Danny and Daryl
Daryl Jones had walked by the Toyota three times: If he walked by again he would probably attract the wrong kind of attention. Even though he was a black man in a black neighborhood, it just wouldn't sit right with someone. They might guess he was up to something, but it didn't matter, he didn't have to go by again he had seen what there was to see.
Big Toyota, not one of the little ones. Looked to be in good shape too. Locked up tight, sitting at the curb right in front of Jessie Brown's pool hall: Which didn't really mean shit. It could be a player, it could be someone just having a quick drink in the underground bar in the basement, but it could also be one of the big boys in the poker games that went on all day and all night in the back room. That could be a problem, those guys, any one of them, would probably come out with their guns in their hands, shoot first and never even bother to ask questions.
He turned the corner and walked up next to Danny Gaynor where he sat on the steps of an abandoned building. Danny was probably the craziest white boy he knew. He was also the best car thief he knew, period.
"It'll work," he said to Gaynor. "Long as you're fast enough. They see me over there again I'll be fucked." He looked at his watch. "Got to get a move on too."
Gaynor nodded. "You know I'm fast. Tell me everything you saw," he said.
"Saw? I saw shit! There ain't shit to see," Daryl said. "Fuckin' Toyota. One of the big ones. You know I can't read so I can't tell you what the fuck it says. A big Toyota. I could tell from the symbol. It's blue. It's not tricked out, ain’t no bangers' car. Don't look like no old man's car neither. Doors is locked... Let me see... Got nice seats, looked comfortable. I can't think of nothing else I saw except these guys in the pool hall looking at me 'cause they might think I'm scoping it out, you see?" he asked.
"Yeah... Yeah, okay, man. I'll be right back." He got up and walked around the corner.
Daryl watched from the corner. Danny was good. So good that sometimes you didn't even realize what he had just done.
Danny walked up to the Toyota, the slim-Jim came up and sank into the window channel in one practiced move, so that it looked like he was simply bending to put the key into the lock. Even to Daryl it looked like Danny had simply slid a key into the Toyota's door lock. It was what your mind suggested because it didn't really see what happened: It was too fast. As he came out of the bend and straightened up, the slim Jim popped out and went back down the front of his pants and his other hand opened the door.
His head never dropped out of sight once he was inside the car. It just looked like a man settling his briefcase on the passenger seat, maybe, or a case-file, just getting ready to start the car and head off to work. He didn't hear it start, but he saw some dust lift from the curb of the roadway and the Toyota moved away and headed down the street.
Nothing. No one came out screaming and yelling: Whoever owned the car would find out later. He turned, jogged down to the next corner and climbed into the passenger side of the car when it stopped.
The ignition cylinder had a screwdriver sticking out of it. One of those cheap plastic, yellow handled ones. Danny said he liked them because they were easy to use without destroying the ignition. If you intended to peddle the car you simply went to the parts house, bought a new cylinder and door locks. All new keys, everything worked and there was no visible damage at all.
Danny held up a set of keys. "Under the fuckin' floor mat. Should've looked. I know better," he said.
They crossed over into Brownsville and pulled into what appeared to be a vacant warehouse. Two guys that were roughly the size of gorillas loaded the trunk up. "Don't fuck with it," one said. "Give it to them, take what they give you, bring it back." They both nodded and left the warehouse. They stopped long enough to switch plates and then they were rolling again.
Carlos had given them money to buy a used car to make the deal. Three thousand dollars, but they had spent that money on crack. It went so goddamn fast, Daryl thought. One minute you were a king, the next a piece of shit sucking some dudes' dick for more crack while the other guys laughed at you. He'd seen it. Never done it. It didn't have him by the balls yet, but it was creeping up.
It was worse for chicks. For chicks it was, "Sure I'll give you a rock, just blow my dog." Not, My Dog-My Boy, a real dog. That kind of shit. Crack was bad shit: Still bad shit, even with crystal. Had been for so long. Fuck, they were both bad, he supposed, but they were so goddamned good. It made you feel so goddamned good.
