A Perfect Life

by Mike Stewart

  “And?”

  “And”—Budzik's wiggling foot went into overdrive—“I got the motherfucker. Traced his ass to a phreak bulletin board.”

  “You think you could spare me the brilliance and just . . .”

  Budzik waved him off. “You see, a phreak is a phone hacker. They have bulletin boards set up on the Internet where they share information on stealing cell phone access. Stuff like chip hacking, phone company employees who'll take a bribe, model weaknesses, stuff like that.”

  “Budzik . . .”

  “Dumbass used his standard hacker name.” He paused to build the drama, then said: “Click.”

  “And—please tell me—you came up with some brilliant way of tracing this guy's hacker name to a real person.”

  “Nothing particularly brilliant about it.” Budzik smiled. “I know the guy.” He unlaced his fingers and made a so-so motion in the air with one hand. “Self-taught. Pure hacker outlaw. Smart, but no match for me.” The little man paused, milking the situation for drama. “Your five-thousand-dollar name is Darryl Simmons.”

  Something tickled at the back of Scott's memory. “Your MIT buddy Ellroy mentioned Simmons. Made the guy sound . . . well, violent.”

  “Yep. That's young Simmons in a nutshell. Does that scare you?”

  Scott rose to his feet as he thought about the question. He was surprised at his conclusion. “No.”

  Budzik's expression changed. Some of the cockiness faded. “Maybe you don't know what you're dealing with.”

  “Maybe. In any event, you earned your money.”

  “Bet your ass.” Budzik picked up a printout and read Click's address out loud.

  Scott nodded and walked to the top of the stairs. “One more thing . . . I saw Cindy's eye. I don't like that kind of thing.”

  “Tough shit. She does.”

  Scott looked into the man's eyes and saw something very much like pure evil. Evil. You get scared enough, you can believe in anything. “I asked her to take a ride.”

  Budzik strode forward. “She's not going any—” Scott stepped up to meet him, and Budzik's voice broke.

  “I'm giving her a chance,” Scott said. “She may come back to you. Nothing I can do about that. But for now, Cindy's leaving here with me. You're not going to do anything or say anything to stop her, and you're not going to follow us.”

  “We had a deal.”

  “We still do. I bought your time, and I paid in full. But right now, I'm going to give a new friend a ride.”

  As Scott turned to leave, Budzik blurted out, “I'll tell Click. I'll tell Simmons and he'll kill your ass.”

  “What are you going to tell him? That you hacked his identity and sold it to me for five grand? He's not going to believe I did it on my own. And, even if I had, how would you know about it? You tell Click about our deal and you've got two problems. One, he'll probably kill you himself. And, two, I'll definitely be back to pay you a visit. Or, you can just let it go. I'll go away. Click will never know you messed around in his life. And you'll still be fifty-five hundred dollars richer.”

  Scott turned and descended the stairs. He half expected Budzik to come running after him, but heard nothing. Cindy waited by the door. She had put on an expensive suede coat. A weekend bag sat by her feet. She smiled tremulously as Scott approached. “Are we ready?”

  Scott nodded, then reached down to pick up her bag.

  Her eyebrows arched, and he could see blue skin beneath the makeup. “What'd Peter say?” There was pleasure in her tone.

  Scott opened the door and stepped aside. “Not much he could say.”

  She looked around the loft one last time and then stepped out into the foyer.

  Forty minutes later, Scott dropped Cindy off at a home for battered women. He flashed his hospital ID and dropped his mentor's name to get her admitted.

  She was not happy.

  Maybe she'd go back to Budzik. Maybe to someone else. Someone even worse. But there was nothing he could do about that. Tears & Roses was a good place; some of the best physicians and shrinks in Boston volunteered time and resources there.

  Most people in trouble want help. He hoped Cindy Travers was ready to take it.

  CHAPTER 21

  Scott Thomas's digital watch read 12:00. Straight up midnight.

  Four hours' drive south of Boston, Cannonball Walker's mind raced and occasionally jabbed at his conscience as he checked into the Madison Hotel on Central Park West. He checked a gold pocket watch and decided to call Scott when he got to the room, regardless of the time.

