John Sandford: The Fool's Run

"Convincer money," I said.

She shrugged. "Free money, Mr. Kidd. All cash, no record, no taxes."

"I declare all my income, Miss.

"Smith."

"Right." If her name was Smith, I'd eat my brushes. "How much for the main job?"

"You'll have to talk to my employer about that. If you take it, you won't have to worry about financing a place in New Orleans. You'll be able to buy it outright."

She was cool, superior, and slightly snotty. A male friend, if she had time for one, would have a hard body, a great tan, a gold chain, a two-seater Mercedes-Benz, and no sense of humor. A commoner had little chance of peeling off her shorts. Should it happen, she'd do it purely for the experience, like shopping at Kmart or sniffing glue.

She knew what I was thinking, of course. And she knew she was reaching me, with her information, money, and long athletic legs. All management tools, properly deployed, well under control. It was mildly irritating.

Letting it percolate for a moment, I looked down at the battered, grass-green fiberglass hull of my boat, the brilliant white D'Arches paper, the black handles of the watercolor brushes. It was all I really wanted to do; I didn't want to fool with some rich guy's computers. But a bigger boat would be nice, and money would buy more time to paint. And New Orleans is a pleasurable place.

"It sounds illegal," I said after a while.

"I don't know what you did for Jack Clark," she said, "but I got the impression that the police wouldn't be happy about it. When I talked to him, he was grinning like the cat that ate the canary."

"I could call Jack and ask who your boss is," I said.

"He wouldn't tell you," she said promptly.

"Five thousand?" I'd been rubbing my hands with an old T-shirt, now a paint cloth. She handed me the envelope, absolutely sure of herself.

"In twenties and fifties," she said. "See you at the airport in an hour?"

"Make it an hour and a half," I said, giving up. I tucked the money into my hip pocket. "I've got to pull the boat out of the water, and make arrangements for the cat. take a shower."

She looked at her watch and nodded. She started to walk away, then changed her mind and turned back to the ruined painting.

"I went to an opening a few weeks ago," she said. "Oil paintings, though, not watercolors. They had holes cut in the middle of them. Like that one. My friend and I spoke to the artist. He said the holes represented his contempt for the conventional form that has trapped painting for so long. He said the American Indian, for instance, often painted on irregularly shaped war shields.

It was the kind of talk that gives me headaches.

"Miss, ah, Smith?" I said when she slowed for a breath.

"Yes?"

"If we have to fly to Chicago together, if I take this job, do me a favor?"

"Yes?"

"Don't talk to me about art, okay?"

Her face froze up. Offended, she looked down at her watch and said, "An hour and a half. Please be prompt."

She started stiffly across the sandbar toward the willows, but loosened up after a few feet, and even gave it a little extra effort, knowing I'd watch. Which I did. At the base of the levee she stopped to put on her shoes, glanced back, and nimbly climbed the bank.

I keep a pair of 8 x 50 binoculars in the boat, so I can get a closer look at landscape structures. When she disappeared over the levee, I got the glasses and jogged after her. A car door slammed as I scrambled up the levee and put the glasses on her car's license plate. It was a Minnesota tag, probably a rental. Back at the boat, I wrote the number on the cash envelope with a nice vibrant black made of alizarin crimson and hooker's green.

Then I went off to call Robert Duchamps, pronounced Doosham, and usually called Bobby.

The cat, a tiger-striped torn, had moved in a few months after I bought the apartment. He was waiting now on the back of the living room couch, gazing out the window toward the river. He was doing the same thing one day when a pigeon, one of the big blue and white numbers, smacked headlong into the glass. He came off the couch like a bullet and hid under the kitchen sink for the rest of the day. He hasn't trusted a pigeon since.

"I'm going out of town," I told him. "I'll leave the flap open. Emily will feed you." He looked at me, yawned, and turned back to the window.

Emily Anderson lives in the apartment below mine. She's seventy years old and a damn good painter. Most Wednesday nights we hire a model and drink beer and draw and argue. I walked down the stairs and knocked on her door. When she answered, I told her about the trip. She agreed to take care of the cat.

"Though you ought to pay me for taking care of the smelly thing."

"Jesus Christ, you drink enough of my beer to float a battleship," I said.

"Yeah, and make sure there's a six-pack in the fridge," she said as she shut her door. We get along famously.

I live in a sprawling apartment in the northeast corner of a converted red-brick warehouse, four floors up. The painting studio is on the north side, under a lot of glass. There's also a study, a small living room that looks east toward the rail-yards and river, a tiny kitchen with a dining bar, and one bedroom.

Most of my time is spent in the studio or the study, which is dominated by three walls of books and a bunch of personal computers. There's an IBM-AT that's been collecting dust lately, one of the IBM PS/2s, a Mac II, and my favorite, a full-bore Amiga 2000. A Lee Data dumb terminal is stuffed under a book table next to an early vintage Mac. A few old-timers from Commodore, Radio Shack, and Apple sit in boxes in a corner with power cords wrapped around their disk drives. I work on the big machines when I need money, but prefer the small ones. Power to the people.

I turned on the Amiga, loaded a communications program, and typed in Bobby Duchamps's phone number in East St. Louis.

Bobby lives in the phone wires. We met one night in the late seventies, by accident, deep inside the General Motors design computers. We had a nice chat, and he gave me a number in Chicago. The number didn't exist as an independent phone line, but it triggered an intercept. Bobby was a phone phreak before he started hacking.

Bobby specializes in databases. He's deep into Arpanet and Milnet and BNeT and a half dozen other international and intercontinental data networks. He knows the credit company computers like the back of his hand. If you need something from a phone-wired database, chances are he can get it.

Other than that, I didn't know much about him. I was down in New Orleans once and hadn't hooked up my portable, and he called me on a voice line. He sounded like one of those soft-spoken Delta blacks, in his teens or twenties. He had a speech impediment, and hinted that he had a physical problem. Cerebral palsy, something like that.

Since then I've called him at half a dozen different numbers in the biggest metro areas east of the Mississippi. I don't know whether he actually moved or somehow changed area codes. You can get him personally, twenty-four hours a day, if you know how.

The East St. Louis number rang without an answer. I counted the rings to eight, and pressed the "a" key before the ninth ring. It rang twice more, and then the carrier tone came up. If I hadn't pressed an "a" between eight and nine, it'd have rung forever.

After another moment, a?came up on my screen, and I typed in a pseudonym. After another moment, a WHAT?appeared.

I typed, need info 45 minutes max on driver rental car (unknown agency but probably from St. Paul Muni) XDB-471 white Ford.

It sat there on the screen for a moment before he came back with $50, his price for the information.

I typed OK and he came back with LEAVE ON RECEIVE. I typed OKagain and a second later the modem signaled a disconnect. I switched the modem to auto-answer and hung up.