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Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

Page 23

by John Sandford


  “Ah, no.” I glanced at the clock. 3:56. “That, I’m afraid, could be managed. People could be bought, the charges denied, especially if LuEllen and I weren’t around to back them up. Somebody might say the whole thing was a fantasy . . . and even the people who would believe it wouldn’t have any way to prove it for sure. Besides, the instigator of the whole thing is a vegetable. You can’t put a vegetable on trial.”

  “So what did you do?” Maggie asked.

  I shrugged. “Same old shit you saw in the Washington apartment. A computer blitz. The fact is, if you mess with me or LuEllen, our friends on the computer net will take Anshiser right down the toilet. Right down.”

  Maggie glanced at the dark man again. He frowned and tipped his head back and stared at me, figuring, and finally said to Maggie, “I don’t know.”

  She thought she did, though. She had decided it was a game, and looked at me with what may have been genuine regret.

  “I’m disappointed, Kidd. We thought you’d be better than this. Let me tell you what we’ve done. We have the best people—the very best, better than you—watching every move that’s made on those computers. It has been a major inconvenience, and it cost us a lot of money, but we’ll get it back with the Sunfire contract. In any event, we know you’re not in there. Just in case, we have backups of all our software, and all the daily work. We can shut down and sterilize our system in half an hour, and be back up with completely clean software. Everybody who does anything on the system is logged in and out, and the input is studied by the security crew. There isn’t any way you can reach us. You just don’t have the leverage for a deal.” She shook her head and stood up. “I think it’s time to leave,” she said to the dark man.

  The clock said 3:59.

  “By the way, don’t try to use your telephone. It won’t work,” she said, showing a few teeth. “I couldn’t figure why you stayed in an Anshiser Hotel. You must know we could control the place.”

  “Don’t go,” I said. “We have more things to talk about.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. A note of triumph had crept into her voice. The clock ticked over to four, and she started toward the door, the dark man standing to follow. The blond opened the door, and she walked away, giving it a little extra effort as she walked. At the door she paused, and seemed about to say something.

  Then the lights went out.

  Everything else went with them—the clock, the TV, the air conditioning. There was a stuttering, and emergency lights came on in the hallway. Somewhere, a smoke detector screeched, and doors started popping open down the hallway.

  I had pulled the blackout drapes over the windows to intensify the effect. I waited for a few seconds, and reached back and pulled the drawstring. Daylight flooded the room, and the blond was standing just inside the door, pointing a small-caliber automatic pistol at my chest. A long, fat silencer was attached to the snout.

  “Why don’t you come back in and sit down?” I suggested.

  Maggie looked shocked, but came back in. “What have you done?”

  “I’ve shut down Anshiser,” I said. “Or at least, my friends have.”

  “What are you talking about, we have the best security, there was no way . . .”

  “It’s awful good,” I agreed. “Too good to penetrate in the time that we had. So we had to do something different.”

  “What did you do, Kidd?”

  “We went into the power company computers. We couldn’t get every little dinky Anshiser operation, but we got all the good ones. All the hotels, all the factories, your headquarters back in Chicago. Not a single one of the big operations has power. If you call up your airframe fabrication plant you’ll find they don’t have a computer problem, they’ve got a problem with everything. They can’t run a fuckin’ power drill.”

  The Tower of Destruction. The lightning bolt. Power plants, of course. And it had been shown in conjunction with the Magician, the computer-freak card. It was all coincidence, but a timely one—I really don’t believe in that magic shit.

  “This can’t last. . . .” Maggie blurted.

  “Yes, it can. Believe me: Anshiser is shut down. Unless I tell my people to bring you back up, you’ll be down for three or four days before the electric people find the fault. And then the next bomb goes off. If you’re really efficient, you might get fifteen or twenty days of work out of your companies in the next year.”

  She sank down in the chair opposite me, and the dark man said, “Sonofabitch.” He looked at the blond and said, “Put it away.” People were shuffling through the hall in the dim light, moving toward the stairwell. The smoke alarm, apparently triggered by the power shutdown, was still screeching into the gloom. The blond stepped inside and shut the door.

  “How long will it take to get us back up?” Maggie asked.

  “Probably two or three hours. We have a lot of them to deal with,” I said. “But we don’t want to bring them back up too soon. We want to give you a chance to call around. Find out how bad things can get. See if you can fix it yourself.”