  Ten hours' drive farther down the Atlantic coast, inside a glass-and-cedar beach house on Spinnaker Island, Charles Hunter stood in the door of his daughter's bedroom watching the child sleep. Twenty feet away, Kate Billings paused while unpacking her bags. She walked to the window, where she gazed at moonlit ocean and felt the same calm and fulfillment that Charles felt watching Sarah sleep safe in her bed.

  Scott was alone now. He stood deep inside the shadow of an inset doorway, watching the second-floor apartment of Darryl Simmons. This part of Boston was old. It was a place where decades of stale odors mixed with the clean metallic scent of New England winter. He shifted his weight, tapping one foot against the other for warmth.

  Occasionally, Click's dark silhouette would float across drawn curtains, and Scott would move farther back into the shadows to wait, to force himself to stay quiet. A couple of times, a group of teenage boys had wandered by, catching Scott's eye, puffing out their chests and talking trash—their slurred words hanging in the winter air inside visible puffs of fog. But anger and desperation so filled the young graduate student that the teenagers had sensed enough to leave him alone.

  This was a bad neighborhood, bad as they get in modern America. Any man who stood alone in a darkened doorway had to be more predator than victim. And Scott felt predatory. He watched Click's form move across cheap, drawn curtains and visualized kicking the hacker's door down. He could almost feel the man's weight in his hands as he imagined slamming Simmons into the wall until he lost consciousness.

  Scott shook his head. He tried not to think about hurting the man. He tried not to think about hurting anyone. But he felt empty without the fantasy. He felt warm in its presence.

  The sound of a door opening cut into his thoughts, and he hastily stepped deeper into the inset doorway. Click, dressed in heavy topcoat and stocking cap, trotted across the asphalt and turned right in Scott's direction. Scott thought of stepping out. He thought of taking the guy down as he passed, of twisting arms until they snapped, of forcing Darryl Simmons to tell everything he knew.

  But they were stupid thoughts.

  What Scott needed was to get inside Darryl Simmons's life the way Simmons had gotten inside his. He needed to know motivations and means. He needed to know why. So he leaned his back against the door, propped one foot against the kickplate, and bowed his head to look at the ground. Simmons passed by without so much as a sidelong glance.

  As the hacker's footfalls faded, Scott stepped into the street and followed.

  Three blocks over, Simmons disappeared into an ancient parking garage and emerged minutes later driving the blue Lexus with chrome wheels—the same car the two burglars had driven a week earlier after breaking in to Scott's apartment on Welder Avenue.

  Now Scott intended to return the favor.

  He retraced his steps to the doorway across from Click's apartment window, where he waited ten more minutes. Watching. Listening for some sound that would warn him not to enter the dark apartment. At exactly 12:20 A.M., he stepped out of the recessed doorway.

  The apartment building was a dump. Gaps showed in the steps where bricks had been pried up and used as doorstops or makeshift weapons; spray-tagged plywood covered what had been a glass rectangle in the front door; the twin scents of smoke and grease reeked from a metal grate on the sidewalk.

  Scott paused to glance up and down the deserted street. He reached inside his coat and rummaged inside a nylon
bag hung from his shoulder, coming out with a thin-bladed chisel. Scott had never jimmied a door before. But, as it turned out, it was a surprisingly easy thing to do. Most crime is relatively unskilled—that's why people who fail at everything else are drawn to it. At least, most crimes are easy right up until the time you get caught; so he'd thought quite a bit about the best way to commit burglary. Lingering would look suspicious. Scott planned to move with purpose, to get in and out as quickly as possible.

  He pushed into the foyer, where radiator heat burned and stung his cheeks. He smelled more grease, more smoke. A tangled hum of domestic noises—televisions and radios, clinking dishes and muffled voices—echoed in the dark stairwell.