So the money got cracked up, that was all there was to it and Danny's solution had been to liberate the Toyota. There had never been any doubt that he could do it. None at all. If they could just keep their shit together for the next 24 hours or so they'd be fine. Back in the money. Sell the Toyota if they needed more.
"I don't know how to get there," Danny said.
"Well, first get us the fuck out of Brownsville before we get dead," Daryl said. "Let's go slow. It's a small town up north, almost in Canada. They got them country-ass farm girls up there. Cows everywhere, probably. Let's get out of New York and then we'll worry about getting up there," he said. “I got a fuckin' map. Take us out through Jersey. We got 'bout seven hours to get there... Plenty of time, I think.”
Danny nodded. He turned the radio on and headed out of Brownsville.
Rochester New York
Ben Neo
Ben had managed about four hours of sleep. Considering everything he had gotten done that was pretty good. No better or worse than his usual amount.
He wandered through the house to the kitchen. There was a huge walk in freezer in the basement, which, for some reason it would probably cost a lot of money to determine, had refused to kick on last night. So he'd had to take the racks out of his refrigerator and stuffed what was left of Carlos in there.
He opened the door to the refrigerator now and picked up the black duffel bag that sat in Carlos' headless lap and closed the door once more. The parts in the duffel bag had to go back to Prescott. What he intended to do with them Ben did not care to know; especially the other item. Head, two hands, one penis. Ben understood the symbolism of it, but the fact of it had been a little tougher to deal with, especially since he'd been the one to have to deal with it, but as requested, it was in there. Jefferson Prescott could make a statue of it if that's what he wanted to do.
He carried the duffel bag to the back door and placed it next to the big brown suitcase. Just over fourteen and a half million dollars in untraceable hundred dollar bills. Jimmy had met him in a bar over on ridge road late last night and delivered it to him in the parking lot. It wasn't enough to tempt him, although if he didn't have what he had in his own accounts it might have been. The weight of it was enough to make any man consider, but there was always the reality of Tommy Murphy and crazy Jimmy West to consider too.
He left the duffel bag next to the suitcase, went to the kitchen table, it was a retro 1950s style table on a pedestal: He moved the pedestal, took out his pocket knife and carefully levered out the one foot by one foot square floor tile that sat directly under the pedestal to reveal a floor safe. He bent, worked the combination and opened it. He pulled a paper bag and three 9 MM handguns from the deep well, leaving it empty for the first time he could remember. The paper bag held traveling money. Emergency stuff. Enough to buy whatever he might need. The three handguns were cheap, flat-black Chinese weapons. Good in a fix, but not much more. None had serial numbers, and all had friction tape wrapped around their handles to impede finger prints in case he had no time for gloves and had to leave one behind. He was wearing an over-sized leather jacket. The cash went into one pocket the three handguns in the other. He had already pulled his car around back, so it would be no problem to load it. He opened the back door, made his way down the steps, set the duffel bag and suitcase down and unlocked the trunk. Clean, except a black suitcase that sat to one side. That was Carlos' suitcase he had set in the back seat yesterday. He debated on taking it out and decided to leave it, he'd take care of it later i
f he needed to.
He set the duffel bag and the big brown suitcase into the trunk and then shut it. He got in the car and opened the glove box, slipped the paper bag and one of the guns inside, stuck another gun under the driver seat when he went around, and kept the last one in his pocket. His silenced 22 was in an inside pocket of the same jacket. He went back; locked the kitchen door after one last look around. A few minutes later he pulled out of his driveway and headed down Lake Avenue. It was not yet dawn and the traffic was light and sporadic. The city not yet awakened. He decided on the long route and ended up driving East Avenue out of downtown before he crossed to ridge road and headed towards Watertown.
Jilly
Jilly worked at the phish. She had nearly gotten the last user. She only needed the right password to get where she needed to be. And it would come along it always did.
