“How do you know?” Whoever was upstairs was clumping through the kitchen—heavy footsteps, a man, and probably a big one.
“Because. Because they always do. It’s a rule,” LuEllen said. “Something about vibrations. If you hide in somebody’s closet, they’ll look in the closet. If you hide under the bed, they’ll look under the bed. Get that window open.”
I pulled it open, and LuEllen said, “Help me.” I boosted her up, and she pushed on the screen until it popped outside with a noisy crack.
“Shit,” I whispered.
“No sweat, the central air will cover us,” LuEllen grunted. “Now push me up as high as you can. Right up against the ceiling.” I pushed her higher, and she got her arms out on the grass. Her stomach was a solid slab of muscle, and she kept her entire lower body as rigid as a pipe as I fed her over the glass and out onto the lawn.
She was a small woman, and the fit was tight. The chances of my following her were exactly zero.
“Give me my bag,” she whispered down to me. I handed it to her, and she pushed the screen back up against the window. “When you hear talking, you go right out through the garage. Out through the garage, around back, and wait behind the fence, you hear? And close this window.” I had no idea what she meant. Her oval face looked down at me, and then she was gone. I shut the window and locked it.
One second later, Denton started down the basement stairs. LuEllen was right; he’d find me. I stood back from the bathroom door and set my feet. If I hit him hard, and just right, he’d be down and I’d be out. But if I missed, he almost certainly carried a gun, and he was in his own house. The door to the family room opened and I started shallow breathing.
The doorbell rang. LuEllen. Denton grunted and turned back up the steps. I eased the bathroom door open. From the base of the stairs, I heard him open the front door, and a flustered LuEllen asking about a park, where it was, tennis, girlfriend apparently gave her wrong directions, decided to walk, smells so good with the rain . . .
Denton stepped out on the front porch. I crossed the kitchen to the garage door, noticed with unnatural clarity the bologna sandwich on the kitchen table, the three envelopes sitting next to it, the sign on the wall: TRY OUR FAMOUS PEANUT BUTTER & JELLY SANDWICH. It was like a slow-motion pan in a movie. I resisted an impulse to take a bite from the sandwich, silently cracked the door to the garage, closed it slowly behind me, walked around the Ford Taurus now parked in the garage and out the back. In another ten seconds I was beside the house, between the pool fence and the garage. LuEllen was walking down the driveway with her bag, waving and smiling at Denton. I heard the front door close.
“Are you following that lady?”
The voice was only a couple of feet away, and my heart almost stopped. I looked down, toward the fence, and found a pair of small, blue eyes peering between the woven boards. A little girl, not more than four.
“Yeah, we’re playing a game,” I said.
“What kind of game?”
“Like hide-and-seek,” I said. “But it’s a secret.”
“Are you sure?” she asked suspiciously.
“Of course I’m sure. Haven’t you ever seen television?”
I left her with that to chew on, figuring Denton had had more than enough time to get his sandwich and head downstairs again. I walked straight out the driveway, looking neither right nor left, into the street.
LuEllen was fifty yards in front of me. When we were out of sight of the house, I jogged until I caught her.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said.
“Thanks for pulling me out of there.”
“Don’t talk to me; I’m too high to talk.”
We were back at the car in two more minutes. LuEllen hit the coke as we pulled out from the curb. “Goddamn, that feels good.”
“The coke?”
“The whole thing. Going in, getting out. God, I’m so high I could fly.”
WE MOVED INTO a downtown Washington hotel with a handy automated switchboard. That night we called into the bug at the Dentons’, but nothing went out. I lay on the bed reading an Artnews and listening for the tone that signaled a data transmission.
LuEllen was washing her hair. She left the bathroom door open, tossed her clothes on the toilet seat, and went back and forth past the open door, pleasantly pink as always. We slept in the same bed again that night. The next morning we were in spoons, and I woke up with her moving against my stomach. She was still asleep, I thought, until she muttered, “Geez, feels like somebody dropped a pencil in the bed.”
