Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“You take full responsibility,” Jimmy said. “I like that.”

“Well, it seemed only right.”

“What the hell is a Code Five, will you tell me that?”

“I don’t know. What’s NICNAC Central? Who’s Taylor Feldman?”

“You said Fielding.”

“Well, it was Feldman before he changed it. I don’t know, man. I just made it all up but it sure impressed Rita.”

“You sounded so desperate.”

“Well, why shouldn’t I be? Half-past one in the morning and we’re not even into NPSN yet.”

“We are now.”

“And how sweet it is. I’ll tell you, Hong, you can’t beat that Code Five. It really cuts through all the bureaucratic bullshit, you know what I mean. ‘I got a Code Five emergency coming down.’ Man, that just about blew her doors off.”

“ ‘Rita, you’re beautiful.’ ”

“Man, I was falling in love, I have to say it. And by the time we were through we’d sort of established a relationship, you know?”

“You gonna call her again?”

“I bet I can get a password off her anytime, unless something tips her that she just gave away the store. Otherwise next time I call her we’re gonna be old friends.”

“Call her sometime,” I said, “and don’t try to get a password or an access code or anything else.”

“You mean just ring her up to chat?”

“That’s the idea. Maybe give her some information, but don’t try to get anything out of her.”

“Far out,” David said.

“And then later on—”

“Got it,” Jimmy said. “Matt, I don’t know if you’ve got either the digital dexterity or the hand-eye coordination, and you don’t really know a thing about the technology, but I have to tell you something. You’ve got the heart and soul of a hacker.”

According to the Kongs, the whole process really got interesting after they got into NPSN, whatever that meant. “This is the part that’s fascinating from a technical standpoint,” David explained, “because here’s where we try retrieving information the NYNEX people claimed wasn’t available. They’ll say that just to brush you off, but some of them were telling the truth, or what they thought was the truth, because the fact of the matter is they wouldn’t know how to go about finding it. So it’s almost as though we have to invent our own program and feed it into their system so it’ll spit out the data we want.”

“But,” Jimmy said, “if you’re not into the technical side of it, there’s really nothing there to keep you on the edge of your chair.”

TJ, awake now, was standing behind David’s chair and watching the computer screen as if hypnotized. Jimmy went over to the refrigerator for a can of Jolt. I dropped into the one easy chair, and David was right, there was nothing to keep me on the edge of it. I sank back into the cushions, and the next thing I knew TJ was shaking me gently by the shoulder, saying my name.

I opened my eyes. “I must have been sleeping.”

“Yeah, you sleepin’, all right. You was snorin’ some earlier.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost four. The calls is comin’ up now.”

“Can they just get a printout?”

TJ turned and relayed the request, and the Kongs started giggling. David got control of himself and reminded me that we didn’t have a printer with us. My sponsor was a printer, I almost said. Instead I said, “No, of course not. I’m sorry, I’m still half-asleep.”

“Stay where you are. We’ll copy it all down for you.”

“I’ll get you some Jolt,” TJ offered. I told him not to bother but he brought me a can of it anyway. I took a sip of it but it really wasn’t what I wanted, nor was I entirely certain what I did want. I got to my feet and tried to stretch some of the stiffness out of my back and shoulders, then walked over to the desk where David King was working the computer while Jimmy Hong copied down the information on the screen.

“There they are,” I said.

They were coming right up on the screen, starting with the first call at 3:38 to tell Kenan Khoury his wife was missing. Then three calls at roughly twenty-minute intervals, the last one logged at 4:54. Kenan had called his brother at 5:18, and the next call he’d received came in at 6:04, which must have been just before Peter got to the Colonial Road house.

Then there was a sixth call at 8:01. That would have been the one ordering them to Farragut Road, where they received the call that sent them chasing out to Veterans Avenue. And then they’d come home, having been assured that Francine would be delivered there, and then they waited in an empty house until 10:04, when the last call came, the one that sent them around the corner to the Ford Tempo with the parcels in its trunk.

“Wow,” David was saying. “This has been, like, the most amazing education. Because we had to keep at it, you know? There was data you needed, so we couldn’t quit. When you’re just hacking you can only take so much boredom before you go and do something else, but we had to stay with it until we crashed through the boredom and got to what was on the other side of it.”

“Which was more boredom,” Jimmy said.

“But you learn a lot, you really do. If we had to do this same operation again—”

“God forbid.”

“Yeah, but if we did, we could do it in half the time. Less, because the whole speed-search option gets double-timed when you cut back into the—”

What he said after that was even less comprehensible to me, and I’d stopped listening anyway because Jimmy Hong was handing me a sheet of all calls into the Khoury house on the twenty-eighth of March. “I should have told you,” I said. “The early ones don’t matter, just the seven starting at three-thirty-eight.” I studied the list. He’d copied everything: time of the call, the line number of the caller, the phone number you’d dial in order to reach that phone, and the duration of the call. That, too, was more than I needed, but there was no reason to tell him that.

“Seven calls, each from a different phone,” I said. “No, I’m wrong. They used one phone twice, for calls two and seven.”

“Is it what you wanted?”

I nodded. “How much it gives me is something else again. It could be a lot or a little. I won’t know until I get hold of a reverse directory and find out who those phones belong to.”

They stared at me. I still didn’t get it until Jimmy Hong took off his glasses and blinked at me. “A reverse directory? You’ve got the two of us here, with everything buried in the deep inner recesses of NPSN, and you think you need a reverse directory?”

“Because we’re talking child’s play here,” David King said. He sat down at the keyboard again. “Okay,” he said. “Give me the first number.”

They were all pay phones.

I’d been afraid of that. They had been professionally cautious throughout, and there was no reason to suppose that they wouldn’t have taken care to use phones that couldn’t be linked to them.

But a different pay phone each time? That was harder to figure, but one of the Kongs came up with a theory that made sense. They were guarding against the possibility that Kenan Khoury had alerted someone who was in a position to tap in on the line and identify the phone at the other end. By keeping the calls short they could be sure of being away from the scene before anyone who traced the call could get there; by never returning to the same phone, they were covered even if Khoury had the call traced and the telephone staked out.

“Because tracing a call is instantaneous now,” Jimmy told me. “You don’t really trace it, not if you’re hooked into it with a setup like this. You just look on the screen and read it off.”

Why the lapse in security on the last call? By then they’d obviously known there was no need for it. Khoury had done everything the way he was supposed to, had made no attempt to interfere with the ransom pickup, and was no longer worth such elaborate precautions. That was the time they could have felt safe enough to use a phone in their own house or apartment, and if only they’d done so I would have had the bastards. If it had started raining, if there’d been some compelling reason to stay inside. If nobody had wanted to leave the other two with the ransom money.