Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  As they’d grown, and shifted, and evolved, he’d grown right along with them.

  There are, undoubtedly, some serious databases that he couldn’t get at—computers that had been isolated from any phone service; computers where, to download information, you had to accept the information on disk or on paper, handed to you by a guy who checked your credentials in person and got a signed receipt for the disk.

  But those computers are damned few. It’s just too inconvenient. If the director of the CIA wants to look at something on his desktop, he doesn’t want to have to go down in the basement to look at it. He wants it in his office. And if he looked at it on his desktop, then Bobby could look at it too. Because Bobby was everywhere.

  I scanned through the information in the last five files, and thought three things.

  First, when Wayne Bob had looked at that single disk of information and commented that we were now two of the most powerful people in Washington, he may have been right, but that disk was a child’s trinket compared to Bobby’s laptop.

  Second, it occurred to me that I was now the Invisible Man—I could go anywhere, and see almost anything, and probably do quite a bit to people I didn’t like.

  And third, I thought, You’re in a lot of trouble now, Kidd.

  >>> AFTER considering it for a while, I transferred the encryption keys to my own notebook, so I wouldn’t have to re-fetch them from Rachel every time I wanted to look at Bobby’s files. I had a good-sized hard disk myself, and hid them in the clutter. Still, if the feds got their hands on it, and knew what they were looking for, they’d find the keys. I’d find a better hiding place as soon as I got home.

  Home . . . What if Carp had called Krause back, had given him my name and my license plate number, and some thugs were waiting in my apartment to take me down? I got paranoid thinking about it, and finally called the old lady who lived downstairs from me—a painter, and a good one, who took care of the cat when I was gone—to check on the apartment and to tell her I was on my way back.

  “Means nothing to me. You can stay away as long as you want.” She loudly crunched on a carrot stick or piece of celery, and said while she was chewing, “I put the cat through the garbage disposal two days ago, the stinky thing, and stole your Whistler. What else do you have that I need?”

  “How about a real sense of humor?” I suggested.

  She was ragging on me, which was good: she knew everything that happened in the apartment building, so there probably weren’t any thugs waiting on the landing.

  >>> THE rest of the evening was spent systematically going through the last five files, figuring out exactly what was there. An index helped, but the entries were often cryptic in themselves—just a couple of words or initials that Bobby would recognize.

  At one o’clock in the morning, I popped an Ambien to take me down, and got six hours of good sleep. Sometime before nine o’clock the next morning, I was again crossing the rolling green landscape of Ohio, heading toward I-80, which would take me into Chicago.

  I hadn’t thought much about Carp—what he might be doing—since I’d last seen him on his bicycle outside Rock Creek Park. He was in hiding, I thought. I’d also lost track of the murder investigation in Jackson, which I resolved to check into that night. If the feds didn’t winkle him out pretty soon, I’d start messaging the FBI myself.

  At ten o’clock, or a little after, I stopped at a Dairy Queen to get an ice-cream cone. I was leaning against the car’s front fender, munching the dipped-chocolate coating off the ice cream, when I heard the phone ring in the car. LuEllen.

  I scrambled to get inside without dripping ice cream on the upholstery, got the phone, and punched it up. “Yeah?”

  Child’s voice, shaky, and thin, as if she were some distance from the phone’s mouthpiece: “Mr. Kidd? He took me on the way to the liberry.”

  “What?”

  “He took me on the way to the liberry. He wants Bobby’s laptop.”

  Shit. Not LuEllen. It was Rachel. “Where are you, honey? What’re—”

  “Kidd? This is James Carp.”

  Like getting whacked in the forehead. “Carp?”

  “I assume you’re the one who took the laptop out of my car. Pretty smart. I want it back. I’ll trade you.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “The laptop. And Rachel, here. I’ve got her, and I’m going to keep her until I get the laptop. But there’s a deadline. I assume you’re still in Washington. I want you down here near this place, Longstreet, as soon as you can get here. Tonight? Tonight, I think.”

