The Frumious Bandersnatch

6

THERE WAS ONLY one building in Federal Square, and it was appropriately addressed One Federal Square. A forty-story limestone structure lit from below with daggers of light, it would have looked imposing, and a bit intimidating, even if it were not the sole edifice on a plot of ground some fifty yards square.

The Joint Task Force, a team of six crack FBI agents and an equal number of elite police detectives, occupied floors nineteen and twenty of the building. You could not enter those floors without a key. Carella did not have a key, which was why someone was meeting him downstairs in the lobby.

The someone was Detective-Lieutenant Charles “Corky” Corcoran.

In this whole wide world, there is no one with the surname Corcoran who does not also possess the nickname Corky. That is an indisputable truth. Male or female, if you are a Corcoran, you are also a Corky. Charles Farley Corcoran had been “Corky” when Carella met him some twenty-odd years ago at the Police Academy, and Carella guessed he was still Corky tonight, though there was clipped to his suit jacket pocket an ID card and a gold, blue-enameled detective shield hammered with the word LIEUTENANT. Beaming a toothy smile, blue eyes crinkling in a face stamped with the map of Ireland, he extended his hand and said, “Steve, long time no see.”

His grip was firm and dry and warm. He looked as fit and as young as he had, lo those many years ago, when they were both rookies climbing ropes and firing pistols in the Academy.

“Welcome to The Squad,” he said.

The Squad, Carella thought. Supreme egotism in that the designation completely dismissed every detective squad in this city and declared itself The Squad,The One and Only Squad. Welcome.

“Nice to be here,” Carella said.

He was thinking he had not got to bed till almost eight-thirty this morning after being up all night on the kidnapping. He had been awakened by Byrnes at twelve-thirty and had spent the rest of the day either in court chasing court orders, or up in Loomis’ office supervising the installation of the telephone-surveillance equipment. It was now ten-thirty P.M., and he was beginning to feel just a wee bit weary.

The usual modulation from night shift to day shift took place over a period of two days. You worked the midnight-to-eightA.M. shift for a full month, then you took two full days off and came back to work at eight in the morning, the theory being that you’d caught up on your sleep by that time, just like a business traveler adjusting to jet lag.

Sure.

“You’re looking good, Steve.”

“Thanks. Do I still call you Corky?”

“Most people call me Charles these days,” Corcoran said. “Or Lieutenant.” Still smiling, he said, “Come meet the team,” and led Carella across a vast lobby paved with massive blocks of unpolished marble to a bank of elevators simply marked 19–20. There were only two buttons and a keyway in the elevator that arrived. Corcoran took a key ring from his pocket, slid a small key into the keyway, twisted it, and hit the button for 19.

“I understand you’ve done some good work on this case,” Corcoran said.

“Thank you,” Carella said.

The elevator whirred silently up the shaft. The door slid open onto the nineteenth floor. The men stepped out into a corridor that ran past a warren of tiny work cubes, occupied with men and women at computers. Carella followed Corcoran to an unmarked door at the end of the hall. He opened the door and allowed Carella to precede him into a room.

There were six smiling men in the room.

Carella recognized only Barney Loomis, who was wearing a brown jacket over beige slacks, a brown turtleneck sweater, and brown loafers. Three of the other five men were both wearing dark blue suits, white shirts, blue ties, and highly polished, black, lace-up shoes. Carella figured them for FBI. They even looked somewhat alike, all three of them square-jawed and dark-haired, sporting the sort of conservative haircut made famous by Senator Trent Lott, although presumably their own barber was not in Washington, D.C.

The Trent Lott Cut was a precision-tooled hair style that fit its wearer’s head like a carefully stitched toupee. This tailored-rug look was softened somewhat on the trio of agents—Carella guessed one of them was Endicott—because they were each in their thirties and were therefore presumed to be hipper than they actually were, especially since they carried nine-millimeter Glocks and FBI shields. The other two men could only be city detectives. Something in the way they carried themselves, something in their somewhat unpressed look, city detectives for sure. So what Carella had here was three smiling Feebs, two smiling dicks—well, three, when you counted Lieutenant Charles “Corky” Corcoran, standing behind him and presumably smiling as well—and last but not least…

“Detective Carella,” Barney Loomis said, also smiling and stepping away from the other men, his right hand extended. “Glad you could come down.”

Carella took his hand.

