Her eyes were hard, burning. “Go ahead, open it.” He heard the door crack open behind him and turned to see Courtney's pale orb of a face hanging there for an instant before the door pulled shut again. He bent to fish the new license out of the envelope, hard plastic, laminated, “California Driver License” emblazoned across the top of it. They had her name right, had her address too, but the sex was wrong and the height and the weight and the signature at the bottom. But that wasn't the worst of it. The two photos, the larger on the left and the smaller on the right, were of a man they'd both seen before, and he was staring right at them.
There was no question of going back to work. Dana was in a state. Every day, it seemed, the mail brought some fresh piece of bad news, bill collectors dunning her for past-due accounts she'd never opened, a recall notice for a defect in a BMW Z-4 she'd never seen, notification of credit denied when she hadn't sought credit in the first place. And now she'd lost her job, now she'd be driving on an expired license. “What next?” she demanded, her voice strangled and unbalanced, riding up the walls like the cry of some animal caught in a snare, and she took hold of his arms in a grip so fierce she might have been trying to stop the bleeding, only he wasn't bleeding. Not yet. “Back to jail again? Tell me. What do I have to do?”
He wanted to hold her but she wouldn't let him because he was the villain all of a sudden, the stand-in for the bad guy, the nearest warmblooded thing she could fight against. A man. Hairy legs and a dangle of flesh. A man like the one who'd done this to her. He said, “I don't know, I really don't,” and she still held to her grip, her nails biting into the flesh, both of them fighting for balance. All at once he felt the irritation rising in him-she was crazy, that was what she was. Fucking crazy. “Goddamnit, let go of me,” he shouted, and he shoved her away from him. “Shit, Dana. Shit, it wasn't me, I'm not the one to blame.”
At that moment the door pushed open behind them and there was Radko, with his heavy face and his cheap shoes and his cheap watch. “I dun't like this,” he said carefully, slowly. “Not in my office.”
Dana glared at him. Here was another man to lash out at. “I want to kill him,” she said.
Radko studied the gray abraded paint of the floor. “Who? Bridger?”
Bridger understood that he was at a crossroads here, that there was a choice he would have to make, and soon, very soon, between Digital Dynasty and this wound-up woman with the tangled hair and raging eyes. A mad notion of stalking out the door flitted in and out of his head, but he caught himself. Conflict was inimical to him, a condition he'd always-or nearly always-managed to avoid. “I'm sorry,” he said, ducking his head in deference. “It's just that thing-you know, with Dana and what she's been through? It just won't go away.”
Radko lifted both hands to smooth back the long talons of his hair, then he lifted one haunch and settled himself on the edge of the receptionist's desk and began fumbling for the cigarettes he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket. “This thiff, yes?” he said, his voice softening. “This is it? This is the problem?”
Bridger acknowledged that it was.
“So sit,” Radko said, gesturing to the plastic chairs along the wall, “and you tell me.” And then, to Dana, as he touched the flame of his Bic to the cigarette, “You mind?”
“Yes,” she said, “I do,” but he ignored her.
Over the course of the next half hour, while Courtney went out for coffee and Plum twice stuck her head through the door to assess the situation and deliver updates to the crew and the cigarette smoke rose and the sun inflamed the undersized windows, Dana, who barely knew Radko, unburdened herself, and when she was at a loss, Bridger was there to offer amplification. Drawing at his cigarette, smoothing back his hair, sighing and muttering under his breath, Radko listened as though this were the plot of a movie he expected to bid on. “You know,” he said finally, “in my country this thing goes on all the time. This stealing of the documents, of the people too. Kidnap for ransom. You know about this?”
Bridger nodded vaguely. He wasn't even sure what country Radko came from.
“Let me see that,” Radko said, slipping the ersatz license from Dana's hand. He studied the picture a moment, then offered his opinion that the DMV had screwed up and the computer had sent the license to the address of record rather than the new address the thief had given them. “If you get that address,” he said, glancing up as Courtney came through the street door with their coffees, “then you get this man.”
Dana had become increasingly animated as they worked through the litany of details-how they'd contacted the credit reporting agencies and put a security hold on all her information, how they'd sent out copies of the police report and affidavit to the creditors of the spurious accounts, how they'd gone to the police and the victims' assistance people-and now she wondered aloud just how they might go about doing that. “This guy could have a hundred aliases,” she said, removing the plastic cap from the paper cup and pausing to blow at the rising steam. She took a sip. Made a face. “And how do we get the address? They won't even run a fingerprint trace. Not important enough, they said. It's a victimless crime. Sure. And look at me: I'm out of a job.”
“Milos,” he said.
Courtney had settled back in at her desk, making a pretense of focusing on her computer, and Plum, for the third time, pushed open the security door and let it fall to again. Bridger said, “Who?”
“Milos. My cousin. Milos he is finding anybody.”
The next afternoon-a Friday and Radko gone to L. A. for another “meeding”-Bridger left work early to pick up Dana at her apartment. He had to get out of the truck and ring her bell-or rather, flash it-because she wasn't quite ready, and he stood there on the doormat for five minutes at least till she appeared at the door, but the appearance was brief. Her face hung there a moment, wearing a look of concentrated harassment, the door swung open, and she was gone, clicking down the hallway in her heels, looking for some vital thing without which she couldn't leave the apartment even if it were on fire. He wanted to remind her-urgently-that they had an appointment with Radko's cousin at four-thirty and that his office was in Santa Paula, a forty-five-minute drive, but he wasn't able to do that unless he was facing her and he wasn't facing her. No, he was following her, from one room to another, her hair flashing, her arms bare and animated as she dug through a dresser drawer, pawed over the things on the night table, tossed one purse aside and snatched up the next. “I'm running a little late,” she flung over her shoulder, and slammed the bathroom door.
Bridger wasn't happy-he resented feeling compelled to speed and risk another ticket-but he was resigned. He put his foot to the floor, the tires chirped and the pickup protested, wheezing and spitting as he gunned it up the ramp and onto the freeway, and he glanced over at Dana to see how she was taking it, but she was oblivious. He remembered how she'd told him that when she'd first got her new car-a VW Jetta-it ran so smoothly she couldn't tell whether the engine was actually going or not and had continually ground the starter without knowing it. Only after she realized that people were staring at her in the parking lot-grimacing, clenching their teeth-did she begin to adjust. It was all about the vibration, and eventually she trained herself to pick up the faintest intimation of those precise valves working in their perfect cylinders and all was well. The pickup was another story. Yet once he got it up to cruising speed and kept it there he was able to make up the time with some creative dodging around the cell-phone zombies and white-haired catatonics whose sole function in life it was to block the fast lane, and they pulled into Santa Paula no more than twenty minutes late for the appointment.