Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “If we find him again, we need to surprise him, disarm him, and grab the laptop,” John said. “If we’d known for sure what he looked like, we could’ve grabbed him at the trailer before he had a chance to get the gun.”

  “We should have researched him before we tried to grab him,” LuEllen said. “At least, we should have found a picture of him.”

  “Yeah. We blew it,” John said. To me: “What do you want to do?”

  “Go out on the ’net and do what we should have done before—research him,” I said.

  “When he shot at you guys, I could barely hear the shots,” LuEllen said. “He was inside. There wasn’t anybody else around, and with everybody using air-conditioning, it’s possible nobody else heard the shots. If nobody called the cops and pinpointed Carp’s place, we might be able to get back inside.”

  “That’d be a last resort,” I said.

  “It might be full of stuff that would tell us where he’s going—if the cop sirens chased Carp away, and nobody heard the shots.”

  I looked at John and he nodded.

  >>> “THE other thing,” LuEllen said. “I hate to keep harping on it, but I can’t see any downside to telling somebody that Bobby is dead. If we don’t, they’ll start going after people they think might be associated with him. Might know something. There’s no way to tell where that would stop. The thing is, Carp is fucking with politicians. You know how they hate that.”

  John shrugged. “I don’t see a huge problem with telling somebody. Except, who’d believe us?”

  “There’s one person I can think of.” I looked at LuEllen. “Rosalind Welsh.”

  LuEllen thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. She’d do.”

  “Who’s she?” John asked.

  We’d only met Welsh once, I told him, during a spot of trouble that led to a car getting melted in a Maryland shopping center garage while LuEllen and I stole a van from a housewife, and black helicopters—well, sort of a greenish-black . . .

  “Just green,” LuEllen said.

  . . . green helicopters landed in the parking lot and people ran around like ants and waved their arms until the fire trucks came.

  “She works for the National Security Agency,” LuEllen said to John. “She’s a security expert, not a computer freak. She’s too heavy by fifteen pounds. She thinks Kidd’s name is Bill Clinton.”

  “Hmm,” John said. “Sounds perfect.”

  We decided to make the call that night—I had all of Rosalind Welsh’s phone numbers, unless she’d moved or died, and I was sure she’d be happy to hear from me. First though, we needed to find a Radio Shack.

  If there weren’t such things as Radio Shack stores, I probably would have become a humble shepherd, instead of the hardened criminal and painter that I am. But there are Radio Shack stores, and after the discouraging session with John and LuEllen, I looked at my watch, and figured I had about twenty minutes to get to one.

  Fortunately, there are as many Radio Shacks in the New Orleans area as there are blues singers: I ran in the door of my favorite store five minutes before closing, gathered up most of what I needed—a screw-on N-type female chassis mount connector, a little roll of 12-gauge copper wire, some solder, a pigtail with an N-type male connector at one end, and the cheapest wire cutters, tape measure, and soldering iron I could find—and carried it to the counter.

  The clerk recognized me as a one-time regular. He looked over my purchases, rang it up, and asked cheerfully, “Gonna do some war-driving?”

  “Huh?” I said as I paid him.

  “Ah, you know,” he said. He was too tall, too skinny, and had spent twelve seconds getting dressed for work that morning. Maybe less. “Or maybe you don’t need a Lucent gold card.”

  “What’s that about?” I asked.

  “About ninety dollars,” he said.

  I took two fifties out of my billfold and stood there. He disappeared into the back for a minute, then came back with a Lucent card in the kind of Ziploc bag usually used to hold marijuana and cocaine . . . and maybe peanuts and raspberries and other legal stuff, for all I know. He handed me the card and I handed him the money and said, “Keep the change,” and he put it in his shirt pocket.

  “If you go about nine blocks that way, there’s an all-night supermarket that sells Dinty Moore beef stew,” he said for the extra ten dollars. “I recommend the can. It’s just about perfect for a waveguide. And the area around Tulane is your happy hunting ground.”

  “You are a prince among men,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

  Did I mention the service at Radio Shack?

