Home?”
LuEllen shook her head. “We need to go into San Francisco . . . the Jimmy Cricket Golf Shop, and Lanny Rose’s Beauty Boutique. I got directions.”
“Golf shop?”
“Yeah. I’m taking up the game. And I want to look good while I’m playing.”
Jimmy Cricket—he claimed that was his real name—was a nicely weathered gent wearing a black Polo sweatshirt over a golf shirt and jeans, with tassels on his loafers. He was regripping a Ping driver when we came through the door. He smiled and asked, “What can I do for you folks?”
“Weenie called you earlier today,” LuEllen said.
“The Gray twosome,” he said, as though we’d just shown up for our tee-time, “I thought you were a single.”
“Nope,” LuEllen said, “Mr. and Mrs. Gray. Weenie said to tell you that all cats are gray in the dark.”
“Okay. Well, Weenie’s word is good with me. If you’ll step into the back . . .”
We went through a flip-up countertop into the back room. Cricket extracted a tan duffel bag from a pile of empty golf-club shipping boxes, placed it on a workbench, and dug out five rag-wrapped hand guns: four .357 Magnum revolvers and a 9mm semiauto. “I brought the auto just in case,” he told LuEllen.
“We’re not gonna need it,” she said. She picked up one of the guns, flipped out the cylinder, pointed it at one of her eyes, and held her thumbnail under the open chamber, to reflect light back up the barrel. Picked up another and did the same thing. “Can’t tell much, but they look okay.”
“They’re all perfect mechanically,” Cricket said. “They are clean and cold.”
LuEllen looked at all five, then pushed one at Cricket and asked, “How much?”
“Six.” He wouldn’t come down on the price but he threw in two boxes of shells, one of .38 Special and one .357. On the way out the door LuEllen spotted a pair of shooter’s earmuffs, and gave Cricket another ten dollars.
“Now we can play guns,” she said.
Lanny Rose’s Beauty Boutique looked like it was permanently closed, with fifteen-year-old pastel green “Walk-Ins Accepted” signs fading and badly askew in the windows. LuEllen insisted on banging on the door anyway, and a minute later, Lanny peered out from behind the “Closed” sign. He saw us, popped the door, and said, “Jesus Christ, you almost knocked the front of the bidnis in.”
“Weenie said the world looks better through rose-colored glasses,” LuEllen said.
“Yeah, yeah, fuck a bunch of weenies,” Lanny said, but he pushed the door open a bit, and LuEllen and I followed him through the gloomy beauty parlor into a back room. When we got there, he was hanging a pale blue drape on a wall, using pushpins.
“Stand there. Smile, but only a little,” he said.
I stood, and he took my picture, twice, with a Polaroid passport camera. Then he took two pictures of LuEllen and said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
LuEllen said, “I think I’ll come along and watch.”
She had her hand in her pocket, and Lanny said, “Weenie promised you wouldn’t be no trouble.”
“We won’t be; I’m just coming along to watch,” LuEllen said. “My friend will sit out here in front and read a magazine.”
They were gone for twenty minutes. I sat in a dusty beauty-parlor chair and read a story in a four-year-old Cosmo about how women can keep their men interested by learning the latest in blow-job techniques—the techniques themselves were described blow by blow, so to speak, by a panel of successful New York advertising and media women. I was not only convinced, I was supportive.
When LuEllen and Lanny came back, Lanny was complaining. “I never make copies of any faces. Weenie knows that.”
“I don’t trust Weenie,” LuEllen said.
Back in the car, she handed me four cards: two Texas driver’s licenses, and two credit cards. One credit card matched each license. “Will they stand up?”
“Unless you’re busted, in which case they’ll get your prints anyway,” she said. “They’re both real people, and the accounts are real, although we don’t know the credit limits or the billing dates. We could use them in an emergency, but then they’d only be good until the guy’s next bill came in.”
“Bobby could get us credit limits and billing dates,” I said.
“Might be worth doing . . .”