“Pencil your ass,” I said.
“Oh, God, not that,” she said, and rolled away, smiling. The smile slowly faded when she saw my face and she said, “Not yet. It’s hard not to tease you, but I’m afraid if we made love, Dace’s face would come up. That might ruin it forever. . . .”
WE SPENT THE day around the hotel, in the pool, in a shopping arcade, buying books, and watching movies on television. That night, just after eight o’clock, Denton went into the NCIC. We watched the entry transaction come up on our screen, and I was flabbergasted. There were virtually no screening protections at all. He signed on with his own name, a backup code—“weaver”—and an account number. Then he was in.
What?
Got NCIC entry codes. Would prefer you do search, all known execs Anshiser and associated companies.
Send codes.
We slept in the same bed again that night, and it was easier, but shorter. The computer started beeping for attention shortly after seven in the morning. Bobby said there would be multiple dumps. I plugged in the printer and routed the incoming data to paper as it arrived.
It was all there, in the NCIC files, if you knew where to look. Anshiser was involved with the mob all the way back to his teenage years. His father had been an accountant—a banker and money-mover for half of the organized crime syndicates in the country. He was trusted, with impeccable books.
Anshiser took his father’s methods a step further. He laundered the mob’s dirty cash with a variety of money-making and money-losing ventures: vending machine companies; trash-hauling concerns; hotel casinos in Atlantic City, Reno, Las Vegas, and the Caribbean; hotels in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, Freeport, and a half dozen other tourist destinations. Federal cops suspected him of recirculating big-time drug money through his casinos. The process was simple enough. A drug dealer has, say, a suitcase full of ten-dollar bills—an awkward way to carry your money. Take it to Anshiser, pump it through the company, and out comes a handy pocket-size packet of thousands, ready for a trip to the third world. Less, of course, a ten percent handling fee.
More sophisticated opportunities were available for investors in the trash-hauling firms. One deal had Anshiser executives locating a failing trash-hauling company with old, screwed-up equipment but reasonably good potential. An unnamed dealer supposedly had two million in cash that he wanted to use in the U.S. but couldn’t explain to the Internal Revenue Service. He gave the two million to Anshiser and got back in return fifty thousand dollars in stock in the failing trash hauler. Anshiser sent one of his hard-nosed executives in to run the company. New equipment from other Anshiser trash haulers was transferred in, at no charge to the new company. In a very short time, the dealer had stock worth a million and a half, and Anshiser bought him out. The dealer paid his taxes and, instead of two million in impossible-to-explain cash, had a perfectly legitimate, IRS-SANCTIONED, million-dollar bankroll. Anshiser’s people took out a half million and owned a thriving garbage hauler.
We read through all the printouts before ten o’clock, then went down to the shopping arcade for croissants and coffee. I sat in the booth and found it hard to think.
“I really got took,” I said finally. LuEllen was watching me across the table. “There was so much money, I didn’t want anything to be wrong. We should have gotten out after we bumped into Ratface the first time. That was never right, we knew it wasn’t right. And I had Bobby on the
other end of the line, and I didn’t use him. I should have given him an open account to keep running stuff on Anshiser and everybody else involved. If we’d known about Whitemark’s Snagger program, we would have known something was wrong. If we’d known Anshiser’s old man was in the mob, we would’ve been warned.”
“Pigs and wings,” LuEllen said. She was looking at the light fixtures.
“Thanks. I needed that.”
“Stop whining, for Christ’s sake,” LuEllen snarled. “Tell me why they sent Ratface the first time. I still don’t understand that. They had Maggie right there watching us.”
