Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  While I was painting, LuEllen sat on the back bumper and used a screwdriver to rip the guts out of the roller-receipt box, and the X-Acto knife to cut a quarter-sized hole through the plastic side. Her JVC miniature camcorder fit snugly inside, held in place with the duct tape; she used the rubber cement to glue a receipt across the face of the box.

  “We ready?” she asked, as I finished up the roses.

  “If you are.”

  “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t have to do anything, truth be told. LuEllen drove the truck up to the gate, said something to the gatehouse guard, who pointed, and let her in. I waited a block away, in the car.

  She was inside for exactly twenty-two minutes, about ten more than I thought reasonable. She waved at the guard as she left, took a left, and five minutes later, we met in a weedy, litter-strewn strip under a freeway. When I got there, she’d already gotten out a gallon jug of spring water and a roll of paper towels, and was wiping Rose’s Roses out of existence.

  “No problem,” she said cheerfully, as I walked up. “I even got a date, if we need it.”

  “Who with?”

  “Guy named Ralph Carnelli, he’s an office guy there; some kind of low-level manager, I think.”

  Inside the compound, she’d driven around until she spotted the Poinsettia building. The first and basement floors were parking, she said. That was as much as she could see. Then she found the clubhouse, which sat on the edge of the golf course. The clubhouse included a receiving area, the upstairs management offices, and a lounge and exercise room for the residents.

  “I got lost,” she said. “I wandered all over the place . . .”

  “An easy mistake to make, in such a big building,” I said.

  “Yeah. I went up these stairs and eventually I found Ralph and he took me back downstairs and showed me the reception desk. I left the flowers for Annebelle and we got to talking. He came on to me a little and I gave him a little shine. I wouldn’t give him the phone number, but I took his.”

  “Nice guy?”

  “Good-looking, forty-two, divorced. Big shoulders.”

  “With that skirt and your ass, the poor guy never had a chance.”

  “Exactly. And . . .” She paused for dramatic effect.

  “What?”

  “The clubhouse is open all night. Twenty-four hours. The door that connects the clubhouse to the office suite can be slipped. At the back of Ralph’s office is a big wooden flat file that has the names of different buildings on different drawers, four names to a drawer.”

  “Architect’s drawings?”

  “That’s what I think. Couldn’t see for sure. But the office has something to do with maintenance.”

  “Tonight. We cross the fence onto the golf course, watch the building; when it’s open, we go in.”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  We got a call from Green at eight; they were in Houston, and he and Lane would be heading for Dallas as soon as it got light. LuEllen and I replayed the movies she’d made at Lago Verde, until I knew my way around the place as well as she did.

  We went into Lago Verde at ten o’clock, carrying nothing but a thick woolen Army blanket we got at a salvage store, a dinner knife I stole from a Denny’s, and a penlight. We parked on a residential street a block off the golf course, after spotting a convenient tree along the edge of the course; the course was bordered by an eight-foot chain-link fence, but without any guard wire at the top. We both wore jeans, black gym shoes, and crimson jackets. Dark red is as good as black for concealment, as long as nobody throws a light on you. If a light is thrown on you, you look a lot more innocent in red than in black.

  The tree at the edge of the golf course was halfway between two streetlights, along a commercial strip. Across the street from the tree, a paint-and-wallpaper place closed at eight o’clock, and the adjoining high-end stereo place at nine. At ten, with a good space between cars, we jogged across the street. LuEllen tossed the blanket over the top of the fence, and I lifted her up to it, and she was over. I did a quick climb, pivoted on my belly on the blanket, and dropped to the other side. We both squatted behind the tree, to look at the passing cars. Nobody slowed. We waited, out of sight, for ten minutes, and then headed across the golf course.

  Once we were away from the strip, the golf course was dark as a coal sack. I’d never had a mental image of Dallas as a place with trees, but it has about a billion of them: from the air, the city looks like a forest. Golf courses are even denser with them, and most of them seem to have thorns. We crossed a fairway, moving slowly, I stepped into a thorn bush, backed out, fell in behind LuEllen, and we groped our way toward the apartment light three hundred yards away.

