John Sandford - The Fool's Run

She started going through them as I was screwing the strike plate back on the phone outlet. She'd just put the last book on its shelf, and I was dropping the screwdriver into my bag, when the garage door went up.

We froze and looked at each other. There was a beat of silence, then another beat, and then a car door slammed.

"Shit, he's home," LuEllen hissed, as the garage door came down with a bang. Her face was deathly pale. "And he's a cop. He'll have a gun."

"Did you lock the house door behind you?"

"Of course."

"So now what?"

"Get all the tools. Get everything," she whispered violently. We shoved a couple of extra bugs and the disk copies into the bags.

"In here," she said, pushing me into the bathroom. She stepped back out to the computer area and looked quickly around to make sure we'd left nothing behind. Satisfied, she followed me into the bathroom and eased the door shut.

"Open that window," she whispered urgently.

The bathroom window was one of the slanted type, with the hinges on the bottom. It pulled down forty-five degrees.

"There's no way we can get out of that," I whispered to her. "Maybe he's just here for a minute, we can wait, and he'll leave."

There was a click and a mechanical hum, and LuEllen shook her head. "That was the central air. He's going to be here for a while. And I'll tell you something. He'll find us. He'll be down here in ten minutes."

"How do you know?" Whoever was upstairs was clumping through the kitchen-heavy footsteps, a man, and probably a big one.

"Because. Because they always do. It's a rule," LuEllen said. "Something about vibrations. If you hide in somebody's closet, they'll look in the closet. If you hide under the bed, they'll look under the bed. Get that window open."

I pulled it open, and LuEllen said, "Help me." I boosted her up, and she pushed on the screen until it popped outside with a noisy crack.

"Shit," I whispered.

"No sweat, the central air will cover us," LuEllen grunted. "Now push me up as high as you can. Right up against the ceiling." I pushed her higher and she got her arms out on the grass. Her stomach was a solid slab of muscle, and she kept her entire lower body as rigid as a pipe as I fed her over the glass and out onto the lawn.

She was a small woman, and the fit was tight. The chances of my following her were exactly zero.

"Give me my bag," she whispered down to me. I handed it to her, and she pushed the screen back up against the window. "When you hear talking, you go right out through the garage. Out through the garage, around back, and wait behind the fence, you hear? And close this window." I had no idea what she meant. Her oval face looked down at me, and then she was gone. I shut the window and locked it.

One second later, Denton started down the basement stairs. LuEllen was right; he'd find me. I stood back from the bathroom door and set my feet. If I hit him hard, and just right, he'd be down and I'd be out. But if I missed, he almost certainly carried a gun, and he was in his own house. The door to the family room opened and I started shallow breathing.

The doorbell rang. LuEllen. Denton grunted and turned back up the steps. I eased the bathroom door open. From the base of the stairs, I heard him open the front door, and a flustered LuEllen asking about a park, where it was, tennis, girlfriend apparently gave her wrong directions, decided to walk, smells so good with the rain.

Denton stepped out on the front porch. I crossed the kitchen to the garage door, noticed with unnatural clarity the bologna sandwich on the kitchen table, the three envelopes sitting next to it, the sign on the wall: TRY OUR FAMOUS PEANUT BUTTER amp; JELLY SANDWICH. It was like a slow-motion pan in a movie. I resisted an impulse to take a bite from the sandwich, silently cracked the door to the garage, closed it slowly behind me, walked around the Ford Taurus now parked in the garage and out the back. In another ten seconds I was beside the house, between the pool fence and the garage. LuEllen was walking down the driveway with her bag, waving and smiling at Denton. I heard the front door close.

"Are you following that lady?"

The voice was only a couple of feet away, and my heart almost stopped. I looked down, toward the fence, and found a pair of small, blue eyes peering between the woven boards. A little girl, not more than four.

"Yeah, we're playing a game," I said.

"What kind of game?"

"Like hide-and-seek," I said. "But it's a secret."

"Are you sure?" she asked suspiciously.

"Of course I'm sure. Haven't you ever seen television?"

I left her with that to chew on, figuring Denton had had more than enough time to get his sandwich and head downstairs again. I walked straight out the driveway, looking neither right nor left, into the street.

LuEllen was fifty yards in front of me. When we were out of sight of the house, I jogged until I caught her.

"Don't talk to me," she said.

"Thanks for pulling me out of there."

"Don't talk to me; I'm too high to talk."

We were back at the car in two more minutes. LuEllen hit the coke as we pulled out from the curb. "Goddamn, that feels good."

"The coke?"

"The whole thing. Going in, getting out. God, I'm so high I could fly."

We moved into a downtown Washington hotel with a handy automated switchboard. That night we called into the bug at the Dentons', but nothing went out. I lay on the bed reading an Artnews and listening for the tone that signaled a data transmission.

LuEllen was washing her hair. She left the bathroom door open, tossed her clothes on the toilet seat, and went back and forth past the open door, pleasantly pink as always. We slept in the same bed again that night. The next morning we were in spoons, and I woke up with her moving against my stomach. She was still asleep, I thought, until she muttered, "Geez, feels like somebody dropped a pencil in the bed."

"Pencil your ass," I said.

"Oh, God, not that," she said, and rolled away, smiling. The smile slowly faded when she saw my face and she said, "Not yet. It's hard not to tease you, but I'm afraid if we made love, Dace's face would come up. That might ruin it forever.

We spent the day around the hotel, in the pool, in a shopping arcade, buying books, and watching movies on television. That night, just after eight o'clock, Denton went into the NCIC. We watched the entry transaction come up on our screen, and I was flabbergasted. There were virtually no screening protections at all. He signed on with his own name, a backup code-"weaver"- and an account number. Then he was in.

What?

Got NCIC entry codes. Would prefer you do search, all known execs Anshiser and associated companies.

Send codes.

We slept in the same bed again that night, and it was easier, but shorter. The computer started beeping for attention shortly after seven in the morning. Bobby said there would be multiple dumps. I plugged in the printer and routed the incoming data to paper as it arrived.

It was all there, in the NCIC files, if you knew where to look. Anshiser was involved with the mob all the way back to his teenage years. His father had been an accountant-a banker and money-mover for half of the organized crime syndicates in the country. He was trusted, with impeccable books.

Anshiser took his father's methods a step further. He laundered the mob's dirty cash with a variety of money-making and money-losing ventures: vending machine companies; trash-hauling concerns; hotel casinos in Atlantic City, Reno, Las Vegas, and the Caribbean; hotels in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, Freeport, and a half dozen other tourist destinations. Federal cops suspected him of recirculating big-time drug money through his casinos. The process was simple enough. A drug dealer has, say, a suitcase full of ten-dollar bills-an awkward way to carry your money. Take it to Anshiser, pump it through the company, and out comes a handy pocket-size packet of thousands, ready for a trip to the third world. Less, of course, a ten percent handling fee.