One of the FBI agents stepped away from the other blue suits. “I’m Stan Endicott,” he said. “Special Agent in Charge. Welcome aboard.”

Carella had been taught by a sergeant at the Academy never to trust a smiling man with a gun in his hand. He wondered if that same sergeant had ever said anything about a roomful of smiling men in suits, all of whom were packing if the bulges under their jackets were any indication.

“Meet the rest of the team,” Endicott said, and introduced first his lookalike in the blue suit, “Special Agent Brian Forbes,” and then another FBI agent whose name flew by like the Twentieth Century, and then the pair of city dicks, one of them a Detective/First, the other a Detective/Second. Carella thought he recognized one of the names as belonging to a man who’d made spectacular headlines breaking up either a dope ring or a racketeering scheme or something of the sort—but what had Endicott meant by “Welcome aboard?” Or Corcoran by “Welcome to The Squad?”

Everyone was still smiling.

“I brought that stuff you asked for,” Carella said, and walked over to the large conference table in the center of the room and put down his dispatch case. Through the huge windows facing South, he could see across the square to the new red brick Police Headquarters building, ablaze with light even at this hour. He snapped open the latches on the case, lifted the lid, and removed from it first a sheaf of his own and Hawes’ typed DD reports…

“Our reports on the crime scene witnesses,” he said.

…and then the reports Meyer and Kling had filed on their visits to the marina and their interview with the marina watchman…

“These are about the boat and the stolen Explorer.”

…and then the report Willis had typed up on his and Parker’s visit to Polly Olson.

“Also,” he said, “the report from Mobile was waiting when I got there. I haven’t looked at it yet. I can leave it here with the other stuff, if you like.”

“He still doesn’t get it,” Corcoran said, smiling.

Carella wondered if his fly was open.

“What?” he said.

“You’ll be working with us,” Endicott said.

Carella figured they must be shorthanded. Some detective out sick or on vacation. Supposed to be twelve men on the Joint Task Force, only six of them in the room here, still smiling like drunken sailors.

“We thought Mr. Loomis should be working with someone he liked and trusted.”

“Actually, I asked if that would be possible,” Loomis said, and nodded.

“Will that be okay, Steve?” Endicott asked.

“Well…sure,” Carella said.

“Now you’re pissing with the big dogs,” Corcoran said, grinning, and clapped Carella on the back.

Hard.

FAT OLLIE WEEKS was watching a cable television channel whose slogan was “Equal and Equitable,” which they hoped conveyed the promise of commensurate and unbiased reportage on any subject their reporters tackled. Tonight’s burning question was “Gay or Fey?” and its subject matter was the Tamar Valparaiso video Bison Records had generously provided.

The moderator was a man named Michael Owens, who was familiarly called “Curly” Owens by his colleagues because he happened to be bald. This reverse spin was something called “irony,” a favorite figure of speech practiced in English-speaking countries where it was thought clever to express a meaning directly contrary to that suggested by the words themselves. Curly was, in fact, the very opposite of hirsute, his condition exacerbated by daily shavings and waxings that gave his head the appearance of an overripe melon.

His two guests tonight were at opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum in that one of them was a minister who represented a Christian Right activist organization that called itself the “Citizens for Values Coalition,” or the CVC, and the other was a homosexual who was speaking for a group that called itself “Priapus Perpetual,” or PP for short.

Ollie didn’t choose to waste time watching a fag who called his prick a pee pee debating a priest who was probably a fag himself, but he happened to be eating at the kitchen table right then, and the clicker was on the coffee table in front of the TV set, and he didn’t feel like walking into the adjoining room to go switch channels. Besides, he had just watched the clip from the Valparaiso video, and he had to agree that the little lady was splendidly endowed, ah yes, so maybe these two jackasses would have something interesting to say about her obviously fey assets. Ollie supposed the word “fey” had something to do with female pulchritude, otherwise why had it been positioned opposite the word “gay”?

“Well, you’ve seen the video,” Curly told his guests. “So which is it? Gay or Fey?”

The minister’s name was Reverend Karl Brenner. He was a man with a long sallow face and snow white hair, wearing for tonight’s show Benjamin Franklin spectacles and a rumpled, dark gray suit with a white collar, the fuckin hypocrite, Ollie thought. Brenner himself thought the words “gay” and “fey” were synonymous; he had no idea what they were supposed to be debating here. If a man was fey, he was, ergo, gay. And the African-American man on the video was obviously both fey and gay.

