Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  As I did it, I was counting to myself. Some of the alarm systems give you as much as two minutes to punch your code into the key pad. Some of them give you less. As soon as she’d gone into the apartment, the keypad began a slow beeping. Then she was into the closet. I stepped in behind her and pushed the door shut.

  Twenty seconds. I could hear a scuffling sound, a ripping sound, then quiet, except for the beep-beep-beep-beep and then beeeeeeeeeeeeee. Thirty seconds. The pad was dialing out. Damnit. The shortest possible delay. LuEllen appeared in the doorway, black-on-gray. “We’re good,” she said, in an almost normal voice.

  “I’ll rig the line,” I said. I was drenched with sweat: I did industrial espionage, and went places where I wasn’t wanted, but the big-time apartment break-in wasn’t my style.

  “Look at the rug,” she said.

  I looked down, in the light of her flash: we were leaving greasy tracks behind us. “Uh-oh.” I stepped to the door and looked out in the hall. The tracks came all the way down the hall from the elevator, though they were harder to see in the subdued hall lighting. “Let’s get the line rigged. We’ll just have to take a chance that nobody’ll see them.”

  Another unforeseen risk.

  We did a quick run through the apartment to make sure it was empty. On the way, I stopped for a few seconds to admire LuEllen’s work with the alarm. She’d used the knife to cut a hole through the drywall to expose the alarm console—couldn’t just pull the wires out, because if you cut a wire, the security service would be automatically alerted. She’d then stripped the wire, clipped in bypasses, and then cut the wire between the two bypasses. The top bypass silenced the keypad; the bottom one would keep the circuit alive, so the cut-wire call-out would never be made. She’d done it in about twenty-five seconds.

  The suite that had worried us, the possible maid’s suite, was just a guest room. The computer was in a small purpose-built office. “Don’t stop,” I said. “Just walk on by.”

  The balcony ran the width of the apartment. We took a moment, surveying an adjoining balcony with the night-vision glasses, then carefully opened the door and listened. I could hear what sounded like a radio or CD, but it was inside, contained. Above us, I thought. We looped the climbing rope around one of the support posts on the balcony, and coiled the rope so that a quick kick would launch it down the side of the building. If somebody came through the door, we could be on the ground in less than a minute, pulling the rope after us.

  That done, we headed for the safe, which was nicely concealed behind a piece of wooden paneling. LuEllen said, “I’ll do this, you get going.”

  I walked back and forth and around the room, leaving traces of the black grease, while LuEllen started pulling out her equipment. After leaving the tracks, I went back to the door, took off my pants, jacket, shoes, and the dirty kitchen gloves, and walked back to Corbeil’s office in my shorts and socks.

  LuEllen made a lot less noise than I’d feared. She was good at this, and what she was doing was more a cover than any serious attempt at the safe. As long as Corbeil concentrated on the safe, and not the computer, we’d be cool.

  In his office, I shut the door and turned on the light. What I was doing was simple: I was loading a program that would spool anything he typed on the computer to a file on his hard drive. Another program—one of my own design—would send the file to one of my online mailboxes, and then erase its tracks. The only question was, had Corbeil booby-trapped his computer with hardware of some kind, or software, to detect intrusion?

  I spent twenty minutes trying to figure that out, and in the end, didn’t. I didn’t think so, but you can’t be sure, not in twenty minutes.

  As soon as my software was in, I checked the rest of the desk, found a couple of Zip disks, and copied them to my own Zip disks.

  I was just finishing when LuEllen scratched on the door. I turned out the light and opened it: “Almost done,” I said.

  “I need your help. Hurry, and get dressed.”

  In the study, LuEllen had done two things: she had taken her heavy bar, which had an edge like a razor, and had cut through the wall around the cylindrical safe. The safe was set in concrete, inside a steel frame that was probably bolted to the building beams. Around the cylinder flange, she’d fitted a five-sided, one-size-fits-all steel collar, with adjustable bolts.

