David Dun - Overfall

After her father died, a slow determination began to build in Anna that culminated when she moved out. It wasn’t determination to be on her own, or to be a movie actress, or to find the right man. It was a determination to make life happen in place of letting life happen. That was the only way she could later explain it to herself and the few others who got to know her well.

It seemed as though the day she moved out her mother began paying attention to her. In fact they began talking almost every day. That was the year she wrote the poem. She lied when she told Sam she couldn’t recite it.

Day Care

“I’ll take you with me,” she would whisper each morning and pull strands of hair from the slick of tears that washed across my face. “Look,

I’ll put you in my coat pocket”- this made me smile, this way she had of pretending I was still tiny enough to ride in her pouch-“and you can come with me to all my classes, then at lunch

I’ll slip you little bites of my sandwich and if I get a Coke in the afternoon, you can have a sip” and I knew she would, rather than leave me at the day care with its broken games and pots of dried paint.

Because she knew what it was like to be apart, like a valve of my heart had closed, like a lung was slowly deflating.

Everyone else tore across the playground howling and flinging sand at each other as if they were born there, as if they never felt cut off from oxygen, as if they never held their breath, turned white and damp, couldn’t exhale until someone came to take them home.

Here I would wait all day, try to make myself smaller, try to imagine myself wrapped in the flannel lining of her pocket, among the lint and bread crumbs until my pulse slowed to match hers, until she began to breathe for the both of us, until I lifted my mouth to her fingers for food, went back to that place where I was a part of her.

I knew she would take me back, on those mornings when she had to leave me in the parking lot,

I knew she would shrink me and keep me with her if she could.

Sam knew he had only temporarily cured Anna of the snooping disease, but told Paul that New York could dismantle the parabolic mike aimed at Joshua’s window and take it back to Anna’s, with the result that they would have two such mikes aimed at Anna’s apartment. They would also need to get the mike out of the sprinkler system.

Next he went to work on the Grady Wade situation. He had run a credit check. Not surprisingly she had a couple of credit cards, but they were billed to a PO box. Sam had a cop friend run a DMV check, and that yielded a driver’s license and street address.

Sam took an outdated e-mail address given him by Anna, called for Grogg, and asked him to do what he could with the old address. Perhaps when she changed e-mail addresses she kept the same service provider. When they breached the security for the service provider’s database, they found her current e-mail address.

A random password generator quickly concluded that her password was Tease.”

They viewed her in-box and copied the contents. They needed to extract her deleted items and sent items. To accomplish their task they put an electronic watch on her line and waited for her to access the Internet. Fortunately it didn’t take long. They sent in a retrieval program based on computer virus technology that went into her desktop to copy and then compress her deleted-items folder, her sent-items folder, and all her personal correspondence under “My Documents.” When her computer was at rest, but on, it went to the “connect” function of her modem, and dialed up her Internet provider and sent an e-mail to Big Brain with a “winzip” file containing copies of all of her deleted and sent items as well as the correspondence from “My Documents.” The virus then removed the sent-item e-mail that was the only trail back to Big Brain. Thereafter the virus self-destructed, leaving no trace and doing no damage to the computer. They called the entire process and the program a “Grogg Job.”

Sam now knew substantially more about her, including her current employer. He called the manager of a cab company with whom he did business, and for a thousand dollars cash asked him to query all his drivers about the Gold Spurs, where she worked. An hour and twenty minutes more and Sam had the private phone of the Gold Spurs management, the names of all three bartenders, the doorman, and the owners, along with names of cabbies who knew Grady or the establishment.

Big Brain broke down the computer e-mails and correspondence documents, isolating all declarative sentences and focusing particularly on any sentence that included a descriptive emotional word or phrase such as glad, mad, pissed off, happy, heartbroken, and the like.

Big Brain then did a loose but revealing personality inventory on Grady, which Sam printed out and placed in an envelope marked “Spring.”

In a few minutes they had a cabby on the line who knew the Gold Spurs manager. The manager was new. Very professional. A straight-up guy. One of the cabby’s wealthy regular fares went to the place twice weekly and usually paid for the cabby to go in. Since the patron was a high roller, the manager came around. Always count on the cabbies.

Sam was on the freeway, headed to the establishment, in minutes; for another two hundred dollars the cabby greased the skids with the manager and the bartender on duty. (Of course both names went immediately into Big Brain for future use.)

Gold Spurs was a big sprawling place with a lot of limos. Money obviously flowed here; bouncers were thick and Sam saw plenty of tuxedo-clad floor managers. The place featured semiprivate rooms, nonalcoholic beer and soft drinks, chocolate-covered strawberries, and a menu of sorts.

Sam wanted Grady Wade, known as Mirage, in a semiprivate room. Normally the rooms would hold a party of eight and went for three hundred dollars per hour. Plus the girl at thirty dollars a dance for steady lap dances or a hundred and fifty dollars per half hour for friendly chats and lap dances, as the customer required. Before Sam went into the room he needed some background. There was a little bristling from a floor manager at the request for information about Grady, but it could be arranged for two hundred dollars-just local color about her work at the club, no address, no phone number.

Upstairs in the VIP lounge he found Nester, the so-called bartender who poured soft drinks. The guy was handsome, not too smart, and obviously spent the better part of his mornings pumping iron. Sam elected to go straight to the manager.

Two twenty-dollar bills got Nester to flick his head with practiced vanity at the office door.

Sam was greeted by a man with a neatly trimmed beard, a slim build, and a seemingly genuine smile. Not the sort he expected to find.

“I’m Will,” Sam said.

“Come in. I’m Guy.”

The office was nice, even plush. Guy had putters and golf balls in the corner and a carpet cup and fake green behind his desk.

“What can you tell me about Grady Wade?”

“You don’t look like the type to get moonfaced over a young dancer.” Guy smiled to take the sting out of the comment. “Or a serial killer.”

“That’s gratifying,” Sam said.

“It would be helpful if I knew your motives.”

“I’m a friend of her aunt’s. I think maybe Grady needs some help, but I’m not sure, and I want to find out.”

“Fair enough.”

“Tell me about her. I mean about her, not how she wiggles her ass.”

“Men admire her in droves. They follow her around like sick puppies. Her hair is golden, her eyes are the deepest blue. None of the customers can usually catch the sadness. They watch the plastered-on smile.

“She loves to please the crowd, she wants them all to fall in love so that she can walk away and leave them hurting, wanting more. She succeeds.