  One flight up, Scott paused outside a painted wooden door that bore the apartment number he'd gotten from Budzik. He stopped to listen. The background noises remained steady. The loudest sounds were Scott's own breathing, the beat of his own heart. He tapped lightly on the ancient door. No answer. The thin chisel slid easily between door frame and cheap molding. Scott felt for the dead bolt, got a corner of the chisel wedged into its side, and levered the bolt back into the lock. He held his breath and swung the door open.

  The lights were off, but ambient light from the street showed a room about twice the size of his former living room on Welder Avenue. He could make out a couch, two chairs, a worktable, and four computers. This was Click's office, not his apartment.

  Scott closed the door and pressed his back against paint-caked panels.

  The street had been relatively bright. Inside now, he needed to adjust quickly to the dark. He stood very still and closed his eyes. One step at a time. It was his mantra for the evening. He'd planned out everything. One step at a time. A full minute passed, and he opened his eyes. Moving easily around and through tables and chairs, pasteboard boxes and thick cables, Scott made his way to the room's only window and parted cheap curtains. The street was empty.

  He unbuttoned his coat and pulled out the nylon bag, swapping the chisel for a metal penlight. Sweeping the disk of light across the walls, he located two doors. One turned out to be a closet filled with electronic equipment; the other was a bathroom. Neither held any danger. Scott turned to grab a wooden chair and wedge it under the front door knob. He'd once seen a reformed professional burglar on Oprah. The trick, the guy had said, was to lock or barricade the bedroom or apartment door and have an alternate escape route available. Scott went in search of alternate escape routes.

  The bathroom window would have let out onto an ancient, rusted fire escape if only it hadn't been painted shut. Scott clamped the penlight in his teeth and went to work with the chisel. Rivulets of sweat ran down the small of his back. His heartbeat sounded like boots marching through muck. It took four and half minutes, but the sash popped loose and moved up. Scott cussed into the rush of winter air that flooded the bathroom.

  One more thing before he could work. He turned and ripped down a dark blue, mildewed shower curtain. Back out in the main room, he pulled duct tape from the nylon bag and sealed the shower curtain over the window that faced the street. Finally, he walked over and flipped on a desk lamp.

  The front door was barricaded, an escape route was ready, and he could work in decent light without anyone seeing from the street. It had all taken just under ten minutes.

  Oprah's professional burglar had sworn it had never taken him more than eight minutes from the time he entered a home until the time he walked out with every valuable in the place. But Scott wasn't here to steal cash or jewels. He wanted information, and that was going to take time.

  The desk drawers held almost nothing—just pens, highlighters, and printer cartridges. A pyramid of pasteboard boxes occupied a back corner. The top box held two or three dozen PDAs—Palms, Visors, Blackberries, Pocket PCs, and Sony Clies. All used. Scott remembered reading that the information on stolen PDAs was generally more valuable to the crook than the device itself.

  A thought glowed at the back of his mind.

  A beat-up Palm Vx stood in a charger next to one of Click's computers. It was a slightly newer version of his own Palm V. He picked up Click's PDA and dropped it into the nylon bag. Then he went back to the pasteboard box and picked out a similar device. After unscrewing the top off of the stylus, he used the pin to press the reset button on the back of the Palm, dropped the device into Click's charger, and pressed the hotsync button to copy the backup files of the Palm's contents from the computer's hard drive to the virgin Palm.

  The closet held stacks of equipment and brown boxes. In one, Scott found a treasure trove of cell phones. Budzik had called Click a phreak—a phone hacker. Scott chose a new Motorola flip phone in a case with its own charger. It worked. He dropped it into his bag.

  Finally, Scott tried the computers. Here Click's professionalism showed. Scott couldn't get past a welcome screen without multiple passwords. He'd just powered on the last of four computers, vainly hoping that one was accessible, when a light knock came at the door.

  “Click? Open the door, boy. I got somethin' for you.”

  Seven hundred miles south along the Atlantic coastline, Kate Billings lay in bed staring at the ceiling of her new room. Unseasonably warm breezes wafted through open windows, ruffling linen curtains and caressing her arms and face. The soft rhythmic rush of the surf filled the room.

