State of War

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?”

Alex spun his flatscreen to face her. On the screen was a photo and brief dossier of Corinna Skye.

“Her,” Alex said, nodding toward the screen. “She’s a lobbyist for CyberNation, and she’s been working me pretty hard.”

He gave her a moment to read through the short file. When she was done, she shifted her eyes to look at him, and he saw there was steel in those eyes.

“Working you how?” she asked. Her voice was soft, but carried an edge.

Michaels shrugged. “Nothing specific,” he said. “She’s come by the office a couple of times to make some points and deliver some information. She even called the house the other day.”

“When you were working out in the garage?”

He nodded.

“Guru told me someone called. She didn’t say who, though.”

“She called again earlier today,” Alex said. “She said she had a meeting with Mitchell Ames and has some interesting information to pass on to me. She wants to meet me at her hotel at seven tonight for a drink.”

Toni’s eyes flicked to the flatscreen and then back to him. “And?”

“And I have a bad feeling about this.”

“What has she done?” Toni asked, her voice still soft and low, but still with that edge of steel.

“Nothing. Nothing specific, anyway. It’s just that she’s been a bit too… suggestive, I guess. But between her innuendos and the timing with this CyberNation suit, I just have this feeling that I’m being set up. And I don’t want to take any chances.”

“So you’re not going to meet her?” Toni asked.

Alex shook his head. “I have to meet her. But I want you to come with me. If Guru won’t mind watching Little Alex for a while longer, that is.”

Toni smiled at that. “I’ll call her right now,” she said. “And I’ll be ready to go by six.”

She rose to leave, but paused in the doorway and turned back to face him. “And by the way,” she said. “I love you. And thanks.”

And then she was gone.

Alex just sat there for a moment, enjoying the warm feeling she had left behind, and then he picked up the manila folder holding her report on the hacker.

In spite of himself, he couldn’t help feeling that one more virus-strewing hacker was not Net Force’s biggest problem. CyberNation and their lawsuit, their bribing a Supreme Court judge’s clerk, their devious ways to get their agenda across, that was a problem. This was nothing. They had caught the guy. End of worry about him.

He looked at the folder. Best he read it, though, and be ready to tell Toni what a good job she had done.

It didn’t take long. It was good work, both on Jay’s and Toni’s parts, even though they didn’t have quite all of it. According to what she had written, there was still this man behind the scenes, supposedly, but that would be a simple enough sting: Wait until he called, set up a meeting, go and collect him.

As Michaels read the description of the suspected kingpin, he thought the man sounded familiar somehow. Like somebody he knew.

He couldn’t pin it down. Ah, well. It would probably come to him in the middle of the night. Besides, a lot of people looked alike. Sometimes when the anchor described a criminal suspect on the evening news, it was all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. “Police describe the suspect as a white male, age twenty-five to thirty-five, five-foot-nine to six-feet-two inches tall, one hundred and sixty to two hundred pounds, with brown hair worn moderately long. He was last seen wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes.”

That could be any of a million people in any big city on any given day. Maybe one of two million. Who did they hope to collect with such a description?

Well, he didn’t need to worry about it now. He had to talk to the secretarial staff and the ops who were going to be amassing paperwork for that shark Mitchell Ames on behalf of CyberNation.

Just what he needed.

As they came out of the Indian restaurant, Junior said, “I spotted a liquor store down the road a piece. You want to get a fifth of Southern Comfort to take to the house?”

“Sure, why not?” Joan said.

She wore a disguise to match Junior’s, just like he’d told her to — cowboy boots under a long blue denim skirt, and a shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons under a white cowgirl hat.

Even so, the clerk in the restaurant had looked at him like he was some kind of pervert, since Joan did look young enough to be Junior’s daughter.

“So tell me more about this gig,” she said, after they had collected the bottle and gotten back into the rental car.

He shrugged. “It’s just like the last couple,” he said. “This one is a fat, rich Texas oilman who got into politics. You’ll be working as a temp secretary in his office, romance will blossom, we’ll set up a photo shoot at a motel, the usual.”

“My fee?”

“Same as last time.”

She was silent for a moment, only the deep drone of the car’s AC to break the quiet.

“What?”

“I was thinking, maybe I need a raise.”

A cold wind seemed to blow across the back of his neck. That wasn’t like Joan. “Why?” he asked. “You’re making good money for not much work.”

“Well, I heard on the news about that guy out in California. The Democrat? Turned up dead in a park a couple days ago?”

He managed not to react to that. Ames had been right after all. “What’s that got to do with you getting more money, cher?” he asked.

“Come on, Junior, do I have ‘Stupid’ tattooed on my forehead? We caught him with his pants down. You went and had a talk with him, he flipped out, and you capped him. At least that’s how I figured it, unless it is just one huge monster coincidence, which I don’t believe it was.”

He made a show of thinking about it. After a moment he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but okay, maybe I could come up with a little bonus.”

She smiled at him, a big, happy grin. “How much?”

“What you think is fair?”

“Ten thousand. Since people are getting dead and all.”

“No way. I maybe could go three thousand.”

“Eight.”

“Five.”

“Seventy-five hundred.”

Junior pretended to consider it. It didn’t matter how much he agreed to, she wasn’t going to get any of it anyhow, but he had to make it look good. If he’d just rolled over and agreed to the ten, she’d have been suspicious.

He sighed and shook his head. “All right. Seventy-five hundred.”

She reached over and laid her hand on his thigh. “Always a pleasure doing business with you, hon.”