The laptop was fastened to the wheelchair tray by snap clamps and he fumbled at them for a moment before the computer came loose. As he worked the clamps, he noticed the wi-fi antenna protruding from the PCMCIA slot on the side of the machine. There was something more, then.
He carried the laptop to the door and left it there, still turned on, then went through the house to the kitchen, moving quickly, thinking about the crime. Mississippi, he was sure, had the electric chair or the guillotine or maybe they burned you at the stake. Whatever it was, it was bound to be primitive. He had to take care.
He pulled a few paper towels off a low-mounted roll near the sink and used them to cover his hands, and he started opening doors and cupboards. In a bedroom, next to a narrow, ascetic bed under a crucifix, he found a short table with the laptop’s recharging cord and power supply, and two more batteries in a recharging deck.
Good. He unplugged the power supply and the recharging deck and carried them out to the living room and put them on the floor next to the door.
In the second bedroom, behind the tenth or twelfth door he opened, he found a cable jack and modem with the wi-fi transceiver. He was disappointed: he’d expected a set of servers.
“Shit.” He muttered the word aloud. He’d killed a man for a laptop? There had to be more.
Back in the front room, he found a stack of blank recordable disks, but none that had been used. Where were the used disks? Where? There was a bookcase and he brushed some of the books out, found nothing behind them. Hurried past all the open doors and cupboards, feeling the pressure of time on his shoulders. Where?
He looked, but he found nothing more: only the laptop, winking at him from the doorway.
Had to go, had to go.
He stuffed the paper towels in his pocket, hurried to the door, picked up the laptop, power supply, and recharging deck, pulled the door almost shut with his bare hand, realized what he’d done, took the paper towels out of his pocket, wiped the knob and gripped it with the towel, and pulled the door shut. Hesitated. Pushed the door open again, crossed to the couch, thoroughly wiped the oxygen cylinder.
All right. Outside again, he stuck the electronics under his arm beneath the raincoat, and strolled as calmly as he could to the car. The car, a nondescript Toyota Corolla, had belonged to his mother. It wouldn’t get a second glance anywhere, anytime. Which was lucky, he thought, considering what had happened.
He put the laptop, still running, on the passenger’s seat. The laptop would take very careful investigation. As he drove away, he thought about his exposure in Bobby’s death. Not much, he thought, unless he was brutally unlucky. A neighbor trying a new camera, an idiot savant who remembered his license plate number; one chance in a million.
Less than that, even—he’d been obsessively careful in his approach to the black man; that he’d come on a rainy day was not an accident. Maybe, he thought, he’d known in his heart that Bobby would end this day as a dead man.
Maybe. As he turned the corner and left the neighborhood, a hum of satisfaction began to vibrate through him. He felt the skull crunching again, saw the body fly from the wheelchair, felt the rush. . . .
Felt the skull crunch . . . and almost drove through a red light.
He pulled himself back: he had to get out of town safely. This was no time for a traffic ticket that would pin him to Jackson, at this moment, at this place.
He was careful the rest of the way out, but still . . .
He smiled at himself. Felt kinda good, Jimmy James.
HUH! WHACK! Rock ’n’ roll.
Chapter
Two
>>> FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW in St. Paul, over the top of the geranium pot, I can see the Mississippi snaking away to the south past the municipal airport and the barge yards. There’s always a towboat out there, rounding up a string of rust-colored barges, or a guy heading downstream in a houseboat, or a seaplane lining up for takeoff. I never get tired of it. I wish I could pipe in all the sounds and smell of it, leaving out the stink and groan of the trucks and buses that run along the river road.
I was standing there, scratching the iron-sized head of the red cat, when the phone rang.
I thought about not answering it—there was nobody I particularly cared to talk to that day—but the ringing continued. I finally picked it up, annoyed, and found a smoker’s voice like a rusty hinge in a horror movie. An old political client. He asked me to do a job for him. “It’s no big deal,” he rasped.