The representative of Priapus Perpetual was named Larry Graham. He knew that the widely accepted meaning of “fey” was “strange or unusual” but he himself had been considered strange or unusual long before he became gay. Dressed tonight in a purple turtleneck sweater over which he had thrown a beige cashmere jacket, he sat looking smug and self-satisfied, the little fag, Ollie thought. Actually, Graham was as bewildered as the reverend was, even though he realized the question wasn’t being asked about the black dancer who’d played the Bandersnatch, but rather about Tamar Valparaiso herself, whose father had warned “Beware the Jabberwock, my son,” mind you, and had later exulted, “Come to my arms, my beamish boy,” don’t forget.

As Graham saw it, the question being asked was: Who or what is this person with the exuberant breasts in a torn and tattered costume? A girl or a boy? A daughter or a son? A male or a female? In short, gay or fey? A revealed homosexual or merely a female eccentric, a whimsical adolescent girl, or—dare one even suggest it—a visionary? A Joan of Arc, mayhaps, wielding an invisible vorpal sword?

“What do you say, gentlemen?” Curly asked, and then immediately said, “Ooops, excuse me, Larry,” and then, compounding the felony, said, “But that’s what the debate tonight is all about, isn’t it?Is the person on that tape supposed to be homosexual, like Larry Graham here, who admits it freely? And if so…”

“Of course he is,” Graham said.

“Reverend?”

“Are we talking about the African-American in the mask? If so, he is very definitely homosexual.”

“And how do you know that? ” Graham asked at once.

“Well, the very way he moves, ” Brenner said.

“He moves like a dancer,” Graham said.

“Fred Astaire didn’t move that way. Neither did Gene Kelly.”

“Besides, we’re not talking about the dancer. The question does not refer to the dancer. ”

“It certainly doesn’t refer to the girl, ” Brenner said.

“That’s exactly the metaphor,” Graham said.

The Reverend Brenner didn’t know what metaphor meant, either. He thought it meant simile. If so, was this little homosexual person here implying that the girl being assaulted was somehow a simile for a homosexual?

“I do not see any connection,” he said. “The problem with organizations like yours, Mr. Graham, is that you presuppose everyone in the world is either already homosexual or else would like to become homosexual. That is the implicit threat to family values, and the entire reason for the existence of groups like CVC…”

“I do believe, yes,” Larry said, “that ‘Bandersnatch’ is about a young boy coming out of the closet, yes. If we study the video carefully, we…”

“Oh, please,” Brenner said, “that’s utter nonsense.”

“Why don’t we take another look at it?” Curly said, and to someone off camera, “Can we roll it again, boys?”

Ollie thought, Good, let’s watch the strip tease again.

This was not the tape Honey Blair and her crew had shot on the night of the kidnapping. This was the studio-shot video with its animated footage and a skimpily but fully clothed Tamar larking under a yellow sky with pastel colored clouds and whimsical budding flowers and fanciful floating insects while the sound of a synthesizer…

She looks like a shepherd boy, Ollie thought, and suddenly understood what Larry Graham had meant a moment ago.

She did not look like a boy for very long.

Within seconds after the black guy in his gray mask came whiffling out of the woods, he was clawing and biting at her and tearing her clothes to ribbons, exposing a ripe female form that Ollie was sure would promote perpetual Priapic emissions from teenage boys all over America, not to mention even more mature males in the population.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Graham’s voice said over the video. “The boy has to recognize himself as female before he can realize his full power.”

Bullshit, Ollie thought, and the telephone rang.

He hit the mute button and picked up the receiver.

“Weeks,” he said.

“Oll?”

Patricia.

He grinned.

“Hey,” he said, “how are you?”

“Fine, Oll,” she said. “Whatcha doing?”

“Watching television. You familiar with this kidnapping the 8-7 caught?”

“Yeah, this new singer.”

“Some fag is saying she’s a boy.”

“Get out,” Patricia said.

“Did you see the video?”

“Sure, it’s all over the place.”

“That’s some boy, huh?”

“I’d like to look like a boy like that,” Patricia said.

“You look fine just the way you are,” Ollie said.

“Thanks, Oll,” she said, and was silent for a moment. “I was calling to…uh…see if we’re still on for Tuesday night,” she said.

“Why shouldn’t we still be on?”

