John Sandford - The Fool's Run

"Just keep on rolling," LuEllen said. "Don't bother to look back."

"Christ, it's the Jukes."

"Nice Harley, though."

"Wonderful."

"Softtail," she said.

"I'd rather eat worms than ride a Harley-Davidson," I said, remembering a bumper sticker I once saw on a Honda.

"Riding a Honda's like fuckin' a faggot; it feels sorta good, but you wouldn't want your friends to see you doin' it," LuEllen said. "I thought this Bobby guy was finding us people without kids."

"He's doing it from databases. There aren't any guarantees."

"So now what?"

"The Durenbargers are probably the best bet," I said. "You've seen the other choices."

"Durenbarger, Jason and Ellen," she said, reading from the list. "They make a lot of money between them. Goddamn, I hate apartments."

The Durenbargers lived in an apartment called the Summit Rock, not far from our own.

"There are too many people around," LuEllen said as we sat on a bench across the street from the Summit Rock. "If you crack the door with a crowbar, somebody will hear you. It's only a short walk down the hall to check. Then they see the door and call the cops.

"And there are too many eyes around, even where there shouldn't be. Look how you caught me, outside your place. You were on the fuckin' roof. In the middle of the night. Asshole."

"Always be alert; America needs more lerts."

"Right. Then, with apartments, there's a hassle getting through the outer door. In some towns, like Des Moines or Lincoln, you can walk up to the front door as one of the tenants goes through and catch the door as it closes. You say 'Thanks' and go on in. Most of the time, you get away with it. Here, there's too much crime. Everybody's suspicious. You try that trick in a big city, and they'll ask to see your key."

"What do we do?"

"We get a key," she said. "Do we know what they look like? What their cars look like?"

"Yeah, we know the cars. His is a dark-brown Thunderbird. She's driving a red Toyota Celica." I thumbed through the report Bobby had sent us and found the license numbers.

"Okay. We wait. We see if there's any chance to get a key."

"That could take forever."

"No. You said time is getting tight. We'll give it a couple of days, and then we'll try cracking the place."

The street in front of the apartment was one-way. The paired street was on the other side of a narrow public boulevard six blocks long, dotted with oak trees and green, metal benches. We found a place to park across the boulevard and waited.

LuEllen waited well. I didn't. I was looking at the story of my life, as represented by the folded and bent bits of paper in my billfold, when LuEllen cleared her throat.

"Ah," she said.

"What, ah?"

"You think it's Dace? The leak?"

"I don't know if we've got a leak. We had a problem, and it seemed to go away. We get some information that doesn't fit with other information, but nothing happens. I don't know."

"If we have a leak.

"I still don't think it's Dace," I said. "He doesn't lie well enough."

"Look at it this way," LuEllen said. "You talk to him. He's nodding his head, but inside, he's saying, 'What a story. Giant companies raiding each other.' It could be the story of his life."

"I thought about it," I admitted. "But it doesn't feel right. He's just too. innocent."

She looked out the window and sighed. It sounded like relief. "I think the same thing. But I had to ask. You've got one of the great poker faces in the Western world. But I kind of trust your instincts."

"You in love?"

She pushed out her lower lip and squinted at me, thinking.

"Maybe," she said.

Jason Durenbarger showed up at six o'clock, his wife a half hour later. They parked in back of the Summit Rock, their cars side by side in a fenced compound.

"Too bad they don't have garages," LuEllen said. "Most people hide spare house keys in garages. We could shake down the garage and find it."

"If pigs had wings.

"Yeah."

We waited four more hours. For the first twenty minutes, we talked. Then LuEllen turned the radio on, and we discovered that it's impossible to listen to a radio in a parked car. Something about the ambience. After she turned the radio off, it was like driving across North Dakota, except we didn't get to stop for gas.

"They aren't gonna move," LuEllen said finally.

"Now what?"

"Home."

"Maybe we ought to rent an apartment there, if they've got vacancies," Dace suggested, when we told him what had happened. "We've got the money. Once we're inside, we could take a chance on popping the door."

"It's an idea," I said, looking at LuEllen.

"Two problems: The manager gets a good look at us and knows we're guilty as sin if we pay for the place, then split the day after the burglary," LuEllen said. "So we'd have to stay on for a while. That's the second thing. We can't stay. If there's a burglary a day or two days after we move in, the cops'll look at us. Just routine. I don't want to be looked at."

"Hmph."

"If you watch people long enough, something happens. They go to a restaurant, she goes into the can, leaves her purse on the sink. I only need a minute with the keys to make an impression."

LuEllen had three or four metal Sucrets boxes filled with damp clay. She could open them, press both sides of three keys in each, and shut the lid to protect the impressions. The process took two seconds per key.

The next day we looked at another prospect in the suburbs. The husband was an engineer who specialized in fiber optics as they applied to air-frame control. The wife was a real estate agent who sometimes came home at odd hours in the middle of the day. The neighbors on one side had a half dozen kids, and there were more kids in the house across the street. It was possible, but dangerous.

We got back to the Durenbargers' at five o'clock. Jason Durenbarger arrived promptly at six, as he had the night before. His wife was only a minute behind him.

"They're young; they ought to go out," LuEllen said. "They won't stay in two nights in a row."

The day before we'd picked out what we thought was their apartment. The lights went on a minute after Jason went inside, confirming it.

"Here we go," LuEllen said half an hour later. The Durenbargers walked out the front door of the building, around to the side toward the parking lot. We were on the opposite side of the block. I hurried around the boulevard to get behind them, and moved too fast. They still hadn't come out of the driveway as we approached. LuEllen ordered me over to the curb.

"Fuck it. Just wait," she said.

There's a technique for following another car. You never get too close, you stay in an adjacent lane rather than directly behind the car you're following, and you memorize the other car's tail-lights. A good surveillance man will risk losing the car before he risks being spotted.

And here we were, illegally parked fifty feet from their drive, in plain sight. A good surveillance man would have been weeping in disgust. It didn't matter, because they pulled out with barely a glance up the street. We memorized the tail-lights, gave them some distance, and followed them onto Interstate 295 and across the river to Georgetown. As they got off the main streets, we were forced to close up, but I managed to keep a car or two between us. Finally they slowed and turned through a curb cut beside a nice-looking, redwood-and-fieldstone restaurant.

"Oh, God, get in behind them. Quick. Right now," LuEllen said, almost shouting. "Look at the valet. Oh, shit." I didn't know what she was talking about, but her tone was clear enough, and I eased in behind the Durenbargers. Jason walked around the front of the car, took a tag from the valet, and they went inside. The valet put a flat hand out to us, telling us to wait, and drove the Durenbargers' car back into the lot.