LuEllen looked him over. "You gotta be kidding."
"Hey, lady.
"Hey yourself, asshole. If you had a gun in your hand it'd make a bigger lump. There's nothing in there but your fist. Why don't you take it home and fuck it?"
The guy looked at her, mouth half open. Then he did something with his hand in his pocket. There was a pop, and LuEllen said, "Oh, shit, he shot me."
When the gun went pop, I kicked the guy on the inside ball of his knee. His leg went out from under him and he lurched forward, and I hit him with a right hand on the bridge of the nose. His nose crunched, and he went down like a sack of sand.
LuEllen was looking at her arm. "Maybe I'm not shot. No, I think I am."
The guy was face down on the blacktop with both hands covering his face, trying to figure out what happened. Broken noses do that to you. For the first few minutes, it's impossible to think about anything else.
LuEllen pulled up the sleeve of her blouse. An inch above the elbow was a red streak where a small-caliber bullet had grazed her, pushing holes through the shirtsleeve both coming and going.
"He could have hurt me," LuEllen said.
The locksmith had seen the commotion. He came out and looked at the guy lying on the blacktop.
"Tried to rob you, huh?"
"Yeah. Thanks for the warning."
The locksmith shrugged. "I ain't the Sisters of Mercy."
"He shot me," LuEllen said. The guy tried to get up on his knees, one hand still cradling his face. LuEllen moved behind him and kicked him in the crotch, a full-footed punt. The guy gurgled and knotted up, his hands in his crotch now. Blood streamed down his chin into his little black beard. LuEllen dipped into his jacket pocket and came up with a single-shot.22 built into a stainless steel Zippo cigarette lighter.
The locksmith reached out for it. "A.22 short. Effective range, about the length of his dick. What a dipshit."
"Let's go," said LuEllen.
"Ain't you going to take his money?" asked the locksmith.
"You can have it," LuEllen said. As we drove away, the locksmith was going through the guy's pockets.
LuEllen didn't say much for a while, just kept looking at her arm, and finally giggled. "Wish I had some coke."
"Probably good that you don't."
"You should have felt his nuts squish."
"Yeah, right, a real treat, and I missed it."
"How come you didn't go for his nuts in the first place?"
"Too chancy a target. If you miss and kick a thigh instead of the balls, he'll be inside your shirt. There's no reflex to protect the knee, and that's crippling if you get it. And nothing hurts as bad as the first two minutes of a broken nose."
"It really sounded ugly when his nose broke," LuEllen said. "It gives me the shivers thinking about it."
"Yeah, well." I touched my own nose, which has been broken twice. I can remember each time with painful clarity. "You ought to hear it from the inside."
That was on a Friday. We couldn't risk going into the Durenbargers' place over the weekend, so Dace and LuEllen drove out to a cabin he owned in the hills of West Virginia. "The shack," he called it. "My wife hated the place. She called it Chigger City."
On Sunday afternoon, while they were gone, Bobby called. I'd given him Ratface's real name-Frank Morelli-and with the help of a Washington phone phreak, he'd been watching Morelli's phones. No activity.
I look up gas stations near Morelli apartment and check data banks for most likely credit cards. Morelli makes five charges in past week Atlantic City area.
He's out of town?
Yes/week. Also check consumer credit reports, shows personal loan secured by Chevrolet, year unknown, but bluebook value at $4,500 so must be old. Also estimated pretax earnings last year $52,000.
Thanx. Keep tabs.
Yes/Bye
LuEllen and Dace got back at midnight, and I told them about Bobby's call.
"So it's unlikely that he's watching us," LuEllen concluded.
"And he's a small-timer. Fifty-two thousand in billings wouldn't keep a church mouse alive in D.C., not if he pays for an answering service and an office in addition to an apartment," Dace said.
"I feel better about it," LuEllen said. "That's still weird about the gays, though. I wish I knew about that."
We went into the Durenbargers' first thing Monday morning. I made my copies, set the bug, and we were out of there like a cool breeze. LuEllen didn't touch a thing.
CHAPTER 10
Monday night, while and LuEllen went to play in the District, I broke down the disks we'd taken from Ebberly and Durenbarger. The Whitemark code system was simple. When the central computer was called from the outside, it asked for a name and account number. After receiving those, it sent a code word back, directly to the home computer, and asked for a matching word from the code disk. The home computer scanned the list of words on the disk, found the match, and returned it. If the code was correct, you were in.
When I understood the code operation, I reviewed Dace's outline of Samantha Ebberly's sessions on the Whitemark computer. She had gone directly to a number of administrative files, and also called up a letter form. The format was standard. When I was sure that I knew what I was doing, I dialed one of our computers into the Ebberlys' to make sure she wasn't talking to the Whitemark system. She wasn't. I left the line open, in case she came on, then I dialed our second terminal into Whitemark.
Entry was routine. Inside, I found a typical mainframe administrative system, stuffed with files and forms. Using common techniques worked out by hackers over the past couple of decades, I spent four hours wandering through the system, opening files, reading, and moving on. There were no surprises, and there were some disappointments.
Security was a notch tighter than I hoped it would be. Key files were protected with personal passwords, and I had no way around them except laborious trial and error. I let that go for the time being. Whitemark programmers had also constructed programming barriers between the various sectors of the computer. Using Ebberly's codes I could wander at will through the open administrative sector, but I couldn't get down to the underlying programs. I couldn't get into the system itself.
I next checked the Durenbarger codes. Once again, entry was easy. On the engineering side, the computer was jammed with numbers and designs and ongoing work, with key files protected by personal passwords, just like the administrative side. And, as on the administrative side, access to the programming level was thoroughly blocked.
LuEllen and Dace came in late, saw me working, and tiptoed away. Much later, I went to bed and lay staring at the ceiling. By four in the morning, I'd decided there were no options. We had to get into the programming level of the computer. We had to crack another house.
At breakfast, LuEllen rambled on, sore, about the play they'd seen the night before. It concerned a street gang. The single scene was set in a basement, where the gang was waiting for a shipment of pistols.
"It was like one of those World War Two movies, where there's a Jew and a black guy and an Italian and the coward and this cool, white guy who's the hero. You know, one of everything," LuEllen said. "That's what this gang was like. But I know gang punks. I went to school with them. You don't find any Jews and blacks and whites together. You hang out with a white gang and it's nigger-this and nigger-that. If a Jew comes along it's fuckin' kike. In real life, these guys are assholes."
"It was supposed to be allegorical," Dace said dryly.
"Right. What really happened was, the guy who wrote it had his head up his ass." LuEllen trailed off and peered at me. "Why so glum? Something we should know about?"
"We have to hit the systems programmer's place," I said. "The head man's. There's no way around it."
"You knew we might." She was leaning on the refrigerator, munching a bowl of dry Honey-Nut Cheerios. The play was forgotten. "When do you want to do it?"