“You’re crazy,” she shrilled. “We don’t do that.”
“What is it?” the man shouted in the background. “Let me talk to him.”
“You’re talking to Bill Clinton, here, Rosy-I know what you do,” I said. “Now, I would suggest, for your own health, that you stop chasing us innocent computer folks around the country, and find out who killed Bobby. If you don’t, we’ll start fucking with you again. Remember the last time we did that? How your Keyhole satellites went nuts and all the GS-80s started pooping in their Italian pants? You don’t want that again.”
“Listen, Bill,” she said earnestly. “Do you have any proof…?”
“Nothing you would believe,” I said. “But if you check out the dead black man in Jackson, it won’t take you long to figure out who he was, all on your own. The FBI are already involved; all you have to do is give them a hint.”
“Bobby DuChamps?” she asked. That surprised me. They’d actually gotten a name.
“Almost,” I said. “His name was Robert Fields. Get it? And listen, Rosalind, really: have a nice day.”
I hung up feeling that I’d been mean to her, but sometimes, with security people-she was NSA internal security-it’s the only thing that works. Hate will wake you up, if not set you free.
“YOU do it?” John asked, when I got back to the motel. He and LuEllen were watching the end of a movie called XXX, about a boy and his GTO.
“All done. Can’t tell what will happen next, but maybe some of the feds will… what?” I looked at LuEllen.
“Reorient themselves,” she suggested.
“That’s good,” I said. “Reorient themselves.”
JOHN was in one room, LuEllen and I in another. We were beat. We’d been flying, driving, hacking, and getting shot at for twenty hours and needed some sleep. We arranged to meet at eight the next morning, and LuEllen and I said good night to John and crawled into bed.
Just before we went to sleep, LuEllen said, “Think about Carp’s trailer. Ten o’clock in the morning is the best time to hit an open target like that. Think about it in your sleep.”
I did that.
THERE’S no better source for burglary supplies than your local Target store. You can get cheap, disposable entry tools, plastic gloves, Motorola walkie-talkies, backpacks, and everything you need to change your appearance. Like khaki shorts.
Everybody knows what a burglar looks like-an ethnic minority, probably, lurking in the bushes until the coast is clear. After dark, on a moonless night. Wearing a ski mask. Which is why most professional house-breakers go in at ten o’clock in the morning or two o’clock in the afternoon, during the workday, when school is in session and the house is probably empty. And they always knock first.
We synched the walkie-talkie channels on the way over to Carp’s, and I changed into the shorts, tore the price tags off a pair of wraparound sunglasses and put them on, along with a Callaway golf hat.
We first made a pass outside the park, but could see no activity over the wall near Carp’s. Then we went in and cruised down his street. There was a door on the back end of the Carp mobile home, the one we hadn’t seen the night before, that Carp had gone through, and it was hanging open an inch or two.
The front door, where John and I had spilled out onto the lawn, was closed, as we’d left it. Just around the corner, and about four houses up, an old guy was mowing his tiny lawn with a tiny electric lawn mower. He glanced at us as we went past and LuEllen said to John, “When we pull into the place, go straight ahead and get out on another street, so you won’t drive past that guy again.”
John nodded. “All right.”
LuEllen looked at me. “Ready to try it?”
“I didn’t see anything that said no.”
John would be waiting outside the park. If we called and said, “Dave, come on,” he’d come in through the park, taking his time. If we said, “Hey, Dave, hurry it up,” he’d come down the outside street, and we’d jump the wall.
IN OUR shorts and golf shirts and over-the-shoulder pack, LuEllen and I were an unremarkable, almost invisible, couple knocking on Jimmy James Carp’s door, knocking just loud enough to attract somebody inside. There was no answer and I tried the door. It opened and we waved at John. As he left, we stepped inside as though we’d been invited.
The place was dark, with curtains and shades on all the windows. I hit the lights and found that we were in the kitchen. The place was a mess, with dirty dishes stacked around a sink. An overflowing garbage bag sat on the floor between a small dinette table and the line of cupboards on the opposite wall. The garbage bag was jammed with pizza boxes, corn-curl sacks, instant dinner cartons, and microwave popcorn bags, and that’s what the place smelled like: like every kind of stale cheese you can think of.
The next room along was the living room, with the furniture arranged to focus on a large-screen TV. Most of the furniture had a patina of dust, and the room was littered with paper: the New York Times, the LA Times, tabloids, popular science magazines, a facedown copy of Penthouse. An all-in-one stereo sat on a corner table, with a couple dozen CDs. On the wall, somewhat askew, was a full-color framed copy of the Praying Hands.
There were two bedrooms along a single hallway in the back: the first was a woman’s room, not much neater than the rest of the place, and even dustier. The second bedroom belonged to Carp. A dozen computer books and manuals were scattered on the floor around the bed, all but two on IBM hardware. One of the others dealt with encryption, and the last one was an O’Reilly’s Guide to the C++ language.
I moved the pack to the back door, closed and locked the door, and we started tearing through the room. We didn’t take long: we’d done this before. In two minutes, I had a ream of paper-old bills, new bills, bank statements, notes, employment records-a dozen floppy disks, and a half-dozen recordable CDs. I was loading it into our backpack when LuEllen, who’d moved back out to the front room, said, “Hey.”
I poked my head out of the bedroom. “What?”
“Laptop,” she said.
“What?” I went out, and sure enough, a Toshiba notebook sat under the edge of the couch. The power supply was still plugged into the wall. It looked exactly like somebody had been lying on the couch with the laptop on his stomach, while watching TV, had shut down the laptop and then pushed it under the couch so it wouldn’t be stepped on. I know that because I’d done it about a thousand times. We pulled the plug and took it.
“Bobby’s?” LuEllen asked. “Is that too much to expect?”
“Yeah, that’s too much,” I said, as we put it with the pack. “Baird said Bobby’s was an IBM. And this one doesn’t have a built-in optical drive. It’s a travel machine like my Vaio. Bobby’s was probably a lot heavier, with a bunch of built-in stuff. He didn’t travel.”
We’d been inside for five minutes at that point and my internal egg timer was telling me to get the fuck out. Same with LuEllen. “Unless you’ve got something special to look at…”
“Let’s go,” I said. That’s when we heard a car’s tire crunching on the gravel outside.
LuEllen touched my arm and moved to a window. She could see out through a crack in the blind, and she hissed at me, “Two guys,” and then, “Coming to the door.”
I couldn’t see out, but I glanced at LuEllen’s face: she seemed pleased. She liked this shit, because it cranked her up, and she lived for the crank.