“I just wondered, that’s all. Also, there’s this old movie playing at the Atlantis—that’s like an art house, y’know—I thought I’d like to see again, if you’d like to see it. It’s with Al Pacino, it’s called Looking for Richard. That’s Richard the Third, the Shakespearean character, y’know. Well, it’s also a real king, but Shakespeare wrote the play.” Patricia hesitated again. “Do you think you might like to see it?”

“Sure,” Ollie said. “Whatever you say, Patricia.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Good. You’ll like it, I promise. It’s not at all what you expect Shakespeare to be.”

“Hey, I love Shakespeare,” he said.

“Well, good. Then I made a good pick, huh?”

“You certainly did.”

He had never seen a Shakespeare play in his entire life.

“Also, how should I dress?” she asked. “I told you, I’ll be working Tuesday…”

“Me, too.”

“So I won’t have time to go home and change…”

“Me, neither. Just put on what’s in your locker. Whatever you wear to work that morning.”

“It won’t be anything fancy,” Patricia said. “Just slacks and a sweater, probably.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“Okay then. You working tomorrow?”

“Oh sure.”

“See you up the precinct then.”

“See you,” Ollie said.

There was a click on the line.

He sighed heavily and put the receiver back on its cradle.

The fag and the priest were still going at it.

He hit the mute button again.

“…sending this message to adolescent boys all over America,” the Reverend Brenner was saying. “If you want to slay wild dragons…”

“It isn’t a dragon,” Graham said.

“…then you have to declare yourself to be homosexual! What kind of a message…?”

“I’m sure that isn’t Tamar Valparaiso’s mess…”

“You just said the boy in that video…”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

“I’m sure her message is simply ‘Be what you wish to be. In choice, there is freedom.’ ”

“Oh, are we going to get into the abortion issue now?”

“Not on my time,” Ollie said out loud, and turned off the set, and wondered if any of that scrumptious apple pie his sister had baked was still in the refrigerator.

WHAT WAS CALLED CSI in some cities was called MCU here in the big bad city, and never the twain shall meet. The Mobile Crime Unit had struck out twice last night, once on the Rinker and again on the Ford Explorer, but that didn’t mean they weren’t as sharp or as perceptive as their television counterparts. On the contrary, the package they had messengered over to Carella at seven-thirty this evening, and which he now presented to The Squad downtown, included one piece of very important information.

As expected, there’d been no latent fingerprints on any of the railings or bulkheads the perps may have touched in boarding the River Princess and then descending into the ballroom where Tamar was performing. The intruders were wearing gloves. So much for that.

But they were also wearing running shoes with identifiable soles. And whereas they hadn’t left any recoverable footprints on the rubber ladder-treads that ascended to the second level of the yacht, they had left behind some discernable prints on the mahogany steps and the parquet dance floor inside.

Together, Carella and The Squad looked over the report prepared by an MCU Detective/First named Oswald Hooper.

The report stated, unsurprisingly, that the recovered footprints had been left behind on stairway and dance floor by two separate males wearing running shoes later identified from laboratory comparison soles as Reeboks. That the persons wearing the shoes were both male was established by the size and type of the shoe and also by the angle of the foot, definitively different for male and female.

What was revealing about the separate prints, however, was the separate walking pattern for each man. The pattern for the man whose prints were consistently recovered on the starboard side of the stairway and dance floor was remarkably different from the pattern for the man who’d been on the port side of all the action.

“Starboard is right, port is left,” Corcoran told Endicott.

Endicott gave him a look intended to convey the knowledge that his father had taken him sailing on Chesapeake Bay when he was still a toddler. Corcoran missed the meaning of the look.

“The guy on the right was the one who did all the hitting,” Carella said. “Have you seen the tape yet?”

“Only on television,” Endicott said.

Forbes, the other FBI agent, said, “It’s all over the place.”

“I’ve requested a copy from Channel Four,” Corcoran said.

“Are they giving you one?” Carella asked, surprised.

“Why not?”

“Well, when I seized it as evidence, they threatened to sue the city.”

Corcoran raised his eyebrows and gave him a look intended to convey the knowledge that this was the Joint Task Force here, kiddo, this was The Squad.

“Well, good luck,” Carella said, and shrugged, but he felt he had been reprimanded. Or perhaps warned. And he realized all at once that Lieutenant Charles Farley Corcoran did not want him on this team. He almost walked out. Something kept him there. Maybe it was the fact that Barney Loomis had requested his presence as someone he liked and trusted.

