Free The Starving Years by Jordan Castillo Price Page B

Puerto Ricans across the way.”
    And then, just as suddenly as Tim’s solitary existence was invaded by this horde of strangers, he found himself standing beside his computer, alone. Well…mostly alone. He could hear Randy and Javier outside—Javier yelling in Spanish to the next building over.
    Tim sat down at the computer and tried to see if anyone had pulled up anything they shouldn’t have, but an empty browser window faced him. Nothing more incriminating than that. He pulled up an HTML file and began typing it in Text Edit, and over the snap of his fingers flying across the keyboard, more Spanish carried through the closed window. He had no idea what it meant—everyone always sounded pissed-off and urgent in Spanish.
    It sounded good on Javier.
    Bowery riot makes Broadway impassable from Bleecker to 4th. Phone lines down. Canaan Products recruitment fair in the Pamoda Building—coincidence?
    Ending with a question was good—it was vague enough to deflect a potential libel suit, if anyone at Canaan Public Relations ever decided the Voice of Reason was a bigger threat than the psycho left-wingers who lay in wait to ambush the company’s senior partners and fling buckets of algae at them to protest sanitation violations at the upstate plant. Violations that turned out to be a total fabrication, in fact. Some jilted factory drone blew the whistle on his boss. His boss, it turned out, had committed the crime of poor judgment. She’d had an affair with the whistle-blower, thought better of it, and finally opted to go back to her husband. The allegations had made Canaan look bad—for maybe half a day. Until every last test came back well within recommended range. Bacteria, mold, heavy metals, even pesticides. All Mr. Algae had accomplished in the end was making his fellow protesters look like a bunch of deranged freaks.
    Typical.
    But at least Tim could learn from their mistakes. He didn’t lie in wait with stinking buckets of algae to try to prove something rotten was going on at Canaan. Any blowhard could stir up a riot.
    What Tim wanted was to stir up the truth.
    He FTP’d the small addition to his site, then closed Text Edit. No sense in trying to be clever—he’d seen the riot himself, but he didn’t know who’d started it, specifically. Or—as Javier had so helpfully pointed out to him— why . Just an insider tip that something would be revealed at the job fair. Something big.
    Hardly news at all.
    More voices carried from outside. Marianne: “Does your phone work?” A pause where someone a building away replied, then Marianne’s confirmation in attempted Spanish that everyone in Tim’s apartment was in the same boat. “No. No telephono.”
    Tim fingered the flash drive in his pocket. They could potentially be out there for quite a while, shouting back and forth to confirm that, basically, nobody knew anything. How could they? Not unless someone had a shortwave radio. And somebody else who really was “in the know” happened to be privy to whatever had made the crowd go wild this time, and decided to broadcast about it on his shortwave radio. In Spanish.
    He ran his thumb over the smooth plastic USB housing. How long would it take to hack into Canaan Products? Minutes? Hours? If Javier had grabbed the right folders. If Tim could even get in at all.
    The strangers on Tim’s fire escape could very well turn around and come right back inside. But he suspected they wouldn’t do it within the next five minutes.
    He could at least see which folders were there.
    He stared at the flash drive. Plain. Exactly the type of thing on which someone would bring a résumé to a job fair. He glanced over his shoulder at Javier’s silhouette. To walk into that job fair looking as noticeable, as memorable as he did…and to just make off with data like it was nothing? Someone would either need to be phenomenally brave or phenomenally stupid to even try. And Javier didn’t strike him as stupid.
    He turned back