“You’ll never get it that way, Blue,” Rexall says about the phone, his breath some sort of minty, which doesn’t fit with the rest of how he presents.
“Just forgot the code,” Jade mumbles. “Trying all my usual ones.”
“That’s why you’re two-fisting it?” Rexall says about the fact that she’s holding more than one phone. He licks his lips long and slow, presumably so they won’t crack when he grins the lecherous grin Jade knows is coming.
“You know,” she says to him, resetting, “here in a little bit, Hardy’s going to be looking for suspects for… for something that’s about to start happening. You’re maybe going to be at the top of that list, might want to have your alibis in order.”
“I didn’t even know her, Your Honor,” Rexall says, holding his Boy Scout fingers up but then leaning over to take a profane sniff of the back of his middle finger.
“Just remembered,” Jade says, “I don’t talk to you anymore.”
Rexall holds his left hand out for the pink phone, snaps twice when Jade doesn’t give it.
“What for?” she asks.
“She said without talking to him,” Rexall halfway-quotes back to her, and—what the hell—it’s either surrender it or continue this conversation. “Wouldn’t believe how many of these get permanently lost over here,” he goes on, stepping over to a PC buried under about fifteen half-done computer repair jobs. “I crack them, wipe them, jailbreak them, they go for hundred and fifty each, easy like Sunday morning.”
“I’m not looking to sell it, I’m just—”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s your backup phone,” Rexall says, plugging it into the PC, tabbing over to a terminal window. “Fifty dollars.”
“I don’t have fifty dollars, Rexall. I don’t even have fifty cents.”
“Show me a little something then?” he says. “Couple of…
not-so-little somethings?”
“Um,” Jade says, no eye contact, resisting the urge to check the zipper of her coveralls. “I’m seventeen? Not that that’s even an appropriate request if I was legal.”
“Had to try,” Rexall says with a no-harm no-foul shrug, then out-louds the magic key-combo he’s typing that runs his program: 36-26-36.
“You sure you should be working around kids?” Jade asks.
“Or even around, you know, living people?”
“Tried the morgue in Boise,” he says. “There was… an incident. Ask your dad about it sometime, he was there.”
Jade waits for him to guffaw or chuckle, because this has to be a joke, doesn’t it? Please? Finally she just says, “How about you do this for free, I don’t narc you out to Hardy. Not for cracking this phone, I mean. For… inappropriate requests?”
Rexall stiffens but doesn’t turn around.
“I was just goofing,” he says as if hurt, hitting return grandly, the pink phone flashing twice then going black.
“Great, your fancy program bricked it,” Jade says, taking it when he hands it to her. “Thanks.”
“Power her up,” he says. “No passcode anymore, all the data remains. You’re welcome, jailbait.”
“You give scuzz a bad name, Rexall,” Jade says, holding the pink phone’s power button in.
“Thank me now or thank me later…” he says. Then, about his own phone in the timecard slot: “Plug mine back in, won’t you? It’s… it’s doing something.”
Jade nods her best noncommittal nod, is waiting for the pink phone’s startup to finally get over with.
“And—and don’t, like, look at it?” Rexall adds on his way out, eyebrows raised like he’s just asking for common courtesy here.
Jade doesn’t dignify this, just stares him down until he’s gone. A half step later she has his phone, is powering it down without having to log in, mostly because she doesn’t want the distant thrill it would probably give him for her to type that “36-26-36” in. When the phone’s cycled down, she steps up onto the stool, hides his phone in the ceiling, pulls the tile back into place, says in monotone, “Sheriff Hardy, the evidence you need is right above Main Supplies, I saw him tucking it up there one day.”
The pink phone buzzes awake in her hand. Jade taps through this and that, most of it in a language she doesn’t know. But then she lands in the photo album, because selfies are the universal language.