  Maggie looked at the dark man. “What do you think?”

  He shook his head. “What I thought in the first place. We cut the deal and walk away. And keep his phone number in case we need his help sometime.”

  “No chance,” I said.

  “Don’t shut any doors,” he said. It didn’t sound like a threat. It sounded like advice.

  Maggie was still looking for a way out. “We could go after your computer friends.”

  “No. The National Security Agency has gone looking for Bobby, and came up empty. A bunch of hoods aren’t going to find him. And if you come after me or LuEllen, if there’s even a hint of it, Bobby’ll take Anshiser apart.”

  “What happens if you’re hit by a car?” the dark man asked.

  “You better pray I’m not, because you’ll be out of luck,” I said. He nodded. That was the kind of deal he understood. One that had no options.

  “Look,” I said to Maggie, “in a couple of years, anything I say about this whole Whitemark deal, or about Dace, will be ancient history. Nobody will pay any attention. It’ll be like if you called up the FBI and said you knew who killed Judge Crater. Nobody would give a shit. So if we can make it through a couple of years together, you’ll be safe. And there’ll be no percentage at all in coming after us. You’ll have that whole big company to work with.”

  “He’s right,” said the dark man.

  “Okay,” said Maggie, deciding. She stood up again. “It’s a deal. Turn the power on.”

  Chapter 21

  I WAS WORKING on the sandbar below St. Paul. I’d dragged the anchor halfway up the bar and buried it, and the boat swung placidly on its line as the towboats streamed by. It was hot, the first real heat of the coming summer. She crossed the levee, pushed through the willows, and walked out on the bar. She was wearing gym shoes, jeans, and a peek-a-boo blouse. She had a nice tan.

  “Neat picture,” she said when she came up. She said “pitcher.”

  “Thanks. How was Mexico?”

  “All right. A lot of foreigners.” She laughed and I smiled and she said, “Old joke.”

  “No kidding.” I laid in a long vermilion horizon.

  LuEllen did a critical pout, cocked her head, and nodded. “Not bad,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Seen Maggie lately?”

  “Not since I called you—not since Vegas. There’s a mutual lack of interest.”

  “Still think we’re safe?”

  “I think so. We put ourselves outside the percentages. Have you been back to Duluth?”

  “Snuck in and out a week after you called. Moved some money around, and went back.” She wandered around, looked in the boat. “I saw that old man Anshiser croaked.”

  “Yeah. Maggie’s running the place. A new guy took her job, Dillon’s still number three.” I dropped in some very liquid ultramarine and feathered it into the vermilion.

  “I could never do that,�
� she said. “Paint, I mean. Like you put in that hill, with purple. Who would think that a hill with green trees is purple? But it kind of is, isn’t it?” She looked across the river at the hill.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Have you thought about Dace at all?”

  “You mean, do I feel guilty?”

  “Yeah.”

  I stopped painting and looked at her. “Yes. I do. I thought I knew what we were getting into, and I didn’t. And Dace paid. But there’s nothing I can do about it. I could go after Maggie, I suppose. But I can’t do that, either. And I like it here. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running from somebody, the cops, or the mob, or whoever.”

  She nodded. “That’s where I got to, sitting on the beach. I kept thinking, Dace would want us to do this, or Dace would want us to do that. Then one day I figured, Dace doesn’t want us to do anything. He’s dead. It’s like they turned out a TV. It’s like thinking a TV show wants you to do something, after you’ve turned it off.”

  I went back to painting and she watched for another minute or two, then ran off down the sandbar, stopping to look at the flotsam. She was back in five minutes with a wasp-waisted seven-ounce Coke bottle.

  “Must be twenty years old,” she said.

  “I don’t want to break your heart, but you can still buy them like that.”

  “Oh yeah?” She looked at me suspiciously, but when I nodded, heaved it into the river. She had a good arm. The bottle hit and bobbed up, its neck sticking out of the water.

  “Been stealing anything?” I asked.

  “Nope. I’m too rich,” she said. “But I’m thinking about it anyway.”

  “Playing the ponies?”

  “A little.”

  “How about the nose candy?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “Were you faithful to me down in Mexico?”

  She snorted and threw a driftwood stick after the Coke bottle and watched them both float away. A tow jockey ran his harbor boat by, heading toward the coal dump downriver.

