Pipsqueak by Brian M. Wiprud Read Free Book Online Page A

reassuring squeeze.
    “Last time I checked, Dudley’s hometown, Memphis, was in Tennessee.” She pushed her head back into my chest and looked up into my eyes. “Garth, please, I want you to think about Nicholas. You can’t afford to discard family.”
    She put her face back into the morning paper. “Don’t forget the ring box.”
    I palmed a tiny black velvet box out of the armadillo mail basket next to the front door. “See ya, Sweetums.”
     
    Dudley lives about twenty-five short blocks from me. Using the gridiron conversion factor, that’s about twenty-one football fields. Though with metric the new standard, I suppose we should start converting to soccer fields, which would make Dudley’s, uh . . . Anyway, he’s walking distance on a nice day, due south, near the corner of Renwick and Canal Streets. He’s got a studio loft in a narrow, white brick carriage house, one of those landmark Federal-style buildings sandwiched between grimy postwar warehouses and auto repair shops. Two wooden barn doors form the building entrance, and the ground floor is Dudley’s garage and workshop.
    By profession, he’s an electronics whiz, high-end auto security being a recent specialty. The “alarms” use space-age resources once the sole province of the NSA, NORAD, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. One or two of which, as it so happens, are Dudley’s former employers. He can’t talk about it, and elects not to talk about what goes into his most popular product, Shadow Box. Made of some exotic polymer (in either flat black or white), these sleek little boxes the size of radar detectors are adorned only with one cryptic blinking blue diode. No knobs, buttons, wires, dials, displays, suction cups, hook/loop fasteners, attachments, or switches. Just the little blue blinking light and the embossed words
Air Freshener
. He installs it on the ceiling of your vehicle next to the dome light and clips a chip to your car key, and Shadow Box knows when an intruder has entered the vehicle.
    What exactly happens next is open to conjecture—Dudley won’t say. I’ve never seen it in action, but apparently there’s a blue flash and the intruder is “strenuously repelled.” It’s my guess Shadow Box produces a static charge of some kind. In any event, the intruder is zapped like a june bug, after which he usually stumbles out of the vehicle and crumples to the ground, presumably the victim of the
narcotique du jour
. (The “zap” effects are supposedly temporary, but I don’t think the motorist owners of these devices would lose any sleep if the thief were irreparably brain-damaged.) Back at the Bat Cave, Shadow Box has communicated with the chip in the car key, which beeps and blinks blue light. The next course of action is up to the individual motorist. Theo in the East 70s might call the cops and have the “drugged-out” bounder arrested, while Joey out in Sheepshead Bay might just acquaint the intruder with the business end of a Louisville Slugger.
    A legal device? Nope, which is why Shadow Box is labeled
Air Freshener
. But it fills a demand among victimized, frustrated, and ultimately vindictive New York motorists with a hankering to kick a little butt. Motorists, that is, with five thousand dollars to spare and the patience to stand in line up to a year for installation. Dudley doesn’t advertise or discuss details over the phone. It’s all word of mouth and all cash.
    Upstairs in the studio is where Dudley practices his hobby—avian taxidermy—and that’s where I found him after he buzzed me through the front door. Songbirds are his specialty. Not only is his trade illegal, but so is his hobby.
     
    Most songbirds are protected under both federal (the 1912 Migratory Bird Treaty Act) and New York State law. In some cases, a particular bird might also be listed as Endangered and Threatened as per Title 50, Part 17.11 & 17.12 (Subpart B), by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife statutes. And it’s also possible that a