  “I’m not in Washington,” I said. “I can’t get there tonight. I’m in my car in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Then get somewhere,” he snapped. His voice had a high, squeaky quality, as though it were on the edge of cracking; as though he were on the edge of cracking. “I’ll tell you this. This is what I’m going to do. I’m gonna stick this girl so far out in the woods that you’ll never find her. Out in the wilderness. I’m gonna chain her to a tree. If you fuck with me, I’ll never go back, and you’ll never find out where she is.”

  “I’ll get you the laptop, but I can’t get there tonight,” I said. My voice was scared, and I didn’t care if it showed; maybe it was better that it showed. And I was lying like a motherfucker, trying to buy time. “I’m way up in West Virginia. I can get there maybe tomorrow afternoon. Honest to God, I’m out in the sticks. I’ll get to an airport, try to find a flight that’ll get me into Memphis, and I’ll get a car from there. But don’t put her out in the woods. If you put her out in the woods and she dies, you’ll get the death penalty. You still might be clear with the cops.”

  “Oh, bullshit. They know I killed Bobby. The only thing that’ll get me clear is that laptop, and the files. If I have that, they’ll talk. They’ll let me go off somewhere and play with myself. Otherwise, I’m toast. You try to jump me, I swear to God I’ll put a gun in my mouth and little miss black girl here will rot under a tree in the middle of a swamp.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t do that,” I said, as urgently as I could.

  “Fuck you. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”

  He was gone.

  >>> I CALLED John. “I just got a phone call from James Carp. He’s there in Longstreet and he says he’s got Rachel. Have you seen her?”

  “Rachel?” He was sputtering like I had. “Rachel? She just left here half an hour ago, walking down to the library.”

  “I talked to a little girl, just for a moment. Sounded like Rachel. She said he got her on the way to the library, goddamnit, John, I think he got her, you gotta check.”

  “Call you back,” he rasped, and he was gone.

  >>> I HAD passed Cleveland on I-80. As soon as John was off the phone, I turned around and headed back, my laptop propped against the steering wheel. I pulled up Microsoft’s Streets and Trips program. Cleveland International was on my side of the metro area, fortunately, and I was able to take I-480 right back in. As soon as I figured out where I was going, I called directory assistance and got phone numbers for four charter air services. I was probably sixteen hours from Longstreet by road, close to a thousand miles. But maybe I could get a plane into Greenville.

  The first place I called at Cleveland International was basically an air ambulance service. The woman who answered the phone recommended another service, whose number I didn’t have, but who she said was most likely to have a plane free quickly.

  I called, and got a man’s quiet voice. “Rogers Air Transport.”

  “I need to get a plane to Greenville, Mississippi, in the next couple of hours,” I said, and my voice reflected it. “Do you have one, or do you know where I could get one?”

  “What do you want, exactly?”

  “To get down there as fast as I can. I’ve got a family emergency.”

  “Well, uh, I can get you a Lear into Greenville, have you down there in a couple of hours or a little more. But, uh, it won’t be cheap.”

  “How
much?”

  “Mm, I’d have to figure it.” There was a moment of silence, and I had the feeling that he was staring at the ceiling, rather than running an accounting program. He came back. “About forty-five hundred. That’s if I don’t have to hang around down there.” He sounded apologetic.

  “I’ll take it,” I said. “I’m on the way to your place now. I’m maybe thirty or forty miles out. You won’t have to hang around, I’ll fly back commercial to pick up my car.”

  “About payment, uh, we require—”

  “You can have it any way you want it,” I said. “Cash, check, or credit card.”

  “Cash would be fine.”

  >>> ROGERS Air Transport had its worldwide headquarters in a cream-colored metal pole barn that served as both hangar and office. I parked in front, dug my stash cash out of the trunk, got one bag with clothes and another that had all three laptops, and carried them around to the office, which smelled pleasantly of aviation gas and hot oil, and was empty.