  >>> I STOPPED at the supermarket, got the can of Dinty Moore and a can opener, drove back to the motel, and built the antenna. The worst part was trying to flush the cold beef stew down the toilet: it just didn’t want to go. John stood there, grimacing at the bowl, flushing it over and over, saying, “Man, that’s nasty. It looks like somebody was really sick.” A bright orange ring-around-the-bowl was still there the next morning.

  After cleaning the beef-stew can, I went online to an antenna site with a calculator, did some figuring, and with the soldering iron put together a nice little wi-fi antenna. Wi-fi stands for “wireless fidelity” and works as a high-frequency wireless local network—it’s cheap, and it allows several people, in several different places around the house, office, or classroom to use the same Internet connection. It’ll probably be obsolete by tomorrow, but today, it was spreading around the country like a rash. Usually, the range is limited to just about the area of a big house. With an antenna, though . . .

  Normally, I wouldn’t ride on somebody else’s Internet connection, simply because it wasn’t necessary. Connections are a dime a dozen, if you’re legal. Most Starbucks have a wi-fi connection. But the Carp problem made me nervous, and if I rode on somebody else’s network connection, there’d be no way to backtrack our inquiries. And it would be faster than doing it from the motel: working over a telephone hookup was like having water drip on your forehead.

  The kid at the Radio Shack store had recommended the Tulane area as a happy hunting ground, but I had a different idea. I’d found that lots of warehouses use wi-fi because warehouses are constantly involved in inventory movements, and those movements are often uploaded via the Internet to central control offices. Few of them have any kind of protection.

  LuEllen and I took I-10 out toward Kenner and New Orleans International, LuEllen driving while I watched the laptop, and eventually we found a truck stop parking lot next to what looked like a warehouse, where we got a strong signal from a wi-fi network.

  And it was a fast one, maybe a T-1 line. In the next hour, I pulled every bit of information I could out of the National Crime Information Center, out of credit agencies and insurance companies, and from three different credit card companies. When I was done, I still didn’t have a photograph of Jimmy James Carp, but I had a different kind of picture, and it was one that scared us.

  >>> “THE guy might be working for the Senate Intelligence Committee,” LuEllen blurted to John, when we got back to the Baton Noir. John was stretched on his bed, watching CNN. “He might be a spy or something.”

  He sat up, dropped his feet to the floor. “What?”

  “The last job I can find for him, the last one that paid Social Security taxes, was the U.S. government, and the reference number traces back to the Senate Intelligence Committee,” I said.

  “The government killed Bobby?”

  “I don’t know—the Social Security payments stopped a month ago, but if he’s fucking around with the intelligence community, that might not mean anything,” I said. “On the other hand, that didn’t look like a government operation out at the trailer park. If the feds knew what was on that computer, they’d have it locked in a vault somewhere.”

  “It feels bad, though,” LuEllen said.

  “Tell you something,” John said, pointing at the TV. “He’s done it again. Bobby. Carp. There’s a story out there, coming out now, about ho
w some Homeland Security department might have sprayed a virus into San Francisco to see how it would spread. It was supposed to be a test in case of a smallpox attack, they wanted to see what would happen, and they used a virus called, uh, Newport? That’s not right, but something like that. Anyway, a lot of people got sick and four people may have died . . . the shit is hitting the fan, and CNN says the leak involves a lot of classified government computer files and the sourcing resembles the Bobby releases of the past couple of days.”

  “Norwalk? Norwalk virus?” LuEllen asked.

  He snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”

  “Weren’t there a whole bunch of cruise ships a while back, where they had epidemics?”

  “Exactly!” John said. “That’s the one. They’re saying—they say it’s only speculation—that those could have been a more controlled test, before they dumped it into San Francisco.”

  “Ah, man. That means there must be a bunch of stuff that’s not encrypted—or he found a key.”

  “We’ve gotta find the fucker,” John said.

  LuEllen said, “He’s probably not twenty miles from here.”

  “Might as well be in Chicago,” I said. “I got his credit card numbers, if he uses them . . .”

