We planned to stop a mile or so away and call the fire department, but by the time we got to the pay phone, we could hear sirens and they were getting closer. So we kept going. But I’d looked back from the corner as we’d gone slewing around it, and even in the driving rain, the fire looked like a bad dream out of Revelation, or out of Jackson, Mississippi, in 1930.
John had been right. For bringing in an FBI investigation, nothing worked quite as well as a dead black guy and a great big stinking Fiery Cross.
Chapter
Five
>>> AT TEN O’CLOCK that morning, the bedside alarm went off. I sat up, disoriented for a moment, in a bed at the Days Inn across Interstate 55 from the La Quinta. I’d dropped John just before five, then crossed the highway and rented a room.
When I checked in, I told the clerk that I’d intended to arrive earlier, but I’d gotten stuck in a casino, and then in the rain. He did a desk-clerk’s indifferent chuckle-nod-and-shuffle—he could really give a shit what I’d been doing—and told me I had to be out by noon anyway, or they’d have to charge me for another day.
That was fine. I’d just wanted to get on the record, at the same time hoping I didn’t smell like gasoline. When I woke up at ten, I slapped the clock to kill the alarm, turned the TV to the Weather Channel, and called LuEllen on my cell phone.
LuEllen answered just as a satellite picture of Hurricane Frances came up on the TV. “Where are you?” she demanded. “Is everything okay?”
“Well, our friend is gone,” I said. “We went into his house and found some DVDs.”
“I know he’s gone.” She wasn’t shouting, but she was emphatic. “I assume that’s him that’s been all over CNN and Fox. Was that you? My God, what were you thinking?”
We were not mentioning names or actual incidents. “Hey, hey. Slow down,” I said. “I just got up. I’ll tell you everything when I see you. The hurricane looks like it’s getting closer.”
“That’s the other thing. They’re saying landfall in twenty-four hours, somewhere between New Orleans and Panama City. We’re right in the bull’s-eye. People are closing up.”
Rule of thumb: bad weather always comes at the worst possible time. “What about the casino?”
“They’re open until six o’clock tonight,” LuEllen said. “I called them, but I haven’t been over today—I was too worried about you guys, I was afraid I’d miss your call. Why did you turn off your cell phone?”
“I didn’t want it to ring last night, in the middle of things. I forgot to turn it back on.” I started clicking around the channels on the television, and stopped when I got to Headline News.
“Jesus, I was afraid you were in jail or something,” LuEllen said.
“Listen, this thing up here is a mess—I might have to get more involved. But we’re close on the slot-machine research. Get the assignment notes and get over there and start dropping coins. I can be there by two o’clock, I think. You oughta be about finished and we’ll throw our shit in the car and get out.”
“Where’re we going?”
“I don’t know. Figure something out. I’ll be in the car on the cell phone. You say there’s a lot of TV?”
“Can’t get away from it. The big guys have been called in.” She meant the FBI.
“We were hoping for that,” I said.
“What?”
“I’ll see you in three or four hours, and explain.”
>>> DONE with LuEllen, I called John on his cell phone. “I’m on my way to an Office Depot,” he said. “Buying supplies for the city. Just got up, tried to call, but I kept getting your answering service.” He was out establishing an alibi. He added, “If you look at TV . . . it worked.”
“That’s what I hear. I haven’t seen it yet—have you called Marvel?”
“Not yet. Should I?”
“Probably. I just talked to LuEllen and she’d about laid an egg. If Marvel sees it before you call . . .”
“I’ll call her now. The report is on CNN and Fox.”
“CNN’s stuck on sports,” I said. “I’m heading back—I’ll call you at home when I figure something out. I’ll be on the cell phone full-time.”
“Good luck,” he said. “Oh, one other thing. I was thinking about it last night.”
“Yeah?”
“You oughta jump back in the sack with LuEllen. You’re acting like a kicked puppy and it can be pretty fuckin’ tiresome.”
