bachelor."

  He gave the ring a twist and moved his face around into a lopsided smile. "Yeah, I took the plunge. It’s good, but we hit a rough patch. I'm not sure what’s going to happen." There was a strain in his voice, an effort to shift conversational gears. "What about you and Maggie? You kids got any little ones yet?"

  "I guess this is where it's my turn to let things get awkward," I said. "Maggie and I aren’t together anymore. She stayed in Morgantown, and she's in Philadelphia now. She’s the web editor for a newspaper there."

  Things got quiet, as things do when we discuss our failures. I ran my finger across the rim of my glass.

  "So how you killing those long hours spent not busting humps? Sit at home, watch the Game Show Network? Go fishing? Got yourself a garden? Because I don't see you out there hauling dirt around, fussing over flowers."

  "I did the fishing thing, until I couldn't stand sitting on my ass all day waiting for something to happen. Hell, 30 years with the state police was enough of that shit. No, I went and got myself a private investigator's license."

  "You get a trench coat and fedora with that?"

  Pete laughed. "I'll tell you what; it's not a bad way to kill time you got that refuses to die."

  "What kind of shit you doing?"

  "A little of this, a little of that. I do contract work for an agency, most it your basic stuff, like working insurance cases, running security for events. What you up to?"

  "Security for a coal company now."

  The waitress brought us our food. Pete flipped open the lid on the ketchup bottle and squeezed until his French fries had vanished underneath an ocean of red. "You working out of the box at the entrance?"

  "Generally. My knee doesn't give me much allowance for running around."

  "I could see where that would be a problem." Pete took a bite of chicken strip. "You like it?"

  "No. It sucks sweaty ball sack, actually, but it's what's there for the time being."

  "After all the shit with the white supremacists, I thought you'd get famous there for a hot minute or so. No book deals, maybe a TV movie?"

  "Not the kind of famous I want to be."

  "Famous is famous, isn't it? What other kinds of famous are there?"

  I bit into my burger. The jalapeños were fresh, and I felt a good burn as I chewed. I sipped my Coke. "There's famous for helping bust up a white supremacist organization, and there's famous for dragging a massive dick around on a roller skate. I'd prefer the 'massive dick' kind of famous."

  Pete motioned to the waitress, and she brought him over a fresh beer. He drank some.

  "Most of what I end up doing is divorce work, or background checks, the crap big firms don't wanna deal with, or it's too little for them to hassle," he said. "I make fifty an hour doing shit anyone with Google can do."

  He stood up enough to reach into
his front jeans pocket and bring out a small case, flipped it open and handed me a business card. It looked professional, glossy with raised letters.

  "'Peter Calhoun, Security and Investigations,'" I said. "Check you out."

  "Don't let it get your dick too hard. Those are ten bucks for a shit-ton of them from a place online. It's not like the old days with Jim Rockford, he had the little printing press set up in his car, making 'em up as he went."

  I set the card on the table. "Still don't explain what you're doing in Parker County. It's not like you came for the view, or for the scintillating nightlife."

  He picked up a chicken strip, looked at it, set it back down. "I'm looking for a guy named Isaac Martin. He's from around here, and I thought you might be able to help out."

  "In spite of what you might have heard, we're not all related around here."

  Pete took a drink of his beer. "I saw a T-shirt a couple of years ago that said 'It's All Relative in West Virginia.'"

  "Yeah, it's like the one for Kentucky: 'Three Million People, 15 Last Names,'" I said. "Because if you can't laugh at incest, what can you laugh at?"

  4

  Isaac Martin was a programmer for a tech startup in Morgantown. Red Salt LLC was three friends from West Virginia University who had gotten together and developed a digital currency similar to Bitcoin. What I understood about Bitcoin was no one understood the shit, but the news channels liked to talk about it. What I got was that it some monetary system where you purchased the currency to use in online transactions.

  "Red Salt developed Cashbyte," Pete said. "Everything so far is just the 'hype' stage, where people talk, but the infrastructure isn't secure yet. But they’re getting big about it. The hype's enough where you have countries in Central and South America talking about switching to Cashbyte as a national currency because they can't manage their own."

  "I’d like to apologize now for only understanding about a third of what you're talking about," I said. "I'll nod a lot, if that's okay."

  "I can’t make much sense of it, either. You’ve got to be a combination of financial expert and computer nerd to follow it all."

  "How rich is any of this making Martin?"

  "So far, it’s not. But it almost doesn't matter because they've got people lining up to throw money behind the damn thing. The company's building name recognition, and people say it's more stable than Bitcoin, which is a big selling point. The thing with Bitcoin is you can buy it and the value fluctuates for no reason; it's like putting a fifty in your wallet before you go to bed at night and waking up the next day and you've got yourself either a hundred or a twenty. Cashbyte holds its value, which makes it less of a financial gamble."

  My head ached as I tried to think about it. I drank more of my Coke.

  "When did Martin disappear?" I said.

  "A week ago. Red Salt was scheduled to meet with a group of backers–Japanese businessmen who wanted to invest–and Martin never showed up for the meeting."

  "And no clue where he went?"

  "He wouldn't be 'missing' if someone knew where he was, would he?"

  Pete reached into a briefcase next to his chair and brought out an iPad. He flicked at the screen and pulled up a photo of Martin.