  “Everybody’s gonna be looking for him,” John said.

  “Everybody’s gonna be looking for Bobby, unless we tell them he’s dead. Or for one of Bobby’s friends, if we decide to tell them,” I said. “We’re the only ones looking for Jimmy James Carp.”

  >>> WE TALKED about it as we watched CNN, and then LuEllen said, “Hey, we found out about Melissa. Melissa Carp.”

  “Yeah?” John said.

  “She was his mother. She’s dead. She was killed in an automobile accident a month ago.”

  “Maybe flipped him out,” John said.

  And we talked about other trips we’d been on together, we talked about Longstreet, we talked a little more about Rachel Willowby, and what would happen to her. “If she thought Jimmy James Carp wanted to talk to her because he wanted to fuck her . . . then there are people who are talking to her because they want to fuck her,” John said. “She’s about ten-to-one for winding up on the corner.”

  Something to mull over. Even later, after watching more about the Norwalk virus story, and more talk, we decided to tell the NSA that Bobby had been murdered.

  >>> LATE that night, I went back out—way back out—up I-10 into Baton Rouge. I found a pay phone in a bar parking lot and, using LuEllen’s anonymous calling card, called long distance to Glen Burnie, Maryland. The phone rang seven times before Rosalind Welsh picked it up. She sounded as though she’d been asleep, and I realized that it was after two in the morning, Eastern time. “Hello?”

  “Rosalind. Bill Clinton here. Remember me? Hope I didn’t wake you up, but I guess I must have.” At that moment, honest to God, a rat walked past the pay phone on its way to the bar, as confident and casual as a cat heading home. “Jesus,” I said.

  “Who?” Welsh was struggling up out of the sleep. “Jesus?” I heard a man’s voice say, “Who is it?”

  “Did you get remarried?” I asked cheerfully.

  “What do you want?” she snapped. “This is the man with the mask?”

  “Who is it?” the man asked, and I heard her say, “Never mind; it’s for me.”

  “You remember me, now,” I said. “You’re awake.”

  “I’m awake.” But not happy.

  “You remember that guy Bobby who caused you all the trouble? And you went looking for and got your ass kicked? And is causing all this trouble with these pictures and the Norwalk virus thing, and all of that?”

  Long pause. “Yes. Where is he?”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “He’s been dead for a couple of days.”

  “What?”

  “Did you see the news stories about the black man killed in Jackson, Mississippi, and the Fiery Cross that was burned on his front porch?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “That was Bobby. He was murdered. Somebody killed him for his laptop, which has all that stuff on it that you’re seeing on TV. We think maybe—maybe—it was you, that you’re running some kind of an operation against the government. Was it you guys, Rosalind?”

  “You’re crazy,” she shrilled. “We don’t do that.”

  “What is it?” the man shouted in the background. “Let me talk to him.”

  “You’re talking to Bill Clinton, here, Rosy—I know what you do,” I said. “Now, I would suggest, for your own health, that you stop chasing us innocent computer folks around the country, and find out who killed Bobby. If you don’t, we’ll start fucking with you again. Remember the last time we did that? How your Keyhole satellites went nuts and all the GS-80s started pooping in their Italian pants? You don’t want that again.”

  “Listen, Bill,” she said earnestly. “Do you have any proof . . . ?”

  “Nothing you would believe,” I said. “But if you check out the dead black man in Jackson, it won’t take you long to figure out who he was, all on your own. The FBI are already involved; all you have to do is give them a hint.”

  “Bobby DuChamps?” she asked. That surprised me. They’d actually gotten a name.

  “Almost,” I said. “His name was Robert Fields. Get it? And listen, Rosalind, really: have a nice day.”

  I hung up feeling that I’d been mean to her, but sometimes, with security people—she was NSA internal security—it’s the only thing that works. Hate will wake you up, if not set you free.

  >>> “YOU do it?” John asked, when I got back to the motel. He and LuEllen were watching the end of a movie called XXX, about a boy and his GTO.

  “All done. Can’t tell what will happen next, but maybe some of the feds will . . . what?” I looked at LuEllen.