>>> I WAS shaving when the Bobby story came up, and I stepped back into the main room to watch. The anchorwoman, who was wearing an amazing lilac shade of glitter lipstick, had one minute earlier been laughing excitedly about the lame excuses of a Hollywood celebrity charged with drunken driving, and had now wrenched her features into a semblance of solemnity as she told about the cross-burning. Though she took almost a minute to relate the story, she had nothing but the fact that a cross had been burned and a dead man found. The FBI was investigating. I finished cleaning up and took off.
In the daylight, Jackson didn’t look too much better than it had at night, though I’m probably not giving it a fair shake. All I saw were the highway sights, the usual run of discount stores and fast-food joints and quick-lube garages, and that was it for Jackson.
Going south, into the hurricane—all right, into a ten-mile-an-hour breeze—was a lot quicker, even with the rain, than the drive up the night before. I was in my sort-of-new car, an Olds Aurora, the most anonymous V-8 in Christendom, and not a bad car except for the soggy suspension, numb steering, and underpowered engine. I’d had it modified at a tuner shop in Wisconsin, squeezing maybe 300 horses out of it, and the suspension was now reasonable and the custom seats were actually good. A new passenger, riding in a straight line, with his eyes closed, might think he was in a BMW 540i. Cornering, though . . . you can only do so much with front-wheel drive.
I pushed hard, out of the motel by 10:20, staying on the gas, and pulled up to the Wisteria at 1:30. Now the coastal highway looked like hurricane season. Pickup trucks full of plywood, and even sedans with plywood roped to their roofs, were rolling up and down the beachfront, and people were boarding windows and moving boats. Big rollers were coming in from the Gulf, kicking up chest-high spray.
I’d had a pack of chocolate-covered doughnuts and a Diet Coke for breakfast, so I was an unhappy camper when I boarded the Wisteria. LuEllen was back in the slots, four machines down from a guy who looked like he’d just climbed off an oil rig.
“How’re we doing?” I asked.
“Another hour,” she said, slamming a quarter in the slot. “Another half hour, with you here.”
“I gotta get a sandwich,” I said. The oil-rig dude was giving me the hard eye. “Are they still talking about closing at six?”
“They’re talking about five, now. The hurricane is picking up speed.” She slammed another quarter, the last in her bucket, dug a notebook out of her pocket and entered a number.
“Just a quick sandwich.”
“I’ll come with you. Won’t make any difference on the time. We’re almost done.”
“You’re gonna bum out your fan club,” I muttered.
“I know,” she said, with a smile. “He’s kinda cute, too, in a razor-fight way.”
We went back to the aptly named poop deck, where I got a meatball sandwich and I filled her in. She’d done something to change the look of her hair, or maybe she’d just gone to smaller earrings, little diamonds that sparkled against her dark curls. She was curious about Bobby, since he’d been involved in two or three incidents where she’d nearly gotten her ass killed. I told her how fragile he looked and about the wheelchair.
“So we’re dealing with some kind of incredible asshole,” she said when I finished.
“Yeah. An incredible asshole with a laptop that’s got God-knows-what on it.”
“I gotta believe that Bobby was careful.” One of the reasons LuEllen hung out with me was that I was careful. She worried when people weren’t careful. She was perfectly willing to b
reak into a jewel merchant’s house in the middle of Saddle River, New Jersey, at three o’clock in the morning, knowing that place had more alarms than Wells Fargo . . . but she was careful about it. “He always seemed careful—you didn’t even know his name or where he lived, and you guys have been working together for years.”
“I hope he was,” I said. “But we can’t take the chance. He knows all about Anshiser, about what happened in Longstreet, about the whole deal down in Dallas—and if Microsoft ever finds out about the XP trapdoor, about that whole thing up in Redmond, they’ll probably hire a couple of killers.”
“Fuck Microsoft. I’m more worried about the people in Washington.” She wouldn’t even say the initials.