“You lie like a Yankee carpetbagger,” I said back. I hadn’t talked to him in years, but we were picking up where we left off: friendly, but a little contentious.
“I resemble that remark,” he said. “Besides, it’ll only take you a few days.”
“How much you paying?”
“Wull . . . nothin’.”
Bob was a Democrat from a conservative Mississippi district. He was worried about a slick, good-looking young Republican woman named Nosere.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Kidd: the bitch is richer than Davy Crockett and can self-finance,” said the congressman. He was getting into his stump rhythms: “When it comes to ambition, she makes Hillary Clinton look like the wallflower at a Saturday-night sock-hop. She makes Huey Long look like a guppy. You gotta get your ass down there, boy. Dig this out for me.”
“You oughta be able to self-finance your own self,” I said. “You’ve been in Washington for twelve years now, for Christ’s sakes.”
Pause, as if thinking, or maybe contemplating the balances in off-shore checking accounts. Then, “Don’t dog me around, Kidd. You gonna do this, or what?”
>>> WHEN all the bullshit is dispensed with, I am an artist—a painter—and for most of my life, in the eyes of the law, a criminal, though I prefer to think of myself as a libertarian who liberates for money.
At the University of Minnesota, where I had gone to school on a wrestling scholarship, I carried a minor in art, with a major in computer science. Computers and mathematics interested me in the same way that art did, and I worked hard at them. Then the Army came along and gave me a few additional skills. When I got out of the service, I went to work as a freelance computer consultant.
Aboveground, I was writing political-polling software that could be run in the new desktop computers, the early IBMs, and even a package that you could run on a Color Computer, if anybody remembers those. I was also debugging commercial computer-control programs, a job that was considered the coal mine of the computer world. I was pretty good at it: Bill Gates had once said to me, “Hey, dude, we’re starting a company.”
Underground, I was doing industrial espionage for a select clientele, entering unfriendly places, either electronically or physically, and copying technical memos, software, drawings, anything that my client could use to keep up with the Gateses. The eighties were good to me, but the nineties had been hot: a dozen technical memos, moved from A to B, could result in a hundred-million-dollar Internet IPO. Or, more likely, could kill one.
All that time, I’d been painting. I can’t tell you about whiskey and drugs and gambling and women, because those things are for amateurs and rock musicians. I worked all the time—maybe dabbled a little in women. Unlike whiskey, drugs, and gambling addictions, I’d found that women tended to go away after a while. On their own.
As did the political-polling business. I sold out to a competitor because I was losing patience with my clients, with my clients’ way of making a living.
Politicians fuck with people. That’s what they do. That’s their job. Every day, they get up and wonder who they’re gonna fuck with that day. Then they go and do it. They’re not of much use—they don’t make anything, create anything, think any great thoughts. They just fuck with the rest of us. I got tired of talking to them.
So the years went by, with painting and computers, and now here I was, talking to Congressman Bob. I wheedled and begged, even pled poverty, but eventually said I’d do it—truth be told, I needed a break from the fever dreams of my latest paintings, a
suite of five commissioned by a rich lumberman from Louisiana.
Then there was my love life, which had taken an ugly turn for the worse.
Getting out of town didn’t look that bad. That’s why, for the past two weeks, I’d been working in the belly of the Wisteria.
>>> THE Wisteria was a casino and hung off a pier on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, between Biloxi and Gulfport. Designed to look like a riverboat, it was the size of a battleship. Sweeping decks of slot machines, which would take everything down to your last nickel, sucked up most of the space. There were also three restaurants, two bars, and a poop deck for the low-return games.
Muzak, mostly orchestrated versions of old Sinatra sounds, kept you happy while you cranked the slots, and gave the place its class. All of it smelled of tobacco, alcohol, spoiled potato chips, sweat, cleaning fluids, and overstressed deodorant, with just the faintest whiff of vomit.
I was inside for six hours a day, thinking about painting and women, while throwing money down the slot machines. The job was simple enough, but I had to be careful: if I screwed it up, some bent-nosed cracker thug would take me out in the woods and break my arms and legs—if I was lucky.
