“Can you at least tell me if she’s in Portland?”
“I’ll be able to tell you in a couple of weeks, max.”
“Why by then, particularly?” the lawyer wanted to know.
I shrugged.
“I’ve already spent a lot of money,” the father reminded me.
“Uh-huh,” is all he got back.
“Isn’t there any way to get more . . . aggressive about this?” the lawyer said, his academic tone designed to take some of the insinuation out of his words.
“Not much point hurting people for information they don’t have,” I said, bluntly.
“I’m opposed to violence,” the father said.
“Me too,” I assured him, catching the lawyer’s thin, conspiratorial smirk.
A pro burglar had trained me. I mean a professional, not a chronic. To the public, you do the same thing often enough, you’re a “professional,” no matter if you’re a total maladroit at it. The government feels the same way about the people who work for it.
The newspapers will call some congenital defective who sticks up a dozen all-night convenience stores in a month a “professional criminal,” but people who actually make a living from crime know better.
The old-timers knew how to ghost a house so slick, they could unload the pistol you kept on the night table in case of burglars and put it right back in place between your snores—just in case you woke up while they were sorting through your jewelry like an appraiser on amphetamine.
They prided themselves on never carrying a weapon, never hurting anyone, and never stealing anything they couldn’t turn over quick. Back then, if one of the black-glove freaks who combined house invasion with rape ever dared to call himself a thief, he might get shanked just for disrespecting the profession.
Today, your average burglar is like your average bank robber: an amateur or a junkie. Both, most likely. The take is always small, and the cops don’t even bother to dust for prints. They just give you an incident number, so you can lie to your insurance company.
There are still pro jobs being done, but they tend not to get reported to the cops; the victims aren’t big fans of law enforcement.
The guy who taught me said that a truly pro touch is when the mark doesn’t even know he’s been hit. Until, one day, he looks for whatever’s been taken, and comes up empty. The pro also told me that daylight jobs are the best, if you can blend into the area where you’re working.
I could do better than that, now that I’d code-grabbed the remote for Kevin’s garage door.
I watched the mini-bus with the day camp’s name stenciled on its side, as it stopped at the corner to collect Daisy. If the schedule held, the mother would be off within an hour or so. She always did the same things. Some leisurely shopping, lunch with friends, then maybe a salon for her hair and nails, maybe a bookstore. Aimless, time-killing stuff, but she appeared devoted to it. She never got home before four in the afternoon the whole week I kept watch.
I’d thought about borrowing Kevin’s Volvo for a couple of hours, but I couldn’t know if he would use it at lunchtime. Or if his neighbors would make it their business to mention they’d seen a strange car enter his garage. My impression of the neighborhood was that it wasn’t upscale enough for the pure-leisure class, and everything Gem had learned so far confirmed that. Best bet was that the houses were mostly dink—double income, no kids—occupied, and even the people that had kids worked during the day.
I had an additional layer of protection. Even if some suspicious citizen called the cops, my story would be that I was an invited guest, and I knew the father would back that up. He might not be happy about it, but he’d keep his mouth shut.
At a quarter to twelve, I was in position on the corner. I’d swapped the Caddy for the nondescript Ford again. If any nosy neighbors had seen it when I came to the house the first time, it would dull the edge of their suspicion.
I rolled just past the driveway, then reversed and backed in, triggering the remote as I rolled. The garage was big enough for three cars. And empty. I tapped the remote again, and I was alone in the darkness.
I made my way through the connecting passage to the house, carrying my equipment in one hand, sensors on full alert. Nothing. Rosebud’s room was exactly as I remembered it, curtains open to the light, but no way for any outsider to see in. I used the mini-camera’s flash just for fill—it was so faint it wouldn’t have spooked a parakeet.
I never thought about trying Daisy’s room. Any girl that maintained such an ungodly mess so diligently would know where every single little thing was. And she’d pick up any intrusion quicker than a motion-detector.
