Page 22 of Lone Wolf

“How it works is, delivery vans drop a bunch of FWIPs off in a neighborhood,” Joey said between mouthfuls. She seemed to have cut out the middleman of chewing, skipping straight from biting to swallowing. “They have to follow pedestrian laws, can’t go over ten miles per hour. Range is an eight-mile radius and—most important—they can fit a sixteen-inch pizza.” She made excited pizza hands, indistinguishable from jazz hands but for context. “You use an app to unlock the secure cargo compartment with your stuff. They run all their routes and meet up at shift’s end to get transported back to the warehouse or industrial kitchen or HQ or whatever.”

“Solventry has a food division?”

“Solventry’s like Amazon or Apple or Google,” Joey said. “They have a everything division. Now check this.”

A clickity-clack of her remote fingers changed the surveillance angle to that of the second-floor camera that had nearly vanquished Evan. Down at the base of the stairs, he spotted a familiar homely canine—Loco, leashed to the newel-post as Sofia had said. He tugged at his collar, sniffed the ground, lifted his scrawny leg, and peed on the sidewalk.

From the edge of the frame, the FWIP rolled into view, and Loco froze, leg lifted, urine cut off midstream. As the robot halted obediently at the base of the stairs, a heavyset woman lumbered into view, presumably one of the first-floor residents. Breaking from his trance, Loco barked and snapped at the cuffs of her pants, and she shooed him with a closed-toe wedge shoe.

At the recorded barking, Joey’s Rhodesian ridgeback, cleverly named Dog, stuck his head up into the side-wall feed next to Joey, head cocked, forehead furrowed, tortilla-chip ears perked. His hound lips formed a vague circle and he made a noise low in his throat like a practice woof, unsure yet if the threat was sufficient to draw a full-throated response. Joey kissed his enormous head, shoved him away, and returned her focus to the surveillance footage.

The woman tapped at the screen of her phone, and a moment later a sleek door in the side of the robot slid open in response. She crouched and removed a thick flat package. When she turned to walk past Loco once more, the dog went crazy, snarling and bouncing on his hind legs, the tension of the leash turning him bipedal.

As the FWIP’s door started to close, Loco slipped his collar. He shot over and dove into the cargo compartment. The door shut after him. The FWIP rolled away, the unwary passenger trapped in its belly. The whole thing took less than three seconds.

“Yeah,” Joey said. “That just happened. I’m thinking he smelled someone’s lunch in there.”

Evan rubbed his eyes. “This mission gets better and better.”

“I know, right? Oh, Evan? I meant to ask…”

“What?”

“’Member that one time you got beat up by an old lady with a cane?”

Not the first round of this particular line of joking.

“Yes, Joey,” Evan said wearily.

“Oldilocks hit you jussst right.”

“Clever.”

“I mean, it was nearly a granicular homicide.”

“Can you just show me what else you found?”

“Fine.” Joey’s hand dug in the white bag, rooted around, and came out with yet another taco. The bag was like a clown car, endlessly replenishing. She halted, alarmed. “Hang on. Wait—hang on.” More foraging in the bag. Then she sagged in her gamer chair, boneless with relief. “There’s gotta be a German word for that feeling of soul-elevating joy when you find that one extra hot sauce in the taco bag.” She poured liberally. “Saucenfreude?”

“Joey.”

She licked each fingertip individually, a grooming ritual worthy of a house cat or a five-year-old eating Cheetos. “Fremdsäucen?”

“Joey.”

“Backpfeifengesalsa?”

“Josephine.”

“Okay, fine, allow me to speed us along.” A theatrical throat clearing. “Autonomous delivery robots have specific routes that can be traced. As a marvel of raw talent and prodigious learning, I already determined that this particular FWIP ran an internal service route for employees of Solventry. The drop-off you just witnessed was a notary-public logbook delivered to a paralegal. While Solventry’s digital security is literally the best in the world next to Google and the NSA, the FWIP doesn’t even have a TPM, so a few hours ago I kidnapped the robot on its regular route—”

Evan said: “You kidnapped a robot?”

“—stole its firmware, and pulled everything off the disk and RAM. Then I noted the next stop and hacked into various surveillance cameras from surrounding commercial and residential security systems, which yielded … this.”

The front wall lit up with new surveillance footage, granting a wide view encompassing three entrances to a row of modern town houses on a busy street.

“Aaand action,” Joey said, snapping her fingers.