  Fifty yards out of the clubhouse, we found a soft patch of grass between two trees, spread the blanket, and hunkered down. We could see lights both at the front of the clubhouse and at the back. The upstairs windows were dark.

  The back of the clubhouse was framed by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. We could see a line of soda and snack machines along one wall, and a bunch of soft leather chairs, like the first-class lounge in an airport. There were a half-dozen people in the lounge. Two had apparently just come out of the exercise room; they were putting on tennis shoes. The other four were sitting in a group of chairs, talking.

  “Could be a while,” LuEllen said.

  About three hours, in fact. The group in the lounge stayed for an hour and a half, an animated conversation that seemed to go on forever. When they finally left, a couple of other people had settled in. More came and went from the exercise room. Traffic slowed down after midnight, but every time we thought to move, somebody else would show up. At one-fifteen, we hadn’t seen anybody for fifteen minutes.

  “Let’s try,” LuEllen said.

  We left the blanket and started through the dark to the clubhouse door. Twenty yards out, at the edge of the golf course, we came to a line of head-high shrubs. After we passed them, we’d be out in the open and committed. We stopped, looked around, then LuEllen touched my arm and we moved.

  Slowly, LuEllen on my arm. We got to the clubhouse, stepped inside. No sound, except a refrigerator gurgle from one of the soda machines. We waited another second; then LuEllen slipped the dinner knife out of her pocket, walked to the door connecting with the executive suite, slipped the lock with the knife blade, and we were in. And up.

  Ralph’s office door had the same crappy lock. We slipped it and LuEllen led the way inside. I shut the door behind us and she turned on the penlight. The flat files were not locked; didn’t have locks. The architect’s drawings for Poinsettia were right where they were supposed to be, in the Poinsettia drawer, with drawings for Wild Rose, Black-Eyed Susan, and Hollyhock. The drawings for Poinsettia made up a pad a half-inch thick, and probably three feet long by two and a half wide.

  “Take the whole thing?” she asked.

  “Might as well. Hope nobody goes looking for them.”

  “They’re dusty; we should be okay,” she said.

  We put the room back together, and walked out. As we crossed the paved area toward the parking lot, another couple was coming off the parking lot, carrying a blanket, but not ours. We never got closer than fifty yards, but they waved, and LuEllen waved back, and then said, “Jesus Christ, Kidd, the golf course is the local lover’s lane. We’re lucky we didn’t trip over somebody.”

  “Better cover for us,” I said.

  We saw nobody on the course. We crossed the fence, strolled back to the car, and were out of there.

  16

  LuEllen tends to wrestle herself around pillows, and wind up in odd positions. When I woke up the next morning, her bare bottom was sticking out of a tangle of sheets, and a glorious sight it was, like a new peach, round and firm and slightly pink. I will confess to an inordinate fondness for that portion of the female anatomy, and after a few minutes I reached over and gave it a little pat. A little stroke.

  “If you touch me, I’ll rip your fuckin’ heart out,”
she groaned.

  “But it’s so interesting.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Can’t. Time to get up.”

  She propped herself on her elbows and looked at the bedside clock. “Bullshit,” she said, and dropped straight down. “Be quiet. I need another hour.”

  I went to the window and stuck my face into the crack between the curtains. “Nice day out. Blue skies, no clouds.”

  “This is Dallas, you moron, it’s supposed to be like that,” she said. “Now go away.”

  Not a morning person. I got cleaned up, humming to myself. Thought about LuEllen’s ass—all right, I’m not just fond of it, I actually contemplate it—and remembered Clancy.

  Clancy’s the woman back in St. Paul, who was building a computer with me. Very nice woman. Smart, interesting, sexy. Too young for me—I’m eight years older than she is—and the difference troubled me, though it didn’t seem to bother her much. And we weren’t finished with each other; there was more to say.

