Johnny made a stop at the gas station, and I got to the register in time to pay for his cigarettes and some beef jerky. He spent a bunch of time talking to the guy behind the counter about off-gassing pipes and toxins. The guy laid his hands over his plaid-stretched gut and nodded. I got the feeling Johnny was like the town idiot, except he was really the town savant.

“You know Harper went to MIT, right?” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “She’s pretty smart.”

“We was all proud of her. Then she came back for that fuck of a father. He shoulda croaked faster. Done us all a favor.”

“Harper said everyone loved him.”

“Feed them enough barbecue, and they’ll love you.”

“I’ll remember that.”

He tossed me the black helmet. Redox hadn’t budged.

“Is the Barrington place far?” I asked.

“Let’s get something to eat first.”

“I’m buying.”

“Damn right, you are.”

He took me across three empty parking lots and a light industrial service road behind an abandoned brick structure. We landed in a dark bar right out of a movie. It smelled of stale beer and cigarettes and sounded like treble-heavy speakers and clicking resin pool balls. There was no sign out front.

Johnny pointed at a seat at the bar and introduced me to Kyle, Damon, Reggie, Curtis, and Butthead. A mug of beer and a shot of something amber appeared at my elbow.

“You were up at the Barrington place last night.” Damon pulled on his long goatee.

“This is the California guy Harper found.” Reggie handed me my shot and held up his own. I was apparently expected to drink it.

“Found?” I said.

“Knew each other in college, ain’t that right?” Johnny added.

“Those girls pick up strays where they find ‘em,” Kyle said. “They’re all right.”

Damon grumbled something behind his beer.

“Crazy broads,” Reggie added, smiling as if they were his own special crazy broads.

Kyle shook his head and threw back his shot, leaving wet hair on his handlebar moustache. Butthead, whose four hundred pounds were at least twenty pounds sideburn, shook his head as if he didn’t have to say a word out loud. They all understood each other in glances and half sentences.

I threw back my drink. Wild Turkey. Maybe. It burned, but I liked a little burn now and again. I cooled it down with a gulp of cold, pissy beer. It was good, and a new shot was in my hand a second later.

Damon raised his. “To the Barrington girls.”

Sure. I’d drink to that.

“What the fuck’s that on your wrist?” Johnny asked me, clicking his beer mug on my Langematik.

“Fucking watch.”

“How much that set you back? Thirty large?”

“What the—?” someone behind me exclaimed.

“Not telling.”

“Oh, shit! He ain’t telling!”

Everyone laughed. I didn’t think it was funny.

“It was a steal.” I wanted to show them I was shrewd. “My dealer found a guy who didn’t know what he had, and I grabbed it.”

“What you do for a living out there in Cah-lee-fornia?” Johnny stretched out the word to mock it. He was the leader of this crew, at least for the night.

“I’m a hacker.” Which was partially true but most easily stated and threatening enough to make my balls look a little heavier.

“A hacker?”

“Holy shit!” Butthead exclaimed. “So you, like, get into people’s computers and steal?”

“Yes and no—”

The gang argued about what hackers did, their feelings about us, how cool or not cool the entire idea was, and whether or not hacking made you a man or a pussy.

“Hack me!” Damon took out his phone. With his long goatee and huge holes in his ears, he could have been transplanted into the San Jose hipster scene in the blink of an eye.

“Are you serious?” Butthead tried to talk sense into him, but Damon waved his phone at me.

“Fuck it. Hack me right now. I ain’t got nothing to steal. Fuck it. I want to see.”

“Nah.” I denied his phone. Once I touched it, it was mine.

“Do it, motherfucker.”

“No.”

“You ain’t shit. You mean you can’t.”

The group went up in awws of resignation when I shook my head. They really thought I couldn’t. No one had doubted me in years, and suddenly my balls were featherlight.

“Fine,” I said, taking Damon’s phone. I pressed the volume and home keys at the same time. “Give me that safety pin.” I pointed at a row of them on his jacket, and he pinched one off.

“You need the passcode to… oh shit.”

I didn’t have my own device, which would have cut my hack time in half. But there wasn’t much I couldn’t do once I was into his phone, which only took a second. Then I downloaded a piece of code I’d developed to do a particularly neat trick. A few taps, and his life opened her legs for me.

“Your One US Bank password is 123123? Are you trying to get robbed?”

“What the—?”

“You have $423.34 in there. I’ll leave you the twenty-three dollars. You’re welcome.”

Voices of amazement and awe, which I bathed in. I was a sucker for this shit. I didn’t need or want his four hundred dollars but his esteem. Their esteem. I didn’t know them, but these guys made me feel like a king.

Butthead had his phone in his front pocket. I tapped it with Damon’s to connect them. It was so easy it was a joke.

“Butthead,” I said, “your Twitter password is ‘titties,’ all lowercase. So’s the America First Bank checking and the—”

“I like titties. What can I say?”

“Kyle.”

“I know my passwords, thank you.” His voice was resonant and serious. What it suggested clearly was “I believe you’re a hacker. You can stop now.”

I gave Damon his phone. “Do a factory reset and protect yourself, would you? All you guys. Long passwords, all different, numbers, letters, symbols. All right? Stop fucking around.”

“Tell you what, California Boy,” Kyle said.

Shit. This wasn’t going to end well. Nothing that started with “tell you what” and ended with something besides your actual name ended well.