  Isaac Martin was so boyish-looking, he'd get carded until his 40s. He was thin and tan and spent time in a gym. His blonde hair was stylish, cut short on the sides and back and longer on top, and his teeth couldn't have been whiter if he brushed with Clorox. The photo was from a beach vacation, where Martin wore a Hawaiian shirt, standing in one of those restaurants where life is a constant luau. Someone's arm was around his shoulder, but the picture was cropped to show only Martin.

  "He doesn't look like a guy who spends his life in front of a computer," I said.

  Pete glanced at the iPad. "No, I don't suppose he does."

  "And what makes you think he came back to Parker County?"

  "Nothing except I've got nothing else to go on. His parents are dead, and there's no other family. He hasn't touched his bank accounts and credit cards since he vanished."

  "Any chance he's been moving his own money into Cashbyte or some other one of the electronic currency things?"

  Pete shook his head. "Nothing from his financials for the past year shows anything like that."

  "What about friends? He got a wife or a girlfriend?"

  "Neither," Pete slipped the iPad back inside his briefcase. He hadn't finished his food, but he still pushed away the half-full plate. "I need help here. You're a familiar face in these parts, so they may be more open with you than with me." Pete tapped his thumb on the tabletop. "I'll throw part of my fee towards you, obviously. I need to find the guy."

  I scribbled my email address on the back of the business card he’d given me and handed it to him. "Email me what you have and let me see what I can find out. Give me a day."

  "I can ask for little else."

  "Good, because since you're on an expense account, you're buying lunch."

  5

  Pete didn't have much on Martin. Only that Martin graduated from Parker County High School a decade prior, ran off to WVU, scored himself a degree in computer programming, and started up Red Salt with some classmates.

  I found articles about Cashbyte that touted it as "the next 'currency of the future'" and Red Salt as the "company that would save crypto-currency." You live long enough, you lose count of the things that are "the whatever of the future.'" I still wanted those flying cars and off-world colonies Blade Runner promised.

  The articles talked about how three programmers from West Virginia had written code which offered not only more security and anonymity than Bitcoin but also simplified the "mining" process, which was the method of how Cashbyte was distributed. It required less computing power, and made it more open to more people with fewer resources.

  All of this might as well have been in a foreign language; my knowledge of high finance ended with me tossing spare change into a coffee can in the kitchen at night.

  Martin's partners in the venture were Patrick Price and Vikram Kaur. In the pictures, Martin looked ill at ease, as though the attention made him nauseous, or nervous.

  Price looked less like what I expected a computer programmer to look like, and more like someone who helped blondes do keg stands. He was built like a gym rat, with a neck as thick as a fireplace log, holding up a head like an inverted teardrop. He cropped his hair close to mask a receding hairline and overcompensated with a thick beard and biceps ready to pop the seams of his shirt, compressed into an undersized frame that meant he needed help reaching shit on a tall shelf.

  Kaur possessed a casual smile and a lack of guile the other two lacked. He wore glasses with chunky black frames and different T-shirts with smart-assed sayings. In one photo, there was a laser pistol and the words "Han Shot First"; in another, there was a jumbled Rubik's Cube and "If You've Got a Problem, Yo, I'll Solve It." He'd wear on a human's nerves in 30 seconds flat.

  Once upon a time, I might have opened the phone book and called up anyone with the name Martin until I tracked down one of his relatives, who I would hope would point me somewhere in his direction. The problem being we existed in the 21st century, and even in somewhere as rural as Parker County, no one used phone books anymore, and damn few folks had landlines that would be in the phone book, anyway.

  I wish I could say I figured this out early, but I'd be lying if I did. No, instead, I walked to the library, down the street from the courthouse, and found the most recent Parker County phone directory and two pages of listings for the last name "Martin." On a whim, I looked for my name and saw I wasn't in there, which made sense since I only had a cell phone. From there I put two and two together, because I'm a goddamn trained investigator.

  If Martin was only 10 years out of the local school system, there might be a teacher from Parker County High who remembered him. If they did, they may steer me to family faster than the phone calls.

  The Parker County High yearbook for the year
Martin graduated—Go, Bucs!—was smaller yet slicker than from my high school days, and looked more designed and less tossed together. I flipped through the senior portraits, looking at kids in their dresses and rented tuxes, and thought how unprepared they were for the world awaiting them, with their wispy and ill-advised facial hair, choppy bangs, and eyes that said they knew everything but didn't understand a fucking thing.

  I went back into the annuals, checking the two previous years, and then the two years succeeding years, and I still didn't anyone listed as Isaac Martin. I stepped outside and called Pete.

  "How positive are you he graduated from Parker County?" I said.

  "What I know says he attended Parker County High. Hell, he was an honors student."

  "No chance he got home-schooled, or maybe one of those private Christian schools where they tell you the earth is flat and six thousand years old?"

  "What are you getting at, Henry?"

  "That Isaac Martin wasn't who he said he was."

  Pete got quiet. The silence felt heavy and awkward, and I said I'd call him back.

  I double-checked the annual from 10 years ago and looked at the senior pictures one by one until I found him. It seemed his photo had been mislabeled. There could have been a typo at the printer's. Perhaps gremlins had switched photos. Who knew?

  Isaac Martin was the valedictorian of that graduating class of Parker County High School, except the name underneath his photo was "Isaac McCoy." He had a litany of honors under his name to have shamed a presidential candidate. Debate team. Chess club. Chemistry club. All-county band. Honor societies with Latin names I couldn't decode with the ring from "Little Orphan Annie" and three good hints. Newspaper editor. Oh, and yearbook editor.