“They were paranoid,” I said. “Remember how she’d call Chicago to tell them what we were doing? Talking to computer people? When I laid out the attack for them, and they began to see what could be done, in detail, they really started to get worried. I think they wanted a better line on us. Maggie told them what she could, but she’s not a computer tech. If they’d gotten a bug on our line, they could’ve looked at the attack programs in detail. And that’s why it was such an old-fashioned bug—we were dealing with the mob, not the NSA or the CIA or the FBI or any other fuckin’ alphabet.”
“The fuckin’ mob,” LuEllen said. She thought it was funny.
“It doesn’t seem to be a mob. It seems to be a whole bunch of people who float around in rackets.”
“What do you think a mob is? Italians in zoot suits with violin cases under their arms?”
“I don’t know. This doesn’t seem so organized. It seems like they just . . . know each other.”
“That’s what a mob is. People who know each other. Our mob got started because you knew me and Dace,” she said.
“We’re not exactly a mob,” I said dryly.
“Oh yeah? Then what are we?”
I thought about it for a minute. “A gang,” I said firmly. “We’re a gang.”
“Okay, so we’re a gang,” she said. “What I don’t understand is why Anshiser does all this stuff. He’s already got more money than God.”
I shrugged. “Maybe he likes it. Maybe they don’t give him a choice. And it must be profitable. They’ve probably got a hundred of these scams going all the time,” I said. “Who knows how much they take down? Thirty or forty or fifty million a year, all of it hidden? I bet there aren’t five people in Anshiser’s company who know all of it. Anshiser, Dillon, Maggie, maybe a couple more in that working group at his house.”
“So. What do you think, Kidd?” she asked. “Is this better or worse than dealing with the feds?”
“Better. Much better,” I said. “The problem with the federal people is that once a decision is made, it becomes part of the bureaucracy. Nobody beats a bureaucracy. If they seriously want to get you, they’ll do it. If it was the feds, our best bet would be to run. Brazil, or someplace like that. But if we’re dealing with a company, especially a one-man gang like Anshiser’s, we might be able to develop some leverage.”
She considered it for a moment, and nodded.
“Something else,” she said, her face cold and intense. “When I thought it was federal people, I couldn’t figure out what to do about Dace. I mean, federal people are like cops. But these guys are just hoods.
“We can get back at them for Dace,” she said. She reached out and gripped my wrist so hard that the nails bit through my skin. “I want them dead. Like Dace.”
Chapter 17
DREXEL THE GUN salesman wasn’t surprised to see us back. He seemed pleased.
“Trading up? Or adding to?” he asked as he opened the door.
“Adding to,” I said. “I need an M16.”
“What range will you be shooting at?” We followed him through the living room and down the basement stairs. There was no sign of his wife or daughter.
“I don’t know. It could be fairly long.”
“Ah, you are in luck,” he said happily. He opened the gun cabinet. “I’ve just been out to our farm. I happen to have on hand a scope-sighted weapon. An M16/A2, to be precise. I sighted it only three days ago. The mount is quite sturdy.”
He stroked the weapon a few times, gazing at it fondly as if it were a female friend, and handed it to me. It was dead black, and long, and cold, and heavy. “Much like the one you probably used in the service,” he said.
“Yeah.” I looked through the scope at a dart board at the end of the basement. I could see the dart holes.
“There are some differences,” he said, “though you don’t need to worry about them. The main thing is that you’ll be shooting a heavier slug, the sixty-eight-grain Hornady hollow-point. They’ll give you excellent accuracy. It’s dead-on at a hundred and fifty yards. The weapon does have a tendency to ride up on full auto. If you’re shooting that way, at a significantly closer range, you could drop down to a pelvic hold and allow it to ride up. That should cover all the bases.”
Or all the people I intended to kill.
I bought three banana clips and four cartons of shells. He threw in a long cardboard box that said “curtain rods” on the side.
“Minimal camouflage, should you be stopped for something,” he said, sliding the weapon into the box. “Be careful not to jar that scope. It would be best to brace the box in the trunk so it won’t rattle around. If you have a little leisure time before you deploy, you might find a quiet place and check it. Just in case.”
