King of Cards

Close to Home

The next day I woke up to an empty fridge, so decided to get some breakfast at the coffee shop around the corner. Afterwards I went grocery shopping. When I returned to my building, there were police cars and ambulances outside. A stretcher was being loaded into the ambulance. The face of the body was covered by a sheet.  

A cop was standing in front of the entrance. I tried to go around him, but he stopped me with a raised arm. 

“Can I help you?” he asked, in tones that suggested help was one of the furthest things from his mind. 

“No thanks,” I said. “Just trying to get my shopping upstairs, but I think I can handle it.” I raised one of the Waitrose bags I was carrying. 

The cop narrowed his eyes at me. He was big and beefy, red-faced, about fifteen years older than me. “You saying you live here?” His tone was openly skeptical. 

I smiled engagingly. “Yes, I do!” I showed him the electronic access key card we used to open the front door. 

He scowled. “You can’t come in just yet. The boys are still finishing off upstairs. Why don’t you go and wait with the other residents over there.” He pointed at a group of people standing in a small group a little way up the road. “Your parents are probably there already.”

My parents? Why would they be here? Then I suddenly realised: he presumed the only way someone my age could be living in this block would be if I lived with my parents. I decided not to set him straight. Never volunteer information, is my policy. Especially not to officialdom. 

I trotted off up the road to the little group. As I got closer, it was obvious that they were agitated. I’d never had much to do with my neighbours, but some of the people looked vaguely familiar. One guy in particular, long-haired despite being in his fifties at least, wearing leather trousers and waistcoat. I had seen a few times for sure. I went up to him. 

“Hey, do you know what’s going on?”

The ageing rockstar turned away from his companion, a pretty but bored-looking blonde about my age. “Hey man,” he drawled, accent firmly mid-Atlantic. “Total bummer. Looks like the Wangs got bumped off by someone.”

“The who?”

“The Wangs. Old Chinese couple. Third floor. Murdered, both of them. Cleaner discovered the bodies this morning.”

“Oh God, that’s awful!” I couldn’t remember the couple at all, but it’s still pretty shocking when violence hits so close to home. 

“Tell me about it. I’m right next door to them!” The man shook his lank locks. 

“Arnie, when are they going to let us back in?” whined the girl. “I need to get my yoga stuff.” Her pout was the stuff of legend. 

He turned to placate her. “Soon, babydoll. Can’t be much longer.”

“That’s what you said before!”

I turned away and lit a cigarette, resting my shopping bags on the ground at my feet. I was a bit annoyed myself. Shopping is tiring, and I just wanted to get upstairs and relax on the sofa with a latte from my ridiculously expensive coffee machine. 

Something was nagging at me, something at the back of my mind, a half-remembered connection I couldn’t bring forward. 

I consciously relaxed, taking a big drag and letting it out slowly, while I let my mind float free. Then it came to me. I coughed and spluttered on the last of the smoke. 

Wang! I knew I’d heard that name before. Or rather, seen it. 

When I had uploaded the huge file of credit card numbers to my server yesterday, I hadn’t dared to do it directly from the machine at the private hire company. System logs would have given them the IP address of my server in an instant. And I didn’t want to send it directly to my home computer either. So I had uploaded it onto another computer, on a random wireless network, that I had found.