“No. I work for a legal services company, investigations. The company’s got a computer system, with electronic mail. One day I got a piece of mail from Bobby. About a case I was working on - he’d read about it in the papers, developed some information from data bases. He gave me a number to call on the computer gizmo-“

“Modem.”

“Yeah. I called, and we’ve been going back and forth ever since. Five years. I even got my own computer so I could talk to him

privately. He can get anything. Crime reports, credit records, secret research you’d never see. I don’t know where he gets it, but it’s always right.”

“Data bases,” I said. “He’s a genius with them. But that still doesn’t tell me about Longstreet.”

There’d been a kid named Darrell Clark, John said, fourteen and computer smart. A friend of Bobby’s. Knew his math. Knew his logic. At least, that’s what Bobby said. Bobby sent him a book called A Primer for the C Language along with a pirated copy of a C compiler. Darrell came back three days later with a sophisticated Mac II program. Sent him Assembly Language for the Mac II. Talked to him in a month and got back an assembler program of breathtaking complexity.

“The kid was smarter than Bobby. That’s what Bobby says.”

“You keep saying was,” I said. “What happened to him?”

“Longstreet cops killed him.” John tipped his head for a mouthful of Coke. “They say Darrell came at one of them with a knife and the other one had to shoot. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. What really happened was, they thought Darrell was a purse snatcher and they shot him by mistake. In the back. With a machine gun.”

“Jesus. A mistake?”

“They had this new toy, this machine gun. The cop had to try it out. Blew the kid all over the railroad tracks.”

“So what happened to the cop?”

“Nothing. That’s why we’re going down there,” John said. He glanced over at me. “Darrell Clark won’t get justice. His family won’t. The town is sewn up tight by an old-time political machine. The cops are near the center of it, and they won’t let their man get taken down.”

We lapsed into silence again. He seemed to be waiting for a comment, but I had none to offer. The problem with dead people is simple enough. They’re dead. There’s no point in getting revenge for a dead man because the dead man won’t know and can’t care.

John was waiting, though, so I eventually gave him a question. “What do you want me to do?”