Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “Goddamn it,” I said.

  LuEllen shrugged. “If we’ve got three digits and she’s only blocking the fourth, it just means it’ll take a little longer to get in. We might have to try a dozen combinations, but we’ll get it.”

  “When can you print?”

  “Tonight, when we get back. I can’t do it on the river because of the engine vibrations.”

  THE NIGHT WAS still warm, but we wore dark long-sleeved shirts and jeans and the gum boots instead of shoes. I carried my portable in its black nylon case, and LuEllen had a daypack over her shoulder. We walked without talking, LuEllen using her miniature flashlight sparingly as we moved through the darkness. At the bottom of the hill she stopped, leaned her face close to my ear, and said, “Wait three minutes.” I thought she was going up the hill, but instead, we simply stood in the dark.

  When your eyes adjust from light to dark, the night vision seems to fade in, like a black-and-white slide coming into focus. What was pitch-dark when you first come out of bright lights is suddenly nothing more than twilight. It works the same for your hearing, although most people aren’t aware of it. When you stand stock-still in a dark place, the noises that once resided in the background suddenly come to the fore. You notice the roar of far-off trucks climbing a grade, the motors and air conditioners, the insects in the trees, the sound of the wind. Human voices are an absolutely distinct sound; even from a long distance, when you can’t make out the individual vowels and consonants, the rhythm or the rise and fall of the pitch tell you that you’re hearing another human.

  We heard all the background sounds, picked them up one at a time. No voices.

  We waited the full three minutes, and then LuEllen was moving again. I trailed behind. The track along the levee broke out of the brush thirty or forty yards from the animal control buildings. The main building, the white one, was thirty yards away, across an open stretch of weedy lawn. A gravel driveway came in from the other side but stopped short of the building.

  We waited for another five minutes in the weeds just out of the cleared area. There was one exterior light, up on a pole outside the main building. No lights were showing in the building.

  “Glad the kennel’s on the far side,” LuEllen said. She took her picks and a power rake out of her pack. “Let’s try not to wake up the mutts.”

  We were absolutely exposed as we crossed the yard. If anyone was up the hill or anybody came up in a car, we were in the open. There was no point in being furtive but we were furtive anyway. LuEllen went straight to the door, tried the knob, found it locked. There was a window around the side, and she tried it. It was locked. She came back to the door and looked at the lock.

  “I’ll try the picks,” she whispered. “Maybe we can avoid the power rake. Hold the light.”

  She opened it, but it took twenty sweaty minutes. The power rake would have done it in two, but it sounds like a spoon dropped in a garbage disposal. When the door was open, we took a quick look around the side of the building, then crossed the yard and waited in the weeds again, listening and waiting. If there were any kind of unseen alarm, somebody should be coming up the road.

  The sense of hearing isn’t the only thing that sharpens in the dark. As far as we were from the building, there was a light but persistent stench of animal urine and fear. And something else…

  “Raw meat,” LuEllen muttered. “From the shooting pen…”

  Nothing moved on the road. We went back and inside. The lock on Hill’s office door was nothing. LuEllen slipped it, and we were in. The computer was another old IBM. I brought the machine up and began dumping the hard disk to my portable. LuEllen went through the desk and found a box of floppies. When the disk-to-disk transfer was complete, I loaded the floppies one at a time, found two sets of files, and saved them to my machine.

  That done, I slipped in a utility program I’d written myself. A hard disk is like an electronic filing cabinet, with lots of storage space for files. Unless the operator is running complicated accounting programs with enormous amounts of data or huge applications programs, there’s usually plenty of empty space.

  I checked and found the Longstreet gang had used less than a tenth of the available disk space. Good. My program—a gem, if I do say so myself—simply made a second copy of everything on the disk and then hid it in the free space. The copy would never show up on directories or in any other routine transaction unless the right code phrase was entered at the prompt. I made the code phrase redneck. And fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

  If these were the books, and the Longstreet gang got nervous and tried to erase them, there was an excellent chance that there’d still be a set left on the machine, hidden under the code. A set available to the state cops…

  After LuEllen had unlocked the desk, she checked a filing cabinet, found nothing interesting, and then went through the rest of the building. As I finished, she came in and said, “Come look at this.”