  Clancy in St. Paul, LuEllen in Dallas. Hmm.

  When we were done in Dallas, LuEllen would most likely take off again. She had a tendency to winter in warm places, like Mexico, Venezuela, or the Islands, and to hang with the indolent rich. I, on the other hand, would be back in St. Paul, in snow drifts six feet deep, with wolves, and would need the comfort of a woman like Clancy.

  I would probably try to hide this moment with LuEllen. Given my past track record, I’d probably succeed. The thing was, LuEllen wasn’t just sex: she was a friend. Our time in bed was an expression of friendship. I worked over that line of thought as I shaved. This whole sex thing with LuEllen would take some seriously hypocritical rationalization, I thought, if I wanted to keep my feet warm over the winter.

  LuEllen was still in bed when I finished cleaning up, so I went downstairs to the restaurant, had eggs, bacon, and toast, read the paper—Firewall was still on the attack. The IRS had no idea of how to screen them out without losing billions and billions. In Germany, the cops raided the apartment of a kid who had an Internet handle that translated as Cheese (so said USA Today), but Cheese had been in the bathroom at the time and that apparently gave him some kind of immunity from prosecution: he wasn’t actually hacking when they came through the door. In any case, USA Today said that Cheese was the rat in the DoS attack.

  When I got back upstairs, LuEllen was dressed: “Green called. He and Lane are checking into a Radisson Hotel up in Denton, which is like twenty miles from here.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because Green plays golf, and it’s a golf resort.”

  “Silly goddamn game,” I said.

  “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she said.

  “Chasing a white ball around a cow pasture . . .”

  “Look at a list of people who play it, and tell me they’re chasing a ball around a cow pasture. If you gotta brain in your head, you gotta suspect that there’s something else going on, even if you don’t play yourself.”

  My eyebrows went up: she actually sounded a little passionate on the subject. Not like LuEllen, eternal cynic. “Mmm,” I said.

  “Fuck you.”

  LuEllen drove. I sat in the passenger seat, looking through the architect’s drawings and trying not to get carsick. Eventually, I gave up; but I’d found one interesting thing.

  “There’s a silent alarm wired into Corbeil’s apartment. The console is in a closet.”

  “Can you trace the out lines?”

  “Nope. The lines go into an indicated junction box along with lines from some other rooms, and then they all go down to the first floor.”

  “Either to a security service or over to the reception area in the clubhouse. Or both.”

  “Clubhouse would get a quicker response,” I said.

  “Yeah, but if you wanted a little more weight, some pros with guns, it might go out.”

  The Radisson sat on a hill on the west side of the highway; it took a while to find the driveway in, but we got it sorted out eventually and went up to Lane’s room. Green answered the door. He was wearing a golf shirt and loose, pleated, tan slacks and had his hand in his pocket. He took it out when he saw us. “There you are.”

  Lane was lying on a bed, watching a movie on HBO. LuEllen, who’d come in behind me, looked past me and said, “Emma. I didn’t know that was on.”

  She went over and dropped on the bed next to Lane.

  “I think we’re gonna go into this Corbeil guy’s apartment,” I said to Green and Lane. “We’ve got some . . .”

  “Shhh,” Lane said. “They’re gonna kiss. This only takes a minute.” Emma and her friend were standing under a spreading oak. Lane and LuEllen were totally focused.

  “I think we gotta . . .”

  “Shut up, shut up, just one minute.” LuEllen held a finger up.

  I went over to look: “Christ, that woman’s got a long neck.”

  “They all did back then,” Lane said.

  “This wasn’t made back then, this was made . . .”

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP,” LuEllen said.

  I looked at Green, who shrugged, and we went over to a corner of the room, sat down, and shut up.

  After Emma and her friend were married, and the movie ran down what happened to everyone else, Lane sighed and turned off the TV. “God, I love that movie.”

  “So do I,” LuEllen said. “But you know what? I don’t think they did a very good job with Frank. They needed to make him more attractive in the beginning and worse in the end, and show why Emma was attracted to him.”