“Better safe than sorry,” said LuEllen.
“A stitch in time saves nine,” Drexel shot back.
I gave him another twenty-five hundred for everything. As we were going out the door he asked if we’d had a chance to shoot the other weapons.
“No, we haven’t,” LuEllen said.
“I’d like to hear how they perform, if you have a chance,” he said pleasantly. “I do have a fifty-percent buy-back policy for all weapons in new or near-new condition, after you are finished with them. Lesser amounts if there is damage.”
“Thanks. We’ll keep it in mind,” I said.
“That guy is a lizard,” LuEllen said as we drove away. “He’s like a cross between Beaver Cleaver’s dad and Alfred Krupp.”
I nearly drove the car over a curb.
“Alfred Krupp?”
“I read books,” she said defensively. “You act like I’m a fuckin’ dummy.”
DACE HAD TAKEN LuEllen to his cabin in West Virginia only once, and it was before Maggie showed up. LuEllen didn’t remember mentioning it to her.
The cabin, LuEllen said, sat over a pool on a small stream that allegedly harbored a trout or two, though Dace admitted he’d never seen one. The nearest cabin was half a mile downstream. There was nothing at all above him.
“He liked it because it was remote,” LuEllen said. “The land is no good for farming, the timber is all bad second growth. The only thing up there are a few cabins along the stream. Dace said you can’t even get in or out if it snows. He came up here once in the winter and almost froze his ass off before he could get out.”
The road, she said, wasn’t on any map. I wasn’t so sure. We stopped at the county courthouse and bought a large-scale county map.
“You were right,” said LuEllen, after we unrolled it on the hood of the car. “This is it.” She traced a narrow track along Greyling Creek. It ran through the lower reaches of the mountains between two all-weather gravel roads.
“It’s a good thing to know. Dillon will find this thing. If I give Maggie directions, the shooters will come in the other way. Count on it.”
The road to Dace’s cabin ran parallel to the creek, which lay off to the right. To the left was a partly wooded ridge that rose two hundred feet to the ridgeline. We followed a single strand of overhead electric wire along the road, past a half dozen cabins and two broken-down barns. The wire ended at Dace’s place. The cabin was high on the bank, thirty feet above the stream.
Like the other cabins along the creek, Dace’s was small and primitive, built from four-by-four timber and rough siding. The roof was covered with green tar shingles. A one-holer outho
use sat on the upstream side of the cabin, surrounded by a screen of pines, with a new moon cut in the door. Nearby, a strand of plastic-covered rope, tied between two trees, served as a clothesline.
“Dace said they get terrific floods through here every few years,” LuEllen said, as we pulled onto the dirt patch that served as a parking place. “They cut down most of the trees upstream, and there’s nothing to soak up the water.”
I got out and looked around. The weather had broken, and though it was cool now, the day was a pretty one. Dace had thinned the trees between the house and the creek, and there was a pleasant view down to the water. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, the fishing would be prime, the muskies carrying late-season weight. I needed some time on the water.
As I walked around the yard, LuEllen tramped through the falling leaves to an herb garden beside the porch. She turned over a rock, took a bottle out of the ground, unscrewed the cap, and dumped a key out.
“His emergency key,” she said.
The cabin was as simple inside as it was out. There was a two-burner electric range, a wood stove for heat, a table, a few chairs, a couch, a stack of old magazines, and two beds and a bureau behind a partition. I unloaded the luggage and we got comfortable.
We spent that day and the next walking the neighborhood. On the hill above the road, there were large areas of grassy hillside that at one time might have been pasturage. There were no animals to be seen. The grass was broken by patches of wild raspberries and clumps of ragged, second-growth timber. The strip below the road, along the creek, was heavily wooded.
We found an acceptable ambush site two hundred yards downstream from the cabin and an excellent one seventy yards above it. The site above the cabin was better. And that’s where I expected to see them.