“Where to-the library?” He was pushing himself up now, stretching. He took a final dab at the shirt and dropped the Kleenex and newspaper into the trash.
And here was the grin, opening wide. “Yeah, that was what I was thinking. Maybe cruise across the bridge over to Highland Falls or someplace like that, Monroe, Middletown, whatever-they got a library there, right?” Now there was another bike out on the road-or two more bikes, a whole mini-motocross thing going on, the summer morning sawed lengthwise and then sawed through again. Sandman shifted his weight, tented his fingers in front of his nose. “No big deal, nothing strenuous-use the hookups there for a couple hours, make some money, that sort of thing, you know. And then maybe lunch and a couple brews or a nice bottle of wine, I mean, if Natalia doesn't need you to haul furniture around or anything-how about that place up along 9W there where you sit outside way high up and look down on the whole valley?”
“Like gods?” He was smiling himself now too. The tension, whatever it was, had slid away from him like a wet coat in the foyer of a very good restaurant.
“That's right,” Sandman said. “Like gods.”
Sandman's latest scheme was built on a solid foundation of research (“Research I was doing while you were dicking around in California,” he said, but with a grin, always with a grin), and it made sense both logically and financially. Instead of picking up IDs in an almost random way-off the Internet, out of the innards of the Dumpster, paying some kid three dollars a pop to skim credit card numbers at the gas station or the Chinese restaurant-Sandman was looking to target the rich and the super-rich and make the kind of connection that could pay the bills for a whole lifetime to come. “Why not?” he insisted. “If it works small, it works big, right?” Peck had to agree. He was ready to graduate. More than ready.
Because women found him interesting (and he found them interesting in turn; he'd been married something like four or five times), Sandman was able to extract certain small favors from the ones he felt especially close to. At the moment, he was simultaneously seeing two women Peck had never met, and never would meet, both of whom worked in the financial sector. One of them was some low-level functionary at Goldman Sachs-a secretary maybe-and the other, who was divorced and had two kids who were monumental pains in the ass, was an analyst at Merrill Lynch. What did they do for him? They provided stationery. And a legitimate address.
At the library, Sandman eased himself into a chair, booted up one of the computers and showed him how to access the files of individuals the Securities and Exchange Commission kept on its website as a public record. Then they migrated to separate ends of the row of computers and went to work. Once they were in possession of this information, they would use the stationery to request credit histories on selected individuals, and this would give them access to the brokerage account numbers. Then it was easy. Or it should be. Go to the Internet, transfer funds from existing accounts to the ones they'd set up elsewhere, let things rest a couple days and transfer them again, taking it deeper. Then close it all down, in and out, and nobody the wiser. And nobody hurt, except a couple of fat cats so fat they couldn't keep track of their own sweat trail. And they were crooks, anyway. Everybody knew that.
It was past two when Sandman came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He didn't know where the time had gone. Rather than print things out-and he was still a little paranoiac here-he was copying the files by hand into a notebook he'd brought along for that purpose, and he must have had a good hundred names already, but it was like fishing in a deep hole where they just won't stop biting. Or better yet, picking up nuggets off the floor of a gold mine. When have you got enough? When do you stop? He could have sat there all day and all night too.
“Hey, buddy, time for lunch, what do you say?”
Peck just stared at him, his eyes throbbing and the first faint intimation of a headache blowing like a sere wind through the recesses of his skull.
“Some fun, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said, but he couldn't elaborate, not yet, still in thrall to the munificent and all-encompassing kingdom of information. He glanced to his right, where another library patron, a titanic black woman with a pretty face and a sweeping curtain of dreads, was maneuvering her mouse so delicately she might have been peeling a grape with one hand. She looked up then and smiled at him, a smile surfeited with sweetness and simple pleasure, and he smiled back.
“But it's okay, we got enough,” Sandman was saying, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Tomorrow we type some letters and then we move, get in and out quick before anybody knows what hit them, because you know they're going to pull the plug on this, they got to. I mean, I can't believe we're the only ones-”
“Yeah,” Peck said, his voice sounding unnatural in his ears as he turned back to him and logged off the computer. He was so charged up he could barely breathe. “I know what you mean.”
Then it was back down what had to be one of the most scenic highways in the world, the road sliced right out of the side of the mountain like a long abdominal suture holding the two pieces together, and the view had never seemed so exotic to him, sailboats on the river like clean white napkins on a big blue tablecloth, the light portioning out the sky in pillars of fire. Sandman had the radio cranked, the car-a new yellow T-Bird he'd nicknamed “the Canary”-was taking the turns as if it were riding on air and the two of them were as high as lords and they hadn't touched a drop of anything yet. It was glorious. It was golden. It was good to be back.
They pulled up the long gravel drive just after six, the sun shuddering through the trees, the air heavy, saturated, offering up a feast of odors he'd forgotten all about, from the faint perfume of the flowers along the path (and what were they, daffodils?) to the one-part-in-a-billion offering of a skunk's glands and the fresh wet unchlorinated scent of rainwater in the barrel under the drainpipe to the wafting glory of top-quality angus beef hitting the grill on somebody's hibachi two or three houses over. He felt new-made. Felt unconquerable. It didn't hurt that he and Sandman had shared two bottles of the best wine on a pretty poor list in a pretty poor restaurant with the best view in the universe, because the second bottle, a Sauvignon Blanc chilled to perfection so that it went down cold enough to refresh you but not so cold that you couldn't pick up on its body and the subtle buttery oakiness of the cask it had resided in, lifted his quietly buoyant mood and made it soar. Was he drunk? No, not at all. His senses were awakened, that was all. The world was putting out its vibes, and he was receptive to them.
He hadn't given a thought to Natalia all afternoon, except to consider, somewhere in the back of his mind, that they'd have to go out to dinner because he really hadn't had time to plan anything. She had the car, so she would have been out shopping and she would have picked up the kid and probably taken her for a sandwich someplace. He was thinking alfresco, if the mosquitoes weren't too bad-there was a place in Cold Spring, right on the water. Maybe they would try that.
The first thing he noticed was that the sprinkler was going on the side lawn-Madison had been dancing through the revolving sheets of water in her shorts and T-shirt and he must have told her ten times already to be sure to shut the water down when she was done because it pooled there and made a mess of the lawn-and then he saw that Natalia, in her haste to haul her loot into the house, had left all four doors of the car wide open. Or no, it was only three. She was improving. Definitely improving. When Sandman pulled up beside the Mercedes and cut the engine, the first thing Peck did was get out and slam all three doors before ducking round the corner of the house to shut off the water and retrieve the sprinkler. In the process of which, he got his Vans wet.