  “Hello?” I called. Nothing. A side door led out of the office, and I stuck my head out and saw a redheaded man walking toward me. He wore denim overalls and a train engineer’s hat, and was wiping his hands on a rag. “Mr. Kidd?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Jim Rogers.” He stuck out a hand and I shook it. “We’re ready if you are.”

  “My car’s outside.”

  “It’ll be okay there until you can get back. I hope it’s nothing terrible down in Greenville.”

  “It’s bad enough,” I said. I wasn’t going to be able to avoid saying something. “My dad’s had a heart attack. They’re gonna try to fix things, but nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

  “Aw, too bad,” he said. A woman came around the corner, mid-thirties with smile lines around her eyes, a good tan, a ponytail, and a flight suit.

  “This is Marcia, our co-pilot,” Rogers said.

  “I’m his old lady,” Marcia said. “You ready?”

  Jim’s eyes sort of drifted—I had the feeling he wasn’t the most dynamic of executives, though he might have been a hell of a guy—and I said, “Oh, yeah, better give you this,” and handed him forty-five hundred from my stash cash. He took it and nodded, not asking the obvious question, which I answered anyway. “I was up here buying pottery,” I said. “Lucky for me, a lot of those places only take cash.”

  “Lucky,” he agreed.

  >>> JIM ROGERS was a garrulous guy, and his wife smiled a lot and nodded at him. They took turns flying the plane, and Rogers talked us down to Greenville. Airplane stories, mostly—he’d been a bush pilot in Ontario for a few years. That was fine with me: I nodded and told him a couple of Ontario fly-fishing stories, and no real information was exchanged. I called John on his cell phone as we were passing near Louisville, and he told me that nobody could find Rachel.

  “Sounds bad,” I said, without thinking. Jim and Marcia glanced at each other, misinterpreting it.

  “Get your ass down here,” John said.

  “I’ll be in Greenville in a little more than two hours,” I said.

  When I rang off, Marcia said, “More trouble.”

  “Pretty tense situation,” I said.

  “Gotta pray for the best.”

  John was waiting when we got there. He grabbed my bag with his good arm and started off to his car, while I shook hands with Jim and Marcia; I think they thought John was my faithful retainer, me being white, John being black, and all of us being in Greenville.

  John and I were on our way to Longstreet by 3:30. John was as grim as I’d ever seen him. “He’s a crazy man,” he said. And, quietly nuts himself, “I’m gonna kill him.”

  Chapter

  Nineteen

  >>> WE PULLED INTO LONGSTREET after six, still bright daylight, and brutally hot. People tended to stay off the streets with these temperatures, and the downtown strip had that cheap-science-fiction-movie vacancy, the emptiness that makes you think the residents are off having their brains eaten by aliens. Two yellow dogs, sitting in the awning shade in front of the Hardware Hank, were doing nothing but staying alive.

  Marvel had been roaming the town in her car, methodically, street by street, looking for Rachel and for Carp’s red Corolla. She found neither. John called her when we were a mile out of town and she pulled into their short driveway just a few seconds ahead of us.

  Marvel watched us park, and when I got out of the car she stepped over to me, looked up, and asked, “What’s going on, Kidd? What’d you do?”

  “It’s all part of the same thing that got Bobby killed and John shot,” I said. “Bobby’s goddamn laptop turns out to be worth its weight in plutonium, and Carp’s crazy to get it.”

  “Then give it to him,” she said. “Get Rachel back.”

  “We’re gonna get Rachel,” John said from behind her. “We’re gonna get her, one way or another.”

  Marvel almost got launched again, spinning around. “You, Mr. Shot-in-the-Arm bigshot spook secret agent—”

  “Shut up,” he said, and walked into the house. Marvel’s mouth snapped shut, and a moment later tears started. I’d never seen John speak to her in anything like the tone, even without the words. She hurried after him and I stood in the yard with my bag full of computers, feeling like the world’s leading asshole for just being a part of it.