  “I didn’t think he was very attractive at all,” Lane said. “I don’t see how he could possibly compete with . . .”

  “Could we talk about what we’re doing?” I asked.

  “I think that would be good,” Green said, “since we’re in these guys’ hometown.”

  We brought them up to date on what we’d done, without providing any details that might be used against us in a court. We would have to trust them at some point, though, and I said, “We’re seriously considering going into Corbeil’s apartment. He has a T-1 phone line, and we think he probably uses it for rapid access into the company computers. There’s a good chance that I can tap into his computer line, and that’ll give us a door into their mainframe.”

  Lane said, “We’ve been looking at the photo you sent us, and I can’t see anything in it. If we knew who the people were . . .”

  “It’s a blank wall,” I said. “Jack must have gotten something out of the computers that went with the photographs. That’s what we need to find.”

  “I really, mmm, I had some problems back home and if I got caught going into a place, I could be looking at a long time,” Green said. He sounded apologetic.

  “You couldn’t go in anyway,” I said. “It’s not an area where a black guy can wander around. We could use a couple of eyes, though.”

  “We could do that,” Green said. “Do we know anything about the place?”

  “We came up with these,” I said, touching the drawings. “I’ve seen a couple of things in them; everybody ought to take a look, and see if we can spot anything else.”

  We did that, spreading the drawings around on the beds like pages from The New York Times on a Sunday afternoon. LuEllen said, eventually, “Look at this.” She was pointing at a blank box.

  “It’s a blank box,” Green said.

  “It’s a safe.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bet your ass it is,” she said. “Let me look at the drawings for that wall . . . and for the opposite wall. Where are the materials specs, anyway?”

  After a while, Lane and LuEllen went out for Cokes, and Green and I continued to look at the blueprints.

  “You’re pretty good at this,” Green said after a while. It sounded like a statement, but there was a question inside of it.

  “I’ve done it for a while—not exactly this, but related stuff.”

  “I know a little bit about Longstreet,” he said. I looked up at
him: Longstreet was supposed to fade away into the past—a political seizure of a small town in the Mississippi delta, engineered with several tastefully chosen burglaries and a few bad moments at the dog pound, to say nothing of the weeks of hospitalization and physical rehab that followed.

  “I wish people would forget about all of that,” I said, finally.

  “Most of them are forgetting, but not everybody,” Green said. “What I’m saying is, my friends tell me that I should go all the way with you. That it’s important.”

  “I’m not sure how important it is outside our little group,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to be misled.”

  “Not too worried about that,” he said. He stood up, stretched, looked out the sliding glass doors toward the golf course. “What I’m worried about is, I’m getting bored. Hard to stay sharp when you’re bored, stuck in hotel rooms.”

  “Do you play golf?”

  “Does a chicken have lips?”

  “Why don’t you take LuEllen out for a round? She’s getting antsy herself. I’ll read through these drawings for a while longer, keep an eye on Lane.”

  “Okay.” He chewed on a lip for a minute, then said, “Think Lane has a little thing for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A little thing,” he said.

  “I thought, maybe, you guys have been hanging around for a week or so . . .”

  He shook his head: “I’m not from the right social-educational strata.”

  “She’s a bigot?”

  “No, no. Never that. She’s got a Ph.D. and I never quite went back for my GED, if you know what I mean. She’s got this thing about . . . diplomas. Degrees.”

  “Huh. Don’t know what to tell you,” I said. And I didn’t.

  We spent some more time looking at the architect’s drawings and when LuEllen got back, I said, “We go in through the garage. I can get us up to Corbeil’s floor, but after that, I’ve got no guarantees. If we want to make it a quiet entry, I don’t know. You’d need some lock picks or something. I don’t think we could use an autopick. There are three other apartments up there.”

  “How are you going to get us up? If we don’t know how long we’re gonna be up, I don’t think it’d be a good idea to take the elevator apart.”