From a guy he knows is okay he buys a cloned cell phone, good for a month until the citizen paying for all the calls sees his bill. Last, he goes to an Internet cafe, where anybody can log on for two bucks an hour, and a white-faced kid with round glasses and chin stubble shows him how to do what he needs to do.
Now he has to wait a week for the PIN’s to come through. He spends the time scoping out targets. First he thinks it through, working out the profile of a soft hit. From the yellow pages he makes a list of one-man chartered accountant and tax consulting firms with office addresses in the better suburbs. Then he cruises the prospects, looking for ground floor locations, alleys he can park in, windows he can break. Alarms don’t worry him: police response time is fifteen minutes on a slow night; he means to be faster than that.
Mikey finds three he likes, two accountants and a tax consultant. After the PIN’s come, he does them — one, two, three — between ten and eleven the same night. His method of operation is the same for each job: he puts the Toyota under a window, climbs up and smashes in with an arm-long crowbar. Inside, he locates the computer, pulls its leads free or snips them with wirecutters if they’re screwed in. He pries open drawers and cupboards, loads any disks he finds into the gym bag, and carries it all to the window.
He’s quick and efficient. His slowest on-the-job time this night is under three minutes — there are two desktop decks to cut free and take to the window, but he saves time on the backup disks, neatly boxed in the accountant’s bottom drawer.
Mikey’s home before midnight, too wired to sleep. One by one he connects the decks to a monitor lifted from one of the offices, powers them up, and scans the hard drives. Each one is loaded with data, a lot of the files hidden behind passwords.
“Password, my ass,” he tells the monitor screen.
Mikey waits until a quarter to noon before calling the first hit — he figures it’s easier to negotiate with a guy whose belly is thinking about a Big Mac. It’s a dud. When the tax consultant hears Mikey’s proposition, he says, “Shove the disks up your ass. My whole operation’s backed up on a notebook at home. You didn’t even break my stride, you scuz.”
Mikey shrugs and dials the second one. He tells the girl who answers he needs to speak to the boss.
“I got your stuff,” he tells the accountant.
The guy is slow. “What?”
“You didn’t notice something was missing this morning? I got it.”
There’s a short silence. “You’re the burglar?”
“Ding,” says Mikey.
“What do you want?”
“I wanna sell you your backup disks.”
The man tells Mikey to do something anatomically inappropriate.
“Okay.” But Mikey doesn’t hit the cell’s off button.
“No, wait!” the accountant says, and Mikey can see him now, chewing his lip, thinking about it. “How much are we talking about?”
Go high, Mikey says to himself. “Ten,” he tells the voice on the phone.
“Ten what? Ten thousand? You are outa your goddamn mind!”
“Yeah?” Mikey comes back. “So whatta you offering?”
Another silence, then, “I’ll go two.”
Mikey laughs. “If you’re going two, then it’s worth ten.”
The accountant doesn’t know many swear words. In only ten seconds he’s repeating himself.
Mikey cuts in. “Hey! Any more of this abuse, the price goes up. Or maybe you never see your files again.”
The man on the phone is choking it down. “Okay,” he says, “ten. What do we do?”
“We stop thinking about calling the cops in and phone traces and all that TV crap. I’m on a cell clone, you know what that means?”
“I know.”
“Good. You got a cell?”
“Yeah.”
“Gimme the number.” Mikey writes it on a pad. “Okay, go get the ten grand, fifties and hundreds. I’ll call you back, one hour.”
“Wait! How do I know you’ve got my files? Maybe you just read in the paper about the break-in, and you’re gonna try and rip me off.”
Mikey is ready for the question. He reads off the names of a couple of files.
“Okay,” says the accountant, “one hour.”
While he’s waiting, Mikey calls the third opportunity. The man is a recent immigrant. His thick Chinese accent gives Mikey a fit-tie trouble, but it doesn’t take too long to make an arrangement. Mikey settles for five and arranges to call back. It’s embarrassing because the guy is crying and talking about his children.
“Man’s either a great negotiator or a freaking great actor,” he says to the parking lot where he’d stopped to make the calls.
At one o’clock he calls the cell phone of the accountant with the ten thousand, tells him to put two grand in a certain account at the TD bank at Forty-First and Boulevard.
“How do I know you’re going to come across with the files?” the man wants to know.
“If I rip you off, you’ll tell your friends. Then how’m I going to do business with the next guy?”
“That’s bull.”
“Then you just gotta trust me,” Mikey says. “Put the money in.”
Mikey waits by an ATM on Commercial Drive, sitting on the Toyota’s hood, kicking a front tire with his heel. He gives it twenty minutes, then puts his card in and checks the balance of the TD account. The screen says the balance is two thousand fifty dollars.
The bank card will only let him withdraw a thousand a day. He takes half of the two thousand and tells the bank to transfer the remaining money to another of his accounts. Then he uses the second account’s card to withdraw the other grand.
“Hoo hoo,” Mikey says, and dials the accountant’s cell again. This time he wants four grand in a Bank of Montreal account on Oak Street. While the accountant is traveling, Mikey heads to another ATM.
He takes the thousand the machine will give him and moves the other three grand to other accounts and drains them. Then he sends the accountant to another bank to drop the last installment of the ten thousand, and it works again.
“Smooth,” Mikey says. The ten thousand goes into a safe deposit box at a bank where he does no other business. Then he drives out to an Internet cafe in the yuppie stronghold of Kitsilano. He calls the accountant one last time and gets the man’s modem number, dials it up, and uploads the twelve data disks through the big funnel of the cafe’s 56 modem.
“You seeing it come through?” he asks the accountant.
“Yeah,” comes the answer.
“Here comes the last one. Nice doing business with you.”
“Bite me.”
Mikey laughs and heads out the door to his pickup. As he walks, he dials the Chinese accountant’s cell. The man is blubbering again, but he’s ready with the five.
“Okay, stop making all the damn noise,” Mikey says. “I’m trying to tell you what you gotta do.”
He gives instructions, then hangs up. He thinks about the man scurrying around to get him some money. “This is how it feels,” he tells the guy with the grin in his rear view mirror. “This is how it feels to be like Angie T. This is how it feels to be... more.”
“You shoulda come in with me,” Mikey says.
“Gimme them pan-fried noodles,” Cheeks says.
Mikey passes the dish. He’s just picking at the ginger beef and shrimp chow yoke, a little steamed rice in a bowl. There are three more heaping piles of Chinese food on the table and Cheeks is eating from every one, using the serving spoon that came with the rice.
The proprietor brings over a platter of garlic prawns, then goes into the kitchen, starts yelling something in Chinese. There’s nobody else in the place.
“You’re lucky you can eat like that,” Mikey says. “A burglar, you don’t keep the weight down, some night you get stuck in a narrow window. The cops come, they’re all laughing at you, or maybe it’s the guy owns the place finds you, gets himself a two by four.”