“What’s this about a walking pattern?” Endicott asked, and they all went back to reading Hooper’s report.

Apparently, the man on the left possessed a normal walking pattern. That is to say, an imaginary line drawn in the direction of his walk had run through the inner edges of his heel prints. The distance between the footprints of a man walking slowly would be about twenty-seven inches. The distance for a running man would be forty inches. A man walking fast would measure thirty-five inches between footprints. The guy on the left had been moving very fast. Thirty-three inches between footprints. But it was a normal walking pattern, and not a broken one.

The guy on the right, however—the one who’d rifle-stocked the black dancer and slapped Tamar Valparaiso—had been moving more slowly, twenty-eight inches between footprints. And his walking line indicated that he was partially leaning on his left foot and slightly dragging the right foot.

“Leaning?” Endicott said.

“Dragging?” Corcoran said.

Carella almost said “Shhhhh.”

Absent any perfectly flat footprints for the right foot,Hooper’s report went on,and given the slower gait and broken walking line, it would be safe to conclude that the suspect sustained a past injury to the right leg that manifests itself now in an existent noticeable limp.

“That’s what it was!” Carella told them.

He was referring to what he’d noticed on the tape, but hadn’t been able to pinpoint until just this minute. None of the others knew what the hell he was talking about.

“So what do we do?” Endicott asked. “Put out a medical alert?”

“The report says ‘past injury,’ ” Corcoran said.

“How far in the past? Could’ve been last week.”

“A physician’s bulletin can’t hurt,” Carella said.

“You want to take care of that?” Corcoran suggested.

And all at once, Carella got it.

He was going to be the errand boy.

“What’s my role here going to be?” he asked. Flat out. Head to head.

“What would you like it to be?” Corcoran asked right back. Straight on. Toe to toe.

“I don’t want to be a gopher, that’s for sure.”

“Who says that’s what we want?”

“What do you want?”

“I think it’s what I want that counts, isn’t it?” Loomis said, stepping in. “I’m the one those men will be contacting,I’m the one they’ll be expecting to pay the ransom, whatever that’s going to be. If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I believe Detective Carella is as qualified as any man in this room to handle whatever may come up in the next few days. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t assign him to running out for coffee and sandwiches.”

“I’d be happy to put out that physician’s alert,” Carella said.

“Thank you, Steve,” Loomis said.

“I’ll get someone in the cubbies to do it, don’t sweat it,” Corcoran said.

“Whoever does it, let’s get it done, ” Endicott said, reminding everyone that he was the SAC around here. “Let’s take a look at these DD reports, see if anything pops out at us. Steve, you want to walk us through?”

THE WHOLE IDEA of this thing was to keep the girl alive for forty-eight hours. That was all the time they needed.

Avery had got all the fake stuff for the gig from a man he’d done business with before, a purveyor of false identity documents like social security cards, birth certificates, divorce decrees, gun permits, college diplomas, drivers’ licenses, press credentials, and of course credit cards that actually worked when you used them. The man’s name was Benny Lu, or at least that was the name he used here in the United States, preferring the nickname to the full Benjamin Lu that was on his Hong Kong birth certificate, if even that was real. Benny had migrated to the United States four years ago, after he’d almost been busted by Hong Kong’s ICAC.

Avery had met him two and a half years ago, when he’d needed several false documents in order to casually prove to a certain rich fat lady in Palm Beach that he was, in fact, one Judson Fears of Gloucester County, Virginia, before she would let him into her luxurious waterfront mansion and incidentally her bed, the suspicious old bitch. He had later run off with $200,000 worth of her nice jewelry, thank you, but it served her right for not accepting him at face value, and besides, the jewelry was insured.

“I used to work in a Hong Kong restaurant,” Benny told him the first time they met. Benny was tall and slender, with a droll smile and eyes that always seemed amused. He had the long narrow fingers of a Flower Dancer, precious assets in the delicate operations he performed. “I was making coolie wages,” he told Avery, “until I realized I was in a position to be of valuable assistance to certain people who had need of certain information.”

Avery thought it odd that a Chinese man would use an expression like “coolie wages,” but he made no comment because he believed it was important for a person to listen carefully while he was being educated.