Or, I should say, our arms and legs.
>>> MY friend LuEllen had come along. She actually liked casinos, and I needed the help. She was also doing therapy on me: she referred to my lost love as Boobs, and had worked out a complete set of verbs and adjectives based on that root word. The day before, in the Wisteria’s fine-dining restaurant (“The best surf-and-turf between New Orleans and Tallahassee”), she’d held up a glob of deepfried potato and said, “Now there’s one boobilicious Tater Tot.”
“You give me any more shit, I’m gonna stick a Tater Tot in one of your crevices,” I said, with more snarl than I’d intended.
“You’re not man enough,” she said, unimpressed. “I’ve been working out three hours a day. I can kick your ass now.”
“Working out with what? Golf? You’re gonna putt me to death?”
She pointed a Tater Tot at me, a little edge in her voice. “You may speak lightly of my crevices, but do not say bad things about golf.”
>>> THE JOB: Miss Young Republican Anita Nosere—who was, from the pictures I’d seen of her, fairly boobilicious herself—got her money from her mother. Her mother was managing director of a syndicate that owned the Wisteria. Congressman Bob had been told that the casino was skimming the take, thus shorting both the U.S. government and the state of Mississippi on taxes. The skim was one of those simple-minded things that are almost impossible to spot if the casino does it carefully enough.
It works like this: the casino advertises (and reports to the tax authorities) a given return on the slot machines. If that return is even a little lower than the rate reported, the income increases sharply. That is, if you report that your machines will return 95 percent to the players, but you really only return 94 percent, and a million bucks a night goes through the slots, you’re skimming $10,000 a night. In a few months, that adds up to real money.
Of course, you have to be careful about state auditors. For a politically well-connected company, in Mississippi, that wasn’t a major problem: “Them boys is crookeder than a bucket of cottonmouths,” Bob said.
The congressman could have hired one of the big independent auditing companies to do his research, but that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Me, he could get for free, and get a good idea if the charges were true. If they were, then he’d hire the big auditing company, do the research, and hang the Noseres, momma and daughter together, all in the name of truth, justice, and the American Way.
>>> EXACTLY what we did was, we dropped dollars—and quarters and nickels—into slot machines and counted the return, and then ran the results through a statistics package. We wanted 98 percent confidence that we were less than half of a percent off the true return. We therefore needed to take a large random sample of machines and had to run enough coins through each machine that we’d get a statistically accurate return on each.
I’d chosen the target machines the first night, using a random numbers program in the laptop I carried. We’d been at it ever since, dropping the dollars, quarters, and nickels, doing the numbers at night, avoiding crackers with bent noses, and generally dancing around the possibility of acts of unfaithfulness, if that’s what it would have been.
Can you be unfaithful to a mood, to a sense of guilt? I mean, the woman was gone. . . .
But Marcy’s departure had driven me into an emotional hole. A number of good women have walked out on me, and there’s no way that I can claim it was always, or even usually, their fault. When the first bloom of romance fades away, they begin to pay attention to my priorities. Sooner or later, they conclude that they’ll always be number three, behind painting and maybe computers.
They might be right, though I still hate to think so. There was no question that as I got older, I’d become more and more involved in the work. I’d sometimes go days without talking to anyone, and become impatient when a woman wanted to do something ordinary, like go out to dinner.
That was not a problem with LuEllen. I’d known her for a decade, spent hours rolling around in various beds with her, and still didn’t know her real last name or where she lived. I knew everything about her but the basic, simple stuff.
At this point, we were not in bed. I don’t know exactly what she was doing, in her head, but I was just drifting along, dropping coins, thinking about painting and sex and listening to the rain fall on the casino roof, the car roof, and the motel roof, thinking about getting back to St. Paul and the serious work.
