Night Talk Read Online Free Page A

was the likely candidate. Cheap and easy to get. Or to cook up yourself if you did an Internet search for a recipe and could get your hands on some cough syrup or cold pills with pseudoephedrine in them.”
    Feelings of panic and paranoia were common side effects and Ethan sounded on the phone as if he was experiencing both altered states. You killed me. Greg wondered what the hell he’d meant.
    With the pulsating lights and uniformed techs gone, the area had shut back down. Downtown L.A. in the wee hours was even more deserted than the center of many other great metro areas because the city-center streets were ones of faded glory—the city’s pulse had moved closer to the ocean to something called the West Side, with Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and West Hollywood thrown in, none of which was actually part of L.A. but rose like concrete islands as the city swept west to the coast.
    He chose downtown for his broadcasting studio over beach towns and the Valley because he liked the moody, darkly atmospheric, almost film noir atmosphere of the area, which had been too long forgotten but was haunted by the ghosts of movie palaces from the Golden Age of Hollywood and visions of grand days long gone.
    Tonight the street no longer felt like a fit for Greg. Ethan’s body would always be there, not on the ground but in his head each time he came and went into the building. It would take a while to get the studio moved, but he’d start thinking about a new location from which to broadcast.
    They walked under the marquee of the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway. The theater was nearly a hundred years old and was one of the first great movie palaces. He loved movies, and old classics were his favorites.
    â€œI wonder what he meant,” Soledad said.
    He knew what she was referring to. The last words from Ethan. A bizarre accusation.
    â€œI don’t know. Some thought generated by whatever chemical cocktail cooked his brain.”
    â€œHe’d called earlier.”
    â€œEarlier this evening?”
    She shook her head. “No, the last couple of days. I didn’t pass on the calls because he was only a little crazy. Not threatening. He said they were trying to play God.”
    â€œWho’s ‘they’?”
    â€œHe never said and I didn’t ask, but if you remember his hot point over the air to you was the overwhelming intrusion into our lives by the government and business. Not that I blame him. People used to worry whether having a social security number would permit the government to keep track of them. Today we can’t watch a movie, buy a loaf of bread, make a phone call or send a text message without some governmental or business entity storing the information.”
    â€œWorse than that,” Greg said. He nodded at the bank across the street. “We’re being filmed right now not only by cameras at the ATM but by most of the businesses on this street. Getting to work in the morning in any big city means getting filmed dozens of times; I’ve heard as much as a couple hundred times when you add in all the traffic cams. A lot of people are bothered by it, but Ethan was particularly agitated.”
    â€œAngry,” Soledad said.
    â€œMaybe he was just more aware of it than the rest of us because he was aware of how intrusive electronics can be. Did he ever tell you which government agency he worked for?”
    She shook her head. “When I interviewed him for airtime he said he wasn’t allowed to disclose where he worked, but hinted it was secret stuff. I took it to be something to do with terrorism because everything secret today seems to head that way. He said he got caught hacking into someplace and got one of those get-out-of-jail-free cards by testing security systems for the good guys.”
    â€œHe had a dark view of the future, like many of us. He talked about how mass surveillance created by the electronic tracking that is recording everything