Neon Dragon Read Online Free PDF Page B

little, walk with a bit more grace and rhythm, and blend into any Latino section of the city. Bilson, Dawes knew that in making me an offer they were getting a pregnant pony—a twofer. They got an up-and-coming pin-striper who can mix with the State Streeters, and double points for hiring a minority.
    I JOTTED DOWN THE NAME , Manuel Morales, and walked to the brick precinct building surrounded by blue-and-whites on Sudbury Street.
    BUSINESS COMES IN WAVES to the center desk inside the station-house door. The officer on duty was blond, buxom, and beleaguered. I waited until she was going in three directions—to check on the release of a prisoner for a mother and father, scan the sheet of located stolen cars for a teenager, and take information on a missing person from a barely prehysterical wife.
    I flashed a business card from a computer retailer who had recently tried to sell me a laptop computer. That got her attention. I didn’t say it was my name on the card. If she wanted to assume it, that was her business.
    I asked her to call Manny Morales in data entry. She took me out of order because mine was probably the easiest and least emotional demand she had had to deal with all shift.
    She grabbed one of the three phones in front of her and tapped in four digits. She asked for Morales. In about three seconds, she handed the phone over the counter to me. With me on the shelf, she was back in the maelstrom that had now grown by a young couple who were reaching high C over a car theft. In the confusion around me, I could have been talking in an isolation booth.
    I cupped my hand over the phone and said, “Officer Morales?”
    â€œNot ‘officer,’ just ‘mister.’ What can I do for you?”
    The words were not much, but the rolled
r
’s and Latino cadence of the syllables were like Mozart to my ears. I followed suit by coloring the vowels and pointing the consonants until Manny and I sounded like a couple of muchachos from San Juan. I explained that the software company had sent me to check the computer system for viruses. Since Manny’s job involved the keyboard and not the internals of the computer system, I was hoping that his training gave him a notion of what a virus was, but no clue as to how you diagnose or medicate it. I had taken a computer course at Harvard, which at least let me bandy about a few words of computer literacy.
    I caught the desk officer’s attention long enough to put her back on the line. At Manny’s request, the officer gave me a clip-on pass thatgot me into the bowels of the station house. I followed directions back to the computer room, where I spotted a long, lean, white-shirt-and-tie type, about three inches taller and ten pounds lighter than me, sitting at a computer console. He had the dark hair and well-structured cheekbones to go with the accent.
    There were five other men and two women at other consoles in the room. Only one of the women came unglued from the screen long enough to take note of my presence as I crossed to the one I assumed was Manuel Morales.
    Manny shook hands and pulled up a second roller chair with a sweep of one long leg. I took it and mumbled “
Com-esta?
” on the way down.
    He grinned and came back with, “OK, man. What’s up?”
    I took the hint that we were perhaps not in a haven of racial impartiality and switched to English.
    â€œHow long since they checked for viruses?”
    He slouched his long frame back in an easy posture, which told me that no alarms had gone off yet. I carefully avoided the serious crime of impersonating a police officer. I had absolutely no idea of the degree of criminality attached to breaking
into
a police station.
    â€œI don’t know, man. I just got in here last week.”
    Alleluia.
    â€œThen I guess you’re not aware of our company policy. We give follow-up service to check for viruses in the programming every two weeks for the first three months.