Torrent(28)

“I’ve got to take Zelda to the repair shop,” Simon said after he slurped up the milk in his bowl of granola. He’d informed me that a mocha wasn’t an appropriate breakfast, but I wasn’t sure his option was any healthier, given the amount of brown sugar he’d dumped on the top. “You staying here?” He waved to my open laptop.
“Yes. We’ve got a spot by an outlet. I can go for hours.” Our pub table stood against the wall by a piano with my laptop cord snaking down to the outlet. On previous days when we’d visited the Raven, we’d had to settle for tables in non-outlet-serviced locales. Today, the cafe was quiet, with only one other person sharing the dining area, a bleary-eyed, laptop-toting kid wearing a Yavapai Community College sweatshirt. I hadn’t seen a television yet, but the dearth of people in here and on the streets suggested that the White Spar incident had hit the news. Temi’s three early-morning text messages asking where we were and demanding to know if we were all right provided further evidence for that hypothesis.
“You can go for hours? All by yourself, eh?” Simon smirked, but it was a tired gesture. His eyes were bloodshot too. He’d probably take a nap in the waiting room while the headlights were being replaced. He never had trouble sacking out on a random chair, bench, or gum-decorated sidewalk in public.
“I’ve warned you about my introvert tendencies,” I said. “Did you send me that picture of the thing from the hotel room yet?”
“Yeah, but I’m more interested in where that monster’s going next than in antiques, albeit glow-in-the-dark antiques are intriguing. You’re going to find out more about that, right? Instead of wasting hours trying to look up foreign words you think you heard last night.” He gave me a pointed look.
Yes, I’d meant to spend more time researching the L.A. connection, and I had pulled up a few stories, but those words I’d heard Jakatra and Eleriss speak had kept repeating in my mind. I’d played with countless spelling possibilities, plugging each into the search engine, but I hadn’t found anything useful. Not all that surprising if the language wasn’t based off the Latin alphabet.
“I promise I’ll research your monster,” I said, “but we’re not tracking down anything that can rip our heads off, no matter what I find on it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Simon said. “But the riders are a different matter, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to know about them and their language.”
“Yes...”
“So, you’d want a sample if you could get it?” he asked.
“If I could figure out what language they were speaking, I’d have a better shot at finding information on that object in their room.”
“That was a yes, right?”
“Yes.” I wondered why he was pursuing this so relentlessly.
“You get all the details on L.A., and I’ll see if I can figure out a way to get you that sample.” Simon smiled and strolled away.
I had a feeling I should find his parting words, or perhaps his motivations, suspicious.
A busboy cleared his plate, and I set to work, digging deeper into the California incidents. I was so engrossed in the research that I didn’t notice Temi until she tapped me on the shoulder sometime later.
“I’m here for my introduction to estate sales,” she said, though her raised eyebrows implied she doubted we’d be doing that today.
“I’m guessing most of those will be canceled.”
Temi sat down, placing a number on the edge of the table. “The streets are empty of pedestrians, and even the auto traffic is scarce. Are you going to tell me what’s going on from your side of things? I’ve seen the CNN and local news version.”
“Simon and I were up in the mountains yesterday morning, treasure hunting, basically. He’s working on a program that uses 3D mapping technology, some historical databases I pointed out to him, and a bunch of stuff I don’t understand very well to create a geographic information system. It helps you hunt for long-forgotten and sometimes buried ‘rusty gold’ as they say in the biz. It’s similar to the technology people are using to find old shipwrecks on the bottom of the ocean. I go along to dig up what we find, I point out if it has any historic or financial value, and, if so, we drag it out and sell it. My job is also to choose likely spots for his software to search by rummaging through historical records and old maps to find out where there used to be settlements, permanent or temporary. We’ve only been doing this for a few months, but we’ve already found some fascinating sites, including previously undiscovered Anasazi ruins.”#p#分页标题#e#