Ch. 11 – Rainy Days

Derrick looked Williams in the eye. “If you want to get your mod working again, we’ll need to go on a field trip to find the person who hacked your account. I’m not gonna lie, this will cost more money, although your existing one hundred dollar payment will be credited towards it, since it’s all the same job.”

“How much more are we talking?” Williams asked, tapping the armrest like he was trying to drill a hole into it.

“That depends on how much work I have to do, but I’ll definitely need some more payment up front to continue. Basically, you’ll need to find out who is using your account right now. It might be some random hacker, or it might even be the original owner of that mod.” Derrick glanced at Williams, but the man just kept tapping the armrest, showing no further reaction. He just might be clueless enough that he doesn’t realize that he had bought a stolen mod.

“So you’re gonna find the man for me?”

“You can get it done at Hack Alley, or take this information somewhere else, I won’t stop you. Here, let me write down what we know so far.” Derrick scribbled some notes onto the scrap magazine paper.

“Either way, once you know who they are, you can either use their information to unlock the account again, or force them to give you the login details. We usually charge . . . uh . . . around five hundred dollars to get started on this sort of work.” For this sort of unscrupulous work, Hack Alley would charge as much they could. Williams was able to come up with the money earlier, so it was worth taking the chance to milk him a bit more.

“Five hundred dollars!” Williams’s voice cracked. “I’m just gonna go to their fucking shop. Five hundred dollars is robbery.” His shoes squeaked on the tile floor: the tips scraping the ground as he tried hopping off the chair in one go, but he wasn’t tall enough to overcome the incline.

“You could go to their shop, but I’m guessing they would find a mismatch between your bio-signature and the one they had on file. You . . . do know that your mod is probably stolen, right?”

Williams had successfully pulled himself out of the chair. “I don’t give no fucks where it came from, it just needs to work tonight.” He grabbed the notes that Derrick had written down and marched toward the door. “Man, I had enough of this bullshit.”

Derrick jumped up and followed him. Any business was better than none, after all. “Maybe five hundred is a bit too much. How about four hundred, since you’re a repeat customer?” If Derrick went too low, though, it wouldn’t be worth it. Stealing credentials could take a lot of time and effort if you didn’t have a strong enough lead.

Williams yanked the door open and tsked. “Forget it. I ain’t got a dollar left.”

“Well, give us a call if you change your mind!” Derrick called out, before the door closed. And then Derrick was left alone in the shop for the second time that day. It wasn’t the first time Derrick had lost a customer, and it wasn’t like he was empty-handed at the end of the day. After locking the shop’s front door, he took out the one hundred dollars from Xavier Williams, and put it in a small tin in his room. Tony trusted him enough to handle the shops money, and since his room had a lock on it, it was the safest place to put cash when Tony wasn’t there. That payment, along with the three hundred and fifty dollars from tuning Mark’s prosthetic leg made four hundred and fifty dollars total for the day.

Not bad, considering he had done it all himself.

#

The rain had started back up in the late afternoon, and the sky was dark, even though it wasn’t sunset yet. The pitter-patter of raindrops on the street was like a massage for Derrick’s ears: the only good thing about stormy days. He put the box of parts he had been organizing for the past hour, and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes and listening to the distant rumble of thunder.

The door opened, and Tony trudged in, bringing the rain with him and soaking the tile floor. They should have replaced the door mat after it was stolen a few months ago, but in the meantime, Derrick just walked carefully during inclement weather to avoid slipping and hurting himself.

“What a day,” Tony called out, putting a pile of wet plastic bags on the counter. “You hungry, Derrick? I got dinner for us on the way back.”

“Perfect timing, I was just about to go cook some of the mold in the back of our fridge.”

“Wait, it’s still moldy? I thought you cleaned it—”

“—Yeah, I did. Just kidding.”

“You’d better be! Otherwise all this food would be going to waste. Help me move these suckers into the fridge, will you? We’re just eating these two tonight.” Tony hoisted up the two bags he was holding, and then went towards the kitchen.

Derrick peeked into each bag as he gathered it up in his hands. They were still warm, which was a miracle given that Tony had come back in the storm, meaning the restaurant must have been close by. There was mapo tofu, spicy string beans and shredded pork, hm . . . Tony had bought a lot of Derrick’s childhood favorites. It was strange, though, how many Chinese restaurants were still running near Hack Alley? So many of them had closed down or moved after refugees started flooding into Chinatown, and this street in particular was hit by the worst of the gang violence.

His parents would have moved their old restaurant too, if they had the choice. But money was tight—it had always been—and they weren’t able to make that choice for themselves before a rain of bullets made it for them.

Tony was busying around the tiny wooden table in their kitchen, unwrapping the two takeout containers, and spooning them out onto dishes. Pork ribs and garlic shrimp! Puffs of steam rose into the cool indoor air as they tumbled into the dishes. Tony had gotten out the few ceramic rice bowls he kept in the shop, and two nice pairs of chopsticks.

“What’s the occasion?” Derrick asked.

“Oh, nothing really. I guess you could say I’m in good mood.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

“What, did you have fun with that Sally girl from today?”

“Oh we had more than fun. We went shopping. And guess what she got me!” Tony rummaged through a larger and thicker plastic bag, out of which he took a small figurine of a Lucky Fortune Cat. Its golden body, which fit in the palm of Tony’s hand, glinted in the light, and its raised, beckoning paw seemed to be calling for Derrick to come closer.

Tony held it up to the light and turned it around. “I realized we had never had our own, the whole time that we’d been fixin’ up all the people in this neighborhood. My old boss didn’t care much for superstition, obviously, but we can use all the help with money and luck that we can get.”

“That’s pretty cute, I’ll admit. Where do you want to put it?”

“There’s not much space in this dump, but I’ll find a spot.”

They sat down and started eating. The food was delicious, and even the rice tasted better when it wasn’t the only thing on the dinner table.