  >>> THEY didn’t take long to make up, and spent the next hour taking care of each other—which didn’t prevent some hard talk. “Call the cops,” Marvel was saying. “We’ve got four guys down there at the police station that we can count on. We get them going . . .”

  But John was shaking his head. “Don’t you see? It’s all tangled together. We can’t tell anyone anything, or it unrolls. The next thing we know, we’ve got wall-to-wall feds in the front room. We can get her back, but we have to do it.”

  Nobody said, “If she’s still alive.”

  >>> JOHN had mentioned during the ride from Greenville that his kids were staying with their grandmother overnight, and maybe for a couple of nights, to clear out some space. I didn’t ask what he meant by that, the space comment, because we were talking about three things at once, but an hour after we got in, a couple of black guys arrived at the house. They were not particularly big or prepossessing, but you probably wouldn’t want to fight either of them. They were smart, and smiling, and said hello to John and gave hugs to Marvel, and went back to a third bedroom like they’d been there before.

  A half hour after the first two guys arrived, another two came in. Two more arrived before midnight. More talk, a few bottles of beer, lots of ice water and Cokes for three of them who were former alkies:

  “They could just be ditched in a hotel or motel anywhere up and down the highway.”

  “Fat white guy with a beard and a little black girl? A real little black girl? I don’t think so, he doesn’t want to be noticed and Rachel’s smart, she’ll holler her head off first chance she gets.”

  “. . . got the same problem with any kidnapping, how do you trust each other to make the trade?”

  “The other question is, is this laptop worth saving?”

  “It’s not the laptop, man. It’s Bobby and all the rest of it.”

  “Cut our losses.”

  “Can’t cut Rachel.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  >>> DURING the course of the conversation, I told them about the last time I’d seen Carp, as he rode off on his mountain bike to make the deal with Krause. They all listened carefully, and then one of them, Kevin, said, “So he’ll try something tricky with us, too. Maybe the bike, maybe something else.”

  I said, “When I talk to him tomorrow, I’ll make the point that we’ve all got trouble if this trade caves in. We’ve got trouble because he knows my name, some of what we’ve done, and our association with Bobby. So we can’t go to the cops. And he’s got trouble because we know he killed those two guys at his apartment, and he killed Bobby, and he can’t go to the cops. I’ll tell him we jus
t want Rachel back and I’ll trade the laptop because I can’t get into the laptop anyway.”

  “The question is, where does he make the trade?” asked a man called Richard. “What’s the tricky thing that he’s gonna do? We’ve got five cars, and we all got cell phones, so we can talk, but if he sees us chasing him, and he’s got something tricky going, and shakes us, what do we do? Then we’re really fucked.”

  We argued about that for a while, and with all the talk of tricks, a thought popped into my head. “John, do you have a decent map?”

  He had a county map, and one of the other guys had a big Rand McNally map book, and together they worked well enough. We spread them out on the kitchen table and the others gathered around as I pulled my finger down the curlicue of the Mississippi.

  “Look at this. This could be the trick. If he has me go to someplace pretty far north or south of town . . . and if he bought a canoe or a boat, or stole one, or rented one . . . If he leaves his car on the other side of the river, paddles across, meets me, gets the laptop, and then paddles back to his car . . . we’d never catch him. We’d all be stuck over here, on the wrong side. If he takes us twenty miles downriver, it’d take the best part of an hour just to get back to the bridge and down the other side where he was.”

  “How long you think to paddle across?” one of the guys asked, tapping his finger on the blue line of the river. “I don’t know shit about canoes.”

  “If he knows what he’s doing, ten minutes,” I said. “Two minutes in a powerboat.” I pointed at a couple of narrow points, where the river looked like it was no more than a half-mile across. “He wouldn’t pick one of the wider parts. And he’d get himself all set before he calls us.”