The way she worked it was simple. She had a list of employees who had the clearance she needed. So she sent them a simple password update form as an e-mail attachment. It required them to enter their current password in order to update to the new password. Simple. Looked official too, just like the real thing. Of course there was no real thing, but they didn't know that. If they took the bait she was in, if not the email would destroy itself in an hour and so it wouldn't end up passed along to some tech guy to look into.
Most of these people made a little more than minimum wage, and had access to some of the most sensitive information in the world. And, she told herself, let's face it, someone with a basic high school equivalency diploma could enter data into a computer. It was easy. Kids in grade school did every day. It didn't take a genius, which was good as it helped that they were stupid enough to fall for her trick. Her Email alert chimed. She popped the program up in her browser.
Two returns out of the six. She opened them, both had updated their passwords. She squealed with delight. She would use the one tonight and save the other for the next job like this. She never used a password more than once. One random use usually wouldn't arouse suspicion. Too many uses would: Once and flush it.
She turned around to another machine, bought up the password window from its icon, and typed in the user name and password, once it was up she changed the password to the new password the user had entered. She repeated the process for the other user that had responded. Within a few seconds both accounts were legit again, only she had an in on both of them.
She wasn't entering from a website she was entering through a modeled machine. A perfect duplicate of a machine on an intranet in a government building that was out in L.A. somewhere. An intranet was a closed system, except this one wasn't. A tech that worked there had seen to that by hooking a simple emulation board into a LAN circuit card. After the modification the mainframe handled her request as though it were from a machine that was part of the intranet.
She called up the sets a finger print files and made the changes she had been asked to make. She had no idea who Benjamin Neo was in reality, but in her world he was a customer who paid well and used her often. He had just paid 100 grand for clean fingerprints. His old prints had then been attached to the second name he had given her. She wondered for a second or two what that might mean, then pushed it out of her head. Bad people, good money. She was not a bad person. She had good karma. Sometimes you had to do bad things, but since the bad people were paying you it was really them that did those bad things, she simply facilitated. She thought about that. She decided she liked it.
She popped up the window for her word processor and began typing in her thought. She had a whole collection of illuminating thoughts like that. Someday she might publish it, she thought, but then again maybe not: If she did, everyone would be as smart as she was. Know everything she knew. No, she decided. She'd keep her collection to herself. Go and look at it from time to time just to keep it fresh in her head. She clicked save and then turned the window into an icon.
Bad people, good money, she thought. She sipped at her diet coke and went to work on the next job.
Northbound I-81
Ben Neo
Ben Neo picked up Ed Reiser in Mexico on the way to Watertown. Ed was someone he had developed on his own. Ed thought he had what it took to be a mafia bag man. Ed didn't really know what that was, except what he'd seen in movies. It looked fun. Stimulating, and better than that you could make a lot of money.
Ben had met Ed online. Once they had met a few times, Ben had, had Jilly check him out. Clean. Not so much as a parking ticket. Finger printed when he went into the air force. Honorable discharge. Not the typical guy looking to get into organized crime.
Ed had been disappointed at first when Ben had told him he wasn't in the mafia and didn't know anyone that was, but he was sure he could find lots of things for Ed to do that would be interesting, fun and make him a lot of money as well.
He'd taken him with him twice now. Two small drug deals, which probably looked enormous to Ed. A quarter of million in cash on the last one. This would be his biggest deal to date, enough hard stuff to keep a small city high for a few years.
Ben filled him in on the deal as they drove.
Watertown
Thompson Park
The Cop
The car rolled to a stop. He was by himself. It was still early, a half hour before he had to be in. The shift-change. He had plenty of time, and at his level it wasn't like he had to punch a time clock. Worse came to worse and everything got badly fucked up he could call in sick at the last minute. There wasn't much going on: At least not much that would require his input. He had his partner to worry about, but probably only marginally.