  “Reorient themselves,” she suggested.

  “That’s good,” I said. “Reorient themselves.”

  >>> JOHN was in one room, LuEllen and I in another. We were beat. We’d been flying, driving, hacking, and getting shot at for twenty hours and needed some sleep. We arranged to meet at eight the next morning, and LuEllen and I said good night to John and crawled into bed.

  Just before we went to sleep, LuEllen said, “Think about Carp’s trailer. Ten o’clock in the morning is the best time to hit an open target like that. Think about it in your sleep.”

  I did that.

  >>> THERE’S no better source for burglary supplies than your local Target store. You can get cheap, disposable entry tools, plastic gloves, Motorola walkie-talkies, backpacks, and everything you need to change your appearance. Like khaki shorts.

  Everybody knows what a burglar looks like—an ethnic minority, probably, lurking in the bushes until the coast is clear. After dark, on a moonless night. Wearing a ski mask. Which is why most professional house-breakers go in at ten o’clock in the morning or two o’clock in the afternoon, during the workday, when school is in session and the house is probably empty. And they always knock first.

  We synched the walkie-talkie channels on the way over to Carp’s, and I changed into the shorts, tore the price tags off a pair of wraparound sunglasses and put them on, along with a Callaway golf hat.

  We first made a pass outside the park, but could see no activity over the wall near Carp’s. Then we went in and cruised down his street. There was a door on the back end of the Carp mobile home, the one we hadn’t seen the night before, that Carp had gone through, and it was hanging open an inch or two.

  The front door, where John and I had spilled out onto the lawn, was closed, as we’d left it. Just around the corner, and about four houses up, an old guy was mowing his tiny lawn with a tiny electric lawn mower. He glanced at us as we went past and LuEllen said to John, “When we pull into the place, go straight ahead and get out on another street, so you won’t drive past that guy again.”

  John nodded. “All right.”

  LuEllen looked at me. “Ready to try it?”

  “I didn’t see anything
that said no.”

  John would be waiting outside the park. If we called and said, “Dave, come on,” he’d come in through the park, taking his time. If we said, “Hey, Dave, hurry it up,” he’d come down the outside street, and we’d jump the wall.

  >>> IN OUR shorts and golf shirts and over-the-shoulder pack, LuEllen and I were an unremarkable, almost invisible, couple knocking on Jimmy James Carp’s door, knocking just loud enough to attract somebody inside. There was no answer and I tried the door. It opened and we waved at John. As he left, we stepped inside as though we’d been invited.

  The place was dark, with curtains and shades on all the windows. I hit the lights and found that we were in the kitchen. The place was a mess, with dirty dishes stacked around a sink. An overflowing garbage bag sat on the floor between a small dinette table and the line of cupboards on the opposite wall. The garbage bag was jammed with pizza boxes, corn-curl sacks, instant dinner cartons, and microwave popcorn bags, and that’s what the place smelled like: like every kind of stale cheese you can think of.

  The next room along was the living room, with the furniture arranged to focus on a large-screen TV. Most of the furniture had a patina of dust, and the room was littered with paper: the New York Times, the LA Times, tabloids, popular science magazines, a facedown copy of Penthouse. An all-in-one stereo sat on a corner table, with a couple dozen CDs. On the wall, somewhat askew, was a full-color framed copy of the Praying Hands.

  There were two bedrooms along a single hallway in the back: the first was a woman’s room, not much neater than the rest of the place, and even dustier. The second bedroom belonged to Carp. A dozen computer books and manuals were scattered on the floor around the bed, all but two on IBM hardware. One of the others dealt with encryption, and the last one was an O’Reilly’s Guide to the C++ language.

  I moved the pack to the back door, closed and locked the door, and we started tearing through the room. We didn’t take long: we’d done this before. In two minutes, I had a ream of paper—old bills, new bills, bank statements, notes, employment records—a dozen floppy disks, and a half-dozen recordable CDs. I was loading it into our backpack when LuEllen, who’d moved back out to the front room, said, “Hey.”