The Big Denial of Service
by Tess Schrodinger

It was a tempestuous night in the desert. I needed a drink. I needed a
vacation. I needed a cool dame on a hot tropical island. What I had was
a hangover, a shabby cliché fedora, and a hacker convention in town. Oh
yeah, and a dead body.

For twenty-three years, I’ve been a cop in the City of Sin and some of
that sin is bound to rub off on you, but it’s a nice enough neighborhood
to have bad habits in.  I stood in hotel room 2323 and it smelled of
musty exhausted carpet soaked with copper and the drab anonymity of all
those who had flounced, fornicated and fell through the cracks of
society here. The kind of pungent tang you could still taste on the back
of your tongue long after you’d tried to absolve it with a few shots of
cut-rate detective’s salary scotch.

The who was Bobby Watts. The where was the Paris Hotel and Casino. The
how was a number two Phillips screwdriver through his now bloody black
“I’M HERE BECAUSE YOU BROKE SOMETHING” t-shirt and into his left kidney.
The why was my job to smoke out.

I was fairly sure I was dealing with a crime of opportunity.  These
hackers seemed to be of the sort that spelled trouble with ones and
zeros and if you tried to correct them, they’d steal your bank account
password and fiddle with your life so’s you’d wake up in Singapore one
humid morning surrounded by a chopper squad.  The big Denial of Service
usually comes as the result of introducing a massive shock to the system
or by shutting down the breathing and not turning it back on again.  A
stab to the kidney might not be as visually dramatic as getting pumped
full of lead but the screwdriver damage would have been quick, deep and
critical.  Shock would come like a thief in the night and would have
slipped out of the dark room with his life by the lonely light of a
luminous desolate blue screen.

Watts was a blank man. He had no face. No meaning. No personality. He
was like a two week old crumpled Frys flyer at the bottom of a hotel
wastebasket.  I was pretty sure he hadn’t been much more vibrant when he
had been alive based on the several dozen interviews already conducted
with his alleged friends.  I’d been here for a few hours quizzing the
panoply of geeks and I felt I had a fairly good idea what had led up to
his demise.

I sent the denizens of this temporary realm off to return to their
digital debauchery but held back my prime suspect. These hackers might
have been a clever bunch when it came to jinking into grandma’s computer
and stealing her blue rinsed identity so they could go load up on video
games, pop tarts, and blow up dolls. Nimble fingers could get you far on
a battered keyboard or up a dishy dame’s skirt but not very far when
they are still shaking and corrupt  with the sanguine evidence of
entanglement with the corpus delicti.

I looked down at my perp and wondered if someone had a mortgage on his
soul or if he owned it free and clear. His ID fingered him as one Mr.
Jeffrey Cosine. Nickname, “Stygian”. He was twenty-three, five feet five
inches, brown and brown although apparently that bizarrely cheerful
young lady I had questioned earlier with ink like a career sailor and
who had brandished a pair of keen gleaming hair cutting shears in each
hand like a demented kung fu barber had gotten to him because what was
supposed to be brown was now green. He must have escaped her clutches
before she began an assault on the last shaggy stripe that ran from his
forehead to the back of his pasty white profusely sweating neck. 
Sitting on the once unblemished ivory hotel bed cover, he looked about
as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a cucumber sandwich at a church tea.

I had heard stories like his a thousand times over. He claimed to be a
harmless innocent. A patsy of circumstance and coincidence but he was
behind the eight-ball and he knew it. He asserted that he was
participating in a black bag contest and currently working on one of the
tasks that involved locating a specific room within said hotel so he
could pull a box job and capture a flag.  The Chinese angle on his yarn
had been that as he was coming down the corridor, he’d encountered a
sultry skirt loitering in the 23rd floor hallway.

She’d had more curves than elliptical cryptography. The kind of woman
who you knew was social engineering you but you didn’t mind because you
had no dope of value and the only thing that would be compromised in the
end was her flesh. And you could live with that. And so could she. Or
she had better find another line of work.  He hadn’t had anything worth
knowing and figured he was ahead enough in the game to pause for a
dalliance with her as long as it was a comp on the house.

