Darknet Page 3

  Three days later, in the middle of his tour, he was interviewed on Larry King Live.

  Halfway through the interview, King asked, “So what new music out there excites you, Paul?”

  McCartney shrugged and said, “You know, I like all kinds of music, but I just heard this great song called Summer Drive when I was in Washington. Don’t know anything about the band, but I think I want to hear more from whoever it was who sang it. A bit sassy, a bit serious, pure rock and roll. I loved it.”

  The next morning, Tony got a call from Columbia Records.

  Three weeks later the song was number seven on the Billboard Charts, and it seemed Tony’s lifelong dream was about to come true.

  Six months after that he received his first royalty check. It was for $120,392.

  Tony never told his band-mates how much they got paid. He wrote them each a check for $10,000 and they were ecstatic to get it.

  The song faded from the scene as fast as it’d exploded onto it, and the next royalty check was $16,820. It was the last one he ever saw.

  Columbia released another two singles from the album, but they were universally panned as crap. Not much later, they sent Tony an official note, dropping him.

  He tried again the following summer, but the second album went nowhere. Even he knew in his heart that the new songs were worthless, written too quickly, not enough sparkle, nothing radio would like.

  Tony was a one-hit wonder, a label he detested with a passion. He felt like a joke, a tricky question buried in some secretive edition of Trivial Pursuit, a guy who’d had one shot and blew it.

  There was only one good thing that came from the whole thing: Cindy Jameson. When he was riding on the top of the rainbow, he drove over to her station.

  She met him before her show started and he was stunned. It was late August and she was dressed as if she were going to the beach, not going to work. She wore a pair of ultra-short, faded cut-off blue jeans and a tight tank top that showed off her body perfectly. Her long blonde hair seemed to call out for him to touch.

  His first thought was, I want to fuck her.

  She interviewed him on air and he floated on cloud nine.

  He did fuck her three days later. Six months after that they were married.

  And eight months after that, he beat her with a sack of oranges. She’d stopped playing Summer Drive on her station, and even though she tried to explain that the song wasn’t new anymore and she’d played it as long as she could, it didn’t matter. He knew she was just abandoning him, and she wasn’t going to get away with that.

  The oranges didn’t leave any marks, which is why he chose them. She had to miss three days of work, though, so the next time, he hit her mostly on her back and arms and legs instead of the stomach. He’d learned his lesson.

  Chapter 3

  July 4

  Cindy McKay loved Independence Day. She always had, and this year was no different. If anything, it would be even better than others because Avril was ten years old now and with every passing year, she grew to appreciate special events.

  When Cindy herself had been a child, she remembered her parents taking her out on a cruise on Elliott Bay with aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was the one day each year the entire Jameson clan tried to get together for a party out on the water, waiting for the fabulous fireworks display that would come after dark.

  Even now, she remembered the thrill and excitement she felt each year.

  She and Tony had tried to capture at least a portion of that excitement. For the past couple of years, Tony had picked up a box of fireworks and orchestrated a spectacular show in the back of their yard. Avril’s best friend, Laurie, was always invited. Cindy would meticulously arrange a barbeque dinner ahead of time: chicken thighs for her and Tony, burgers for the girls. Then they’d hang out in the yard and throw the Frisbee or play catch with a softball, with the games usually degrading into Avril and Laurie grabbing some dolls and playing with them in the bushes on the east side of the yard.

  That’s the part I love the most, thought Cindy. Watching my little girl playing happily with her friend.

  The two girls would never be mistaken for sisters, since Laurie was several inches taller and probably thirty pounds heavier than Avril. When they stood side by side, Avril looked too skinny, but Cindy just told herself that was because she’d inherited Cindy’s own body structure. She was skinny as a rail herself.

  “Mom, what time are we doing the fireworks?”

  Cindy was making a grape jelly sandwich so that Avril wouldn’t get too hungry. It was a little after two o’clock in the afternoon.

  “Well, probably around nine-thirty or ten, I think,” she said. “When it’s dark enough.”

  “Okay. When will Dad be home?”

  Cindy had wondered the same thing herself.

  “I’m not sure. Probably not too long now. He didn’t really say how late they’d be keeping the store open.”

  Avril nodded and bit into the sandwich.

  Cindy stared out the back window at the yard. She’d mowed the lawn earlier in the day and set out four lawn chairs for them all.

  Just need Tony now.

  He’d only told her just the night before that he’d be gone for the day. “We’re going to open the store. It’s a busy tourist day and we think it’ll be good for business.”

  “Really? July fourth? I thought you didn’t really cater to the tourist trade.”

  She bit her lip as she said it, realizing he might take that as some kind of criticism. This time, though, he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Not up to me. I’m just the guy behind the counter, not the one who calls the shots.”

  As it turned out, she wasn’t all that unhappy that Tony had been away all day. It’d been fun, just relaxing when she would normally have been working. She didn’t bother turning the radio on to see how her day’s replacement was doing. She didn’t care. She had the time off with Avril and no tension in the house, and that was just fine by her.

  She’d even sneaked in a quick nap after mowing the lawn. It’d been years since she’d done that.

