Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  Corbeil gave Morrison a long look, and Morrison said, “What?”

  Corbeil shook his head, got up, stepped over to the security agent, and said, “Let me.”

  The agent slipped out his .40 Smith and handed it to Corbeil, who turned and pointed it at Morrison.

  “You better tell us what you did with the data or you’re gonna get your ass hurt real bad,” he said quietly.

  “Don’t point the gun at me; don’t point the gun . . .” Morrison said.

  Corbeil could feel the blood surging into his heart. He’d always liked this part. He’d shot the Iraqi colonels and a few other ragheads and deer and antelope and elk and javelina and moose and three kinds of bear and groundhogs and prairie dogs and more birds than he could count; and it all felt pretty good.

  He shot Morrison twice in the chest. Morrison didn’t gape in surprise, stagger, slap a hand to his wounds, or open his eyes wide in amazement. He simply fell down.

  “Christ, my ears are ringing,” Corbeil said to the security agent. He didn’t mention the sudden erection. “Wasn’t much,” he said. “Nothing like Iraq.”

  But his hand was trembling when he passed over the gun. The agent had seen it before, hunting on the ranch.

  “Let’s get the other shot done,” the agent said.

  “Yes.” They got the .38 from a desk drawer, wrapped Morrison’s dead hand around it, and fired it once into a stack of newspapers.

  “So you better get going,” Corbeil said. “I’ll dump the newspapers.”

  “I’ll be to Goodie’s right. That’s your left,” the agent said.

  “I know that,” Corbeil said impatiently.

  “Well, Jesus, don’t forget it,” the agent said.

  “I won’t forget it,” Corbeil snapped.

  “Sorry. But remember. Remember. I’ll be to your left. And you gotta reload now, and take the used shell with you . . .”

  “I’ll remember it all, William. This is my life as much as it is yours.”

  “Okay.” The agent’s eyes drifted toward the crumbled form of Morrison. “What a schmuck.”

  “We had no choice; it was a million-to-one that he’d find that stuff,” Corbeil said. He glanced at his watch: “You better move.”

  Larry Goodie hitched up his gun belt, sighed, and headed for the elevators. As he did, the alarm buzzed on the employees’ door and he turned to see William Hart checking through with his key card.

  “Asshole,” Goodie said to himself. He continued toward the elevators, but slower now. Only one elevator ran at night, and Hart would probably want a ride to the top. As Hart came through, Goodie pushed the elevator button and found a smile for the security man.

  “How’s it going, Larry?” Hart asked.

  “Slow night,” Goodie said.

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?” Hart asked.

  “S’pose,” Goodie said.

  “When was the last time you had a fast night?”

  Goodie knew he was being hazed and he didn’t like it. The guys from TrendDirect were fine. The people with AmMath, the people from “Upstairs,” were assholes. “Most of ’em are a little slow,” he admitted. “Had some trouble with the card reader that one time, everybody coming and going . . .”

  The elevator bell dinged at the tenth floor and they both got off. Goodie turned left, and Hart turned right, toward his office. Then Hart touched Goodie’s sleeve and said, “Larry, was that lock like that?”

  Goodie followed Hart’s gaze: something wrong with the lock on Gerald R. Kind’s office. He stepped closer, and looked. Somebody had used a pry-bar on the door. “No, I don’t believe it was. I was up here an hour ago,” Goodie said. He turned and looked down the hall. The lights in the security area were out. The security area was normally lit twenty-four hours a day.

  “We better check,” Hart said, dropping his voice.

  Hart eased open the office door, and Goodie saw that another door, on the other side, stood open. “Quiet,” Hart whispered. He led the way through the door, and out the other side, into a corridor that led to the secure area. The door at the end of the hall was open, and the secure area beyond it was dark.

  “Look at that screen,” Hart whispered, as they slipped down the hall. A computer screen had a peculiar glow to it, as if it had just been shut down. “I think there’s somebody in there.”

  “I’ll get the lights,” Goodie whispered back. His heart was thumping; nothing like this had ever happened.

  “Better arm yourself,” Hart said. Hart slipped an automatic pistol out of a belt holster, and Goodie gulped and fumbled out his own revolver. He’d never actually drawn it before.