  With that in place, she’d gone to the far wall and cut another hole, exposing one of the I-beams that held up the building. The beams had been covered with drywall, so exposing them was no problem. She’d slipped a steel strap around the beam, then hooked the strap to the collar on the safe, using what amounted to a large come-along.

  The come-along was essentially a high-ratio pulley, with a four-foot-long handle and a three-foot pipe as an extension; the connection was a steel cable. She’d pumped the cable tight; so tight that I could have walked on it without bending it at all.

  “The thing is, the safe is starting to move,” she said. “The concrete is cracking up. I can hear it, but I’ve got so much pressure on it, that when it breaks free, it’s liable to come flying out of the hole.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It won’t fly far—but it’ll hit like a ton of bricks. They’d hear it all over the building. I gotta stand right next to it while you pump.”

  So I pumped the handle of the come-along and she stood next to the safe, watching the concrete deform. “Starting to crumble . . . crumbling . . . crumbling. Stop.”

  I stopped, and she peered at the safe.

  “Give it a little punch.” I gave it a little punch, and suddenly, the safe came free.

  “All right, all right . . .”

  Working as hard and quietly as we could, it still took ten minutes to work it the rest of the way free. When it finally came out, I staggered backward with it and dropped it on a couch.

  “No way I can get that down the elevator,” I said. “The goddamn thing’s gotta weigh two hundred pounds. It’d pull me right off the cable.”

  “We can’t just let it sit here . . . we’ve almost got it,” she said urgently.

  “LuEllen, the goddamn thing is like a two-hundred-pound car battery—I can haul it, but it’s got too much weight in too small a package.”

  “Well, goddamnit, Kidd . . .” She walked around it for a minute, then said, “Wait,” and walked out of the room, turning toward the back of the apartment.

  A minute later, she was back, carrying a black satin sheet. “Let’s get the safe. I’ll help.”

  “What’re we gonna do?”

  “Just help.”

  We wrapped the safe in the sheet, so we could pick it up by the ends. LuEllen is strong as a horse, and she tied a loop in one end of the sheet so she could get it over her shoulder, and then led me back through the apartment, and out a door onto the balcony.

  “What’re we doing?” I whispered.

  “This way.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah, we can do it. From right exactly here. It’ll go right straight down into soft dirt.”

  “Aw, man.” I was scanning the dark golf course. “Somebody’s gonna see us.”

  “Small chance.” She was grinning at me; this was what she lived for, and what might send her to jail someday. “C’mon, Kidd, be a good sport.”

  “Ah, fuck.”

  Before I became a sport, I called Green: “Anything?”

  “Not a peep.”

  “Drive by and see what you can see.”

  “One minute,” he said.

  We waited one minute and he came back, “Man reading a magazine.”

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  “Ten-four.” He wasn’t quite laughing.

  I picked up the safe, groaning, leaned over the railing, got centered, and let it go. A couple of seconds later, it hit the ground eight stories below with a dull thud, like a small car hitting a wooden phone pole.

  We stood absolutely still, listening. An intake of breath? A cry of surprise? Nothing but a car accelerati
ng in the distance.

  “No problem,” LuEllen said.

  We would have been safer, probably, going down the elevator shaft again. LuEllen convinced me to go over the side of the building. “There’s nobody on the balconies. We’re good,” she whispered.

  “Jesus.”

  “Ten seconds from now, we’re gone.”

  Not ten seconds, exactly. I insisted on a last look around the apartment, staying away from the computer but tracking more grease around. We packed up the black bag, and went over the edge on the climbing rope. On the ground, she gathered in the climbing rope and took the bag, while I tried to take the safe. I managed to carry it a hundred yards or so, before I had to stop. Then we wrapped it in one of the sheets, made a couple of handles out of the knots, and in ten minutes got it to the corner.

  I sent LuEllen to get the car, with the sheets. She spread them on the backseat, and when she pulled up next to the fence, I threw the safe over, crawled over after it, then picked it up and humped it over to the car.

  No problem.

  18

  LuEllen always gets cranked when she’s been inside a place she’s not supposed to have been. Dealing with her was like handling a hyperactive child: you try to keep her under control, slow her down. Tonight, she wanted the car, the safe, and the tools.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Back to Shreveport,” she said. “If I give him the tools back, he’ll cut the safe for free.”