  “Is Laurie coming over soon?”

  Avril looked up at the clock hanging over the counter. “I think so. I can text her in a while if she’s not here.”

  Cindy had an urge, so she walked over and hugged Avril. To her surprise, she was hugged right back without hesitation. She closed her eyes and put her hand on Avril’s blonde hair, inhaling the scent of her daughter, never wanting to lose the feel of her.

  “Mom, you can let me go now.”

  Cindy did, reluctantly, and smiled. “I have to get those hugs when I can.”

  * * *

  At 5:00, Tony still hadn’t arrived home. The store normally closed at 4:30, so Cindy figured he was on his way home now.

  “We need milk,” she said to an empty room. She’d somehow let the last carton run low, and she always demanded that Avril drink a full glass with dinner each night.

  She grabbed the phone and called Tony’s cell. It rang three times and then went to voicemail.

  “Hi, it’s me. Can you call me at home? Just wondered if—”

  She hesitated, wanting to phrase it right, not like a demand, more of a suggestion or maybe just making casual conversation about milk.

  Shit. He won’t like this.

  “—Just wondered when I should start the barbeque.”

  She hung up and stared at the phone.

  * * *

  6:00 and there was still no word from him. Avril and Laurie were running around outside and Cindy knew they must be getting hungry. She called Tony’s cell a second time, but again there was no answer. This time she didn’t leave a message.

  She went outside and lit the barbeque, hoping he’d be home before she started cooking. The last thing she needed was for him to think she’d done something wrong tonight. She wanted to enjoy the fireworks with her little family, and she didn’t want a misunderstanding ruining it.

  After another
thirty minutes, she put her chicken on the grill alongside the burgers for the girls.

  “Mom, where’s Dad?”

  “He’ll be here soon, sweet-pea. I think he just got stuck in traffic.”

  The girls laughed as they ate their dinner, but Cindy’s smile was forced. She didn’t much care for her chicken and only ate a few bites.

  Her own mother’s voice rang out in her mind. “You’re too skinny! You don’t eat enough!”

  She knew that was the truth. What her mother didn’t realize was why she didn’t eat. Five years ago she had weighed one twenty, and now, when she had the courage to stand on the scale, she was always at least fifteen pounds less. Sometimes she was even less, depending on how stressful things were with Tony. She just had no appetite when things weren’t going well.

  Which was often.

  She’d tried to text Tony but he hadn’t answered.

  The sun gradually lowered and set. Cindy cleaned up the dinner dishes and took a book out to one of the lawn chairs.

  Avril didn’t ask about the fireworks. When the sky darkened, she just went inside with Laurie and they found a movie to watch.

  Cindy imagined the bright red, green, and yellow streamers filling the air. She remembered the thundering booms from the fireworks on Elliott Bay and the laughter and cries of joy from her family all those years ago.

  She closed her eyes and put her book down, wishing Independence Day was as important to her husband as it was to her.

  The sun set with Cindy totally lost in her own thoughts and tears.

  She fell asleep and didn’t wake up until Tony shook her.

  * * *

  There wasn’t a lot of light in the McKays’s backyard. Cindy was slumped over in her chair and from Tony’s view, she looked like a shrub that had somehow sprouted in the middle of the yard.

  He mumbled, “Dummy.”

  If he’d known where Avril was and knew she couldn’t hear, he would have said something more along the lines of “dumb bitch,” but he was always a bit cautious where his daughter was concerned.

  He stared at Cindy, trying to decide if he should wake her or just leave her there. It’d been a long day and he really just wanted to get to bed.

  In the end he walked over to Cindy and shook her shoulder.

  “Hey, wake up.”

  Cindy jerked awake and looked up at him as if he were a complete stranger. In some ways, that wasn’t so far from the truth, she knew.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Where’s Avril?”

  Cindy blinked and it looked like she was trying to remember, but she just shook her head. “In the house, I hope.”

  “You hope?”

  She climbed out of the chair on the side opposite from him. Even when she was jerked awake like that, she knew better than to get too close to him.

  She rushed into the house, fumbling with the screen door as she entered. Tony followed and closed the door behind him.

  Avril’s bedroom was on the second floor, not far from the master bedroom.

  Please be there, Cindy thought.

  She was.

  The ten-year-old was sprawled across her bed diagonally, arms spread out like she was flying in her sleep. Her blonde hair spilled down her back.

  Cindy breathed a sigh of relief. There was no sign of Laurie. She must have gone home earlier.

  “Good-night, precious,” she whispered.

  She pulled Avril’s door shut. Tony was already in the master bedroom, and although she wasn’t feeling very tired anymore, she followed. She went to the private bathroom in the corner and closed the door before sitting on the toilet. She didn’t have to pee, but it gave her an extra minute before having to get into bed with him.

  When she ran out of time, she flushed and walked back to the main room. He was lying on his side, looking away. Good.

  But then she couldn’t help herself. He’d let her down, but more importantly, he’d let Avril down.

  “Why weren’t you here to set off the fireworks?”

  He didn’t answer, and Cindy wondered if he was asleep.

