The Fool's Run

CHAPTER 15

The phone sounded like a distant dentist's drill. I'd wrapped it in a heavy synthetic blanket to muffle the ringing, and now I couldn't find it. I twisted off the bed and floundered around for a minute in the darkness and finally stepped on it.

"What?" said LuEllen.

"I got it."

The receiver came free and I said, "Yeah?"

"Kidd? This is Maggie."

"Jesus. You okay?"

"Yes. I just got back. I talked to Dillon and we'll start talking to people in Washington in the morning. But we've got another problem. Something happened to Rudy. He collapsed. He's on his way to the medical center. The ambulance just left."

"A stroke? A heart attack? What?"

"No, no, he started spouting gibberish, babbling. It could be nervous exhaustion, a breakdown, they don't know. I'll let you know when we hear."

"Okay."

"Tell me what happened at the apartment."

I told her in a few words, and she asked if we were sure that Dace was dead.

"If they weren't shooting blanks. Ratface shot him three times from a range of about two feet."

LuEllen grabbed me by the arm; I half turned, and then I heard it: the soft buzz of the alarm. The door in my room had been opened.

"Ah, shit," I said.

"What? What's going on?" Maggie asked.

"Somebody's outside. I gotta call the cops. Talk to you later," I said, and hung up.

LuEllen crawled across to the single window and peeked out through a gap between the heavy fiberglass curtain and the windowsill.

"Don't move the curtain," I said. I fumbled the MAC-10 out of the open suitcase, cocked it, and crawled over beside her.

"There's nobody out there," she said. The alarm continued to burp. "You think. wait a minute. Wait a minute."

I looked out over her head. We couldn't see much, but a man in a dark raincoat stepped onto the sidewalk outside my room.

"They're confused," I whispered. "They don't know what to do." The dark shape moved away, and I crawled back to the telephone and dialed 911.

"Is this an emergency?"

"Goddamned right it is. I'm the night clerk at the Knight's Ease Motel and there are two guys with fuckin' machine guns out in the parking lot. Jesus Christ. I gotta go. " And I slammed the phone down.

"Think they'll send somebody?"

"Oh yeah. And if they're good Jersey cops, they'll come in with the sirens screaming. That's in case there really are guys with machine guns. It'll give them a chance to get away."

We huddled below the window, listening, the MAC-10 ready. If the hunters were talking to the night clerk, he might tell them about my "secretary." So we waited in the dark until we heard the siren and then risked another look. A few seconds later, two men crossed the parking lot and got into a big red Buick with dark windows.

"That's them," LuEllen breathed. Ratface was wearing a tan gabardine trench coat that looked two sizes too big for him. The other guy was a barrel-chested pug in a cheap double-knit suit. He moved with the easy grace of an aging heavyweight fighter.

"Yeah." The car pulled away, and we watched it all the way to the freeway entrance. When the phone rang again, LuEllen started across the room. I grabbed her ankle. "Don't," I said. It rang thirty times before it stopped. By then the cops were in the parking lot.

We left the hotel twenty minutes later on the heels of the cops, hustling the luggage and the computer into the car. We didn't bother to drop off the keys, but left them with a ten-dollar bill on a bureau. I did clean up the phone and alarm wires, leaving nothing behind but a nearly invisible half-inch hole in the wall.

"We need some sleep before we can think," I said. "We'll head back through Philadelphia and grab a motel somewhere on the other side."

"We're not worried about federal cops anymore?" From the corner of my eye, I could feel her studying my face.

"No."

"You figured it out?" she asked.

"Some of it."

"I'm glad I didn't have to tell you. That was no coincidence, the phone call coming at exactly the same time as those two goons. Maggie fingered us."

"There's more to it than that," I said.

She thought for a minute, then nodded. "That rat-faced guy. He got here in an hour and a half."

"With the car," I said. "The car was the one I saw in Washington. Dillon routed them right along with us. They must have driven up to Philadelphia, then waited for us to call. He told me to call in six hours, which would tell them about how far we'd get."

"But Jesus Christ, Kidd, what are they doing?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe Anshiser cut a deal with the feds."

"I don't think so. The feds wouldn't be interested in knocking off the small guys and letting the big ones go. They'd do it the other way around, if anything. Net the big fish."

"Jesus," she said. "Maggie. Remember her in the Japanese baths, kidding you about burning your balls off? I thought she'd never stop laughing. She was a friend. I thought you two guys were developing into something."

"I thought so too."

"And Dace is dead."

We drove into the Philadelphia airport and retrieved my car. Before we left, I called Bobby from a phone booth, using the portable.

What?

Need everything you can find on Hellwolf/Whitemark and Sunfire/Anshiser. Crash jobs, full-time. Flat fee $10,000. Need feeds every few hours.

Leave terminal on answer.

Leaving the airport, we turned back west. The appearance of the two hoods and the inevitable conclusion about Maggie kept me awake. I drove all the way through to Gettysburg, where we checked into the biggest motel we could find.

I put LuEllen to bed, called Bobby, and took the first dump of information on Anshiser and Sunfire. LuEllen slept most of the day, woke up long enough to eat, and went back down for the night. I was beat-up but drove into town and bought another printer so I could dump incoming files to paper. Late in the day, Bobby was calling every hour, and the stuff was coming faster and faster. Most of it was useless: lightweight business-magazine stuff, public biographies. I'd seen some of it during the first run-through, before taking the job.

