I was crashing in the alley behind a defunct dog grooming shop in Modesto when I met Rusty and Klein—two gas station punks with board shoes, facial scars, and matching tattoos that read “CANCELLED” across their throats.
They rolled up with a shopping cart full of canned Monster and half a deck of grip tape stickers.
“You Cosmo?” Rusty asked.
“You tell me.”
“We heard you knew how to make hotspots disappear.”
“Depends what’s on the line.”
“Just our freedom and Klein’s third strike.”
They had a plan.
Or something shaped like one.
An abandoned skatepark under a freeway bridge outside of town—shut down after CalTrans tagged it as “infrastructure compromised.”
Concrete still smooth. Transitions solid.
But someone had set up motion sensors.
Klein said they triggered a livestream that fed back to the city’s code enforcement system.
Every time they skated, some suit showed up in a Crown Vic thirty minutes later.
“Not cops,” Rusty said. “Like… city cop freelancers. We call ‘em code bounty hunters.”
The new gig economy: make crime, then farm the ticket revenue.
They wanted to skate.
They didn’t want to get raided.
They needed a tech ghost.
We hit the bridge at 2:17 a.m.
I brought:
- A hacked dashcam rigged to broadcast looped footage of an empty park
- A portable jammer hidden inside a repurposed vape mod
- A set of metal stickers printed to reflect IR scatter like broken asphalt
Took 14 minutes to trick the sensors into believing the place was empty.
Took 10 seconds for Klein to drop in and land a backside 360 on a cracked lip.
They skated until dawn.
No Crown Vic.
No suits.
No sensors.
Just concrete and kids chasing gravity.
Before I left, Rusty handed me a folded napkin soaked in soda syrup.
Inside: a burner SIM card and a note that read:
“You ever need safe passage through Fresno County, find Gutter. Say you fixed the loop. He’ll know.”
Didn’t get their real names.
Didn’t need to.
The park still buzzes.
And sometimes, late at night, I check the stream I left behind.
It’s still playing the loop—quiet concrete, unmoving shadow, frozen time.
As far as the city knows?
Nobody ever skated there again.