Hard Freeze jk-2

by Dan Simmons

  Kurtz turned off his computer.

  "We need to find new office space," said Arlene. "This place gets demolished in a month and we get thrown out in two weeks, no matter what."

  Kurtz nodded.

  Arlene batted cigarette ashes again. "So are you going to have time to help me look for a new office today or tomorrow?"

  "Probably not," said Kurtz.

  "Then are you going to let me choose a place on my own?"

  "No."

  Arlene nodded. "Shall I scout some places? Let you look at them later?"

  "Okay," said Kurtz.

  "And you don't mind me looking during office hours?"

  Kurtz just stared at his once and present secretary. She had come back to work for him the day be had gotten out of prison the previous autumn. After twelve years of hiatus. "Have I ever said anything to you about office hours or how you should spend your day?" he said at last. "You can come in and handle the on-line Sweetheart Search stuff in ten minutes for all I care. Take the rest of the day off."

  "Uh-huh," said Arlene. Her look finished the sentence. Recently, the Sweetheart Search business had run to ten- and twelve-hour weekdays, most Saturdays, and the occasional Sunday. She stubbed out the cigarette and pulled out another but did not light it.

  "What else do we need?" asked Kurtz.

  "Thirty-five thousand dollars," said Arlene.

  Kurtz reacted as he always did to surprise—with a poker face.

  "It's for another server and some data-mining service," added Arlene.

  "I thought this server and the data-mining we've already done would handle Sweetheart Search for the next couple of years," said Kurtz.

  "They will," said Arlene. "This is for Wedding Bells."

  "Wedding Bells?"

  Arlene lit the next cigarette and took a long, slow drag. After exhaling, she said, "This high-school-sweetheart search was a great idea of yours, Joe, and it's making money, but we're reaching the point of diminishing returns with it."

  "After four months?" said Kurtz.

  Arlene moved her lacquered fingernails in a complex gesture. "What separates it from the other on-line school-sweetheart services is you tracking some of these people down on foot, delivering some of the love letters in person."

  "Yeah?" said Kurtz. "So?" But he understood then. "You mean that there's only so much market share in this part of Western New York and Northern Pennsylvania and Ohio within range of my driving. Only so many old high-school yearbooks we can look through in the region. After that, we're just another on-line search agency. Yeah, I thought of that when I came up with this idea in prison, but I thought it would last longer than four months."

  Arlene smiled. "Don't worry, Joe. I didn't mean that we're going to run out of yearbook sources or clients for the next couple of years. I just mean we're reaching the point of diminishing returns—or at least for your door-to-door part of it."

  "So… Wedding Bells," said Kurtz.

  "Wedding Bells," agreed Arlene.

  "I assume that's some sort of on-line wedding-planning service. Unless you're just going to offer it as a bonus package for our successful Sweetheart Search clients."

  "Oh, we can do that," said Arlene, "but I see it as a full-service on-line wedding-planning dot com. Nationwide. Beyond nationwide."

  "So I won't be delivering corsages to Erie, Pennsylvania, the way I'm doing now with the love letters?"

  Arlene flicked ashes. "You don't have to be involved at all if you don't want to be, Joe. Besides putting up the seed money and owning the company… and finding us an office."

  Kurtz ignored this last part. "Why thirty-five thousand? That's a lot of data-mining."

  Arlene carried over a folder of spreadsheet pages and notes. She stood by Kurtz's desk as he looked through it. "See, Joe, I was just grabbing bits and pieces of data from the Internet and tossing it all into an Excel spreadsheet—more or less what the present on-line wedding services do—but then I used some of our income to build a new data warehouse on Oracle81 and paid Ergos Business Intelligence to begin mining the database of all these weddings that other individuals or services had planned."

  She pointed to some columns on the spreadsheet "And voila!"

  Kurtz looked for patterns in the charts and columns. Finally he saw one. "Planning a fancy wedding takes two hundred and seventy to three hundred days," said Kurtz. "Almost all of them fall in that range. So does everyone know this?"

  Arlene shook her head. "Some individual wedding planners do, but not the few on-line wedding-service companies. The pattern really shows up when you look at a huge mass of data."

  "So how does your… our… Wedding Bells dot com cash in on this?" asked Kurtz.

