Free Watch Dogs by John Shirley Page B

seemed unlikely. Pearce seemed to trust Blank implicitly.
    “Keep quiet a li’l minute here,” came Blank’s gurgling voice, as a group of young black men in black and orange hoodies coats went striding by.
    Wolfe nodded and looked Blank over.
    Blank wore a grubby overcoat that might have been black—or might have turned black; its lower hem was frayed almost like the fringe on a leather jacket; two of its large black buttons were missing. A wide brimmed, dented slouch hat angled almost rakishly on Blank’s head, half hiding one eye—instead of a hat band, the hat had a battery powered electric light strapped on it, a surprisingly powerful light, now switched off. Blank’s brown eyes were all that remained intact of his face—the rest of it had been burned away. Pink scar tissue from the old burns overlapped like bandages of raw flesh across his cheeks. His mouth had been burned lipless, and his snaggled, blackened teeth were perpetually visible. His nose was mostly burned away; one of his eyelids was just a parchment-like scrap of skin; his eyebrows were just a memory. His face looked, to Wolfe, like a face in a drawing that had been mostly erased by a hurried artist. There was no clear cut face there. That was one reason he was called Blank.
    There was another reason, Wolfe knew. Blank lived off the grid, even when he walked around within the grid.
    Many homeless people actually had cell phones. Cheap phones were given to them by family, or social services. They often used free computers in a library, or borrowed a friend’s laptop. Some homeless were ex-I.T. workers who’d been laid off one too many times, and still had a lot of tech when they could get it powered up.
    But not Blank. Not only did he have no cell phone, he didn’t even have an electric watch, or a portable radio. He had no driver’s license, no state I.D., no social services I.D. No identification card at all. He had no wallet, and it was said he had no tattoos—or none that hadn’t been burned away. His fingers had been as badly burned as his face...so he had no fingerprints.
    Facial recognition wouldn’t work on a man without a face. And he never told anyone his real name. People on the street knew him only by the moniker “Blank”.
    Blank was blank.
     “Wolfe...” Blank’s voice was a gurgling growl—his voice, too, was blank, without its original character, because his vocal chords had been burned by hot smoke in the nameless fire that had burned him so badly. Rumor had it that years ago, when he was first homeless, Blank had been sleeping in a crack house, and someone careless with his dope lighter had set the place on fire. Most people in the house had burned; Blank had gotten out...or part of him had.
    But that story was just a rumor. Blank’s past was blank, too.
    Wolfe could see why the scarred derelict was useful to Aiden Pearce. It was hard to trace Blank—which made him the perfect “bagman” and streetside go-between.
    “They’re gone,” Blank said, turning toward the street.
    Wolfe saw, then, that Blank’s left ear was missing. There was just a hole in the side of his head.
    “Who was that?” Wolfe asked.
    “Gangbangers. Viceroys.”
    “You got a message for me?”
    “Maybe. I’m just lookin’ in on you for Pearce.”
    “He can look in on me anytime he wants, what I’ve seen.”
    “You ain’t using the camera scrambler?”
    “I am, yeah.”
    “So he needs me to check on you while you’re out, at least in some places. ‘Nother thing, he just decided: you get the tool for sure. I’ll be telling you where to find it tomorrow. Meet me at noon....”
    “Noon tomorrow. Okay. Where?”
    “The camp where we first met.”
    “That where you stay?”
    Blank took off his hat for just a moment to wipe the top of his head with his hand...and Wolfe saw that most of the tramp’s hair had been burned away in that long ago conflagration. Only a few tufts of gray hair stuck out, in random spots.
    Blank put his