On the way to Lane’s, LuEllen launched a little philosophical discussion.
“You know, Kidd, you told me once that revenge doesn’t make any sense, because the dead guy won’t know what you’re doing and won’t care, because he’s dead. So what I’m wondering is, What are we doing? Jack won’t know, and Jack won’t care.”
“We’re not really doing it for Jack anymore,” I said. “We never were, really. We’re doing it for us. They just pissed us off by killing Jack.”
“Not me, especially. I only met him that once. Nice guy, but . . .”
“Then I’m pissed about Jack, and you’re coming along because of me. And I don’t have much choice. I’m involved in this somehow, and I’ve got to find out what’s going on. I don’t want that crew-cut asshole and his pal showing up at my house someday, tidying up some loose end that I don’t even know about.”
“So I’m involved only because you’re involved—and because you say so.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“That’s pretty smug. What if I opted out?”
“You won’t. You couldn’t stand not knowing what happened,” I said.
“You’d tell me.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I’d never say a single word about it. I’d deny all knowledge.”
“Bullshit,” she snorted.
“So you’re in?”
She let her eyes float to the tops of her eye sockets, and then said, “For a while.”
At Lane’s, we ate Lean Cuisines—I had three of them, an appealing mix of Teriyaki Stir-Fry, Swedish Meatballs, and Mesquite Beef—and then LuEllen took Lane and the revolver down to the basement.
“I hate the goddamn things,” Lane had said, when LuEllen showed her the gun.
“They’re the ubiquitous tools of modern life. Even if you don’t like them, it behooves you to know how to use one,” LuEllen said.
“Oh, boy.”
Fifteen minutes after they went down to the basement, a single shot cracked through the house. I jumped up, peeked out the windows all around. Nothing moving. I stuck my head down the basement door, “Jesus, LuEllen . . .”
Bang! A second one, and I nearly jumped out of my shoes.
“All done,” LuEllen called. The smell of burnt gunpowder coursed up the stairwell, and a minute later, LuEllen appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “Had to squeeze off a round or two so she’d have a sense of the recoil.”
“Well, knock it off, for Christ’s sakes, it’s louder than hell up here,” I said.
“Aw, once or twice, no problem,” she said.
They were still down in the basement when the phone rang. I picked it up and a soft male voice said, “Could I speak to Mr. Kidd?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Lethridge Green. I’m a friend of a friend of a man named John. I was told you have a body to guard?”
“Yes. In Palo Alto, although there might be some travel.”
“I get two hundred fifty dollars a day plus any expenses,” Green said.
“That’s fine.”
“How long would the body need to be guarded?”
“I don’t know. Not just a couple of days, though—anything from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.”
“Good. Don’t ask, don’t tell?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“I can be there in two hours, if you’d like me to start tonight.”
“That’d be a relief,” I said. “We’re sort of afraid to leave the body alone.”
“Then I will come directly.”
T hen I will come directly.
Not exactly what I’d expected from hired muscle, but t
hen, with John, you never knew exactly what you might get . . .
8
A few minutes after talking to Green, I went out and checked my cache with Bobby, to see if he’d gotten anything on the guy at the cemetery. He had. He’d run the plate back to Hertz, dug through their computer, and come up with the credit card and license information on the renter: A Lester Benson, of Dallas, using a corporate American Express card issued to AmMath. The car had not been checked in yet.
Lester Benson: hadn’t seen that name before.
There was no hint of a second man in any of the Hertz information, but Bobby was looking through airline reservation files to see if he could spot Benson’s seat from Dallas to San Francisco, and then determine who might have been sitting next to him.
I left a note asking him to find everything he could on AmMath and to dump all the information to my mailbox.
Lethridge Green was standing on Lane’s porch, knocking on the door, when I pulled up. Green looked like a big Malcolm X—tall, too slender, intent, with round gold-rimmed glasses, short hair, and a solemn, searching intensity.
“Mr. Green?” I pushed through the door. “Come on in.”