The bunco, if you believed him, sparked when her lips met his and as
their kisses grew heated she’d reached behind her to open the door she’d
been leaning on with what he’d assumed was her key card and pulled him
into the dark room beyond. They’d done that jagged stumbling tango two
folks do as they tried to find the bed in pale gloom without
disconnecting the patch panel of locked lips, thrusting tongues, and
hungry hands.  The rumpus commenced when she suddenly spun him right
round like a record and then shoved him off balance and away from her. 
He’d gone down blind, his hands landing in the wet River Styx leaking
from the dormant body on the floor he’d felt a moment later as he
reached out in the dark shadows to get his bearings.  Then, quick as you
please, or maybe you don’t, the hotel room door had opened again, the
lights had come on and there he was kneeling like a whore in church with
bloody mitts and a startled expression as the beat cop who’d been called
to respond to a disturbance drew down on him and ordered him to put his
hands in the air.

He had insisted that it must have been the blonde who’d iced the guy. It
had to have been the blonde and he’d gotten caught in a grift. She’d
been as blonde as Hell and dressed in black.  He’d been struck by the
dangling golden spider earrings she’d been wearing because they’d made
him think about crawling the world wide web. And then he’d thought about
doing some crawling of his own up the fishnet meshwork she’d sheathed
her pins in.  By his description, she’d been the kind of dish that would
have made the Pope kick a hole in the stained glass window in St.
Peter’s Basilica.  But we all know women like that don’t really exist
except in dreams and bad movies that consist of endless nights filled
with dark, dismal rain that falls like dead bullets backlit through
window blinds by a blinking neon sign that usually spells out something
like “EAT AT JOE’S” or “BAMALAM GENTLEMEN’S CLUB”.

But the other shoe finally dropped because it always does. Turned out
Mr. Watts was a topflight hacker who had discovered a serious zero day
vulnerability in a computer program being used by a number of financial
type institutions. A computer program that had been written by a bright
young virtuoso who’d made a whole bunch of loot from its sale and the
revelation of a serious flaw in its ability to secure personal
information could mean curtains not just for the software but for the
virtuoso’s reputation as well. And now, conveniently, Mr. Watts had been
fitted for a Chicago overcoat and I had the virtuoso sitting slouched on
the bed before me peddling his sob story about some dame who’d conned
him to take the fall.

He had the means, motive and opportunity. I had more hard evidence than
ticks on a hound dog. This was better then a deck with six aces and it
doesn’t get much better than that.  I informed Mr. Cosine that he’d
performed his final pen test and had passed with dying colors as I
cuffed his scrawny wrists behind his back and sent him down to be loaded
in the paddy wagon.

As the busted flush was whisked away into the dark night to begin his
cruise up the river, I pulled out my pack of smokes and set one to
dangle in the corner of my mouth as I patted my pockets for a light.
Then a small flame appeared, shimmering and dancing as the looker
wielding it said in a sultry voice, “Need a light, Shamus?”

I paused to give her the once over. She certainly wasn’t a joy girl or
streetwalker although there was no doubt about it, she had to be
somebody’s twist. I kept my eye on her as I gently touched her wrist and
I obliged myself, then straightened up to exhale slowly.

“Thanks, Doll,” I said.

“My pleasure,” she replied in a voice that dripped with thick honey and
was as cool and slick as a Teflon cat.

She wore a loose dark trench coat that probably covered up a body that
would have won first prize in a beauty contest for hourglasses that held
a few extra minutes. She looked like a wasp that had a nice sting. The
one you didn’t feel going in but it burned like cheap whiskey for hours
later after she was gone.

At that moment, a huge black metal cased livery car glided to a stop at
the curb. It had been silent as it floated out of the darkness and into
the bright lights of the casino porte-cochère like a grotesque gondola
on the Lethe.  It was impossible to determine who was driving this
construct that called to mind an immense predatory animal laying in wait
to pounce on its prey.

The dame watched it pull to a halt then looked back at me. She spoke two
simple words, “My car…”

And then she strode to it like a shade intent on making its way back
into the anonymity of the local graveyard. She opened the rear door and
a gust of desert sirocco caught her coat as she turned to slip into the
car.  I saw the flash of fishnets on legs that might have gone on for
eternity and made a man feel dirty and nasty while wanting more. As she
began to lower herself into the beast, another gust wafted her golden
tresses and I saw them. Two auspicious arachnids descending from her
ears and swaying with her body as if they were enchanted treasures of
gold from a fairy tale king’s cache.

The mechanical leviathan slowly drifted away as my chin started to drop
and the smoldering pill dropped from my mouth, turning end over end in
slow motion, hitting the ground like a miniature meteor.   I tried to
grab the plate but the darkness had already absconded with that data,
leaving me high, dry, and questioning if I’d hung the pinch on the right
guy.

You can’t always win but there are ways to lose more slowly.  In this
world of shit options, bad decisions, and dire consequences, it was now
clear I needed to cherchez la femme and finger the stinger that had just
stung me.

THE END….?