  “Ready?” Hart asked.

  “Maybe we ought to call the cops,” Goodie whispered.

  “Just get the lights,” Hart whispered. He barely breathed the words at the other man. “Just reach through, the switch is right inside.”

  Goodie got to the door frame, reached inside with one hand, and somebody screamed at him: “NO!”

  Goodie jerked around and saw a ghostly oval, a face, and then WHAM! The flash blinded him and he felt as though he’d been hit in the ribs with a ball bat. He went down backwards, and saw the flashes from Hart’s weapon straight over his head, WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM . . .

  Goodie didn’t count the shots, but his whole world seemed to consist of noise; then the back of his head hit the carpet and his mouth opened and he groaned, and his body was on fire. He lay there, not stirring, until Hart’s face appeared in his line of vision: “Hold on, Larry, goddamnit, hold on, I’m calling an ambulance . . . Hold on . . .”

  2

  The Canadian winter arrived on Friday morning.

  Bleak Thomas and I had been fishing late-season northern pike along the English River, sunny days and cold, crisp nights, the bugs knocked down by the frost, pushing our luck down a lingering Ontario autumn.

  The bad weather came in overnight. We’d gotten up to a hazy sunshine, but by nine o’clock, a dark wedge of cloud was piling in from the northwest. We could smell the cold. It wasn’t a scent, exactly, but had something to do with the sense of smell: you turn your face to it, and your nose twitches, and you think winter.

  The bad weather was no surprise. We’d seen it on satellite pictures, forming up as a low-pressure system in the Arctic, before we left the float-plane base five days earlier—but waiting for the plane on the last morning, looking at our watches as we listened for the noisy single-engine Cessna 185, with nickel-sized snowflakes drifting in from the northwest . . . maybe we began to wonder what would happen if the plane had gone down. And if there’d been a mix-up, and the people at the base thought we’d gone down with it.

  Winter was long in northwest Ontario, and Bleak Thomas probably wouldn’t taste that good. Bleak might have been thinking along the same lines, with a change of menu. When the Cessna turned the corner at the end of the lake, like a silver wink, and the roar of the aircraft engine rolled across the water, Bleak said, “Only an hour late.”

  “Really? I thought he was a little early.” I yawned and stretched.

  “Sure,” Bleak said. “That’s why you chewed your fingernails down to your armpits.”

  The pilot was in a hurry. He taxied up to the rickety dock, pushed along by a gust of snow. Bleak and I threw our gear onboard, and we were gone, bouncing across the whitecaps and into the air. The pilot didn’t bother to check that the boats had been rolled or that the fire was dead in the potbellied stove; he took our word for it. Ten minutes after takeoff, we broke out of the snow and he said, “Good. I always land better when I can find the lake.” Then, to me, “You got some woman calling about every ten minutes.”

  “Yeah? Did she say what her name was?” I was thinking LuEllen because she was the only woman I knew who might want to get in touch in a hurry. But the pilot said, “Lane Ward.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know her.”

  “Well, she knows you and she’s hot to talk,” the pilot said. We were half-s
houting over the noisy clatter of the engine. “She didn’t say what about. She says she’s traveling and doesn’t have a call-back number.”

  He didn’t have much to say after that. We all concentrated on the lakes and canyons flicking by eight hundred feet below. In three weeks, the pilot would need skis to land. A few miles out of the base, as the pilot slipped the plane sideways to line up with the long axis of the lake, Bleak leaned forward from the backseat and said, “We were getting a little worried about you, back there.”

  “Had a little trouble with the plane, getting off this morning,” the pilot said. “I was warming her up and the prop come off.” We both looked out at the prop and then over at the pilot. He just barely grinned and said, “That joke was old when Pontius was a pilot.”

  The pilot’s wife’s name was Moony. She was a leftover hippie with a toothy grin, paisley shifts, and a little weed growing in the window box. After thirty years of cooking for fly-in fishermen, she still couldn’t put together a decent meal. Clients would take her flapjacks down to the lake and skip them off the water like rocks. When they sank, the fish wouldn’t touch them.