“You’re Mr. Kidd,” he said, as he stepped inside. His eyes took in the room, and LuEllen and Lane on the couch, and the .357 on the end table next to LuEllen’s hand. “I see a gun. What’s the situation here?”
“Somebody killed my brother, and somebody burglarized my house this afternoon . . .” Lane started.
“Did you call the police?”
“Yes. They think it was burglars attracted by my brother’s funeral.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I know it wasn’t. We even know who it was; but not exactly why.”
Green held up a finger: “Before you tell me anything else, maybe we should take the first security precaution.”
“What?” Lane asked. We all looked at him expectantly.
“Pull the drapes,” he said.
After we’d pulled the drapes, Lane gave him the story—not all of it, but most of it: her brother being killed in Dallas in suspicious circumstances, the funeral, the burglary at her home. She told him about the fire, but didn’t mention that we were there. She told him about our record search through Hertz, and the two names we had so far: William Hart, mentioned by Jack, and Lester Benson, from the Hertz records. “We’re afraid they might come back—that they might think that Jack passed information to me, or computer files.”
“Did he?”
Lane looked at me, and I nodded. “Yes. He sent me some Jaz disks. A Jaz disk is a high-capacity storage . . .”
“I know what a Jaz disk is,” he said. “What’s on it?”
“Everything from memos to computer games to a lot of gobbledygook that we haven’t had time to figure out. That we might not be able to figure out,” I said. “Whatever it is, we think Jack might have been killed to keep it private. The shoot-out might have been a setup.”
“The guard took a slug as part of a setup?” he asked skeptically.
“The guard didn’t see anything,” I said. “As far as he knows, he might have been shot by the Easter Bunny. He opens the door and, boom, he’s down. The other guy supposedly fires four times and Jack’s killed. The guard didn’t see a thing.”
“Why didn’t you just give them back? The disks?”
“That might not help; because we know about them, and we can’t erase that. Then there’s this group called Firewall . . .” I explained Firewall, as much as I knew about it.
“You’re starting to scare me,” Green said. “If this is some kind of government thing, the FBI or the CIA or one of those other alphabet agencies . . . I mean, I don’t want to be protecting a bunch of terrorists or spies or something.”
“Do we look like terrorists? I’m a college professor,” Lane said.
“A lot of terrorists start out as college professors,” he said.
“Well, I’m not one of them,” she snapped. “I’m just scared.”
“We’re not asking you to crawl down a sewer pipe with a bomb in your mouth,” I said. “Just keep her healthy.”
“That’s it? All I do is keep them off her?”
“That’s it. And if it gets heavy, call the cops. We already did that once, and these guys ran for it. Which tells you where they are.”
“For how long?” he asked.
“For a while. Two or three weeks, anyway. She’s gonna have to make a trip to Dallas. In a couple of weeks, these guys should have figured out that if she had anything, they’d know about it, one way or another.”
He looked at me for a few seconds, a steady gaze, and finally nodded: “You’re lying a little. But if that’s the basic idea of what’s going on, I’ll take the job.”
Green got a hard-shell suitcase out of his car and I cleared out of the guest room. “I’ll get a room in LuEllen’s motel tonight,” I said. “It’ll have a clean phone line. I’ll get with Bobby about AmMath and we’ll start looking for Firewall.”
“Okay,” Lane said. She reached out and touched the .357 on the table. Green asked, “You know how to use that?”
“I just shot a big stack of phone books down in the basement,” she said. “LuEllen told me if I need to, just point it and keep pulling the trigger until I run out of bullets.”
Green sighed and said, “Nuts.”
I wasn’t sure I liked leaving them alone in Lane’s house. If they were targets, they were just sitting there. It’s easy to get lost in America, for a few days or weeks, anyway, and if you try hard enough, nobody can find you. But sitting ducks . . .