  “You knew it was July fourth, knew we always have a barbeque and fireworks. Avril was expecting it.”

  He threw back the covers and rolled onto his back.

  “Jesus, if you wanted fucking fireworks, don’t you think you should have fucking told me? You never mentioned anything. Am I supposed to be a goddamned mind-reader now?”

  “We always do that.”

  “Fuck always. I was working today. I never worked on July fourth before. Things change. You never mentioned any fucking fireworks, so just go cry in the corner and blame yourself.”

  He rolled back onto his side, and Cindy bit the inside of her mouth so that she wouldn’t say anything more. She thought of other things to say but kept quiet.

  Where were you?

  Who were you with?

  Why are they more important than your daughter?

  Just what have you been up to, Tony?

  She refused to cry. What was the point? Crying never helped her before.

  What she really wanted to do was to tell somebody what he was really like. Nobody knew. She’d never even told Maria the complete truth, and if she couldn’t tell her, she couldn’t tell anyone. Even Avril never really saw things that Tony didn’t want her to.

  She felt more alone than she’d ever felt before.

  Soon, she heard Tony’s breathing change and recognized the sound of him sleeping.

  Closing her eyes didn’t help. She didn’t feel the slightest bit tired. Part of her wondered how long she’d actually been asleep outside, but the math seemed too hard to work out. Her brain was only focused on how much she hated her life.

  Finally, she gave up and crept out of bed. She walked to her office, clicked her laptop on, and found her way back to the deep web. DarkNet was calling to her.

  It somehow seemed appropriate. The house was dark, with no lights on except the laptop screen. Dark, secretive, quiet.

  “Where are you, my little secret . . .”

  Cindy clicked her way easily through her Tor software into the secretive side of the wired world where nobody could see what she was doing, and anything was available.

  Anything.

  She’d thought about DarkNet a lot over the past couple of days. How could she not? It was right there, all the frontier-style things that anybody could do. She found The Silkier Road and entered . . .

  The original Silk Road was one of the best known places on DarkNet. It was the world’s most explicit black market drug emporium. One of its spiritual children, Silkier Road, was even wilder. She stared and couldn’t believe she could just click on anything she wanted and buy it . . .

  Cindy wasn’t a prude. When she was a teenager, she’d experimented with marijuana, mostly at parties, and she’d tried a bit of hash one time. She knew some people who had access to harder drugs, but they hadn’t interested her. In front of her was a long list of drugs that she could buy with just a few clicks.

  Ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, LSD, and a hundred other drugs that she didn’t even recognize the names of. It was like browsing at amazon.com. She could add the drugs of her choice to her shopping cart, check out, and arrange delivery to her home. She clicked LSD out of curiosity and found it was 6.92 bitcoins for 50 tabs.

  A bitcoin was the currency of the DarkNet. She could buy bitcoins legitimately, and then use them for whatever she liked, completely untraceable, like everything else in the dark web. One bitcoin was worth about $120 today, so the 50 tabs of LSD would cost her about $840, or a shade less than $17 each. She wondered how that would compare to walking down the back alleys of Seattle.

  She tired of looking at drugs quickly enough and clicked over to a different site. This one sold services: if you wanted something stolen, you could hire this company to do the work. The service listed about 100 chain stores that they were happy to steal from and even offered you proof of theft (in the form of a photogr
aph of your item) before you had to pay.

  “Don’t really need anything stolen,” she whispered.

  There was a creak somewhere in the house, and she froze, wondering if Tony had woken up and was coming to find her.

  Not bloody likely, she knew. He didn’t care enough about her to find her.

  She wandered deeper into DarkNet.

  Arms dealers willing to sell you any kind of gun you wanted, along with an ongoing supply of ammunition. AK-47s were a popular item.

  Pornography of every stripe, every age, every kink. She didn’t bother going into those sites, since she didn’t expect there’d be much there she hadn’t seen somewhere else along the line.

  Then there were the identity fraudsters. They would provide you with a new passport along with all the other government-issued ID you might need. All you needed to do was send in your photo and they’d take care of everything else for a mere 20 bitcoins. You could be a new person almost overnight with a history created out of thin air just for you.

  Along the same lines, you could buy 100 valid Visa or MasterCard numbers. Each group cost only 20 bitcoins. They came with a guarantee that they were legitimate and that you could use each one for an average of three days before they were shut down.

  There were lots of areas for doing things anonymously. Cindy could have rented a house or a car without anybody knowing her real name, opened a post office box or a bank account. There wasn’t much security a few bitcoins couldn’t buy. The same site could track the exact location of a lost cell phone.

  Elsewhere she could find out what sporting events were fixed and bet on the winners.

  She could scare the crap out of somebody by sending a SWAT team to their house in the middle of the night.

  Cindy giggled at that one. It sounded more like an April Fool’s joke than a serious threat, but she knew if it’d happened to her it would be scary enough.

  She hesitated and then clicked on Organ Associates.

  It was a site dealing in harvesting human organs. The site was as professionally created as all the others, so there was no hint of bad grammar that might help identify where in the world this was located. The promises on the site just said they’d deliver any organ that was needed within 24 hours.