I went downstairs, then back up to the adult side of the divided house. The bedroom was apolitical, with that antiseptic, anonymous look that tells you they paid someone to pick out the furnishings. Lots of artifacts from the civilization they’d conquered—brand names on the clothing, jewelry from all the best places, severe-modern furniture. Even the bed linen screamed Designer! very tastefully.
If the mother was telling the truth about having no maid, she did a hell of a job. The place was as dust-free as an autopsy table.
Kevin’s den was as rabid as the bedroom had been sterile. The walls were papered like a wood fence around a construction site. Everything from a giant symbol of the Symbionese Liberation Army to an old magazine cover where some overdosed-on-privilege twit proclaimed Charles Manson to be a great revolutionary. Giant head shots of Huey Newton and George Jackson side-by-side in unconscious irony.
He covered the international front, too: the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Army Brigades, a “letter to the people from Assata Shakur, s/n JoAnne Chesimard,” mailed from Cuba. The whole place was strangely time-warped, as if nothing had happened before or after a ten-year period carved out of the sixties and seventies. Nothing about the IWW. Nothing about the Tamil Tigers.
It didn’t have the controlled chaos that flavored Daisy’s room, and if a maid was being paid money to keep it clean, she was ripping them off.
But none of it was worth a thing to me.
My last shot was the apartment over the garage: the one his wife said he used as an office. I had saved it for the end, because it was closest to my way out—the same way any good burglar starts with the lowest drawer first. I hadn’t seen any stairs leading to it on the outside of the house, so I wasn’t surprised when I found the door off the inside of the garage.
The steps had carpeting, but no decorator had picked it out. The door to the office was a joke—I’d loided tougher ones when I was a little kid.
Inside, a drafting table sat in a far corner, its surface cleared, as if awaiting some action. A clever wall unit had been built over lateral file cabinets, the top of which formed a work surface featuring one of those fax-printer-copier combo machines. I hooked a gloved finger into one of the file drawers and pulled experimentally. It came open without resistance. I used a pocket flash to scan the neatly arranged manila folders inside. They were labeled in a draftman’s writing, all apparently names of projects he was working on.
I checked my watch. Still had almost twenty minutes of the forty-five I’d allotted myself for the job. Where the hell was the . . . ? Then I spotted it, lying casually on a small black leather couch: an IBM notebook computer.
I used wooden matches to mark its corners, then picked it up and carried it over to the work surface, reciting to myself the instructions Gem had given me.
First, I made sure the machine had a floppy drive installed . . . yes! . . . and checked access to the parallel port. Then I took fourteen different cables, each individually twist-tied, out of my bag and gently tried each one in turn. Hit paydirt with number six, and connected the notebook to the pocket-sized SCSI drive I was carrying.
I inserted what Gem’s geek had told her was a DOS boot disk into the computer’s floppy drive and powered it up. As soon as its screen showed a progress bar moving slowly to the right, I checked my watch and left the m
achinery to its own devices.
Kevin didn’t keep his secrets in the usual places. Nothing taped to the underside of drawers, no cutout portions of books, none of the pens were hollow. The carpeting was napless enough to be industrial, but the padding under it was so thick it was spongy to the touch. And the ceiling’s acoustical tile extended halfway down the walls. Maybe it was a look—interior design isn’t one of my specialties.
I expected a DSL connection, or maybe a T1. But he wasn’t even running his online stuff through the TV cable; it was a straight dial-up connect.
And another surprise, there was only one phone line, with no switcher, so he’d have to physically unplug the phone to go online. The phone itself was a high-tech Bang & Olufsen, ultra-audio, directly connected to a large reel-to-reel tape recorder. The setup was pure professional—that recorder could roll for hours and stay as quiet as cancer.
There was no number on the phone. I thought about using it to call my own cellular, then doing a star-69 to capture the info. But the setup spooked me, so I left it alone.
