“No, you don’t understand. This guy finds the fifty people who most need killing, and finds an original way to kill each of them. The point is, what he does is a heroic act even if it’s against the rules, and even against the law, technically.”
“Technically? Doom, the book leaves out the part where the protagonist kills people and goes to jail. And a lot of other things. I’m not sure that’s the interpretation we want you to bring to the book club. Or to anything else.”
Doom took the book back. “You two can treat me like a little girl if you want, but I’m going to be fearless. We have a vision, it’s a worthy vision, and I am going to protect it.” She raised the book over her head and waved it at Serenity the same way that Serenity had waved the atlas when she ran Cy out of the library. “By any means necessary.”
Serenity threw up her hands. “Joy, tell her.”
Joy looked up from her tattoo. “Yes, child, murder is illegal and not a proper hobby for a young lady like yourself.” She turned to Serenity. “But, as a cop, I also saw a lot of times where the big guys used the law to keep little guys in line. By the time I left the force, I was tired of arresting Robin Hoods who the sheriff had caught violating some little rule that offended the princes. I think we’re on the line here, but I think a good attorney could spin this in our favor. And, while I don’t want to get all civic-minded, I think this library—this MAD—is worth fighting for—as long as we keep the kid out of jail. And safe.” She waved a finger at Serenity. “That means you don’t tell your husband.”
Serenity looked at her glass. “Agreed. If we do this right, by the time they catch us—catch me—we will have the expansion underway and it will be too big for anyone to shut down. Maybe some will say this is wrong, and they will have the law on their side. Maybe someone will have to pay a price. And that’s got to be me.”
Joy raised her glass and said, “Damn the law. Let’s be heroes.”
Joy and Doom clinked their glasses together and looked at Serenity.
After a long second, Serenity touched her glass to theirs and said, “In the words of our immortal president, Richard Nixon, we could do this, but it would be wrong.”
They paused, then all three of them laughed harder than they had laughed in a long time.
twenty-six
two thieves don’t make a right
SERENITY WAS TOO DRUNK to go home and explain it to Joe, so she left him a message about a night meeting and went to the MAD for the night.
“Keep your paws off of my spare cot, lady,” the scruffy man sitting on his rolling cot in the library said as Serenity hesitated in front of the empty cot next to his.
Joy yelled from her cot behind the circulation desk. “Get nice or get out, Josh. You can always go back to San Francisco. You know the rules.”
Joy unfolded herself and walked slowly to Serenity. “You want a cot out here, Serenity, we’ve got a free one in the women’s area, over in the children’s section.”
“So you’ve got women now?”
“Women and children. We’ve got a twenty-five-year-old girl from Ivy Green. She was thrown out by her husband last night with her five-year-old. The women’s shelter closed last year when they took away its funding. She heard about us. Tomorrow, I’m going to get one of our other women—Chakira—to watch the kid while the mom and I find her a job and a place to live.” Joy looked at Serenity. “I’m paying Chakira as a jill-of-all-trades day worker in the library. It may take some library money to get the Ivy Green girl started. Hope I’m playing the new MAD game right.”
“Looks like you’ve got it exactly right,” Serenity said. “What’s the woman’s name?”
“How the hell would I know? She’s not my friend. Just somebody the library needs to help. My job.”
Joy started to walk away as Serenity said, “I think you enjoy the job more than you let on.”
Joy stiffened. “Wendy. Girl’s name is Wendy.” Then she walked away.
Serenity went to the break room and got a pack of peanut butter crackers and a Diet Coke, and took them to the server room.
Doom’s workstation and the server’s rack were shoved into the back corner. The rest of the room was filled with children’s desks and chairs, as Doom was setting up a reading workshop for tomorrow.
Serenity sat down at the desk and logged in as herself. She then searched for anything connected with either the Special Projects fund or the Residuals account that had Doom’s name on it. Each time she methodically changed the name to Hammer. She finished both the crackers and the work, leaned back and stretched. Then she looked at the clock and saw both hands straight up. It was midnight.
Just then the Residuals account flashed red. Serenity leaned forward. Someone had tried to access the account, and their transaction had failed. Moreover, they had tried to withdraw money, but the money was now residing in the Library Special Projects fund, with only a few thousand dollars left in the Residuals account.
The transaction bounced, so the people who had come for their money had to know. Trembling, she looked up the code for the organization that was just now realizing their money wasn’t where they expected it to be. It wasn’t one of the authorized users she had seen, and wasn’t anything she recognized. This code was just “GG.” She looked up the contacts table for GG. No such entry. Looked in the history. No history. No description.
She looked at the destination code for the transfer. MYOB. Someone’s idea of a joke. Again, no record anywhere.
Serenity pulled up the raw transfer account and found a bank ID code and account number associated with it. She switched to a web browser and spent a few nervous minutes tracking down both the bank and account.
Bank of the Bahamas, a private numbered account.
But there was more. Some programmer, years ago, in an effort to be thorough, had included the trail of the last successful money transfers in the failure block. A MAD withdrawal was the last withdrawal. But right under it was the record for the last successful deposit. Nothing but an account number.
Serenity recognized the routing part of the account number as a bank in the nearby city of Jericho. And she had the account number of the account that had made the deposit.
twenty-seven
money gusher
THERE WASN’T MUCH SLEEP to be had in Serenity’s office Sunday night. She spent most of the night talking things over with Faulkner, who surprisingly, offered no answers. When the sun came up, she went to the Waffle House for breakfast and woke up sometime later with her head on the table next to a half-eaten plate of eggs.
“Ms. Hammer, I thought I’d just let you sleep.” The waitress smiled at her. “Reckon I spent enough of my days growing up with my head down on a desk at the library, while Momma worked at one no-count job after another.”
Serenity looked at the sun, which was high over the horizon. Then she looked at her watch. “Oh, God, I’ve got to go.”
“You want some coffee to go?”
“God, yes.”
Sam the Squatter met Serenity at the library door Monday morning with a big smile. Like he did a lot of mornings.
“Sam, the answer is still no.”
The smile didn’t fade. “I keep asking. I figure I spend most of my days here anyway. If we were married, I could probably sleep here, too.”
“Talk to that woman,” she pointed to Joy, “about that. No need to try to game the system anymore, Sam. We’re coming to you.” Serenity laughed. “Though it is good for a girl to know where her charm lies.”
“You are charming, Ms. Hammer. And kind. And beautiful. And I brought you a token of my love.” He held out a half-eaten blueberry muffin, probably rescued from the dumpster behind the corner bakery on his way to the library.