Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

She looked at me and smiled. “Okay. So let’s do a disappearing act.”

“What about your job?”

“I e-mailed him, death in the family, don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

“Get some money?”

“Yes. I emptied out both accounts, about four grand.”

“Wow. I just had a little over a thousand.”

Her mouth made a small O and we stared at each other for a second, then it clicked. “Remember?” I said. “I don’t have the Hollywood money yet.”

“Shit, of course. I knew that and spaced it.” She faced forward and put the car in gear. “Left or right?”

“I-80, I guess. Put some miles between us and them.”

She hesitated. “Maybe back roads would be better.”

“Just a second. Let’s think.” She put it back into Park and looked at me with a forced expression of patience, or resignation.

“We leave my car in Iowa City, gun in the trunk, and head off to parts unknown. What happens to the car?”

“I think after two tickets they tow it away. Then wait for you to come bail it out. Auction it if you don’t show up.”

“But I don’t think so. Not in my case. They’ll run the license plate and find I was stopped by Smokies this morning. They’ll read about the gun and pop the trunk, and voilà, I’m a fleeing criminal.”

“But you aren’t a criminal.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I mean really. They can’t search your car without a warrant. You didn’t break any law this morning—but even if you had, could they just pop your trunk and rummage around looking for nothing in particular? Don’t they have to have ‘probable cause’?”

“Hell, I don’t know. If a car’s impounded that means a law was broken. There’s probably another law that allows them to break into it and sell everything on eBay. I mean, who makes the laws?”

We sat for a few seconds, breathing hard, maybe thinking hard. “Wonder how far we could go,” she said, “on five thousand dollars. I don’t have a passport.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t even leave Iowa. Cross a state line and we’ve got the feds on our tail.” I said that last like a movie tough guy, but she didn’t smile.

“When do you expect the check?”

“Probably not till the end of the month. Let’s not even think about it. We’ve got five grand of our own money and ten of the bad guys’.”

“With fifteen thousand dollars,” she said carefully, “we could do like that guy in your book. Manufacture new identities. Or is that all fantasy?”

“No, you really could do it. But it takes some time and planning. And a lot more than fifteen grand; call it a hundred. Each.”

She laughed without any humor. “That much. Buying off officials?”

“No, just side-stepping computers. Like, his first step was taking the identity of someone in another state who was born the same time as him, but died an infant. That won’t work anymore. You’re in the federal system from womb to tomb, no matter how little time you spend in between.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Yeah, ‘Big Brother Is Watching You.’ We’ll be okay if we’re careful. Don’t use any credit cards or IDs, and don’t go anyplace where they scan faces, like the courthouse.”

“Don’t leave any fingerprints on corpses.” She had read my first book, all right.

“I’ll wear gloves if we kill anybody. So you’re the driver. Where to?”

“I asked you first.” She rubbed her face. “Damn. I was thinking get lost in a big city, Chicago. But as you say, face scanners. Liquor stores have them, banks. I guess convenience stores in high-crime areas.”

“So we go to a small town?”

“I’d say so. Stay in Iowa,” she said.

“The Amana Colonies? We’d eat well.”

“Not a tourist place, not too close to Iowa City. Sioux City? Is Davenport too big?”

“Davenport. We could hop on a riverboat and escape to New Orleans. Except I think they’re all permanently anchored.”

“It’s an idea, though,” she said. “It’s one place in Iowa where you could get a G-note changed without drawing a lot of attention.”

“The casino, that’s good. Find some mom-and-pop place out in the country, dash into the casino to change the bills, then move on.”

“No, wait. I’m sure they scan faces on the way into the casino. If anywhere. But they may not be looking for you.”

“Yeah. It’s not as if there was a warrant out for me.” It still felt shaky. “Are there casinos on the Illinois side of the river?”

“Don’t know.” She took the iPak out of her purse, shook it, and asked it, “Search. Riverboat. Casino. Illinois.” It came back with “Harrah’s” and an address.

“Worth the extra couple of miles. That was a state trooper, and I don’t imagine Iowa and Illinois share data down to that level. Not even a parking ticket,” I said optimistically. Just a murder weapon on the backseat.

We picked up bad coffee and a couple of McDeathburgers, compromising culinary standards for speed, and headed straight for I-80. Unlike mine, her two-year-old car had Supercruise, so once we got on the superhighway, she went all the way to the left, shifted it to Traction, and asked it for a Davenport warning. “Finish my coffee if you want,” she said, and cranked her seat back and closed her eyes.

I’d never had Supercruise, and it still made me a little nervous. But it really was safer than driving manually, especially at high speed, so I just watched the pastures and cows blur by and tried to think of something that wouldn’t make me nervous. I closed my eyes and recalled about ten of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’d memorized all of them when I was sixteen, with a little help from Merck’s Forget-me-not™, but that mostly evaporated after a few months. I could still bore people with the famous ones, and my favorite obscurity, “Oh truant muse / what shall be thy amends…” My muse was kind of truant, running for its life.

When the car chimed her awake, she stretched and took over, drifting slowly through three lanes of sub-cruise traffic to cross the Mississippi bridge in the slow lane and take the first Illinois exit. There was a big blinking billboard directing you to Harrah’s Showboat West. “You want to go straight there?” she asked.

“Sure, let’s do it. Run the money through and get back on the road. Be in Indiana by nightfall. Kentucky.” Panic and caffeine overdose, a real recipe for casino success. Take a couple of deep breaths.

The parking lot was huge, serving both the casino and a miniature Disneyworld that didn’t have any Disney characters. We parked at Tombstone A-5 and discussed strategy.

Kit had been to Vegas with her parents, and knew how to play blackjack conservatively. I could do the same with side bets on the craps table, though it took more concentration, and the ambience at craps was loud and testosterone-soaked. So we’d stick to blackjack and not play at the same tables.

We’d move around, playing for a couple of hours, cashing the G-notes at different tables. There were $100-minimum games where the big bills wouldn’t be uncommon. I was hoping that if we cashed them at the tables rather than at the cashier, the serial numbers wouldn’t be scanned immediately.

This was the overall plan: lose steadily but not spectacularly. Quit when we still had 80 or 90 percent of our stake, converted into somewhat used C-notes and fifties.

We quizzed each other on betting strategy for half an hour, using the iPak to deal out of a four-deck shoe, which is what Google said they used here. Then we got on the slidewalk a few minutes apart, agreeing to meet at the main entrance at 5:00.

The entrance foyer was ice-cold and not too loud, a good distance from the muted clang of slot machines and susurrus of crowd noise. As I approached it, it was like walking toward crashing surf.