Page 89 of Nearly Roadkill
Subj:Natural born chillers
Don’t worry, dude. ::throwing my head back with a pirate laugh:: har-r-r-r! They’ll never take us alive! ::savage outlaw grin::
—W.
END TOOBE ENTRY
NARRATIVE ENTRY, JABBATHEHUT
Why, I ask you, why, did Toobe have to click on that strange little wiggling icon?
And now a too-cute giggle from his computer screen interrupts the detective’s daydreams.
Looking up, he sees Typhoid Mary sashaying across his screen, her eyes positively aglow with a cyber-rendition of triumph.
“Hel-l-l-l-o-o-o-o-o, Missy Budge,” she says brightly. “Look what *I* found!”
Before he has a chance to reply, the hippie chick opens her duffel bag and withdraws a… magic wand? She waves it over her head and giggles. “Presto,” she says, “you are now connected.” And Budge’s screen is suddenly filled with a graphic image: the unfortunately bad high school photograph of Toobe.
At the same instant Budge is staring at the unbelievably young face of his only perpetrator, a similar stare-down is happening on a teenager’s screen. Halfway across the world—or is it only across town?—Toobe is swallowing hard, gawking as suddenly into his own screen. For there he sees the unforgiving federal photo ID of Lieutenant Wally Budge.
Neither stirs. They stare at each other’s photos, the detective and the kid, their hands frozen over their keyboards.
As one, two hands flash out toward two keyboards. The nicotine-stained finger wins, punchingCAPTUREbefore the younger hand reachesESCAPE.
And two photos vanish from two computer screens, leaving Budge with his jaw hanging open and an unsmoked cigarette burning between his fingers.
“He’s a little kid,” says Wally Budge aloud to no one. “Just a scared little kid.”
“Got him, Boss,” says Typhoid Mary. “Tracking sequence initiated and sustained. He can’t get away now.”
To:Henderson, Enforcement
From:FBCS Investigations
Subj:Top Priority/Scratch and Winc
Attaching electronic signature to this memo. Follow it down, will you? This Toobe guy? He’s a minor. Keep me posted on every step. I’ll have a warrant by the time you’ve got him.
—Wally
Lieutenant Wally Budge, senior investigator for the U.S. Federal Office of Internet Intelligence, Bureau of Census and Statistics, watches his message vanish from the screen, and whispers,
“A little kid.”
A note:Predictably, law enforcement memos escalated because for a long spell, Toobe went offline. Yes. Frustrating to me as well. I will elaborate when the time comes.
END NARRATIVE JABBA ENTRY
07SCARED
To:Editor, They/Them magazine
From:D.I. Drew
Subject:Gwynyth the Cyberwitch
Hi Asa,