  “Are you, you know, involved with anybody?” she asked.

  “Nah.”

  “What are my chances of getting laid?”

  “Pretty good, if you play your cards right,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “All right.”

  She looked happy. She found a flat rock and tried to skip it side-armed out in the river. It skipped once and crashed.

  The river itself was dark and black and snaky, the currents and crosscurrents bucking up along the bar. We spent most of the afternoon there, painting and talking and watching the clouds roll in, up from the south, over the Mississippi.

  FROM THE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  OF THE PREY SERIES…

  A CRIME NOVEL OF “CLASSIC STINGS” (Booklist)

  THE EMPRESS FILE

  With the same sharp human insight he brings to the murderers and manhunters of his bestselling Prey novels, Sanford takes us into the minds of two irresistible con artists. Kidd and LuEllen are a winning pair of lovers and liars plotting the ultimate sting. Their target is the wealthy (and corrupt) mayor of a small Mississippi river town. Their setup includes buying a houseboat, assuming false identities, and exposing local scandals. Their scam is perfect. Until everything goes wrong…

  “THE IMAGINATIVE CON SCHEME IS CLEVER… BUT THE BIGGEST THRILLS OCCUR WHEN EVENTS DON’T GO AS PLANNED.”

  —Library Journal

  “WITTY AND CINEMATIC… ENGROSSING.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “ALFRED HITCHCOCK WOULD HAVE BEEN DELIGHTED.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  Praise for John Sandford’s Prey novels

  “Relentlessly swift… genuinely suspenseful… excellent.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Sandford is a writer in control of his craft.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Excellent… compelling… everything works.”

  —USA Today

  “Grip-you-by-the-throat thrills… a hell of a ride.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Crackling, page-turning tension… great scary fun.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Enough pulse-pounding, page-turning excitement to keep you up way past bedtime.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “One of the most engaging characters in contemporary fiction.”

  —The Detroit News

  “Positively chilling.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Just right for fans of The Silence of the Lambs.”

  —Booklist

  “One of the most horrible villains this side of Hannibal.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Ice-pick chills… excruciatingly tense… a double-pumped roundhouse of a thriller.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  TITLES BY JOHN SANDFORD

  Rules of Prey

  Shadow Prey

  Eyes of Prey

  Silent Prey

  Winter Prey

  Night Prey

  Mind Prey

  Sudden Prey

  Secret Prey

  Certain Prey

  Easy Prey

  Chosen Prey

  Mortal Prey

  Naked Prey

  Hidden Prey

  Broken Prey

  Invisible Prey

  Phantom Prey

  Wicked Prey

  Storm Prey

  The Night Crew

  Dead Watch

  KIDD NOVELS

  The Fool’s Run

  The Empress File

  The Devil’s Code

  The Hanged Man’s Song

  VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

  Dark of the Moon

  Heat Lightning

  Rough Country

  Bad Blood

  THE EMPRESS

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  JOHN

  SANFORD

  Previously published under

  the name John Camp

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  Henry Holt edition published 1991

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited

  Berkley mass-market edition / November 1992

  Copyright © 1991 by John Camp.

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  For Roswell S. and Anne B.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Prologue

  THE HEAT WAS ferocious.

  The odor of melting blacktop was thick in the air, like the stink of an oil slick, and the rare night walkers glistened with sweat. A time-and-temperature sign outside the state bank poked scarlet digits down the dark streets: 91, it said, and 11:04. Three doors north of the bank, a janitor at the Paramount Theater vacuumed the lobby in slow motion. The theater was air-conditioned. His home was not.

  Across the street from the Paramount, a window dresser at Trent’s fussed with an abattoir of dismembered mannequins. He worked only nights, after curfew for children twelve and under. He was setting up the annual bathing suit display, and modern mannequins, the city council observed, had nipples.

  In the window lights even the dummies looked hot.

  WITH NIGHTFALL an army of insects marched out of the Mississippi river bottoms. Coffee brown beetles, some as long as a man’s thumb, scuttled through the gutters. Hard-shelled June bugs ricocheted like stones off the storefront windows. Fuzzy-winged moths fluttered in the headlights of passing cars. They made yellow smears when they hit the windshields; the biggest ones had guts like baby birds, and blood.

 

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