It was a hard offer to resist. I moved a pile of newspapers, magazines and crumpled empty bags of chips on top of a pile already on the floor. I pulled the chair over next to his. He rolled his chair over to another computer, and started typing away at the keyboard. I looked at the computer screen in front of me and clicked on the mouse to start the game. I took aim and shot at a woman running across Burgundy Street pushing a baby in a stroller in front of her as a car slammed on its brakes. As the woman’s head exploded, I said, “Um, this game is kind of sick, Jephtha.”
“Yeah, well,” he replied grimly, looking over at the screen in front of me, “that very thing happened to me yesterday when I was taking Abby to work. Some stupid pregnant woman with a baby ran right out in front of my car. Why would anyone do something so stupid? I mean, what if my brakes were bad? And there wasn’t a car behind me. She couldn’t wait twenty seconds for me to go by?” He glowered. “Just because you can breed doesn’t mean you should.” He pursed his lips at me. “At least in the game she’s not pregnant. And besides, you don’t kill the baby. If you do, you lose points.” He shook his head. “I’m not that sick.” He gave me an innocent grin.
“Well, no video game company would allow that. People would get pissed.”
“And it would make the national news. The family values assholes would get up in arms-even though women who risk their kids’ lives like that-that’s who they should be pissed at-and every teenaged boy in the country would want to play it, and I’d make a bazillion dollars.” He reached for the folder he’d set down on the desk beside the computer screen. He opened it and removed one of the e-mail printouts, then handed the folder back to me. “All I need is the information on one of these.” He peered at the paper, and laughed. “Chanse, this is not even a challenge, you know? When you going to give me something hard to do?” He sighed. “It’s like taking candy from a baby. You want lunch or something? Abby’s making a strawberry cobbler…her cobblers are fucking awesome, man. It’s like going to heaven.” He raised his eyebrows and licked his lips.
My stomach growled, but Jephtha had treated me to lunch once before. He’d made me an ‘Elvis special,’ a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. It had sat in my stomach for the rest of the day like a lead weight. “No, I’m meeting someone for lunch in about an hour,” I lied, glancing at my watch. “You’ll be done by then?”
“I told you, I’ll have this IP address in like two seconds…there it is.” His eyes gleamed. “Okay, give me another few minutes and I’ll know whose computer this is…well shit fire.” He sneered at his computer screen. “This e-mail address is one of those dummy ones, you know, the kind where you don’t have to give any personal information?” His fingers flew over the keyboard. He shrugged. “Okay, so this is going to take a few more minutes. I’ll have to trace the computer-if they registered it.” He glanced over at me. “Don’t look at my screen, okay? I’m going to have to do something you won’t approve of. Just keep playing Tourist Season.”
“I don’t want to know what you’re doing.” I turned back to the screen in front of me. A man and a woman were copulating in a doorway. I aimed, fired and they both exploded. Five thousand points! In spite of myself, I grinned in satisfaction. Everyone in New Orleans is going to want to play this game, I thought to myself. “You know, you’re probably right about this game.” I said as I took aim at another drunken tourist, this one staggering out in the road carrying a forty-eight ounce daiquiri cup and wearing a feather boa. BLAM! Another twenty-five hundred points. “It’s kind of addicting.” I fired at a car with MICHIGAN plates crawling along at about five miles an hour while everyone in the car gawked at the buildings going by. It exploded, body parts flying everywhere, giving me another ten thousand points. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud.
It was fun. “The New Orleans Tourism Board would probably pay you not to put this on the market.” I added, aiming at a couple of girls in sorority sweatshirts puking in a gutter. I missed, and shot a woman walking her dog on the other side of the street. I lost ten thousand points. Locals were worth a lot more than tourists.
“There.” Jephtha leaned back in his chair with a triumphant grin. One of his printers began to hum. Pages began coming out into the drop tray. “I told you it would be a piece of cake. I’m printing out the bill of sale right now. But-“ he held up a long and bony index finger, “this is the person who bought and registered the computer. It doesn’t mean they still have it.” He picked up a page and whistled. “Glynis Parrish? As in Glynis Parrish, the movie star?”
With real regret, I turned away from Tourist Season and took the paper from him. Sure enough, there it was in black and white. A MacBook Pro, purchased at an Apple store in Beverly Hills. I definitely didn’t want to know how he got this. I stood up and smiled at Jephtha. “E-mail me an invoice, and I’ll get a check to you this week.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me if it’s the Glynis Parrish or not?” He stuck out his lower lip in a pout that made him look about ten years old.
I laughed and winked at him. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” I slipped the bill of sale into the folder with the rest of the e-mails, and tucked it under my arm. I called out a goodbye to Abby, and headed out the front door.
My cell phone rang just as I was getting into my car. I grinned. It was my best friend, Paige. “What’s going on, Paige?”
“Hey, you have dinner plans? Ryan has his kids tonight, and I thought he should have some quality time with them.” She said. She’d been dating Ryan Tujague for a few months now. Usually she blew off a guy after a couple of dates, so this could be serious. I was happy for her. She’d had a rather checkered past when it came to men.
I replied without missing a beat. “It’s really insulting that you only call me when your boyfriend blows you off, you know.” Paige and I met in college, and have been close ever since. Her favorite thing to do is give me shit-and over the years, she’s gotten really good at it. I don’t mind, because I know it’s how she shows affection. So I give her shit right back. People listening to us talk would probably think we couldn’t stand each other. Her sense of humor is a little warped, so we make a good pair. There’s nothing quite like watching a bad movie with her over a few joints and a bottle of wine. She worked as a reporter for the Times-Picayune, and had even been nominated for a couple of Pulitzer prizes. One of the paper’s biggest stars, she was remarkably humble about it. When people complimented her on something she’d written, she’d just dismiss it with a simple, “Just doing my job, but thanks.”
She’s also been a valuable resource for me with her access to the paper’s morgue. Through her job, she met a lot of people in town-and for some reason, people liked to tell her things.
Since the storm, though, she’d expressed a lot of dissatisfaction with her job, and was threatening to quit every other day. I doubted she ever really would-she loved being a reporter. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything else, to be honest with you. She loved New Orleans as much as I did, even though what she saw in the city while doing her job often broke her heart.