  “We don’t want it blown up or anything.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Kidd, nobody’s blown a safe since Bonnie and Clyde. He’ll cut it open with a lathe.”

  She dropped me at the hotel and took off. As I got out, I said, “Cruise control.”

  “Absolutely.”

  When you’re running, you always want to run on cruise control. Get out on the Interstate, set your speed two miles an hour above the speed limit, and no cop on earth will look at you. If you’re not on cruise control, your adrenaline will eventually get to you and you’ll go flying past some cop at a hundred and ten, and it’ll feel like forty-five.

  With LuEllen gone, I walked six blocks to a drive-in phone on the edge of a gas station parking ramp, checked in with Lane, and afterward got online with my dump box.

  Lane was almost as cranked as LuEllen.

  “What’d you get? How come you’re not up here?”

  “We don’t know what we got. It’s in a safe and we’ve got to cut it open. LuEllen’s taking care of that tonight, but she won’t be back until morning.”

  “How about the computer?”

  “We should be online with him. I’m going to check in a few minutes.”

  “Damn it, Kidd, it freaked me out, even though we were outside. Freaked me out. Something for the memoirs.”

  “Better fuckin’ not,” I said. “This is not even for your memories.”

  The dump box was a mailbox I’d set up especially to take everything Corbeil typed on his computer terminal. There was nothing in the box. I hadn’t expected anything. Corbeil, the social butterfly, the model-dater, wouldn’t be back until late, if at all, unless somebody found the broken door.

  Finally, I went out to Bobby. He had nothing more to offer on Jack’s Jaz disks, but was certain that the attack on the IRS was coming from Europe.

  GOT SOME NUMBERS IN GERMANY AND ID’D ZOMBIE COMPUTERS HERE IN STATES THAT ARE FEEDING ATTACK. WILL PASS ALONG TO NSA CONTACT AND TRY TO STEER HER FROM OLD NAMES.

  SHE ’S NO WIZARD . YOU MAY BE PUTTING TOO MUCH HOPE IN STUPID PEOPLE .

  MUST PUSH THEM OFF. THEY STILL THRASH AFTER OLD NAMES.

  TAKE CARE .

  AND YOU.

  I got to bed a couple of hours before dawn, still worrying about LuEllen. I got three hours of sleep, and, still groggy but unable to keep my eyes closed, got out of bed and nearly fell on my face. I’d felt a little creaky the night before, but now every muscle in my body was screaming at me. That goddamned safe. I know what muscle-pulls feel like, and I had what some docs called micro-pulls, the kind you get shoveling snow off a sidewalk. No major muscles, but hundreds of tiny pulls.

  I hobbled into the bathroom, took six ibuprofen out of my dopp kit, swallowed them, shaved, and then spent fifteen minutes in a scalding shower. You’re supposed to use ice, rather than heat, but this was ridiculous: I’d have to bury myself in a snow drift to chill everything I’d pulled. The heat made it feel better, anyway.

  I was toweling off, slowly, when I got the sudden feeling—a premonition without the negative vibe—that LuEllen had just gotten back. I walked over to a window, opened a slit in the curtain, and looked down at the hotel parking lot. Yet another wonderful day, sunny, but with that early-morning dryness that we don’t see in Minnesota. LuEllen was not in sight.

  So much for premonitions. As I finished toweling off, I had another one: I’d just seen something important, but I didn’t know what. What was it? I wandered around, looked out the window again, looked at myself in the mirror, looked at the towel. What the hell was it?

  I couldn’t figure it out, gave up, and got dressed, slowly. My back and underarms hurt the worst, and the inner thighs weren’t good. My hair didn’t hurt at all, but that was the only bright spot. I was leaving the room, going for breakfast, when I had a third premonition, this one about LuEllen again. I went back to the window, looked out, and saw the black Pontiac GrandAm rolling into a parking spot. An accurate premonition—if you have enough of them, and look often enough, you’ll always have a good one. I watched her walk into the hotel, and five minutes later, opened the door as she came down the hallway.

