I headed straight home. I needed to make some phone calls and check out the contents of the mystery box. It sure wouldn't hurt to take some painkillers while I was at it; my neck was killing me.
When I got home I headed straight for the vidphone. I called Chance right back, but he was unavailable. I left a short message and closed it, discouraged. I couldn't wait forever for him to return the call--I had important issues he needed to answer right away. Maybe I should try him at his cabin. It wasn't far from San Francisco, just in some remote abandoned area west of Nevada. I should be able to reach it in a few hours with the speeder.
The curiousity finally took over. I opened the box, which was addressed to me. Inside was a small disc. I inserted it into my computer and saw Tex's image on the screen.
"Hello. If you're watching this, you're somebody I trust, and something has happened to me. But that's okay. I've probably had a pretty good life. At least, I can't see it getting any worse." He recorded this two years ago, not long after the infamous divorce between him and his evil ex-wife Sylvia.
"Every good P.I. keeps track of their activities so a trusted friend can pick up the trail he left behind. Or so I've heard. So I decided to try it. Here goes."
The files on the disc consisted of half-written accounts of a few memorable cases. It was hard to determine the legitimacy of the entries, because most of them looked as though they were written when he was drunk and recounting the good times.
A few looked interesting, like an article pertaining Roswell and another on the tragic Moon Child incident that killed a lot of people, but they didn't look relevant to the case I was on. I would have to check those out later.
His most recent files were probably the ones he intended me to read. They were titled the Australian Resistance, and explained a few things about punk anarchist terrorism. It didn;t say much more than I've read in the papers recently. Apparently this group had been discovered world-wide, not just in Australia, with plans of terrorist attacks. The police had been able to disband the groups before anything serious happened, but the "cells" were becoming more numerous and dangerous.
Not much to go on there. I guess he hadn't intended for me to pick up his trail. He probably just wanted me to understand his private investigator side better. Now I could read about the cases he didn't get a chance to tell me about during our dinner dates.
But first, it was time to pay a visit to my dear brother Chance.
(Go to 10.)