Toni gave him the big-cat-about-to-feed grin again. “Welcome to the real world, Mr. Virtual Reality. The clock is running. If I don’t hear what I want to hear starting in the next sixty seconds, I’ll have that big, mean, nasty guy with all the guns who arrested you take you for a walk to our basement elevator.”
She let him think about that for a moment, not saying anything.
Thumper sighed and sagged back in his chair. “What do you want?”
Toni looked at him. “I want to know why you did this.”
“I was paid! I got hired by a guy to do it. It wasn’t my idea!”
“And his name?”
“I–I don’t know his name.”
Toni stood up and made a point of looking at her watch.
“No, it’s true, I swear! He called me, I met him at an office, we did everything face-to-face. He paid me in cash. I never got his name.”
“Where is this office?”
“At a mall on Long Island.”
Toni shoved a small flatscreen across the table. “Key in the particulars. Name of the mall, where it is.”
He took the flatscreen.
“I want a description of the man who hired you. Height, weight, hair, eyes, everything you can remember. And when we’re finished I’ll send a technician down to work with you on an Identi-kit to come up with a picture of this guy.”
Thumper nodded, already typing.
“Are you supposed to see him again?”
“Yes, yes, for another payment, as soon as he sees evidence of the virus’s effects.”
“How do you make contact?”
“I have a secure phone, no visual, signal scrambled coming and going. He calls me.”
“Where is this phone?”
“Your people took it from me.”
“You use a vox-changer when you talk?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “Good. Maybe you won’t have to turn into a cave fish after all, Mr. Newman.”
Toni went to the door, already planning the next step. She would have Jay put out a press release that the hacker’s next virus was out there doing damage. When the guy paying this clown called, they’d set up a meeting, nail him, and that would be that. This was no sweat, no problem.
25
Dallas was like a whole bunch of other places in the southern U.S. — hot and humid in the summer, and very uncomfortable if you didn’t have air-conditioning. It was ninety-five degrees out there today, with ninety-one percent relative humidity. As bad as back home.
Well, Junior figured, it didn’t matter. He’d be in and out of here in a day or so.
He’d rented a house for a month via the net, a college area near the U of T, out in Arlington, about halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, using a legit credit card he had under a phony name and post office box. He’d had to cough up a thousand bucks extra, a guaranteed “cleaning” fee, and he sure wasn’t going to get that back. Between the rent, the extra fee, the airplane tickets, and the rental car, this would end up costing him five thousand and change, but that was part of the cost of doing business. You had to spend money to make money, and you had to spend whatever it took to cover yourself.
As he drove from DFW airport to Arlington — he had to take the International Parkway to I-30, jig west, and then south on State Road 360—he replayed the shoot-out with the security guard in his mind. It had been much better than the cop. The way he figured it, he could have waited for the county mounties to show and killed them all.
He was invincible.
Joan wouldn’t be that kind of rush. There wasn’t going to be any challenge, no real risk. She was a skinny little thing.
He already knew that he wasn’t going to shoot her. There wasn’t any need to do that. He’d give her a couple of drinks, maybe find some enjoyable way to tire her out, then, once she was asleep, he would put a pillow over her face and she would just wake up dead. Clean, no blood, and he’d be careful not leave any of his DNA around.
Once he had everything cleaned up, scrubbing every place he touched, vacuuming, taking the bag with him, he was out of there, and Joan was no longer a problem. It would be a month before the rental agent came around looking for more money. He’d leave the air conditioner going full-blast, maybe even put Joan’s body in the tub and dump a few bags of ice over her. She wouldn’t start to stink for a while, and God knew college flops didn’t smell like rose gardens anyhow. It would be at least a week or two before she got ripe enough so any of the neighbors would likely complain about the smell. All he needed was one day.
In college towns, Junior knew, people came and went all hours, hopped on a bicycle or scooter or in their cars, and nobody paid any attention to them. Turnover was high in such neighborhoods, kids flunking out or transferring or graduating, so it was hard to keep track of who was living where. He had a cowboy hat and a pair of pointy-toed boots and Levi’s cut for them, a big ole silver belt buckle, and aviator shades. He even had a fake moustache. He looked like any other Texan. What they’d see would be the clothes, and if he was a little older than most students, big deal. He wasn’t planning on interacting with the neighbors.
Come tomorrow, he’d be long gone. And when the cops eventually came round and discovered the body of a woman who had a record for prostitution busts in at least four states Junior knew about — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida — they would hardly call out the Texas Rangers in full battle gear to hunt down her killer. A hooker dead halfway between Dallas, with hundreds of whores to go around, and Fort Worth with almost as many? The cops would figure she’d come in from one of the big cities and had pissed somebody off.
They’d probably figure it for a professional hit once they got to poking around the real estate rental office and hit walls trying to trace the renter, but even so, figuring out motive and who could have done it was a long way past that.
The odds were good that they’d just drop it at that point, leaving the case open but not putting any serious effort into closing it. And if they didn’t? Well, he’d been careful. There was absolutely nothing linking him to that house, nothing to give them even a hint of a trail to follow.
He may be invincible, but he was also very, very careful.
He found the house, made a pass by, and checked out the situation. He wouldn’t be back here until well after dark — he was picking Joan up at the airport at seven, they’d stop and get something to eat on the way, grab a bottle of bourbon, she liked to drink Southern Comfort, he knew — so it’d be nine, maybe ten P.M. before they got back.
It was too bad, ’cause he really liked her. She was useful for his game, and she was great in bed, too, but this was business. Ames was right. There were plenty of other fish in the sea who didn’t know squat about Junior. Better to swim with them and make sure this one went belly up and quiet. Dead women tell no tales.
“You wanted to see me?” Toni asked, standing in his doorway.
Alex grinned. “Always,” he said.
Toni smiled back. He loved that, making her smile.
He could see she was carrying a manila folder under her arm. He nodded toward it. “What’s that?” he asked.
Toni shrugged. “My report on that hacker, Thumper, who released the latest viruses. I’ve sent a copy to Jay, of course, but I thought you might like to see it, too.”
Alex nodded. “Thanks, hon,” he said. “I’ll look it over first chance I get. First, though, there’s something we need to talk about.”
Toni came over and sat down in a chair on the other side of his desk. “What is it?”