He had parked in the lot and walked down the sidewalk to the lookout area at the park. You could see for miles, which was probably the reason they were meeting here for the deal. They would be able to see in all directions, no one could sneak up on them and there was no place to hide. Even his personal car parked farther up the hill in the empty lot stuck out like a sore thumb. He had pulled it closer to the zoo area so it would look like it belonged to an overnight worker there.
He tried to decide quickly where they might meet. In the pavilion to the left that capped a set of stone steps descending out of the park, or at the lookout itself which was a circular stone walled area to the right. He decided to bug both places. He could go up to the main parking lot, still be able to pick up the radio signal, be out of sight, yet close enough to get here quickly if he had to: If he was honest with himself he wasn't even sure that this whole deal was going to happen. The same guy who delivered his payoff had put the bug in his ear. Rivals, he supposed. Trying to knock each other out of the arena. He only knew there would be a substantial amount of money involved and a large quantity of drugs. The guy who had delivered his envelope for the month had called it a tip.
He wasn't worried about a setup. They had been working together for almost five years, who was there to set up? He assumed the money he took covered certain people, certain situations. If he was called and asked to lose a piece of evidence, or soft peddle a case he did. It was that simple. Maybe nothing for six months. Maybe two or three small requests in a month. Maybe something big every once in a while. He could count those on one hand though: Exactly twice, and he had made happen what they had wanted to happen. No problem.
So he wasn't worried about a set up, it was a tip. A little something extra. All he had to do was see how it played out, and that was a few hours away. He had the whole day planned out so he could be solo. Mostly bullshit, but it would keep his partner doing something while he did something else. Apart: He would have the freedom to move. To do what he needed to do, whatever that might be. It would start though with getting to work, making an appearance and then getting back up here to wait and listen.
He placed both bugs. Checked them and then walked back up the hill to his own vehicle.
Lott Road
Billy Jingo
Billy Jingo came awake all at once: He had been dozing in front of the television. He had gotten home about two
AM from work. He'd picked up beer and cigarettes for the weekend, he didn't work Fridays, that was the beginning of his weekend. He'd debated and then decided to stay up a little while, have a few beers and watch TV. The Canadian station was coming in pretty good and there had been some foreign film on. It was in French, or at least he supposed it was in French. He heard enough French living so close to Canada, and he had even been to Canada a few times, so he was pretty sure it was French. He couldn't understand a word of it, but you didn't have to speak French to understand nudity. And there had been a lot of nudity in the film. The film had been about a group of young college girls who kept finding themselves in trouble, or naked, or both. Somewhere along in there he had fallen asleep.
The clock said 7:30 AM. The sun was up. The trailer was cold, a litter of empty beer cans and an overflowing ashtray sat on the coffee table in front of the couch.
He got up, his body stiff. He had run a buffer nearly all of his eight hour shift and his back and shoulders were sore. It would go away, he told himself. It always did. Go to sleep get up tonight and... Well, sit alone and drink beer, watch TV. Whoopee, he told himself. He dropped the beer cans into the bag for empties under the sink. He never bothered to rinse them. He dumped the ashtray and wandered down the hallway to bed.
Watertown Center
Shop and Stock
April Evans
"Going home?" Alice Chambers asked.
"Yeah," April agreed. It was early morning, the sun just coming up, shining through the dirty front windows of the store.
"I could drop you. I know it's not a long walk, but if you wanted a ride, you know," she blushed and her face colored.
The Shop and Stock was on the main highway nearly directly across from the entrance to Lott road. It was a half mile down the road to the trailer park. Not far. She walked it all the time, including early morning and late evening.
April's rule of thumb with Alice was not to lead her on. Not to give her false hope. Alice wanted to be with her, it was clear. There had been a time when they had been together, but that was over and had been over for nearly a year. She didn't want her to think that it might start up again. Letting her give her a ride home might make her think that there was hope. It might, and that could hurt her and she didn't want to do that.
Earth's Survivors: box set Page 140