ZerOes Read Free

says, but the words sound mushy. His face aches.
    â€œAnd I’ll do it again if you try to run.”
    Chance coughs. “I don’t know you, but way I figure it, you’re trespassing.”
    That gets a chuckle. “I’m allowed to trespass,” the man says. No Southern twang, none of that easy, muddy North Cackalacky slide. His words are short. Clipped like with a little pair of scissors. “I’m Mr. Government.”
    Then Mr. Government sticks a stun gun to Chance’s neck and the world goes bright and alive.

                                    CHAPTER 2
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  DeAndre Mitchell
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    SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA
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    D eAndre presses the earbuds into his ears with two pokes of his long fingers, swings his legs out of a Honda Accord that’s not his, and walks over to the gas pump. He tells his jailbroken iPhone to play some music. Chiddy Bang queues up. He thumps drums on his chest with one hand as he pumps gas.
    Then he holds his phone over the card reader for five seconds.
    He feels the phone vibrate as it finds the Bluetooth signal. It starts the download. Credit card numbers—hundreds of them, digits and mag stripe data from all the people who used this pump over the past week—zip into his phone. It vibrates again when it’s done.
    DeAndre pockets the phone. Bobs his head to the music. Slaps an open-palm drumbeat against his thighs. Then he stops pumping gas—just six bucks worth, not even two gallons—and gets back in the car and drives away.
    He’ll sell 90 percent of these credit card numbers. The carder markets online always have scammers looking for fresh dumps of digits. At ten bucks a pop, that makes today a three-thousand-dollar day. And this ain’t the only place he’s running skimmers. He’s got devices at theValero off 82, at the Sev on Shoreline, at the Safeway on Marina. After a couple of weeks he’ll move ’em to new locations. Cycle ’em around.
    He’ll turn the other numbers into plastic. He’s got a top-shelf card printer, spits them out fast. He gets a refresh of cards, can use them quick, then toss them.
    All that will come later. Right now, it’s time to go see his moms.
    This is going to be a good day , he thinks.
    And it will be. Until it’s not.
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    MARIN CITY, CALIFORNIA
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    The houses on Nogales Street aren’t much to look at. Like a bunch of shoeboxes sitting next to one another in an ugly line. The hedges between them are dead or overgrown.
    DeAndre parks the car, gives the side-eye to the housing project across the street—the Olima Apartments, where a bunch of reedy, weedy gangbangers mill around mismatched lawn furniture in the middle of the apartment courtyard. A few whoop and yell as he gets out—they don’t know him and he doesn’t know them, but that’s how they are.
    DeAndre could have been one of them. Thinking he’s a little Tupac in the making—so proud they all come from the same town as the long-dead rapper—slinging drugs and packing a nine. But his moms kept him straight. She made DeAndre do his time at the library. At the comic book store. At the two-dollar movie theater. Most important of all, in the computer lab at the library. He did anything to get out of that house. Anything to get away from those bangers and slangers across the street.
    Miss Livinia pokes around the front lawn of the little lemon-yellow house next door to the one he grew up in. She’s all hunched over, a little pile of raisin-wrinkled lady squinting from behind praying-mantis eyeglasses. She’s picking pieces of mailbox out of the overgrown grass, setting them on a flattened cardboard box to collect them.
    That’s when DeAndre sees—it’s not just the