John Sandford - The Fool's Run

I got back to the apartment late in the afternoon, arriving just behind a metallic-blue Corvette. The 'Vette took the first available slot and I pulled in three spaces down. The 'Vette's driver was already striding down the lot when I got out of the car. It was an entrancing sight. She was small, dark-haired, and perfectly built. She moved like a dancer.

She used her key at the entry door and let it close behind her. I used my own key and caught her waiting for the elevator. She looked me over with a careful eye.

"You must be one of the people in two-A," she said, with a touch of a French accent.

"Yes. And you're.

"Two-D," she said. "Are you. a business?"

"Consultants," I said.

"Ah, consultants," she said brightly, as though it explained everything. In Washington, of course, it probably did. "To tell you the truth, I was happy to see Louis and his little friends move out."

"Louis?"

"The landlord."

"Oh, sure. I've never met him. One of my associates actually rented the place."

"Ah." The elevator came and she got in and pushed the button for the second floor.

"What, uh. " I gave her my best, most open smile. "I can't resist gossip, I'm afraid. That's why I'm a consultant. What about Louis's friends?"

She shrugged, and her eyes evaded mine. "If one is heterosexual. " She shrugged.

"There's an uneasy feeling. I know what you mean."

"You are heterosexual?"

"Yes."

"I saw the woman, your associate. She is very attractive."

"Yes. She looks not unlike you. Very attractive."

She dimpled and was about to say something when the elevator arrived at the second floor. "I do not mind homosexuals," she said, pronouncing the word with care. "But there were. so many of them. Five or six living there at once. In the evenings, sometimes, it sounded like they were all in one pile. And then one hears about AIDS."

"Now you've got me worried. Were they living there for long?"

"Two years?" she said.

"God, I'll have to spray the place."

"Oh, that's not. you are joking me."

"I'd never joke you," I said. We were at my door; she continued down the short hallway and turned when she got to her door.

"Could I buy you a drink sometime?" I asked.

She considered for a moment, then shook her head in what looked like genuine regret. "I have a friend," she said. "If I did not, I would like it." She pushed her door open, gave me a final smile, and was gone.

LuEllen was standing just inside the door when I opened it, with Dace a few steps behind her. A half-finished microwave pizza sat on the kitchen table.

"We heard you talking," she said, a question in her voice.

"Another tenant. She told me something. odd."

"What?"

"She said the landlord's gay and that he used to keep a bunch of male friends in here. Several of them. For maybe two years."

"Aw, shit," said LuEllen, nibbling her lip.

Dace looked puzzled. "What difference does it make?"

LuEllen turned to him and asked the question that was bothering both of us. "If there were a bunch of gays living here, how come Ratface was bugging the place to catch a general and his mistress?"

"Jeez.

"Somebody's lying to us," LuEllen said.

We hashed it over without reaching any conclusion.

"I'll sweep the place again and make sure Bobby is sterilizing the phone lines," I said. "And I'll see if Bobby can get a line on Ratface-Morelli- whatever his name is. Maybe Bobby can do something with his phones."

"Should we be talking about this?" Dace asked, looking at the walls.

I went over the apartment inch by inch and again found nothing. Bobby said our lines were clean. Guaranteed.

"Maybe we're worrying about bullshit," I said. "There's no way anybody could know about us, not unless Anshiser has sprung a major leak. And if anybody did know-the law-they would have moved."

Dace shook his head. "Paranoia," he said. "Shadows."

LuEllen was looking doubtful. "I don't know," she said. She took a couple of slow turns around the front room, then plopped on the couch. "I can't figure it."

"Let it go for now," said Dace.

"Maybe Bobby will come up with something," I said.

"It's worth a try," LuEllen agreed. "Okay. We let it go. For now."

"Good." Dace turned to me. "Wanna look at the loot?"

We dumped LuEllen's tennis bag on the front-room floor. There were a half-dozen pistols, two hundred dollars in cash, three credit cards, and several good pieces of gold jewelry, including a gold and diamond stickpin. Total value, she said, would be about two thousand on the street.

"It'd be a good haul for a junkie," she said. "They usually get a transistor radio and a bottle of picante sauce."

Late that night, she and Dace dropped everything but the cash and guns in the alley in one of the harder districts of Washington. They'd be picked up and get about the use that the cops would expect. The guns they dropped in the Potomac; the cash we kept.

While they were out, I dialed the Ebberlys' number. Before the phone rang, I blew into the receiver with a pitch pipe. The whistle activated the intercept, which linked their line to ours. I flipped the open line over to one of our computers and left it.

When the bug detected a computer's electronic sound packets, it would relay them to our computer. It would also pass them through to the Ebberlys' machine. Ebberly would get her work done as usual. We would have a complete record of it.

Nothing happened the first night, or early the next morning. We left the apartment a little after nine o'clock to scout more targets. When we got back, the computer showed a transmission from the Ebberlys' home to Whitemark.

"That's what we wanted?" Dace asked.

"That's what we wanted," I said. "She must have been working at home this afternoon. Good thing she wasn't there yesterday."

"She's probably home because of the burglary," LuEllen said. "Talking to cops."

A computer work session, printed out, soaks up an enormous amount of paper. Every time Samantha Ebberly even glanced at a personnel form, the computer printed the whole form. I ran the session back across the screen, did some quick editing, and printed it. It was seventy pages long, and I handed it to Dace.

"We need to extract procedures," I said. "We want to do things just the way she did, get in and out without being noticed. Map these things for us. Every time she gets on, map them again. By the time we're ready to go in, we should know how to operate as well as she does."

"All right. But it'll bore my brains out."

"Think about the money."

"I've been doing that."

"Didn't work?" asked LuEllen.

"No, no, it worked. I'll sit here and watch the computer. But don't tell John Wayne."

Samantha Ebberly was a manager, so her codes would get us into the administrative side of the Whitemark computers, but we also had to get into the engineering side. We scouted four of the five engineering targets, and all were marginal prospects. The morning after the Ebberly entry we went to check out the fifth engineer.

From the moment we turned the corner the target looked bad. Aside from the dying brown grass, the front yard was devoid of plant life. A battered ten-speed bike was lying at one side of the driveway, next to a green-and-cream '57 Chevy set up on concrete blocks. The driveway was stained black by a tear-shaped oil slick that was creeping out from under the car.

The backyard was surrounded by a shoulder-high, chain-link fence. There were no clumps of extra-dark-green grass, because there wasn't much grass, but subtle signs were unnecessary.

Two old-fashioned doghouses squatted against the house, and an evil-looking, white-eyed hound crouched beside one of them. The chain around his neck looked as if it might once have been used to haul logs. As we drove by, a blonde in a tight, black T-shirt banged out the front door, followed by a teenage boy who swatted her on the butt as they cut across the moribund grass toward his Harley, which was curled up to the curb.