She took a long drink from the glass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ve kind of kept up with the boy, see how he’s doing and all that. I may have spoken with him on the phone two or three months ago.” Sure, I thought. To blackmail another thousand dollars out of him. And she was fibbing on the time frame. It had to have been more like two or three weeks ago, according to Jared’s boyfriend. The Feds would have checked her phone records, but she probably called Jared from an outside location.
“So the two of you are friends, then?”
“I wouldn’t say that, exactly. But you give birth to someone, you kind of want to see how they turn out, you know?”
“Sure,” I said. “You been doing any traveling lately?”
A glance around her home told me that she wasn’t into computers. A built-in desk on one wall housed an electric typewriter and a few stacks of mail. I didn’t know anyone who had a personal computer and continued to use a typewriter. To a hacker smart enough to write a computer virus like Social Insecurity, a typewriter was a fossil. It was something that belonged in a museum, right next to the eight-track tapes and slide rules.
We conversed some more and I got the sense that there was a side to the woman she tried to hide. Manipulative came to mind. I envisioned her craftily doing whatever she had to, including blackmail, to keep herself living in a comfortable high-rise apartment and driving the late-model Porsche she kept parked beneath it. But I didn’t see her masterminding a kidnapping, plotting to steal millions of dollars overnight, or both. I debated whether or not I should confront her on the blackmail issue with Jared, but decided I could be more effective in putting an end to it if I waited and thought the situation through. I wasn’t flying totally blind, but close to it.
“What do you do for a living, Barb?” I asked, changing subjects. Before answering, she lit a menthol cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew the resulting smoke over one shoulder, away from me. Twenty years ago the action may have been polite, or even sexy. Now, it made her look like a washed-up actress in a B movie.
“I work part-time at a clothing store. And I date rich, old men,” she challenged, going for the shock value, possibly expecting a reprimand on her lifestyle. “To someone in his sixties, seventies, I’m still pretty damn hot.”
“I’m sure you are,” I said, noticing that she had finished her drink. Although she didn’t appear to be getting drunk, she also wasn’t worried about making a positive impression. She wore an attitude like another woman might wear a flashy piece of jewelry—to make sure that it got noticed.
“Is there anything else you’d like from me?” She leaned forward, and slowly licked a celery stick from her drink while she blatantly checked out my breasts.
“No, thank you, except answers to a few more questions,” I said politely, as though she hadn’t just come on to me.
“Cops,” she said with disdain, like she dealt with the law on a regular basis.
“Do you have any ideas on where Jared could be? Do you know of anyone who’d want to harm him?”
“Don’t you think that if I did, I’d have called Sam? I am, after all, kind of a mother to the kid.”
She was about as maternal as one of those spiders that fed on their young. I thanked her for her time and let myself out of the apartment.
City sounds and bright, hazy sunlight greeted me when I left the building. I took a deep breath, not knowing whether to feel sorry for Barb Henley or categorize her with the crooks and creeps. Either way, I’d found out what I needed to about the woman. I felt sure that she wasn’t a kidnapping suspect or a computer hacker, but I also wasn’t eliminating her from my list. There was always the possibility that she was sleeping with someone who was a computer genius. And in her case, it could be a man or a woman.
I caught a cab back to the hotel. Bill and I didn’t have to catch our return flight until five o’clock and until then, the city had our names written all over it. There was plenty of time for some power shopping and a leisurely lunch.
FIFTEEN
The man’s slurred words carried up the stairs as I walked from my home down to meet Soup at the Block. It was an obnoxious customer, ordering Ox to serve him a drink and ending the drunken demand with a particularly offensive racial slur against American Indians. Our thoughts in synch, Ox’s grinning eyes met mine. We both wanted the privilege of escorting the jerk out.
“Flip you for it,” I said.
Ox pulled a quarter out of the register and tossed it in the air before catching the coin and holding it against the back of his other hand. I called heads and won.
The man swayed against the bar. “I said, gimmie a bourbon and Coke, you—”
“Excuse me,” I said politely from behind him.
He turned and his eyebrows went up. “Whoa and whoa. Get a look at you.”
About forty years old, he was well dressed and well groomed. He looked like a banker or perhaps a manager. Some people simply shouldn’t drink. “Did you walk here?”