  Moony offered to throw together a quick lunch, but we hastily declined, jumped in the rented station wagon and drove down to Kenora. Six hours later, we were walking up the stairs at the local-carrier ramp at Minneapolis–St. Paul International.

  I been on worse trips, I guess,” Bleak said.

  His way of saying he’d had a good time. Bleak was a furniture maker, who got a thousand dollars for a chair and fifteen thousand for one of his hand-carved, ten-place craftsman-style walnut dining sets. He gave most of the money away, through the Lutheran Social Services. Bleak believed that craftsmen who got rich got soft, a sentiment I didn’t share. Not that he was a religious fanatic: he was on his fifth wife, and all five of them had been excellent women. And as we walked up the stairs into the terminal, he spotted a dark-haired woman standing at the top and said, quietly, “Look at the ass on this one, Kidd.”

  “Jesus, Bleak, you can’t talk like that in Minnesota,” I muttered; and looked.

  “Intended purely as a compliment,” Thomas said, under his breath.

  The woman turned, and was looking us over as we climbed the steps, taking in the duffels and gear bags and rod tubes. She checked Bleak for a minute, the way a lot of women check Bleak—he had long black hair and was bronzed like an Indian guide—then her eyes drifted back to me. As we crossed the top of the steps, she asked, “Are you Kidd?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “I’m Lane Ward.” She looked like her father might have been Mexican. She had the black hair and matching eyes, and the round face; but she was pale, like an Irishwoman. She stuck out her hand, and I shook it, and picked up the faintest scent: something light, flowery, French. “I’m Jack Morrison’s sister.”

  “Jack,” I said. “How is he?”

  “He’s dead,” she said. “He was shot to death a week ago today.”

  That stopped me. I looked at Bleak and he said, “Yow.”

  The parking garage at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport is under permanent reconstruction, a running joke perpetrated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission. Since parking is impossible, we’d all taken taxis in. Bleak would take a cab down south of the cities to his workshop, and Lane and I got a cab to my place in St. Paul.

  “How’d you know I was Kidd—that Bleak wasn’t me?” I asked, as we waited for a cab to come up.

  “You looked more like a criminal,” she said.

  “Thanks. But I’m an artist.”

  “Oh, bullshit. I know about Anshiser,” she said. “I know what you and Jack did.”

  That she knew about Anshiser was disturbing. Anshiser had been a rough operation which, in the end, had taken down a major aircraft corporation. If I’d known Jack would tell her about it, I wouldn’t have worked with Jack. But then, that might not be realistic. All kinds of people knew a little bit about what I did. They just didn’t know each other so they could compare notes. “You think I look like a criminal?”

  “You look tougher than your friend, with your . . . nose.”

  Hell, I’ve always thought I was a good-looking guy. Forty-something, six feet and a bit, hardly any white in my hair, and I still have all of it. The nose, I admit, had been broken a couple of times and never gotten quite straight. I thought it lent my face a certain charm. “It’s part of my charm,” I said, wounded, as the cab came up. I held the back door for her.

  “Jack said you can be charming . . . if you wanted to be. He said you didn’t want to be, that often.” She got in the cab, and I slid in beside her.

  “What happened to Jack?” I asked.

  “Let’s wait until we get over to your place,” she said, her eyes going to the back of the driver’s head.

  Though winter was on the way, for the moment it was still in Ontario. St. Paul’s trees were shedding their leaves, but the temperature was in the sixties as we crossed the Mississippi and headed down West Seventh Street into St. Paul. Lane was quiet, checking out the local color: most notably, a cigar-chewing guy humping along, slowly, on an ancient Honda Dream. He was wearing knee shorts and black dress socks. “Sophisticated place, for a Midwestern capital city,” she said.

  “Yeah. We’re blessed with individualism,” I said.

  We spent the rest of the ride in idle chitchat; and I sort of took her in, physically. She was pretty, with a good figure, but a figure that came from a careful diet, rather than exercise; a magazine-model’s figure, not an athlete’s.