  Arlene pulled out other pages. "We continue using the Ergos tool to analyze this two-hundred-seventy- to three-hundred-day period and nail down exactly when each step of the operation takes place."

  "What operation?" asked Kurtz. Arlene was beginning to talk like some bank robbers he'd known. "Isn't a wedding just a wedding? Rent a place, dress up, get it over with?"

  Arlene rolled her eyes. Exhaling smoke, she brought her ashtray over to Kurtz's desk and flicked ashes into it. "See, here, at this point early on? Here's the bride's search for a dress. Every bride has to search for a dress. We offer links to designers, seamstresses, even knock-off designer dress suppliers."

  "But Wedding Bells wouldn't be just a bunch of hyperlinks, would it?" asked Kurtz, frowning slightly.

  Arlene shook her head and stubbed out her cigarette. "Not at all. The clients give us a profile at the beginning and we offer everything from full service down. We can handle everything—absolutely everything. From sending out invitations to tipping the minister. Or the clients can have us plan some of it and just have us connect them to the right people for other decision points along the way—either way, we make money."

  Arlene lit another cigarette and ruffled through the stack of papers. She pointed to a highlighted line on a 285-day chart. "See this point, Joe? Within the first month, they have to decide on locations for the wedding and the reception. We have the biggest database anywhere and provide links to restaurants, inns, picturesque parks, Hawaiian resorts, even churches. They give us their profile and we make suggestions, then connect them to the appropriate sites."

  Kurtz had to grin. "And get a kickback from every one of those places… except maybe the churches."

  "Hah!" said Arlene. "Weddings are important revenue sources for churches and synagogues. They want in Wedding Bells dot com, they give us a piece of the action. No negotiation there."

  Kurtz nodded and looked at the rest of the spreadsheets. "Wedding consultants referred. Honeymoon locations recommended and discounts offered. Limos lined up. Even airline tickets reserved for relatives and the wedding couple. Flowers. Catering. You provide local sources and Web links to everything, and everyone pays Wedding Bells dot com. Nice." He closed the folder and handed it back to her. "When do you need the seed money?"

  "This is Thursday," said Arlene. "Monday would be nice."

  "All right Thirty-five thousand on Monday." He grabbed his peacoat from the coatrack and slipped a semiauto pistol in his belt The weapon was the relatively small and light.40 SW99—a licensed Smith & Wesson version of the Walther P99 double-action service pistol. Kurtz had ten rounds in the magazine and a second magazine in his coat pocket Considering the fact that the SW99 fired formidable.40 S&W loads rather than the more common 9mms, Kurtz trusted that twenty cartridges would do the trick.

  "Will you be back in the office before the weekend?" asked Arlene as Kurtz opened the rear door.

  "Probably not."

  "Anywhere I can reach you?"

  "You can try Pruno's e-mail in the next hour or so," said Kurtz. "After that, probably not. I'll give you a call here at the office before the weekend."

  "Oh, you can call here Saturday or Sunday, too," said Arlene. "I'll be here."

  But Kurtz was out the door and gone and the sarcasm was waste
d.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kurtz liked Buffalo winters because the Buffalonians knew how to deal with winter. A few inches of snow—snow that would paralyze some wussy city such as Washington or Nashville—went all but unnoticed by Buffalo residents. Plows plowed, sidewalks got shoveled early, and people went on about their business. A foot of snow got people's attention in Buffalo, but only for as long as it took to push and plow it into the ten-foot-high heap of earlier-plowed snow.

  But this winter had been a bitch. By January first, more snow had fallen than in the previous two winters combined, and by February, even stoic Buffalo had to shut down some schools and businesses when snow and consistently low temperatures kept blowing in off Lake Erie almost daily.

  Kurtz had no idea how Pruno and some of the other winos who refused to stay in shelters more than a few of the worst nights managed to survive such winters.

  But surviving the winter was Pruno's problem. Surviving the next few days and weeks was Kurtz's problem.

  Pruno's "winter residence" was the packing-crate hovel he and Soul Dad had cobbled together under the highway overpass near the rail yards. In the summer, Kurtz knew, fifty or sixty of the homeless congregated here in a sort of Bonus Army Village that was not totally without appeal. But most of the fair-weather bums had long since headed for shelters or Southern cities—Soul Dad favored Denver, for reasons known only to himself. Now only Pruno's shack remained, and snow had almost covered it.