A book was lying open next to the copier. Last Man Standing, Jack Olsen’s monster bestseller. I’d picked it up when it first hit the stores. It was about Geronimo Pratt, an innocent man who had spent a quarter-century in prison, a monument to Hoover’s psychosis of the late sixties, before the courts finally kicked him loose. The book was marked up to the max: pages highlighted in half a dozen different colors, with tiny scribbles in some of the margins. I left it as I found it, open to the same page.
A slight bulge in the carpeting pinpointed the floor safe. It didn’t look like much, but punching or peeling it would have been as subtle as spray-painting the walls. And I didn’t have time to play with the dial; the progress bar on the computer’s screen read “100%.”
I popped out the floppy disk, powered down the machine, removed the cable, and packed up the portable SCSI drive. The notebook went back exactly where I’d taken it from.
One quick scan to make sure I hadn’t left any calling cards, and I was ready to fade, still within my time limit.
Back inside the garage, I started up the Ford. A few seconds’ exposure to carbon monoxide was worth the running start it would give me if I needed it. But when I sent the door up, the driveway was empty.
I was gone in seconds.
Gem wasn’t at the loft when I returned with my swag. I left the computer stuff and the film canister for her; she knew whatto do with them.
The meet with Madison wasn’t for three days. I didn’t want to play my hole card until after I’d spoken with her. I went back into the streets.
I always carry significant currency when I work. It isn’t just for the mordida that’s so much a part of the kind of business I do. A piece of it is emotional—I feel scared without some cash in my pocket. Only born-rich people are comfortable walking around without money.
In New York, it’d take you years of lurking before people noticed you—unless you were crazy enough to hang around a drug drop or a mob storefront. But in Portland, it didn’t take long at all. I didn’t know what the whisper-stream had about me, but I knew I was part of its flow from the way people reacted when I rolled up on them. By then, they all knew I was looking for Rosebud. But they didn’t know why. Unless they bought my story . . . whichever one I’d told them.
I’d put a notice in the personals column of the Willamette Week—an alternative newspaper that was above-ground enough to survive on advertising, mostly from cultural events. If Rosebud saw my ad, she never answered.
There were a few ’zines going around, mostly about the local live-sounds scene. I tracked one of them back to its editor, a nice kid with a color printer and a passionate love of industrial music. He said he’d never heard of Rosebud, didn’t recognize her picture.
He didn’t look like he got out of the house enough to be that smooth a liar, so I figured he was playing it straight. I asked him what it would cost to run a box ad. He told me he didn’t do stuff like that; his “operation” was “noncommercial.” But he did hook me up with another ’zine, this one devoted to what they called thugcore music. “Hardcore’s like bubblegum to us, man,” the kid in charge told me.
He listened as I explained that Rosebud wasn’t tattooed or pierced, hadn’t shaved her head, and didn’t spend a lot of time in mosh pits. But when I told him that she played acoustic guitar, he told me to keep my money.
There’s another music scene that doesn’t get air play—unless you count the shortwave psycho-shows. NSBM—National Socialist Black Metal—a bizarre brew of confused mysticism and real clear race hate. You can’t find it over-the-counter, but it does a big enough business on the Internet that it’s already being ripped off . . . bootlegged, big-time.
From the picture I’d been putting together of Rosebud, I couldn’t see her anywhere near that crap. So I passed on the thugcore kid’s offer to get me some names.
I didn’t like it that the father was so sure she was still in Portland, so I followed him around for a couple of days. He had a lot of meets in semi-public places—walking along the waterfront, having a snack from a street vendor, in a coffeehouse—with people I didn’t recognize. But none of them were within thirty years of the kid’s age. Maybe he’d covered his bets, hired some more personnel.
“That’s Geof Darrow’s work, all right,” Madison said, tapping one long fingernail on the sixteen-by-twenty-inch enlargement. I’d had it made from the photo I’d taken of the drawing in Rosebud’s room. “It’s as distinctive as a fingerprint. There isn’t another artist in the world who could do this . . . although plenty try.”