  I packed my machine and followed her into the back. There was a small loading dock at the rear of the building, with a pulldown door, like a small garage door. Built into the wall opposite the door were two cubicles, four-by-four-by-four feet, with heavy Plexiglas doors. There was a grille in the wall of each, and the doors had thick rubber seals.

  “Gas chambers?” she asked. “For the animals?”

  I looked at the seals and then at a pump apparatus off to the side. “No. It’s a vacuum system. They put the dogs in the chamber and suck the air out. That’s the way they do it most places now.”

  “Christ, it sounds awful.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s supposed to be humane.”

  We left it at that. LuEllen made a last check of the building, to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind, relocked the door from the inside, and pulled it shut after us.

  Ten minutes later we were on the river. We didn’t talk much as we pushed back upstream. LuEllen lay in the sunbathing well, looking up at the stars, and the tension drained away with the current.

  BY TWO O’CLOCK I knew I had the books. I didn’t know what they meant.

  “They’ve used codes for all the categories,” I told LuEllen. “The numbers are there, but I don’t know what the categories are.”

  “Marvel may be able to figure it out,” she said.

  “I hope.”

  While I worked on the books, LuEllen set up the enlarger in the head. She made four prints, fixed them, washed them, and let them dry. By the time I was sure about the books, she was looking at the enlargements under a high-intensity light.

  “We got three out of the four,” she said.

  She had enlarged the images of the safe dial to the size of an old-fashioned alarm-clock face. The numbers were clear enough in the first three. In the fourth, Wells’s index finger covered the critical digit.

  “So it’s seventy-four, forty-four, twelve, and something between… say, fifty-five and seventy.”

  “Hang on.” I got my drawing box, dug around, and came up with a compass and a set of dividers. Using the compass, I drew the missing portion of the dial over Wells’s intruding finger. With the dividers, I measured the intervals between the visible numbers and marked them off around the rim of the dial.

  “If this is the centerline,” I said, indicating the line with a ruler and a sharp pencil, “then the digit is… sixty-six. Give or take a digit.”

  LuEllen looked at me and grinned. “You do have your uses. Other than sexual, I mean.”

  IT WAS ALL coming together. Smoothly. Too smoothly, LuEllen said. She was born and raised in Minnesota and was automatically suspicious of pleasantness. No matter how nice the summer is, winter always comes…

  With the printouts of the Longstreet books in hand, I called John and Marvel. We agreed to drive to Greenville, where we could meet in a motel without dodging the Longstreet locals.

  LuEllen stayed with the boat. There’d be new people in Greenville, and she was paranoid about her face becoming known. At two o’clo
ck Marvel let me into her room at the Sea-B Motel. John was there with Harold and a man I hadn’t met before.

  “This is Brooking Davis,” Marvel said, nodding at the stranger. Davis was a slender, bird-boned man with a square chin, a dark mustache, and the liquid eyes of an Arab. “He’s a lawyer and does appraisal work for the county assessor’s office. Brooking will be our first appointment on the council. If Harold and I don’t know where the bodies are buried, Brooking will.”

  “Well, we found you some grave sites,” I said, handing over the printouts. “It looks simple enough, but I don’t know how it breaks down.”

  Davis had two boxes full of city budgets, memos, and reports. He unloaded them on a credenza, and Marvel and Harold pulled chairs up to the bed. In two minutes the three of them were in deep discussion, comparing numbers on printouts with expenditures and collections in the city reports.

  “How’d it go with Brown?” I asked John.