  Kurtz slid down the steep hill from the road above and postholed his way through the drifts to the shack. There was no real door—a section of corrugated, rusted tin slid into place across the opening of the nailed-together crates—so Kurtz knocked on the metal panel and waited. The freezing wind from Lake Erie cut right through the wool of his peacoat. After two or three more knocks, Kurtz heard a racking cough from the interior and took it as his permission to enter.

  Pruno—Soul Dad had once mentioned that the old man's name was Frederick—sat against the concrete abutment that made up the far wall. Snow had drifted in through cracks and fissures. The long extension cord to the laptop still ran in from God knows where and a stack of Sterno cans provided both heat and cooking facilities. Pruno himself was almost lost in a cocoon of rags and filthy newspapers.

  "Jesus," Kurtz said softly. "Why don't you go to a shelter, old man?"

  Pruno coughed what might have been a laugh. "I refuse to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's."

  "Money?" said Kurtz. "The shelters don't ask for money. Not even for work in trade for a bed at this time of year. So what would you be rendering unto Caesar—except maybe some frostbite?"

  "Obeisance," said Pruno. He coughed and cleared his throat. "Shall we get on with business, Joseph? What is it you would like to know about the redoubtable Ms. Farino?"

  "First of all," said Kurtz, "what do you want in exchange for the information? Your e-mail mentioned getting something in return."

  "Not really, Joseph. I said that I had a request to make of you in return. I assure you that I will be happy to give you the Farino information with no strings attached."

  "Whatever," said Kurtz. "What's your request?"

  Pruno coughed for a minute and pulled the newspapers and rags closer around him. The cold air coming in through the chinks and cracks in the packing-crate hovel was making Kurtz shiver and he was wearing a thick peacoat. "I wondered if you would be so kind as to meet with a friend of mine," said Pruno. "In your professional capacity."

  "What professional capacity?"

  "Investigator."

  Kurtz shook his head. "You know I'm not a P.I. anymore."

  "You investigated for the Farino family last year," said Pruno. The old man's wheezy, drug-addict's voice still carried more than a hint of a Bostonian accent.

  "That was a scam I was part of," said Kurtz, "not an investigation."

  "Nonetheless, Joseph, it would please me greatly if you would just meet with my friend. You can tell him yourself that you are no longer in the private investigation business."

  Kurtz hesitated. "What's his name?"

  "John Wellington Frears."

  "And what's his problem?"

  "I don't know precisely, Joseph. It is a private issue."

  "All right," said Kurtz, imagining himself consulting with another wino. "Where should I find this John Wellington Frears?"

  "Perhaps he could come to your office today? It would probably be better for my friend to come see you."

  Kurtz thought of Arlene and the last time they'd had visitors at the office. "No," he said. "I'll be at Blues Franklin tonight until midnight. Tell him to meet me there. How will I know him?"

  "He likes to wear vests," said Pruno. "Now, about this Angelina Farino query. What would you like to know?"

  "Everything," said Kurtz.

  Donald Rafferty worked at the main post office down on William Street and liked to eat lunch at a little bar near Broadway Market. As a supervisor, Rafferty managed to take ninety-minute lunch hours. Sometimes he would forget to eat lunch.

  This afternoon he came out of the bar and found a man leaning against his 1998 Honda Accord. The man was white—that's the first thing Rafferty checked—and was wearing a peacoat and a wool cap. He looked vaguely familiar, but Rafferty couldn't quite place the face. Actually, this had been an extra-long lunch hour and Donald Rafferty was having a little trouble finding his car keys in his pocket. He stopped twenty feet from the man and considered going back in the bar until the stranger left.

  "Hey, Donnie," said the man. Rafferty had always hated the name Donnie.

  "Kurtz," Rafferty said at last. "Kurtz."

  Kurtz nodded.

  "I thought you were in jail, asshole," said Rafferty.

  "Not right now," said Kurtz.

  Rafferty blinked to clear his vision. "Another state, you would have got the chair… or lethal injection," he said. "For murder."