He nodded, ogling my chest. “In town for a convenshun and got a room with a big bed,” he said thickly. “Come back to the hotel with me and I’ll slow it to you. Shoo it to you. I mean, show you.”
“How about you head on back to your hotel by yourself and sleep it off. Tomorrow’s a new day.”
He grabbed my breasts and squeezed. “How ’bout you take these tits behind that bar and mix my drink.”
I eyed Ox, wondering if the man had gotten so drunk at our place. Ox shook his head. “He was drunk when he got here. Just came in.”
“Right.” I removed the guy’s hands from my breasts and kneed him in the balls hard enough to cause pain but not incapacitate him. When he bent over, I gripped his upper arm and led him to one of the open industrial-size garage doors. “Your wife wouldn’t appreciate you groping a stranger. Go to your hotel and go to bed.”
“Bitch!” The man spun and caught me across the jaw with a backhanded slap. Suppressing the urge to crank his neck and put a permanent end to his drunken binges, I grabbed the hand he’d hit me with and held it in a reverse wrist lock while punching him hard in the abdomen. Just to give his fellow conventiongoers something to talk about tomorrow, I followed the moves up with a palm jab that would most certainly result in a black eye.
As he sat crumpled on the cobblestone and concrete floor, I rummaged through his wallet until I found a hotel key card, complete with an address. Ox phoned for a cab and I removed a twenty to pay for it.
Soup arrived just as the cabbie carted off the drunk. “Did I miss something?”
“Nothing much. I just won a coin toss with Ox,” I said, wiping a drop of blood from my lip. A mere seventy-two hours remained until money would begin transferring into SIPA accounts on July first. Three days until Jared would either be exposed as a scam artist or killed by those who were the scam artists.
Ox handed me a Ziploc bag of ice for my jaw. He knew I hated bruises. “Are you one hundred percent sure that you can stop Social Insecurity from activating?” I asked Soup, holding the ice to the side of my face. Finding Jared Chesterfield was my main priority, but I didn’t want to see innocent taxpayers get robbed. If the virus achieved its goal, e-commerce would be scarred forever. While most crimes quickly faded into yesterday’s news, the repercussions of Social Insecurity could last for years.
“Sure,” Soup answered lightly.
“One hundred percent?” I repeated. The first day of the new quarter, the first day ever in history for the electronic transfer of Social Security funds into privatized accounts was knocking at the door. Not only did I want to prevent the virus from activating, but I also didn’t want the Feds to discover that I had known about the virus but kept the information to myself. They tend to frown on that sort of thing, enough to throw my butt behind bars.
“Yup,” Soup nodded. I’d known the man a long time and he’d never been wrong with a declaration that pertained to computer technology. Still, he’d never been involved with a computer scam with this
kind of potential. The stakes were so high, they needed oxygen to breathe.
“Can you find out who’s behind it?” I asked. “Track the hacker without letting him know we’re on to him?”
“Not unless we let the bug bite and do what it was designed to do. We could determine where the receiving bank account was established and go from there. Then there’s a slight chance.”
“Not an option,” I mused aloud. We sat at the bar, pondering, and I traded my bag of ice for some hot wings with carrot sticks and blue cheese dressing. The Block’s menu didn’t offer soup, but Soup didn’t mind. He ate real food as long as he wasn’t in front of a computer screen or on a surveillance run. The spicy sauce immediately caused us both to sniffle, but a runny nose and burning lips was half the enjoyment of eating hot wings. We ate and thought some more, going through paper napkins and Bass ale draughts at about the same rate.
“Bottom line is, Jersey, this guy won’t be found if he doesn’t want to be. At least not through the electronic dimension. He’s too good. The only way he’ll trip himself up is if he were to start bragging about what he’s going to do. You know how people will talk, to impress a friend or a chick.”
As usual, the Block’s garage doors were open and a breeze that smelled of river and marsh and thriving estuary life moved through the bar, caressing its inhabitants with a comforting earthy scent. Cracker lay on the ground between me and Soup, snoring. He knew from experience that I would not give him a buffalo wing, so he didn’t even try.
“Doubt he would brag until after he had the money in his pocket and was out of the country, anyway,” I said. Nodding in agreement, Ox pulled up a bar stool and joined us.
Soup tossed a stripped chicken wing bone onto the nearly empty platter, wiped his mouth with a fresh napkin, took a swig of beer, and grinned. It was the grin of a Cheshire cat who’d just eaten the prized canary.