  She had an undergraduate degree from Berkeley in philosophy and mathematics, and a couple of graduate degrees in computer science from Stanford. She now lived in Palo Alto and divided her time between an Internet start-up and teaching at Stanford. The start-up, called e-Accountant, would provide billing, collection, accounting, and tax services to Web sites too small to efficiently do it on their own. She expected to get modestly rich from it. She was no longer married to the guy named Ward.

  “He always said he wanted children, but he always wanted one more thing first,” she said. “A car or a boat or a house or a vacation place. I told him that I couldn’t wait any longer, and if he didn’t want to start on a kid, I was going to pull the plug. Even then, he couldn’t decide.”

  “So you pulled the plug.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Any candidates for the eventual fatherhood?” I asked.

  “Yes. A very nice man at Stanford, an anthropologist. He’s working on his own divorce.”

  “Ah. Were you involved in his problem?”

  “No. He doesn’t even know he’s a candidate for the new position,” she said. “Although he should be getting that idea pretty soon, now. He’ll be an excellent father, I think.”

  “Good for him,” I said.

  The cab driver’s eyes came up in the rearview mirror, and I caught him smiling. Pretty women are easily amusing.

  I’m not sure how glad your heart should be when you arrive home in a taxicab with the grieving sister of a friend who’d just been shot to death, but when the cab dropped us, I was happy. Always happy to head up north, always happy to get back. The water gives you ideas, and if you’re up there long enough, you develop an irresistible urge to work, to get the ideas on paper. Bleak was the same way; leave him in a cabin long enough, and he’ll start improving the furniture with his pocket knife.

  And things were going on around home. We had to walk up five flights of stairs because the elevator was jammed full of Alice Beck’s stoneware and porcelain pieces, which she was moving out for a show. Alice yelled down the atrium, “Sorry, Kidd, we’ll be out in ten minutes.” We traipsed on up the stairs, me with the duffel and rod tubes, Lane carrying the tackle bag.

  We stopped on the third floor for a moment, so Lane could look at some of Alice’s vases. She liked them, and Alice invited us to the opening, two days away.

  Lane shook her head. “I’d love to, but we’ve got a funeral to go to,” sh
e said, and we continued on up. At the next flight, she looked down and said, quietly, “Beautiful stuff,” and I nodded and said, “People say she’s as good as Lucie Rie, but I’m afraid she’s gonna burn the building down some day. She’s got a Marathon gas kiln in her back room. I can hear it roaring away at night, that whooshing sound, like the cremation of Sam McGee.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “The cremation of Sam McGee?”

  “No, stupid: the kiln.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “Have you complained?”

  “Nah. I helped her carry it up.”

  Home; and the Cat was in.

  He was sitting on the back of the couch, looking out at the Mississippi, a red tiger-stripe with a head the size of a General Electric steam iron. He didn’t bother to hop down when I came in. In fact, he pretended not to notice. An old lady artist downstairs, a painter, kept him fed for me while I was gone, and he had his own flap so he didn’t need a cat pan except in deepest winter.

  “Hey, Cat,” I said. He looked away—but he’d come creeping around about bedtime, looking for a scratch.

  “He looks like you,” Lane said.

  “Who?”

  “The cat.”

  “Thanks.” I supposed that could be a flattering comment; on the other hand, the Cat was pretty beat up. One ear had been damn near chewed off, and sometimes, on cold mornings, he’d limp a little, and look up at me and meow, like he was asking for a couple of aspirin. I dumped the duffel, stepped into the kitchen, and said to Lane, “Tell me about Jack,” and asked, “Want some coffee?”

  She agreed to the coffee. “I think he was murdered,” she said, as we waited for the water to heat in the microwave. “He was supposedly shot to death after he broke into a secure area of a company called AmMath in Dallas. He was shot twice in the chest and died immediately. Another man was wounded.”

  “But not killed?”

  “Not killed.”

  “So he could tell you what they were doing . . .” The microwave beeped and I took the cups out.

  “No, no, no . . . The man who was wounded was supposedly shot by Jack,” she said. “They say that Jack had a gun and opened fire when he was caught. There were two guards or security men, whatever you call them, and supposedly, Jack shot one, and the second guard shot Jack.”