“Well, yeah. I mean, duh-uuh. That’s the whole point, you know?”
“They can trace it back to this place?”
“You said this site, not this place.”
“Oh.” Isn’t semantics fun? “So what about this place?”
“No way.”
“And nobody else can read it, either? I mean, without having access to the computer on one end of the message or the other?”
He shook his head. “Not unless they’ve got a sniffer.”
I was afraid he was going to say something like that. I looked out the window and saw the cop leaving the phone booth and going back to his car.
“What’s a sniffer?”
“It’s like a wiretap, only for computers. But it has to have a dedicated phone line. Too many signals to sort out, otherwise.”
“How comforting. And who would have one of these sniffers?”
“Them.”
“Them.”
“Yeah, you know. Men in Black, the Forces of Evil, aliens, the government, all like that. Them.”
“Oh, Them.”
“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”
“Perish the thought, Brian. Who else could have a sniffer?”
“Rich people, I guess. And industrial spies. It’s illegal for anybody, of course. Even the cops are supposed to get a court order first. But if you’ve got enough money, you can get any kind of hardware you want.”
“And somebody like you to make it work.”
He stood a little straighter and smiled around a stud.
“Sure, I could do that.”
And if he could, the world was full of people who could. And one of them could have definitely asked the local fuzz to check out a phone number. I looked out the store window and saw the squad car leave the phone booth and head straight for us, though still in no hurry. Ahead of him, though, a brownish-red Pontiac stopped at the curb in front of the door.
At first I didn’t recognize the blonde at the steering wheel. Rosie was wearing a low-cut white dress and lipstick, and she had her hair pulled back into some kind of roll. She looked five years younger than when we had last talked and a lot cuter, and her crooked smile told me she knew as much. She leaned over to look in the plate glass window, searching. I caught her eye and held up a hand that I hoped said, “Wait right there.” Three seconds later, I was getting in the passenger door, ignoring the comments from young Brian that followed me out.
“Kiss me,” I said.
“Why, Herman, I thought you’d never…”
“Kiss me like I’m your loving spouse, finally done copying the work he always takes home with him.”
“Like this?”
“Mmph.” I had been going to say, “Too passionate,” but her tongue got in the way. She had a very talented tongue. Quite possibly electric, also, since it definitely activated things far removed from my mouth. I wasn’t giving it the attention it deserved, though. Above her shoulder, I could see the squad car slow and hesitate, having to rethink the scenario he had just worked out. This was good. We held the kiss for a while longer, and then I got the rest of the way into the car and buckled my seat belt.
“Now cruise on out of here, nice and smooth and respectable. If that cop stares at you, give him a pretty smile and a wave.”
But he didn’t. He kept heading for the print shop. “Go out around the end of the mall by the shirt store, and watch your mirror.”
“Hey, it was a great kiss for me, too, but you don’t have to get all gushy about it.”
“Is he following us?”
“No.” She watched the mirror for a couple seconds. “Oops, yes, now he is. But not fast. Aren’t you going to tell me I look stunning?”
“Actually, you do. How far back?”
“All the way to my irresistible round ass, what do you think?”
“How far back is the cop?”
“Oh, him. Half the length of the parking lot. Thanks for the compliment.”
“My pleasure.”
She turned by the trendy rag store, and by the time we got to the service drive entrance, the cop still hadn’t made the corner behind us. “Turn in here,” I said, pointing. “Put on a little speed, but don’t spin your wheels. We don’t want to leave a lot of dust.”
We turned down the service road and accelerated, and we were almost to the next corner, where we could turn again and be out of sight behind the main mall, when the cop swung in behind us and turned on his flashers.
“So much for finesse.”
“You want me to lose him?”
“Are you serious?” I asked. “You know what you’re doing?”
“Watch me.”
“All right, I will.”
“Really?”
“Punch it.”
She stood on the brakes first, and when the I’m-smarter-than-you-are system wouldn’t lock up the wheels, she hit the hand brake.
“Lots of dust,” she said, by way of explanation.
“I noticed.”
As soon as the brown cloud started to roll around us, she killed the lights and hit the gas, hard, taking the corner around the mall in a power slide and continuing to accelerate out of it. Halfway down the back service drive, the speedometer was passing sixty.
“I don’t want to tell you your business,” I said, “but for what it’s worth, there’s a break in that fence up there that a car could get through.”
“Where?”
“Right by the back door of the bagel joint.”
“Perfect. Hold tight. I think you’ll like this.”
We flew past the fence opening at seventy-plus. She spotted it and hit the hand brake again, throwing the car into a one-eighty half spin on the gravel.
“More dust,” she said. I just nodded and hung on. We came out of our own cloud, slowly and smoothly now, turned up the berm, and went through the fence. Down at the far end of the mall, the way we had just come from, the cop’s lights were just starting to emerge from the first dust cloud, slowly, tentatively. Before he was clear of it, we were gone, over the crest. In another world. Literally vanished in a cloud of dust. I was impressed.