  John smiled. “He was a little surprised when I turned out to be black, looking like I did—and driving that BMW—but we’re all set,” he said. He stepped over to a black nylon briefcase, unzipped it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “I gave him a cashier’s check for a thousand dollars for a thirteen-week option on six hundred acres, at nine hundred and twenty dollars an acre. He was asking a thousand, but I dickered a little. I still paid too much, though. I wanted to seem anxious but like I was trying to hide it. And I wanted him talking around town about how he stuck it to the city boy.”

  “Does he seem like the sort to do that?” I asked. “I hope.”

  “Actually, no,” John said with a grin. “He seemed like a pretty decent guy. But the real estate dealer was an asshole. She’ll talk. She asked me what I wanted the land for. I told them my heritage was in cotton farming and I was thinking of going back to it. She had to stick her hankie in her mouth to keep from laughing. I was wearing the wing tips. They figure I’m a crack dealer from Memphis.…”

  “OK,” I said. “So the word’ll be around.”

  From the bed, Marvel was saying, “If Outhouse is the bar payments, what’s Suburb?”

  “Sounds like they’re getting it,” John said.

  IT TOOK three hours to nail down the printouts. Davis, who’d seemed frail when I first met him, was as intense as Marvel or Harold, and they often deferred to him. But not always. There was one heated argument over a series of entries on recreational fees. The entries might have exposed the Reverend Dodge, and Marvel didn’t want to take the risk. Davis, who apparently hated Dodge, did. Marvel won.

  John whispered: “That woman can talk the bark off a tree.”

  “How’s your… uh, relationship?”

  John glanced covertly at Marvel, then looked back at me. “I’m trying as hard as I can, man. Sometimes I think she’s about to haul my butt back to the bedroom, but then… I mean, Jesus, this is takin’ longer than it has with any woman I ever met.”

  “Is she real, or is she teasing?”

  “She’s real, I think.”

  “Then that’s probably a good sign,” I said. “All the time…”

  “You think so?”

  We both looked at Marvel and realized that everybody in the room was looking at us. We’d been whispering in a way that immediately attracts attention.

  “Uh, we didn’t want to bother you, talking,” John said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Marvel.

  “HERE’S THE SITUATION,” Marvel said, a half hour after her argument with Davis. She rolled off the bed and whacked a rolled-up copy of the printout against her thigh. “This is good stuff. It lays out the kickbacks and the payoffs, how much and where it went, but everything is done by code numbers. We know who the code numbers represent, but we couldn’t prove it immediately.”

  “If the IRS gets it, they could check bank deposits.”

  “Sure,” said Davis, “but that would take some time. If things drag out, we might not be able to get all of them out of the office simultaneously.”

  “Not even if they steal a hundred thousand bucks?” John asked.

  “That’d do it, but that’s an extra risk, and we don’t know if that whole crazy con game with the bridge is going to work,” Marvel said. “We were talking back in Memphis about blackmailing them out of office.”

  “Not the first three,” I said. “Only the governor’s redneck appointments.”

  “Why not try it now?” Marvel asked. “The bridge idea has always seemed kind of… shaky. If we can get around using it, we’d expose John to less risk, you and LuEllen to less risk, and we might get to the same place.”

  I thought about it for a moment. If we could blackmail them out of office, there would be less exposure. And LuEllen was worried already.… I looked at John. “What do you think?”

  “Sounds OK to me,” he said. He turned to Marvel. “How would we do it?”

  “Harold will call Dessusdelit, tell her he’s got to see her, that it’s important,” Marvel said. “She knows him, she knows he wouldn’t bullshit. He’ll go over to her house and lay the books on her. Tell her that all he wants is her resignation. Hers and St. Thomas’s and Rebeck’s. They quit, and he loses the books.”

  “Can you pull it off?” I asked Harold.

  “I don’t know,” he said pensively. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at Marvel, and I realized he would do about anything she wanted him to. “It’s worth a try, I guess. Dessusdelit’s a politician, and she used to sell real estate. She’s been cutting deals all her life. Maybe she’ll figure she can cool out the books and come back later. She won’t know the rest of it—the part about us taking over the town.”