“This was six years ago,” Benny said, “when the economy in Japan was still very big. You had all these Japanese tourists coming to Hong Kong, spending lots and lots of money, and paying for everything with credit cards. These certain people came to me with what is called a ‘skimmer.’ What it is…”

A skimmer, Avery learned, was a battery-operated, wireless device that cost some three to five hundred dollars, and that fit easily into the inside pocket of Benny’s jacket. Whenever Benny swiped a customer’s credit card through this little machine, it read onto its very own computer chip all the data embedded in the card’s magnetic security stripe.

“I’m not just talking name, number, and expiration date,” Benny said, grinning at the simplicity of it all. “What the skimmer also copies is the card’s verification code. This is what’s electronically forwarded from the merchant to the card company’s central computer anytime a purchase is made. The code tells the company the card is valid. Once you’ve copied that code, you have everything you need to make an exact clone of the card.”

He was still grinning three weeks ago, when Avery went to see him again. Benny Lu lived in a small development house out on Sands Spit, a half-hour drive from the city. Avery told him what he needed. A fake credit card that would enable him to rent a car…

He told Benny he’d be renting a car instead of a boat because over the years he had learned that you shouldn’t trust anyone but your mother, and maybe not even her…

…and a fake driver’s license to back up the name on the phony credit card.

“Piece of cake,” Benny Lu said, grinning.

His basement looked like a computer nerd’s hangout. Benny himself looked a little like Fu Manchu in the silk robe he was wearing, which he told Avery his sister who still lived in Hong Kong had sent him for Christmas.

“She says it’s no different under the Chinese,” he assured Avery, who didn’t give a rat’s ass about Hong Kongor the Britishor the Chinese. All he cared about was getting the stuff he needed. It was raining outside the basement windows. This was now the end of April. The kidnapping scheme had already been underway for almost two months by then.

When Benny was skimming credit cards for the Hong Kong gang, he was paid a thousand Hong Kong dollars for every name he delivered, which at the time was the equivalent of about a hundred and fifty U.S. bucks. He would skim three or four cards every day except on his day off, which was Wednesday. This averaged out to something like a thousand bucks a week, not enough to buy his own restaurant but plenty of extra spending money if only the Hong Kong credit card dicks hadn’t busted the gang, and almost busted him in the bargain.

Here in the U.S., Benny paid a hundred bucks for each name skimmed by his people in restaurants and gasoline stations. He got his supply of blank plastic cards from a manufacturer in Germany who mass-produced them and sold them to him (and many other counterfeiters like him) for two hundred bucks a card. Using a thermal dye printer, Benny stamped American Express, Visa, or Master-Card graphics onto the face of a blank card, embossed it with the name and account number of a skimmed card’s true owner, and then embedded the stolen code onto the counterfeit’s pristine magnetic stripe. He sold the clones for two thousand bucks a pop, cheap at twice the price when you considered that whatever you charged on the electronically identical card wouldn’t be discovered until the genuine card’s owner got his bill a month later.

“Sign the name on this sheet of paper a dozen or so times before you sign the back of the card,” Benny told him. “So it’ll have a natural flow to it.”

“Andy Hardy?” Avery said. “That’s the guy’s name?”

“That’s his name, that’s right. That’s the name on the original card.”

“Like in Mickey Rooney?”

“Who’s Mickey Rooney?” Benny asked.

“Don’t they show old movies on television in Hong Kong?”

“Sure, but who’s Mickey Rooney?”

“He was Andy Hardy.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You never heard of Judge Hardy?”

“I try to stay far away from judges,” Benny said.

Avery shrugged, and then signed the name “Andy Hardy” ten times before he signed the back of the card. He was now in possession of a credit card with the name ANDY HARDY embossed on its front in raised letters, and his own “Andy Hardy” signature on the back of it.

“How long will this fly?” he asked Benny.

“Should take you through the end of May at least.”

Which was world enough and time.

Replicating a driver’s license was a simpler and much less expensive matter.

Benny explained that in his line of work a “template” was a layered graphics file that could be computer-manipulated to hide or reveal images and text. In the good old days two or three years ago, when thirty percent of all counterfeit and false identification seized by law enforcement agencies came from the internet, Benny had purchased driver’s-license templates for all fifty states, God bless American enterprise!

Now, while April showers lashed his basement windows, Benny took a digital head-and-shoulders photograph of Avery standing against a blue background. He stored this on one of his computers, together with the scanned “Andy Hardy” signature Avery had used on the credit card. Loading the template for a Connecticut state driver’s license, Benny first called up the photograph, hid it, and then revealed a stored Department-of-Motor-Vehicles signature. When he revealed the photo again, the signature seemed superimposed along its right hand side. Then, in repeated mouse clicks that first hid and then revealed successive layers, Benny replicated the Connecticut state seal, and a shadow image of Avery’s head shot, and the Andy Hardy signature.