>>> L U ELLEN and I were staying in separate rooms at the Rapaport Suites on I-10, one of those concrete-block instant motels with a polite Indian man and his wife at the front desk, a permanent smell of cigarette smoke in the curtains, and a dollar-a-minute surcharge on the telephone. The place wasn’t exactly bleak, it was simply nothing. I can’t even remember the colors, which were chosen not to show dirt. My room was a cube with a can, a candidate for existential hell. And we couldn’t get out.
Rain had been falling since the day we arrived. A hurricane was prowling the Gulf, well down to the south, but had gotten itself stuck somewhere between Jamaica and the Yucatán. The storm wasn’t much, but the rain shield was terrific, reaching far enough north to cover half the state of Mississippi. We’d been kept inside, Noseres to the grindstone.
And life was looking grim for the mother-daughter duo. The numbers said they might be skimming two percent.
>>> WE HAD just finished a three-hour session with the slots, and after freshening up—taking a leak, I guess—LuEllen came down to my room, pulled off her cowboy boots, and sprawled on the bed to read Barron’s.
She’s a slender dark woman with an oval face, a solid set of muscles, a terrific ass, and a taste for cocaine and cowboy gear, to say nothing of the odd cowboy himself.
“Numbers?” she asked, without looking at me.
“Yeah.” I was sitting with my head thrust toward the laptop screen, the classic geek posture, and my neck felt like it was in a vise. “How about a back rub? My neck is killing me.”
“You haven’t been very attentive to me and I’m not sure a back rub would be appropriate,” she said. She turned a page in Barron’s. “Or any other kind of rub.”
“You wanna do the fuckin’ numbers?”
“I’m not getting paid the big bucks.”
“Yeah, big bucks . . .”
She sighed and tossed the Barron’s on the carpet; she was basically a good sport. “All right.” She popped off the bed, came over and went to work on my back. She has powerful thumbs for a small woman. “Wanna go out for a hot-fudge sundae?”
“Sure. Keep working, let me check my e-mail.” She was knuckling the muscle along my spine, right at my shoulder, and I rolled my head and punched up the e-mail program on my laptop, and went out, at a dollar a minute, to see what I could see.
An alarm came up for one of my out-
of-sight e-mail addresses. Spam, probably, but I looked. No spam—it was a note from a man I didn’t know, who called himself romeoblue.
The e-mail said, “Bobby down. Drop word. Ring on.”
“Motherfucker,” I said, as I read it. I didn’t believe what I was seeing.
LuEllen caught the tone and looked over my shoulder. She knew about Bobby, so I let her look. “Uh-oh. Who’s romeoblue?”
“I don’t know.”
“How does he know Bobby?”
I knew the answer to that, but I avoided the question. LuEllen and I trusted each other, but there was no point in being careless. “Lots of people know Bobby. . . . Listen, now we gotta go out. I gotta make a call.”
>>> BOBBY is the deus ex machina for the hacking community, the fount of all knowledge, the keeper of secrets, the source of critical phone numbers, a guide through the darkness of IBM mainframes. As with LuEllen, I didn’t know his real name or exactly where he lived; but we’d done some business together.
>>> THE Gulf Coast could probably be a garden spot, but it isn’t. It’s a junkyard. Every form of scummy business you can think of can be found between I-10 and the beach, and most every one of them built the cheapest possible building to do the business in. It’s like Amarillo, Texas, but in bad taste.
We ran through the rain from my room to the car, then trucked on down I-10 to the nearest Wal-Mart. We made the call from a public phone using a tiny Sony laptop I’d picked up a few weeks earlier. Dialed up my Bobby number and got nothing. No carrier tone, no redirect to some other number, just ringing with no answer. That had never happened before. I made a quick check again of my e-mail and had a second message, from a person named polytrope. He said, “Bobby’s gone. Out six hours now. Drop word. Ring on.”
“Maybe they got him,” I said to LuEllen, popping the connection. “The feds. I gotta make another call, but not from here. Let’s go.”
LuEllen’s a professional thief. When I said, “Let’s go,” she didn’t ask questions. She started walking. Not hurrying, but moving out, smiling, pleasant, but not making eye contact with any of the store clerks.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 72