T. Boyle - Talk Talk

He felt a tick of irritation. He'd been caught unawares, his guard down, caught fretting and worrying and wringing his hands like some paranoiac, some loser. He managed a tight smile as he reached for a wad of Kleenex to dab at the stains on his shirt. “Yeah,” he said, “you're right-too much caffeine, who needs it?”

Sandman crossed the room, his big shoulders bunched under a theatrically ducking head, as if he were afraid he'd scrape the ceiling-and it “was” low, only six and a half feet from the floor to the exposed pipes overhead, but this was all exaggerated, all for show-and then settled one haunch down on the corner of the desk. “Right, but I wouldn't mind a cup of mud myself, if you could spare one. Or Natalia. If the pot's full, I mean. If you've got coffee, some of that Viaggio mocha maybe, maybe with real cream and brown sugar? Two lumps. Or honey. I could do honey.” He lifted one eyebrow, stroked the strip of fur beneath his lip. “Because you know me, I wouldn't want to be the one to impose-”

He was doing his Sandman thing, always just this side of sincere. Everything a joke and every line delivered with a smile, as if he couldn't just walk upstairs and pour himself fifty cups of coffee if that was what he wanted, or move in permanently or borrow the car and take it to Maine or ask for a pint of blood and get it without stint or question. He was testing. Just testing to see if you were still with the program. And sometimes, like in Greenhaven, the program could be brutal. That smile, that Sandman smile, could freeze you at a hundred paces.

“Shit,” Peck said, ignoring him. “I ruined my shirt.”

“So buy another one.”

“If you didn't come creeping around like some fucking meter reader or something-”

“Me? I'm not creeping. Shit, I just rolled over here with the top down because it is one fucking day out there, and then I slammed the door and “stamped” down that driveway like Paul Bunyan… look”-he raised one leg-“I'm wearing my boots, see that? I've been stomping and stamping all morning, man.”

Peck was still in the chair, still dabbing at his shirt. He reached for a new wad of Kleenex. “I ran into Dudley,” he said.

Sandman gave him a puzzled look.

“This guy I used to know, this kid-he used to work at the restaurant. I saw him over in Newburgh-he's waiting tables at a place over there.”

Sandman let out a sigh. “Is that what it is? Is that what's bothering you?”

There was the whine of a motorbike going by on the road out front, the blat-blat-wheeze of a two-stroke engine shifting gears, some geek on his way to carve figure eights in the dirt down by the railroad tracks. They both looked up to follow the sound. “I don't know,” Peck said. “I just don't want any hassles, that's all. Don't want any talk, you know?”

“You didn't give him your business card, did you? Your home phone? E-mail? Your bank account number?” Sandman pinched his shoulders and flashed both palms for emphasis. “No worries, come on, man-he doesn't even know your name.” A long beat. He patted distractedly at his pockets, as if he were looking for a smoke, but since he didn't smoke anymore he let his hands drop to his lap. “So what did you tell him?”

“What do you think I told him?”

“All right, all right. Fuck it.” Sandman got up from the corner of the desk and made a show of shaking out his legs, as if he'd been cramped in the middle seat of a jetliner for the last six hours. “What I wanted to know is, number one, where's my coffee? And number two, do you want to take a ride on the most beautiful day in the history of mankind with the top down and the breeze in your hair?”

“Where to-the library?” He was pushing himself up now, stretching. He took a final dab at the shirt and dropped the Kleenex and newspaper into the trash.

And here was the grin, opening wide. “Yeah, that was what I was thinking. Maybe cruise across the bridge over to Highland Falls or someplace like that, Monroe, Middletown, whatever-they got a library there, right?” Now there was another bike out on the road-or two more bikes, a whole mini-motocross thing going on, the summer morning sawed lengthwise and then sawed through again. Sandman shifted his weight, tented his fingers in front of his nose. “No big deal, nothing strenuous-use the hookups there for a couple hours, make some money, that sort of thing, you know. And then maybe lunch and a couple brews or a nice bottle of wine, I mean, if Natalia doesn't need you to haul furniture around or anything-how about that place up along 9W there where you sit outside way high up and look down on the whole valley?”

“Like gods?” He was smiling himself now too. The tension, whatever it was, had slid away from him like a wet coat in the foyer of a very good restaurant.

“That's right,” Sandman said. “Like gods.”

Sandman's latest scheme was built on a solid foundation of research (“Research I was doing while you were dicking around in California,” he said, but with a grin, always with a grin), and it made sense both logically and financially. Instead of picking up IDs in an almost random way-off the Internet, out of the innards of the Dumpster, paying some kid three dollars a pop to skim credit card numbers at the gas station or the Chinese restaurant-Sandman was looking to target the rich and the super-rich and make the kind of connection that could pay the bills for a whole lifetime to come. “Why not?” he insisted. “If it works small, it works big, right?” Peck had to agree. He was ready to graduate. More than ready.

Because women found him interesting (and he found them interesting in turn; he'd been married something like four or five times), Sandman was able to extract certain small favors from the ones he felt especially close to. At the moment, he was simultaneously seeing two women Peck had never met, and never would meet, both of whom worked in the financial sector. One of them was some low-level functionary at Goldman Sachs-a secretary maybe-and the other, who was divorced and had two kids who were monumental pains in the ass, was an analyst at Merrill Lynch. What did they do for him? They provided stationery. And a legitimate address.

At the library, Sandman eased himself into a chair, booted up one of the computers and showed him how to access the files of individuals the Securities and Exchange Commission kept on its website as a public record. Then they migrated to separate ends of the row of computers and went to work. Once they were in possession of this information, they would use the stationery to request credit histories on selected individuals, and this would give them access to the brokerage account numbers. Then it was easy. Or it should be. Go to the Internet, transfer funds from existing accounts to the ones they'd set up elsewhere, let things rest a couple days and transfer them again, taking it deeper. Then close it all down, in and out, and nobody the wiser. And nobody hurt, except a couple of fat cats so fat they couldn't keep track of their own sweat trail. And they were crooks, anyway. Everybody knew that.

It was past two when Sandman came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He didn't know where the time had gone. Rather than print things out-and he was still a little paranoiac here-he was copying the files by hand into a notebook he'd brought along for that purpose, and he must have had a good hundred names already, but it was like fishing in a deep hole where they just won't stop biting. Or better yet, picking up nuggets off the floor of a gold mine. When have you got enough? When do you stop? He could have sat there all day and all night too.

“Hey, buddy, time for lunch, what do you say?”

Peck just stared at him, his eyes throbbing and the first faint intimation of a headache blowing like a sere wind through the recesses of his skull.