>>> THE meatball sandwich met the Wisteria standard, which wasn’t good but at least filled some space. When I finished, we went back to the slots. To avoid the notice of cracker thugs, we’d been carefully taking our time and moving around. Now we just pounded quarters, and nobody noticed. We had our numbers and were out of the casino at 2:30, and out of the motel by three o’clock. I resisted the urge to pee on the carpet before I left, though it would have given the place some character.
Because the hurricane had taken a bit more of a northeasterly track, we headed west on I-10. Until recently I’d had a condo in New Orleans, but the place had been taken over by a group of Ohio retirees, who’d begun messing with the association rules, and I’d sold out. I’d been planning to buy another one, but got distracted and hadn’t. Now I would have given my eyeteeth to have the old place back, to be where I was comfortable and had really good gear to use on Bobby’s files.
As it was, we were homeless. We took I-12 north of the city, stopped at a CompUSA in Baton Rouge, and bought a heavy-duty external DVD box that I could hook into my laptop. Because LuEllen said she couldn’t stand the rain any longer, we got back on I-10 and pushed on into the night. We finally stopped at a motel in Beaumont, Texas, just over the Louisiana border, still under a cloud deck, but no longer in the rain; the weather stations were promising sunshine in the morning.
By the time we stopped, we’d both grown tired of speculating about Bobby, tired of the casino job, and a little tired of each other. We got separate rooms and crashed.
>>> CRASHED for five hours, in my case. I don’t like short nights, but I’d been running on sugar and caffeine, and found that as I got older, they tended to screw me up. At four in the morning, I was looking at Bobby’s DVDs. Looking at them, as they sat in a plastic bag on top of a pile of clothes in my open suitcase. Not doing anything with them. The idea of all that stuff was intimidating. I walked down the hall and got a couple of straight Cokes and another roll of vending-machine chocolate doughnuts—more sugar and caffeine—and went back to the room, fired up the laptop, and finished the casino numbers.
Finishing the casino job was like knitting: it used some time and calmed the nerves. I was checking my work when LuEllen rang. “You up?”
“Since four,” I said. “We’re done with the casino.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“They’re taking two percent.”
“The greedy fucks,” she said, aghast. “That’s my money.”
“Technically, it was Congressman Bob’s money.”
“It’s the principle,” she said. Then, “You wanna run across the street for some French toast?”
“Give me ten minutes.”
“Well, give me a half hour. I just got up.”
>>> I USED the time to call Congressman Bob in Washington, where it’d be after eight. I called on his direct line and he answered, with his rustiest voice, on the second ring. “Yeah?”
“Congratulations on your reelection to the U.S. Congress,” I said.
He took a minute to sort out my voice, then he roared with laughter. “You got ’em.”
“They’re taking two percent. Two or three million a year, cash money, is going up in smoke and mirrors.”
“How sure?”
“Extremely sure. Exactly ninety-eight percent sure that we aren’t more than a half-percent off. What I’m not sure of is whether they’re doing it all the time. But they’re doing it right now, and if you want to do an audit, you better move on it.”
“Sincy, Blake and Coopersmith are sitting in my driveway with the engine running,” Bob said. “We been waiting to hear from you.”
“You got a hurricane down there.”
“Nah. Just a pissant storm. It ain’t nothing.”
“Okay. Well, you owe me.”
“I do,” he acknowledged. “You know I’m good for it.”
He was. Crooked as a crutch and absolutely good for his word.
>>> WHEN I hung up, I clicked on the TV, watched until LuEllen knocked on the door. As I went to answer it, the talking head on CNN came around to the burning-cross story. We both stood and watched it, and learned nothing. FBI said that they were developing leads and working in cooperation with the Jackson police. Yeah. A black reporter interviewed some fleshy guy who was pulling a fiberglass bass boat up a launch ramp, and who acknowledged that he was, in fact, an Imperial Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, and who said that the Klan believed in racial separation but not in hurting other people. Right. Eyes rolled nationwide and the talking head talked on.
“Did you look at the Weather Channel?” LuEllen asked, as we went down the hall to the parking lot.