“You beat me at eight ball, and I’ll give you my bike.” Kyle pointed out the window at a shiny Harley. “You lose, and I get that watch.”

It was a fair trade if only the objects were considered. Except I could buy a new watch in a minute, and his bike was probably a bigger investment for him.

“I can’t take your bike,” I said.

“You think you’re gonna win?”

“I know I am.”

“Man, you are all balls, kid.”

“Might be so. But I can tell the time on the wall. What are you going to do without your ride?”

“Fuck it.” He slapped down his empty mug. “Don’t care. Come on.”

He grabbed the shoulder of my jacket and “helped” me up. Someone tossed me a stick, and I caught it. Chalk came half a second after, and I snapped that out of the air with my other hand.

I really didn’t want his bike, and I liked my watch, but I could risk it to give these guys a rude awakening. Because math. Physics. And I was just tipsy enough to not care about getting the shit beat out of me. Loose enough to think landing in the hospital with a pool cue up my ass would get me enough sympathy from Harper to release my system.

Yeah. The shots had gone right to my head. Kyle put another Wild Turkey on the table rail.

“Do you fucking people eat?” I asked.

Butthead shouted over the music, “Johnny! Get Mr. California a burger! And get two for my fucking belly.” He turned back to me with a smile. “Yeah. I’m fat, and I don’t give a shit.”

I took out my wallet and gave him my credit card. “Then get three. I don’t give a shit if you’re fat either. But change your passwords. Make them longer and put in a number or something.”

“You’re all right for a California freak.” He took the card.

“You’re the nicest fat fuck I ever met.”

I must have been drunk to say that, and everyone else must have been drunk to laugh so hard. Kyle started the rack. Damon pushed him away and accused him of cheating. Kyle cursed at him. Johnny pushed them both away, said something about even odds of a stripe or a solid falling, and rearranged the balls. Once the rack was set, it was determined that the guest broke. The eleven landed.

“So how you like that Harper?” Kyle asked.

She’s nuts.

“Nice girl.” I circled the table, doing geometry in my head. I could land the nine and set up the next four shots. I wouldn’t take his bike right off the bat, but I wouldn’t lose either.

“You stay in the house last night?”

I sank the nine and had a perfect set up for the ten.

“Yeah. Side.” I leaned over, took the ten. I wasn’t drunk enough to miss the twelve in the side pocket or the setup for the fifteen in the corner.

“She show you Barrington hospitality?”

The balls clicked, and the fifteen made it, but the fourteen wasn’t lined up like I’d wanted. Because… what was Kyle talking about? Was he implying I’d fucked her?

“Food was good. Mattress was lumpy.”

“She made you forget about that though. That’s my guess.” He leaned on his cue and winked.

I looked at him over my cue, still sliding it over my thumb. “She’s a nice girl.”

“Sure is.”

I had a lot going on in my life. I was responsible for the employment of dozens of people, and my life’s work, the work they’d all slaved over, was being held hostage by a crazy woman who’d threatened to sell it. I was in Nowhere, USA, without a car or a cab. My phone was broken and imprisoned by thorns. I was going to get the shit beaten out of me if I wasn’t careful.

But when he implied that Harper was some kind of easy whore, I was ready to tear shit up. I was aware that she’d taken her shirt off in an abandoned train station and begged me to fuck her, but that was me. The thought of her fucking these guys—or any guy, if I was being honest with myself—boiled the bourbon in my blood.

I took my shot, and the fourteen dropped in the corner. “She’s a beautiful girl.” I paced around the table after the thirteen, which hung on the edge of a corner pocket. “And smarter than anyone in this room.” I leaned over and sank it. “Including me.”

I was complimenting her to get the guys to talk, maybe tell me if they were in on her plan, but that didn’t mean I was lying.

“Me too,” Johnny said. “Just saying.”

“She’s too good for this shit.” The thirteen sank like a body over a waterfall, and the cue ball bounced left, tapping the eight. It dropped into the side pocket. “Too good to be stuck here. If I were her, I’d do some desperate shit to get out.”

I laid my stick across the table and held my hand out to Kyle. Ruefully, he pulled on the silver chain that made a U at his waist and isolated a key.

“You don’t know this town well enough to say that.” He snapped off the key. “We’re her people.”

“That may be so.” I still didn’t want his bike, but in the seconds that passed, I decided I’d give it to Harper as payment for their shitty rutting. “But she’s yours too.”

Kyle slapped the key in my outstretched hand and grabbed it tight. I braced myself against what I thought was next. A punch. A flip. Any act of violence I had coming for shooting off my mouth in the backwoods.

“I don’t need you telling me what the Barrington girls are.” He looked at me closely, inspecting every pore, every hair, every flick of my eyes.

I looked back at him with the same directness, funneling my inexplicable anger in his direction. “What are they?”

I wanted him to say it so I could get this over with. His face cracked, and lines appeared around his mouth when he smiled. It was as if I’d said something that relieved him.

“They’re us. That’s all there is to it. They’re good girls. Good people. And if you respect them, we respect you.” He let my hand go.

I put the key on the rail. They’d been baiting me, trying to get me to say something dirty or cruel about Harper and her sister. Fuck them and, also, good for them.

“Who’s going to win you your bike back?” I asked.

“One of my people.” He tossed the cue to Reggie.