Just before the end of her life’s final chapter, predictably entitled Why Me? Vickers offered only a single piece of intel for their trouble. Once, when Tom Chase showered at her house, his cellular phone had buzzed in the pocket of his coat which was then lying on her couch. Curious about other women who might be in his life, Vickers picked up without saying anything. A low rough voice, maybe with a southern accent, perhaps a black man, had asked for someone other than the man now rinsing off in the shower. The caller had followed the full name with a jocular “you-son-of-a-bitch,” as if they had not spoken in some while, but the renewed acquaintance was welcome. When Nelly Vickers remained silent, the caller immediately hung up. A wrong number? She did not tell Chase about it. Did not want him to think she was snooping. He must have figured out she invaded his privacy. He broke up with her the next day.
With Chalk’s cruel encouragement, Vickers even remembered the name the caller had asked for. Of course she had not volunteered this information at once. It had come out a piece at a time, much the same way as her appendages went bye-bye during their interview. Maynard Chalk put the gator in interrogator.
Having gleaned this one name, Chalk assured himself that Vickers’s death was not entirely senseless. Unfortunately, it had taken none of the edge off his unbearable desire to find Tom Chase and fix him. Whatever Chase’s many faults and offenses, including an abject lack of company loyalty, Chalk would take a lesson from his new nemesis: Chase did not mix pussy with business.
With the clean-up call placed, and his fingernails tidied, Chalk slathered a dollop of Purell on his hands and rubbed them briskly as if they were cold. Then he bellied up to his computer. Who was the man Vickers had dimed? Though now he could finally deploy his immense technical resources, the first clue had come as the result of a vigorous beat-down on a living, breathing witness. He stayed true to one of his core ideals of the Millennium: talk before tech.
Chalk did not log onto the World Wide Web most mortals use, with spam, pop-ups, the stroke sites, and the endless offers of penis-extending Levitran weight-loss wonder pills. This was Black Widow, a cyber galaxy that only seven men in the entire world could travel with impunity. The President of the United States did not know Black Widow existed.
On a lonely dead-end street in Quantico, an entire building dropped twenty floors below ground level. That was Black Widow’s lair. It was populated wall to wall with computer geniuses, not all of whom were pimpled, obese, mouth-breathing, asocial, compulsive masturbators, with skid marks in their Fruit of the Looms. This warren of geeks rocked day and night, hacking any site in the world to which Chalk did not already have access. Their efforts were compartmentalized so no one in the cube farm had the full picture. Their results were aggregated and collated into a whole. Black Widow was a network of front doors jimmied, fire-walls breached, and electronic sentinels co-opted to betray their designers and owners. Every database lay open and bare to Chalk with no legal warrant required. The Web of the common man was like a harem of crippled virgins helpless against his priapic despoiling. With Black Widow, Chalk could slither into anyone’s bedroom window over sills of fractured code.
Chalk shedded everything he could find. Cracking into police, jail, and prison records told him a good deal about his employee. Shambling Tom Chase had been an ordinary yobbo up to a point. He seemed like a garden variety punk, a skell always looking to better his sorry lot in the easiest way possible; often getting himself pinched by the local po-po for his efforts. In the drawer of humanity there were a few sharp knives. Tom Chase was a trusty wooden spoon.
Then Chalk delved deeper in the cyber shadows and looked up the name Vickers had let tumble in extremis: This bastard was a real eye-opener, a damn revelation. Had Chalk known this was the real man behind Tom Chase, the weasel would have been tortured to death for the affront of even applying for a job with Right Way. This was the usual fate of any shyster with the balls to come sniffing around for a quick sting. It was clever. Chalk had to hand it to him. Blackshaw had sheep-dipped himself, covering his actual identity the way soldiers got their identities wiped from the records when they were loaned out to the CIA for special missions.
The name Chase was more than just an alias. It was also a bad pun. So be it, thought Chalk. The chase is on. Like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Chalk always got his man; but unlike the Canuckistani cops to the north, he slowly and painfully slaughtered him.
Chalk researched the name Vickers revealed. Plenty of Black Widow hits on the guy. The man was from right next door in Maryland. Chalk ran the name against the picture on file at the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles and confirmed it. The comrade Chalk knew as Tom Chase stared back at him from the screen.
At a signal from their boss, Simon Clynch and Bill Slagget sat down. They were both tall, muscular men dressed in a fresh change of casual clothing after the Nelly Vickers mess, reeking of dueling colognes. Chalk angled the monitor toward them. Clynch took hold of the mouse, left-clicked, right-clicked, scrolled up, and scrolled down. Then, as one they sat back in their chairs.
Clynch shook his head. “He got us, Mr. Chalk. He left a legit-looking paper trail three years old. Brilliant. Picks up the identity of a guy who tripped on acid and dropped out at an ashram in Upstate New York. Pretty smart. The alias’s owner is still alive, but he’s totally off the grid. The identity is viable.”
Slagget chimed in. “Right. So no flags go up when the Social Security number gets back in play after a time-out. The real Chase, the yogi, he even had a decent military record. Which we always like. Our grifter just kept on walking the walk with the stolen identity. Now we know our guy isn’t Tom Chase. He’s Richard Willem Blackshaw.”
Chalk regarded his lieutenants and spoke dangerously low. “Take over. Get me everything you can dig up on this shitbird.”
CHAPTER 8
Ben got to work before the wake of LuAnna’s boat disappeared round the bend in his creek. He retrieved the treasure box keys from the house. He could not help checking the gold bar in the couch. He even stroked it once before letting the cushion flop back into place. At his pier, he refueled the air compressor engine, which ran off a separate tank from Miss Dotsy’s Atomic Four.
Then he ducked into his crab shanty for other necessities. The shanty was built out over his stream, and supported by posts driven into the bottom. In summer, the shanty housed shallow shedding tanks that held blue crabs until that perfect moment in their molt. Then, when their shells were at their most supple, and the meat was mouth-watering, Ben would fish up the soft-shell delicacies, pack them on ice, and take them to market with the rest of his hard-shell catch.
Off season, the shanty served more as a shed. Ben collected eighty feet of extra line, two shovels, four more plastic milk crates, and his older dive light which had fresh batteries. Then he cast off and cruised over to Knocker Ellis’s place.