On the second day, a rainstorm came through from the west. It killed a spell of late September heat and replaced it with autumn. The rain left the park grounds dark and somber. I walked LuEllen along Cemetery Ridge, pointing out the path of Pickett's Charge.

"It doesn't look so hard; it's not hardly a hill," she said.

"It didn't have to be. The crest was just high enough to hide the federals and give them some cover during the preparatory barrage. The Southerners thought the cannonading had done a lot more damage than it had. But they came up the hill into a hornet's nest. The high tide of the Confederacy. The South was defeated that week. Lee was turned around here, and out West, Grant was taking Vicksburg. What a time."

We'd gone out to the battlefield during a break in the rain, but now it was sweeping in again, a thin, gray wall coming down from Seminary Ridge, across the peach orchard, obscuring the Roundtops, and up the hill. We turned our backs on it, retreated to the car.

"I was supposed to be in Mexico today," LuEllen said as we went back to the motel. She stared out the window, and tears trickled down her cheeks. I couldn't think of anything to say. We rode back to the beat of the windshield wipers and the sound of wet pavement hissing under the wheels.

Another lengthy file was waiting at the motel. I dumped it to the printer and started working through it. Ten minutes later I found it.

"That's funny." I sat up on the bed.

"What?"

I looked at the source of the article I was reading: one of the popular science magazines.

"I've seen a couple of references to a guidance system called Snagger. For the Hellwolf."

"So?"

"So it sounds a hell of a lot like the String system. But I haven't seen anything about String."

WHAT?

Need word search on all files, references: String and Snagger.

It took about six hours to accumulate, but when we had done it, the facts were clear enough.

"Anshiser never had the String system. Whitemark developed the Snagger. Same thing, essentially. Anshiser didn't have a clue. Then, six months ago, when preliminary design studies were due, word got out that Whitemark was onto something big. Anshiser didn't have anything to compare with it."

"So Anshiser stole it from Whitemark, not the other way around?"

"Looks like it. They desperately needed time to understand Snagger and do a knock-off for their own plane. That's where we came in. That whole routine they did in Chicago was an act. Jesus! I bought the whole thing!"

LuEllen sat hunched on the bed, her hair hanging limp down the sides of her face, her face wrinkled in thought. Eventually she shook her head and looked up.

"So?"

"So?"

"Yeah. So what?" she said. "So they conned us into doing a job on Whitemark. What difference does it make? If they'd told you the truth and offered you two million to take down Whitemark, you probably would have said 'yes' anyway. They lied, but that's no reason to start shooting at us. We're no more likely to go to the cops now than if they were telling the truth."

"Maybe not. But it makes what we did a lot more serious, especially for Anshiser. If Whitemark had stolen the String system and Anshiser could prove it, it might have cost Whitemark the contract. Or a lawsuit so big that winning the contract would have been meaningless. But if Anshiser stole Snagger and then wrecked Whitemark to slow them down so they could do a knock-off, and if Whitemark could prove it.

"Then Anshiser is ruined. Absolutely."

"And if Anshiser had hired the job done by a group of outsiders, and one of them was a newspaper guy with a reputation for busting defense industries, and another one was a thief whose name he didn't even know.

"It might make sense to get rid of them permanently," LuEllen concluded.

We both thought about it for a minute.

"Where did they get the gunmen?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Anshiser is a defense industry. They know all kinds of people. They probably found a couple of ex-Special Forces guys looking for a little cash."

"And then you've got a couple of guys who know the story and have killed people because of it," LuEllen objected. "I don't know. It sounds weak."

"They wouldn't have to tell those guys the whole story, just point them at the targets," I said. "I can't think of any other rationale."

The motel room had two single beds. When we went to sleep that night, LuEllen suddenly said in the dark, "I'd like to come over and sleep with you, but, like, no sex. I just want to sleep with somebody."

"Come on." She snuggled in against me, and we whispered back and forth for a while, and then she drifted away. Her body warmth under the blanket reminded me of Maggie, like a black patch on my mind. I was dozing off when the computer alarm sounded, and I rolled out of bed to look.

Something weird.

What?

Been in newspaper clip files, gone way back. Anshiser old man was in German mob.

What?

Chicago had German mob. Like Mafia. Anshiser father convicted in 1910 extortion, two years in prison, charged 1914 murder and extortion, not guilty. No more charges but mentioned in stories as accountant for German mob. Don't know what that is yet, keep digging?

Look for stuff on Anshiser and associates.

Already got most of it.

Got access to criminal intelligence data banks, FBI?

No. Tried once. Maximum protection.

How about NCIC?

Easy access if got codes. Need codes.

Who got codes?

I find. Call back later. Want mob clips now?

He dumped the clips to the computer. There weren't many of them, but there was enough information to suggest that Anshiser's father was a major crime figure. Exactly what he did was unclear from the clips. I had just finished reading the clips when Bobby called again. He had a name.

When LuEllen woke the next morning, she smiled, a small tentative smile, the first one I'd seen since the shooting.

"I don't know how to break it to you," I said.

"What happened?" she asked, quickly serious.

"We've got to hit another house. We need some more codes." I told her about the background on Anshiser's father. "We need to get into some crime intelligence files. Bobby found a guy for us. He goes into the NCIC-the National Crime Information Center-from his home computer."

"Uh, is this guy.

"Yeah. He's a cop."