  Kurtz smiled. "Manslaughter." He had been leaning against the Accord's hood, but now he straightened and took a step closer.

  Donald Rafferty took a step back on the slippery parking lot. It was snowing again. "What the fuck do you want, Kurtz?"

  "I want you to stop drinking on days that you drive Rachel anywhere," Kurtz said. His voice was very soft but very firm.

  Rafferty actually laughed, despite his nervousness. "Rachel? Don't tell me that you give a flying fuck about Rachel. Fourteen years and you never so much as sent the kid a fucking card."

  "Twelve years," said Kurtz.

  "She's mine," slurred Rafferty. "Courts said so. It's legal. I was Samantha's husband, ex-husband, and Samantha meant for me to have her."

  "Sam didn't mean for anyone except Sam to take care of Rachel," said Kurtz, taking another step toward Ran Rafferty took three steps back toward the bar.

  "Sam didn't plan on dying," said Kurtz.

  Rafferty had to sneer at that. "She died because of you, Kurtz. You and that fucking job." He found his keys and threaded them through his fingers, making a fist. Anger was mixing with fear now. He could take this sonofabitch. "You here to cause trouble, Kurtz?"

  Kurtz's gaze never left Rafferty's.

  "Because if you are," continued Rafferty, his voice getting stronger and louder now, "I'll tell your parole officer that you're harassing me, threatening me, threatening Rachel… twelve years in Attica, who knows what filthy tastes you've acquired."

  Something flickered in Joe Kurtz's eyes then, and Rafferty took four quick steps backward until he could almost touch the door to the bar. "You give me any shit, Kurtz, and I'll have you back in jail so fast that—"

  "If you drive Rachel again when you're drunk," Kurtz interrupted softly, "I'll hurt you, Donnie." He took another step and Rafferty opened the bar's door in a hurry, ready to rush inside where the bartender—Carl—could pull the sawed-off shotgun out from under the counter.

  Kurtz did not look at Donald Rafferty again. He brushed past him and walked down Broadway, disappearing in the heavily falling sno
w.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kurtz sat in the smoky gloom of Blues Franklin and thought about Pruno's information on Angelina Farino and what it might mean. And he thought about the fact that he had been followed to the Blues Franklin by two homicide detectives in an unmarked car. It wasn't the first time they'd tailed him in recent weeks.

  Blues Franklin, on Franklin Street just down from the Rue Franklin Coffeehouse, was the second-oldest blues/jazz dive in Buffalo. Promising talent tended to appear there on their way up and then reappear without much fanfare when they were serious headliners. This evening, a local jazz pianist named Coe Pierce and his quartet were playing, the place was half-filled and sleepy, and Kurtz had his usual small table, in the corner as far from the door as possible, his back to the wall. The nearby tables were empty. Occasionally the proprietor and chief bartender, Daddy Bruce Woles, or his granddaughter Ruby would come over to chat and see if Kurtz wanted another beer. He didn't. Kurtz came for the music, not for the booze.

  Kurtz did not really expect Pruno's friend, Mr. John Wellington Frears, to show. Pruno seemed to know everyone in Buffalo—of the dozen or so street informants Kurtz had used back when he was a P.I., Pruno had been the gem of the lot—but Kurtz doubted if any friend of Pruno's would be sober enough and presentable enough to make it to Blues Franklin.

  Angelina Farino. Other than Little Skag—Stephen or Stevie to family members—she was the only surviving child of the late Don Farino. Her older sister, the late Maria Farino, had been a casualty of her own ambition. Everyone Kurtz knew believed that older sister Angelina had been so disgusted by the Family business that she had removed herself to Italy more than five years earlier, presumably to enter a convent. According to Pruno, this was not quite accurate. It seems that the surviving Ms. Farino was more ambitious than her brothers or sister and had gone back to study crime with the family in Sicily even while getting a master's degree in business administration from a university in Rome. She also got married twice while there, according to Pruno—first to a young Sicilian from a prominent La Cosa Nostra family who managed to get himself killed, then to an elderly Italian nobleman, Count Pietro Adolfo Ferrara. The information about Count Ferrara was sketchy—he may have died, he may have retired, he may still be in seclusion. He and Angelina may have divorced before she returned here, but perhaps they had not.