  Kate had never lived in a place without traffic noises. She'd never even lived in a place where she could open ground-level windows at night without worrying. The young nurse sighed deeply and pushed back the covers so she could feel the breeze on her bare legs. She wondered if Charles Hunter was sleeping; she wondered if having a beautiful young woman in the house was keeping him awake at night.

  She glanced at the bedside clock: 1:33 A.M. Kate smiled as she rolled out of bed.

  It was time to go exploring.

  CHAPTER 22

  Kate Billings pulled on jeans, leaving her tee-shirt nightgown untucked and hanging to mid-thigh. Trotting across to her closet, she slipped her feet into untied cross-trainers, then thought better of it and tossed the shoes into the closet using her toes.

  Out in the hallway, she brushed fingertips down the wall to guide her steps. Houses, she thought, have a different feel at night. Colors disappear into grays and blacks; windows throw pale planes of dissected moonlight onto floors and furniture; the black silhouettes of plants contrast sharply with the straight lines of walls and tables, seeming even more alive, more organic, than in full light.

  She paused outside Sarah's bedroom, then pushed the door open. The little girl lay in a fetal position, her covers kicked to the foot of the bed. Kate moved silently across the floor, stopping next to the bed. Sarah's long hair had fallen across her face, and it occurred to Kate that the girl looked somehow generic—more an impersonal representation of childhood than an actual child. The thought sent a chill along Kate's spine, and she reached out with painted fingernails to brush the hair back.

  Sarah stirred as her new nanny pulled the sheet and comforter up to her chin. Kate watched as the girl instinctually grasped the comforter in her fingers and straightened her legs to paw at the covers with curled toes. Kate paused a few seconds more, thinking about the events that had led her here.

  Back in the hallway, Kate found her way to the great room and snuggled into an oversized leather chair. Charles Hunter's reading glasses were on the side table, perched atop a well-worn copy of a book titled Rebecca by a woman named Daphne something-or-other. She picked up her employer's glasses and tried them on. As she did, a soft breeze tickled her bare toes.

  Kate moved carefully through the unfamiliar house, all the while following the feel and scent of fresh air. One of the beach-side french doors was ajar. She had already placed her hand on the knob to pull it shut when the sound of glass on glass drifted in from the patio.

  Nerves tingled in the pit of Kate's stomach as she stepped through the door. The stone steps were cold against the soles of her feet.

  “Kate?”

 
She jumped and spun to her left, where her eyes found a man's shape in one of the big wicker chairs facing the Atlantic. “Mr. Hunter?”

  “Trouble sleeping?”

  Kate walked toward the masculine silhouette. “New place, I guess.”

  “Have a seat.” He motioned at a second chair. “Wish I had that excuse.”

  She lowered herself into the chair as Hunter picked up a glass that smelled of whisky. He drank deeply. When he put the glass back down on the tabletop, Kate heard the same clinking that had drawn her out onto the patio. “It's nice here.”

  He nodded, his eyes fixed on the ocean.

  “I know this is a hard time for you and Sarah. Mrs. Hunter's death, especially the way it happened . . .”

  Now Charles Hunter turned to face the new nanny. “I'd prefer not to discuss Patricia's death.” His voice was sharp.

  Kate began, “I understand you'd—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “You don't.”

  Some time passed. Hunter drank more whisky, and Kate watched waves tug at the pebbled beach. Finally he said, “Sorry. Didn't mean to snap.” He paused. “The Boston police called tonight. There's been, ah . . . there's been an arrest warrant issued for that grad student who was taking care of Patricia. What was his name? Scott . . .”

  “Thomas.”

  “Right.” Charles Hunter picked up his glass, killed the contents, and repeated the word. “Right.”

  Kate got up and left the famous architect alone. Back in her room, she placed a call to a Boston hotel where she was given a forwarding number in New York.

  The phone rang a dozen times before a hoarse “hello” came over the line.

  “Is this Canon Walker?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “This is Kate Billings, Scott's friend.” There was no response. “Do you know how to get a message to Scott? It's important.” She told Canon about the arrest warrant. She begged him to get Scott out of Boston, to help him stay away from the police until he could prove his innocence.