There was a momentary awkwardness while I was checking into the motel. LuEllen and I had spent quite a bit of time together, and probably would again in the future, and she wasn’t involved with anybody and I wasn’t that involved, but the awkwardness went away and I checked into a separate room. She came down ten minutes later with a couple of beers while I was talking to a guy named Rufus Carr in Atlanta.
“How’s Monger doing?” I asked Rufus.
“You’re talking to a pentamillionaire,” he said.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“I got five million bucks in the bank, m’ boy,” he said. Rufus was a fat red-haired man who affected a bad W. C. Fields accent. “Until I have to pay taxes, anyway.”
“It works?” I asked.
“Of course it works; I told you it’d work.”
“I knew that,” I said.
“Yeah, bullshit. You were one of the naysayers. You were one of the guys who said Rufus was going to be eating frozen cheese pizza for the rest of his life. Well, I’ll tell you what, pal, it’s nothing but order-out pepperoni and mushroom from now on. And a private booth at Taco Bell.”
“I’ve got a favor to ask. Could you mong some stuff for me?”
“On what?”
“You know about Firewall?”
“Yeah?”
“The rumors are weird. Could you just pick up a few of the bigger sites where you see the rumors, and mong them?”
“Is there any money in it?” he asked.
“Fuck, no. But I won’t burn your house down.”
“Well, thank you, General Sherman. Am I going to get in trouble?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “But this whole Firewall thing is getting totally out of hand.”
“You’re right; it’s my patriotic duty. Besides, I’m not doing anything else.”
“Can I call you tomorrow?”
“Sure. I’ll put it on the trail right now, and get it back tomorrow morning,” he said.
What’s ‘mong’?” LuEllen asked, when I hung up. She was sitting on the bed with a beer bottle.
“Monger. It’s a rumor-tracking program,” I said. “Rufus built it for some securities companies. They use it to bust day traders who try to spread rumors to move the stock market.”
“It works?”
“Hell, he’s a pentamillionaire,” I said.
Next I got back onto
Bobby: he had some preliminary company stuff on AmMath, mostly public information pulled out of various open databases. More interesting was his news on Firewall.
Got a new list supposedly with Firewall. They are: exdeus, fillyjonk, fleece, ladyfingers, neoxellos, omeomi, pixystyx. Friends give me two hard IDs near you. Fleece is Jason B. Currier, 12548 Baja Viejo, Santa Cruz. Omeomi is Clarence Mason of 3432 LaCoste Road in Petaluma.
We’d gotten a map with the car; I went out and got it, and checked. Mason was maybe an hour or an hour and a half away, up north of San Francisco in Marin County. Currier was practically across the street. All part of the Silicon Valley culture that’s grown up around San Francisco like a bunch of magic mushrooms.
“So we’re gonna find these guys,” LuEllen said.
“First thing tomorrow.”
I’m not an easy sleeper; I kicked around the bed overnight, getting a couple of hours here and another hour there, with fifteen minutes of wide-awake worrying in between. I don’t like big, arrogant organizations that push people around, or manipulate them, or extort them—but I don’t see it as my personal obligation to stop them. I just go my own way. I fish and paint and lie in the sunshine like a lizard. I might steal something from one of them, from time to time, software or schematics or business plans, but I’m very careful about it.
The whole AmMath business was not my style. I liked Jack Morrison. He was a good guy, as far as I knew, but I really didn’t know that much about him. Maybe that whole thing about “k” was bullshit; maybe he made it up to pull me into whatever he was doing at AmMath. Maybe he put the rumors out. And Lane herself was a computer freak: maybe she was involved with Firewall.
But if not, “k” was cause for concern. It was not a computer identity as such, it was just an initial, and there may be ten thousand people on the Net who sign themselves with a k. The same with Bobby and Stanford—there are probably a thousand Stanfords out on the Net. And I would imagine that there are quite a few people calling themselves Fleece, although omeomi is not quite as generic. The troubling thing was the grouping. I had heard most of those names at one time or another. I even knew what a couple of them did, although I didn’t know who they were.