The back side of the berm was less impressive. You wouldn’t exactly call it a drivable surface, but the fact that it was downhill made it easier to jolt over the rocks and leap the chasms. The fact that it wasn’t my own car whose undercarriage we were destroying didn’t hurt my feelings any, either. I just hoped we didn’t trip any air bags.
At the bottom was another service road, this one paved with cinders, that paralleled the railroad tracks. Rosie followed it for a quarter mile or so, until we came to a sort of crossing, and then we went over a bunch of tracks and down into the industrial backwaters. We were well out of sight of the mall now, even from the top of the berm, and she put the headlights back on and settled into an easy twenty-five. I toggled down my window and listened for sirens. Nothing. Just distant freeway noise and an occasional airplane.
“Slick,” I said.
“Wow, an unsolicited compliment. Thank you. I had a lot of practice as a kid, chasing jackrabbits over plowed fields in a pickup.”
“Ever catch any?”
“Of course not. Why would I want to catch a jackrabbit?”
Ask a silly question.
“If we want to get clear of this area in a hurry,” she said, “we could go like a bat between two sets of train tracks.” She obviously liked the idea a lot.
“Until we come to a bridge or a switch block.”
“Fuss, fuss. What’s a chase without risks?”
“A successful escape.”
“You know, you really ought to learn to lighten up once in a while, Herman.” Her shoulders slumped and she gave an exaggerated sigh. “Okay. So what’s our plan?”
“Hide someplace in this area for a few hours, until our cop and all the friends he’s calling right now get some other things to think about besides us.”
“Pretty daring. You see a place you like?”
“Not yet. Cruise a bit.” Another jetliner popped out of the sky with a full array of lights, and a block or so away, I saw a flash of what I wanted. “That way,” I said, and she turned into the wake of the jet.
“Who are we, by the way?”
“I said I’d be your guide, not your shrink. If you’re going to do identity crisis, you’re on your own.”
“I mean who are we if we get asked, like by a cop or a desk clerk, okay?”
“We don’t talk to cops. Shoot the bastards on sight.” She took both hands off the wheel and pantomimed mowing down the blue hordes with a machine gun.
“Will you please sober up?”
“Oh, all right. I don’t know what to tell the cops, okay? As far as the hotel is concerned, I’m Ms. Rosemary Wapczech, and you’re none of their damn business.”
“Gee, for some reason, I thought it would be O’Grady.”
“Nope, Rosie the Polack. Sorry. You want it to be O’Grady?”
“For the hotel, I want it to be whatever is on your plastic. But the none-of-their-damned business is no good. They might decide you’re a hooker and toss you out for the sake of their fine reputation.”
“Oh come on, Herman. Do I look like a hooker?”
“The classier ones are hard to tell from real women, you know.”
“Based on your vast experience.”
“Some of my best customers.” Actually, my experience was that the high-tone prostitutes—the society women who got their thrills with a little role-playing and a little walk on the wild side, or the spoiled college girls who didn’t want to wait to cash in on the good life, or even the expensive call girls with their remarkable beauty and penthouse condos and silk-suited lawyers—were among my worst customers. They would stiff me, any chance they got. The real, hard-working street walkers, on the other hand, the ones with too much makeup and too little of everything else, including looks and brains, tended to be rock-solid reliable. I think it has something to do with honor and dignity being more valuable to the people who don’t normally get any of the stuff. I don’t have it all worked out yet. And I didn’t try to tell Rosie about it.
“For the hotel staff, I’ll be Herman—what is it, again?”
“Wapczech. It’s easy to remember: just think, ‘Italian bank draft.’ But you don’t have any ID.”
“They won’t ask, as long as we’re using your credit cards. For the cops, though, we’ll need something else. I have a sort of printing press in my briefcase. Maybe we’ll cook something up when we get to settle down for a bit.”
“Maybe, huh? Meanwhile, maybe we can just be who we are, and you can be taking me back home for jumping bail.”
I thought about it for a minute. “You know, that’s actually not bad. If they have a bulletin on me, we would have to reverse the roles, but it might still work. It would be even better if we had some handcuffs.”
“I have some in my purse.”
“You’re kidding. Why would you…”
“Is that where you want to park?”
“That’s it.” Handcuffs?
We picked a spot in a steel recycling yard, where a lot of old cars were massed together, waiting to be crushed into bales and then fed into a blast furnace. I picked the padlock on the fence with a paper clip from Kinko’s. After we were inside and re-locked, I took off our wheel covers and license plates and put them in the trunk, stuck a cardboard placard from another car on the windshield, and kicked a little extra dirt on the front end. Then we backed in between two other cars, so close on each side that our doors couldn’t be opened. More to the point, it was also too close for anybody looking us over to walk up to the side of the car. It would do, if anything would.
“Snug,” said Rosie.
“Inconspicuous, anyway. Tilt your seat back, so our heads don’t stick up above the dash.”
“Comfy. Can we call room service now?”
“I have to admit, that sounds good. I have some bagels, if you’re starving.”
“Hey, yeah? I have a bottle of champagne and some fancy chocolate-covered black cherries.”