“No. I was just finishing the numbers when you called. It’s not coming this way, is it?”
“It wasn’t even a hurricane when it came ashore. It’s up in Georgia, already, just a big bag of wind.”
“All right. What’re you gonna do today?”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Take a look at the DVDs. If they’re totally encrypted, that’ll take a couple of hours. See if I can figure out what’s going on with the FBI, if I can find a safe way to do it.”
“Then I’ll probably just look around town, I guess. See if I can find a driving range, hit some golf balls. Find a bookstore, get some magazines.”
>>> WE HAD breakfast at a family restaurant, French toast and link sausage and coffee, and then, as long as I still had the car, we went out to a pay phone and I called a friend in Livingston, Montana. He hadn’t gotten up, apparently, and was a little grumpy when he answered on the twentieth ring.
“Sorry,” I said. “You told me if I ever needed a channel, you had one. You still got it?”
“Yeah, but you’d have to wait until after six o’clock tonight, Eastern time.”
“What, it’s on somebody’s desk?”
“Yup.” That didn’t seem to bother him. “He’s a primo source, though. He gets a daily memo on every hot case in the country . . . criminal case, he’s not good on espionage. You wanted criminal, though, right?”
“Yeah, that’s great. How much you want?”
“For you? How about a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate on Amazon?”
“I can get it to you this morning,” I said.
“Got a pencil?”
He gave me a phone number, a name, and a password, and I was good. We went down the road to another phone and I charged a $500 gift certificate to a Visa card belonging to my old invisible friend, Harry Olson of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the guy with the cleanest credit record in the United States of America. He kept it clean by not existing and by paying all bills immediately.
>>> LUELLEN spent most of the day screwing around. She was a jock, was quietly turning into a golf nut, and had always been a power shopper. I expected her back in the late afternoon with a sunburn and an armful of bags from the local shopping center.
As she was acquiring a burn and assuring the financial stability of Abercrombie & Fitch and the Gap, I was digging through Bobby’s DVDs. Since I didn’t have an index, I wrote a little four-line Perl script that sorted through the files on each one and eliminated all the encrypted files.
When all the encrypted files were eliminated, there wasn’t much left. I then sampled the remnant and found ga
rbage—or if not garbage, then a pile of stuff that was simply useless unless you specifically needed it: databases from government agencies and newspapers, mostly. If, say, you needed sixteen hundred memos from the U.S. Department of the Interior written between August 1999 and January 2002, then I had them. But if you didn’t know what memos you wanted, you were wading in garbage.
Six hours in, I’d concluded that the DVDs were probably safe enough. The unencrypted stuff was all public record, as far as I could tell. I would save them to examine more thoroughly, but they didn’t feel threatening.
>>> I HAD done maybe sixty of the DVDs when LuEllen got back, laden with shopping bags. She dumped the bags on a bed, turned on the TV, checked the remnants of the hurricane on the Weather Channel—it had stalled as a deep low-pressure system over Tifton, Georgia, which had gotten forty-eight inches of rain in twenty-four hours, drowning out the local McDonald’s among other worthy civic monuments—and then moved to CNN, where the burning-cross incident had dropped down the play list.
The only new wrinkle was a hard-faced, disdainful rejection of racial murder and cross-burning as not only criminal, but un-American, by the presidential press secretary. He worked up a good head of steam, using words like “miserable excuse for a human being” when talking about the killers. He seemed pretty cheerful a moment later, though, when talking about a breast cancer operation on the presidential dog.
As we watched the dog story, I told LuEllen about the DVDs, and she nodded. “Told you Bobby was careful.”
“But damnit, I’d like to find that laptop,” I said. “Can’t look at the FBI until seven o’clock tonight. From the TV, it doesn’t sound like they’re doing much.”
“TV doesn’t know shit,” she said. “TV knows press releases.”
She said she’d hit six buckets of balls while she was gone, and smelled bad. “I’m gonna take a shower. Back in fifteen minutes.”
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 75