  I glanced at John again, then turned to Marvel.

  “OK with me,” I said. “But it’s your call.”

  “Let’s try it,” she said with satisfaction. “If it doesn’t work, John can still try the bridge scam, you and LuEllen can still hit City Hall, and we can still go to the governor. But if it does work, we avoid all that trouble.”

  “That’s a lot to do before Friday,” I said. “If we’re going to work the bridge scam, it has to be on Friday, so we’ve got to move.”

  “We’ll be back home before supper,” Marvel said. “Harold can call Dessusdelit tonight. Maybe even go over tonight. And just in case, I’ll start calling around and put the word out about John. Smart Memphis dope dealer just bought some land, and there’s something happening with the bridge. It’ll get back to the mayor and her crowd tonight, same time as Harold.”

  “Good. And if Harold can’t convince Dessusdelit and the others to quit, we’ll need some help next week, after the state cops come in. We’ll need a half dozen people with white-southerner accents, to call the paper and the TV station, demanding that the council resign.”

  “That’s fixed,” Harold said simply. He was wearing his brown suit again and sweating lightly despite the air-conditioning.

  “What about the interim rednecks?” I asked.

  “We’ve got two names, Marvin Lesse and Bill Armistead. Both are pretty wimpy, and we’ve got them by the balls on some illegal cement sales. We’ll get them appointed, and when it’s time to push them off… well, they’ll go,” Marvel said.

  “We hope,” added Davis.

  We all looked at each other for a minute; then Marvel said, “It’s scary,” and John said, “Let’s do it.”

  THE PROGRAM was complex.

  Marvel would finish translating the books, stripping out the portions that applied specifically to Dessusdelit, St. Thomas, and Rebeck. Harold would show only those portions to Dessusdelit.

  If Harold couldn’t deal, we’d work the bridge scam.

  The scam was a variation of the old pigeon drop routine. I figured if the pigeon drop worked a million times on Miami Beach, it ought to work once in Longstreet.

  But instead of dropping an envelope of money on the sidewalk, we were dropping a bridge.

  The bridge that Longstreet no longer had but desperately needed.

  Marvel
would plant the rumor that the state Department of Transportation was recommending construction of a toll bridge. But the bridge wouldn’t come into the downtown area for engineering and cost reasons. Instead, it would cross the river just north of town, coming down on the Brown property.

  The property John now held an option on. A property that would quickly sprout gas stations, fast-food joints, convenience stores, and maybe a small shopping center.

  That kind of information is routinely held secret by state departments of transportation so that land prices aren’t inflated before condemnation proceedings begin. The state DOT’s engineering office would be the only place that could confirm Marvel’s rumor.

  Bobby was monitoring the Longstreet phone exchanges, checking lines out of the city offices, and at the homes of the most prominent members of the machine, scanning for the DOT’s number in the state capital. When the number was dialed, a phone would ring at Bobby’s place. An “engineer” would answer. No information could be released, he would say; studies were still under way.… But where did you get that information? That information is restricted.

  In other words, Yes, that’s right, we’re putting in the bridge.…

  It was a marvelous opportunity for a well-run machine, one we were sure it wouldn’t overlook. Whoever controlled the land at the base of the bridge would make a lot of money. And that was… Brown. No? Some black dude from Memphis?

  When John was contacted by a member of the machine, he would hint that he was working for a bigger Man in Memphis and couldn’t act on his own. He’d be the reluctant bride, but he’d get back to them, quickly. When he got back, he’d say the Man would welcome participation, especially since it could grease the council votes needed on zoning matters around the bridge. But votes wouldn’t be enough; the Man would also need money from the machine.

  There’d be some back and forth, but Friday afternoon, after talking to the Man in Memphis, he’d tell the machine that he needed to see some cash. Right then. Before he went back. They didn’t have to give it to him; that would make them too suspicious. They only had to show it to him. Show him that they could get it. A hundred thousand. He was leaving for Memphis in an hour.…