Filling in the blank spaces on the template, he typed in the name HARDY, ANDY and an address he pulled from a Connecticut phone book, and below that Avery’s actual date of birth, September 12, 1969. Just beneath that, he typed in a date of issue, which he fabricated as July 26 the previous year, and to the right of that the letter M for Avery’s sex, and the abbreviation BR for the color of his eyes, and 6’1" for his height. He typed in a false identifying license number across the top of the template, and then an expiration date that was on Avery’s birthday, two years after the date of issuance. Lastly, he hid everything he’d already done, and revealed only the bar-code Connecticut had conceived as a security feature. When he revealed the license again, the bar code was running along the bottom of it.

Voilà!

He now had on his computer a document virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. All he had to do was print it and laminate it, and Avery would be in possession of a Connecticut state driver’s license bearing his own photograph alongside Andy Hardy’s name and signature.

The fake license cost Avery three hundred bucks.

For $2,300, he had become Judge Hardy’s son.

Everything else was free.

That was because everything else had been stolen.

Including the girl, too, when he thought about it.

Cal was the experienced thief here, experienced in that he’d never been sent away for Auto Theft, of which there had been plenty, believe me, him having started taking cars on joy rides when he was but a mere sixteen. It was a shame his record had to’ve been marred by that one botched bank holdup, but nobody’s perfect.

The first car they’d used was the black Explorer, which they’d driven to and from the marina, and which they’d already ditched this morning after they’d dropped the girl and Kellie off at the house. Scoped the early morning streets searching for a vehicle parked in a deserted area, found one that looked reliable enough, parked the Explorer behind it while Cal jimmied the door of the prospect car, opened the hood, jump-wired the ignition, and off they went into the wild blue yonder. Nice roomy Pontiac Montana, too.

Avery found it amusing that all these city dwellers owned or leased these big gas-guzzling SUVs with names that sounded all macho woodsy and outdoorsy. These people lived in apartment buildings, and they took the subway to work, and they probably never drove the car further than the nearest movie complex on weekends, but they were all dying to have these big monsters they could drive “off-road.” Off-road where? Avery wondered.

This was the big bad city, man. You didn’t need an Explorer or a Montana or a Durango unless you wore leather chaps and a cowboy hat. Or unless you were transporting merchandise worth a quarter of a million bucks. They would use the Montana when they picked up the ransom money tomorrow, two hundred and fifty Gs in crisp new hundred-dollar bills. By then, Cal would have stolen the third and final car—probably another one with a name like Caravan or Forester or Range Rover—which they would use to drive the girl from the house to wherever they decided to drop her off.

At first Avery thought he might have some difficulty finding a suitable house. They needed something isolated, but they all wanted to get out of here as soon after the exchange as possible. Cal would be heading for Jamaica because he dug black girls. Kellie was heading for Paris, France; she had already begun taking French lessons. Because traveling together might be dangerous, Avery would be going to London first, and would join her a week later.

The house he’d found was in the direct flight path of the city’s international airport, perched on the edge of South Beach, not one of the county’s better resort areas. Even so, during the summer, and because of its location on the sea, the house would have carried a price tag of five, six thousand a month. A big old gray ramshackle structure furnished with rattan furniture and lumpy cushions that smelled of mildew, it was flanked by two similarly dilapidated buildings, empty now during the transitional days of April and May.

When the real estate agent told him the owner was asking three thou a month, Avery asked, “For what? A house nobody wants because of all the air traffic zooming and roaring overhead?” The agent argued that in these days of extended airport hassles and long delays the house’s proximity to the airport was a plus. It must have also occurred to her that closeness to the airport might be desirable to terrorists as well—I mean, what the hell, did Avery look like some kind of fucking terrorist? The questions she’d asked, the identification she’d pored over—the fake Andy Hardy stuff, ha ha, lady—you’d think Avery was about to build a bomb instead of just kidnap a girl!

The girl was now safely ensconced in the house, and tomorrow morning Avery would make the first of his phone calls. The phones themselves—but that was another story.

By tomorrow night at this time, he’d be in possession of two hundred and fifty thousand bucks!

Thank you, Barney Loomis, and God bless us every one!