  “Saw you in the parking lot,” I said. “How’d it go?”

  “You got a big industrial lathe, cutting a safe is like cutting cheese,” she said. She pushed the door shut. “If you can mount it and turn it, you can cut it.” Then she stepped up to give me a big kiss, and I winced.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That fuckin’ safe. I pulled every muscle in my body.”

  “The penis is a muscle.”

  “It’s pulled,” I said. Then: “You seem pleased. Maybe even chipper.”

  She dug in her pocket and took out something glittery, held out her fist, and I cupped my hand underneath it. She dripped a platinum-and-diamond necklace into it. “Remember that model chick we saw going into his place? She wasn’t wearing it going in. She kept touching it coming out. Looked too nice to be an outright gift. I thought it might be in there.”

  “How much?”

  “Lots. I called my guy in Georgia, and he said he could probably get me a hundred and a half. They’re all small, one-carat, but they’re top quality, like the necklace was made to sell. A bank account.”

  “That was it? The necklace?”

  “Nope.” She grinned. “He had forty thousand in cash, all in hundreds.”

  “Computer disks, printouts . . .”

  She shook her head. “Nothing like that. Some personal papers—a mortgage, birth certificate, his passport. I brought it all back, but I don’t think there’s anything for you. There was enough to make it worthwhile for somebody like me to hit him.”

  “So maybe he’ll be less likely to look at the computer.”

  “Maybe. I’ll tell you, Kidd, you’ve gotten me in some shit over the years, but we’ve always made money, huh? Every time.”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  She tagged along for breakfast and then said she needed a nap. Having her sleepy made me sleepy, and we went back to her room, put out the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and slept into the afternoon. Green called at three o’clock and asked what the hell we were doing.

  We ate dinner together. Green took a look at Corbeil’s passport as we were waiting for the meal, and said, “Travels a lot. Extra pages.” He folded the extra pages out like an accordion. “Travels in the Middle East. And India.”

  “One of those been-everywhere, done-everything guys,” LuEllen said.

  The food arrived and Green started
looking at the mortgage, which he said wasn’t a mortgage at all, but a contract-for-deed, which I said was the same thing, and LuEllen said, “Not quite.”

  Finally, during the dessert, Green folded up the mortgage paper, tossed it on the table, and said, “He’s got something strange going with a ranch.”

  “A ranch?”

  “Yeah. A private sale, looks like. A contract-for-deed. He paid seven hundred and fifty thousand up front, and then a thousand a year for ten years, and he can pay the last ten thousand anytime.”

  “That sounds weird,” I said. “He paid three-quarters of a million up front, but couldn’t come up with the last ten grand?”

  “Makes no sense,” Green said.

  “Sure it does,” said LuEllen. She had a glob of ice cream on a spoon and was licking it, like an advertisement for fellatio.

  “Well, tell us, Miss Sucking on a Spoon,” Lane said.

  “If you get a contract-for-deed, the final ownership doesn’t pass to you until you make the last payment.”

  “So?”

  “So that means the ranch is still in the seller’s name. What’s his name?”

  Green picked up the contract-for-deed and looked at it: “Fred Lord.”

  “See, Fred Lord sells it to Corbeil, and Corbeil still has to pay a few bucks to totally own the land, but he gets the full use of it, but only Lord’s name appears on tax records, land records, and so on. It’s a dodge.”

  “He doesn’t want people to know he’s got a ranch?” I asked. “We ought to look at it. Where is it?”

  “McLennan County, wherever that is,” Green said. “Twelve hundred and eighty acres. Two square miles. Corbeil-land.”

  Lane wanted to go take a look right away. “What else are we going to do?”

  “Monitor my drop box,” I said. “We need that computer more than we need a ranch.”

  “How do we know that?” Lane demanded. “I feel like we’re getting bogged down. It’s been three weeks since Jack was killed. I don’t think anybody cares anymore. Except us.”

  “And the people chasing after Firewall,” I said.