“Never heard of him,” I said. Which wasn’t quite true. My old prison partner, Hercules, had everything Darrow ever drew.
“God. You didn’t see The Matrix?”
The way she said the words, like it was something sacred, I knew she was talking about a movie.
“No.” This time, it was the truth.
“Okay,” she said, as if pronouncing judgment. “Anyway, I can tell you something more about this . . . drawing. It is a drawing, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. I didn’t know Geof Darrow even knew Charles de Lint.”
“Who?”
“See these crows? Well, they’re not birds. See where it says ‘Maida and Zia’? Those are the crow girls,” she pronounced.
“I didn’t see that movie, either.”
“Look,” she sighed, impatient with my cultural deficiencies, “the crow girls are recurring characters in books by Charles de Lint. He’s a fabulist.”
“A what?”
“A writer of fables. And he’s a musician, too.”
“A . . . Wait a minute, Madison. Would a teenage girl like his stuff?”
“You’re kidding, right? It depends on the girl, of course. But he writes beautifully. I adore his work.”
“Have you gotten any letters from—”
She got up to leave. I took it for an answer.
The Borders on Third Street was too damn big to stagger through one rack at a time. I was wandering aimlessly when a dark-haired guy came up and asked me if he could help. His face was too professionally unexpressive for him to be a clerk, so I figured him for the manager. I told him what I wanted, and he knew exactly where it was.
I sat down at one of the tables and got myself a tuna sandwich on what Portland thinks is a bakery roll. Then I started to read what the guy had told me was the latest of the dozen Charles de Lint books they had on their shelves.
It was set in one of those mythical cities that you recognize from the road map of your own experience. The style was realistic, but the narrative was full of magick and faeries and mystical connections between people and objects. All driven by a culture that evolved from street kids, intertwined with their music, their poetry, and their at-bottom goodness . . . almost as if the mysticism was in their gestalt, not their spells. I could see why Rosebud felt close to this stuff. And, reading it, I felt closer to her.
B
ut no closer to where she was.
“I bought you a present,” I told Gem when she came in late in the afternoon.
“What?” she said. The last time I’d said those same words to her, she’d clapped her hands like a little girl and jumped up and down until I gave it to her.
“Just a book,” I said, handing her what I’d bought earlier.
“This is very nice,” she said, taking it from me. “I have not read it. Thank you.”
I wanted to ask her what the fuck was wrong, but I had a date with a pack of skittish whores.
The soft Pacific Northwest rain didn’t sweep the streets clean, but it did cut down on the traffic. I had no luck talking a lone hooker into the Caddy. So, when I spotted the Subaru ahead to my left, looking even more sharklike in the wet night, I tucked in behind and tried my luck there.
The black car ambled along in a gentle series of right-hand turns. If the driver noticed me on his tail, he sure wasn’t panicked about it. Fifteen minutes brought us back to the outer rim of the stroll. The Subaru glided to the curb. When I saw the chubby blonde girl climb out the passenger side, tugging her mini-skirt back down over her hips, I knew that either the driver was a regular or his approach was a lot better than mine.
The hooker was heading back up the street to where I was parked. The Subaru was pulling away. Snap decision. I hit the switch for the curbside window as the blonde came up alongside.
“You working?” I asked.
She glanced into the Caddy, a tired-looking woman who’d been promised diamonds and silk and gotten zircons and polyester. I let her have a good look. She glanced up the street to where she’d been headed. Then back to me.
“Some other time, honey,” she said.
I got back around three. The loft was empty. The Charles de Lint book was where Gem had put it down when I’d first given it to her.
“Can’t you . . . put on some pressure?” Kevin asked me the next day.
“Money’s the best pressure,” I told him.
“I understand that. You’re not saying I should increase the—”
Pain Management b-13 Page 11