By now, I knew better than to ask if she was kidding, and I laughed instead. “You’re just a bundle of surprises, Rosie.”
“I am, aren’t I? I want you to realize, by the way, that I booked us a deluxe suite at the Crown Regal Inn, with a Jacuzzi and a kitchenette.”
“You want me to feel guilty?”
“Very, very guilty. Or disappointed, at the least.”
“I can handle both of those.”
“Anyway, I could see you were going to be a hard sell, so I picked up some goodies. I figured if I can’t get laid, at least I can get high.”
If I’d been eating a bagel, I’d have choked on it. Finally I managed to say, “You’re going to get high on chocolate cherries?”
“You take your pleasure where you find it, Herman.”
You do indeed, don’t you? “Have a bagel, Rosie.” I passed the bag over to her.
“Delighted, Herman. Have a swig of champagne. You have to open it, though. I’m terrible with those things. Also, I don’t want to stain my new dress. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Why would you need my permission not to stain your dress?”
“Just thought I’d ask.” With that, she leaned forward to undo her zipper, then slipped the dress over her head and placed it neatly in the back seat. “I didn’t have time to shop for any underwear,” she said.
I found myself recalling G. B. Feinstein’s line about fine curves: A subtle variation on a timeless theme. Hers weren’t all that subtle, maybe, but they were definitely fine.
“You are…”
“‘Irrepressible’ is the word that I always liked.”
“‘Sneaky,’ is what I was going to say.”
“That, too.” She insinuated an arm around the back of my neck, and I didn’t seem to do anything to stop her.
“You know, I never…” I began.
“No, you didn’t. And you don’t have to.”
I was talking about promises. I hoped she was, too, since…
“You know why I never ran down any jackrabbits?”
“Um. Because you’re too kindhearted?”
“Because I prefer the ambush.”
She did good ambush. I have to say, though, handcuffs are not as much fun as people generally suppose. By the time we got around to the champagne, it was warm, and it exploded all over hell. But we didn’t get any on our clothes.
Chapter Eleven
Love Among the Ruins
“Are you awake, Herman?”
“I am, but I’m in the middle of an intense intellectual exercise.” I pulled my coat back up over her shoulder, where she had shaken it off in her sleep, and she snuggled a bit closer, making my left arm, if possible, even more numb. I did not look forward to the time when it quit being numb.
“Trying to figure out how you wound up sleeping in the middle of a junkyard with a strange woman?”
“No, I’m trying to decide which is more boring, the ceiling in a dentist’s office or the head liner in this car.”
“I thought a headliner was an overpaid performer.”
“It’s also the upholstery they put on the bottom of a car roof.”
She rolled partway over and looked up. “You’re right; that’s pretty boring. Does it win?”
“It’s a tough call. My dentist has artsy pictures on his ceiling, but the hygienist doesn’t wrap her leg around my waist.”
“That’s why they need the pictures.” She flexed the aforementioned limb a bit for emphasis and added an arm to the gesture, and the phrase holding against the night flashed into my mind. Maybe the holding thing is like the green Volvo: it only shows up when you’re not looking for it. But my mind jumped just as quickly to a vision of a murderous black LTD, and the moment was suddenly gone.
“Do you have a watch, Rosie
?”
“Don’t you?”
“I do, but I no longer have the arm it was attached to.”
She sat up, picked up my dead arm, squinted at the wrist, and let it flop back down. The arm woke up just enough to promise me a lifetime of agony.
“Three-thirty,” she said. “You want to leave?”
“Give it another half hour. In a lot of towns, cops change their shifts at four. We’ll slip out in the transition time.”
She stretched and grimaced. “I’d suggest something very nifty to do with that half hour, but I think my back is broken.”
“That’s because you’ve been sleeping on top of a hand brake and a shifting lever.”
“Tell me about it. Your arm helped some, though.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. I’m thinking of having it amputated. Do we have any champagne left?”
She rolled back over to the driver’s seat with a few appropriate groans, grabbed the bottle from under the brake pedal, and shook it.
“A little,” she said. She took a swig and passed it over to me. “Also one bagel. You want?”
“Breakfast of champions,” I said. “But I’ll share.”
She broke the bagel in two and handed me half, and we listened to our jaws work for a while.
“So, why are you on the run, Herman?”
“I bopped a cop.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Put that way, it doesn’t, does it? I bopped a cop who was trying to abduct me. He’s also trying to pin a murder on me.”
“That sounds worse. So you gave him some more ammunition, by running.”
“That I did. Seemed like the thing to do at the time. Still does, for that matter. Are there any more cherries?”
“If there are, they’re all in the cracks between the seats.” She made a “gimme” gesture, and I passed the bottle back to her.
“I thought I was the impulsive one here,” she said. “Why didn’t you just stay where you were and rat this guy out?” She tipped back her head to drain the bottle, making a lovely line that started at her chin and swooped down, graceful and unbroken, all the way to the punctuation of her nipples. I made a heroic effort to return to my other train of thought.
“I can’t do that, exactly.”
Fiddle Game Page 12