“No bragging is going to happen, at least not after the fact. Some crying, maybe,” he said, victorious.
“Who will be crying?”
“I don’t know who,” Soup said, the cocky grin bigger. “But I sure know why.”
Speaking to us like a neurosurgeon explaining a hemispherectomy to a six-year-old, Soup described how he’d spent the last three days doing a type of counterhacking. He hadn’t slept much and had been surviving on minestrone and Red Bull energy drinks, he told us, but he hadn’t felt a high this good since the time he helped Interpol stop a twelve-year-old Japanese kid from shutting down the New York Stock Exchange.
Because the first day of SIPA electronic transfers had not yet occurred, no money was missing. Yet. Soup had written and planted code in Chesterfield Financial’s system that would catch the stolen thousand dollars from each individual SIPA and reroute it back to the original account. Social Insecurity would do its thing, but Soup’s program would snatch the funds before they made it to the thief’s designated account. If it worked as expected, the bad guys would have no idea their bank account remained empty until they checked the balance the following day.
“This will work?” It was a pretty big gamble in my book.
“Did I write it?” Soup answered.
“You’re a wizard, man,” Ox told him. “Is Jersey paying you anything?”
“Hell, no,” Soup said at the same time I answered, “Of course.”
“This little morsel of your handiwork will be worth quite a bit to Chesterfield,” Ox said, stating the obvious, which neither Soup nor I had the foresight to think of. Soup probably did have a nice thank-you paycheck coming from Samuel Chesterfield after it was all over with—if we got his son back alive while saving his company’s reputation at the same time. To a man in Chesterfield’s position, such an achievement would be priceless.
I munched a final carrot stick, letting the chunky blue cheese dressing cool my tongue. “Why even let the SIPA money come out, only to reroute it? Why not just kill Social Insecurity to begin with?”
“This way will be so much more entertaining,” Soup said merrily.
A commotion grabbed our attention and I hoped it wasn’t another repugnant drunk. Thankfully, it wasn’t.
“Son of a bitch! Damn fools don’t know when a gift horse is looking them in the mouth, for crying out loud!” Spud said, using a cane to move as fast as his arthritic amble would allow. Bobby and Trip followed him into the Block. To say that Spud was agitated was an understatement. The walking cane stabbed the concrete floor with each step. Bobby and Trip followed at a safe distance so the cane’s angry tip wouldn’t inadvertently catch one of them on top of a toe. Bobby was offering words of encouragement while Trip had laughed himself into a coughing spell. Everyone in the Block stopped what they were doing to stare at the three stooges.
“I think you mean, ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,’” Trip told Spud.
“What?” Spud demanded.
“Never mind,” Trip said, showing a display of near-pain as he tried to hold in another belly laugh. With much shuffling, the three of them situated their aging bodies at an empty table.
Soup chugged the last of his beer and disappeared with a wave, leaving me with the tab. I always paid my tabs, even though profits from the Block ended up in my pocket anyway. Mine and Ox’s. I dropped some money into the register and carried the plates of bare bones and the pile of used napkins to the kitchen before joining Spud and his buddies.
“What’s up, gentlemen?”
Spud’s arms waved in emphasis or maybe irritation. “They drove the Chrysler and wrecked the damn thing! The bumper’s all messed up, like it was backed into a pole or something.”
Ruby, a fifty-year-old waitress and veteran at keeping customers in line, ignored Spud’s tirade. She delivered three glasses of ice water and efficiently took orders. Spud wouldn’t shut up about his car long enough to talk to her, so Bobby ordered beers for everyone. Ruby returned with four frosty mugs of beer and a basket of steaming hush puppies. I waited for someone to explain what was going on.
“Your daddy here wanted to get his car stolen, so we parked it in the bad district,” Trip explained, eyes watery from laughing. “He left the key in the ignition and the doors unlocked. Even made sure they had a full tank of gas and left a twenty-dollar bill on the dashboard, to get their attention.”
“Whose attention?” I said.
“The hoodlums who were supposed to steal it, for crying out loud!” Spud interjected.
“You left your car in a bad neighborhood, hoping that it would get stolen by hoodlums?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Trip answered for him between contained giggles. “They stole the car all right but then they brought it back!” His words trailed into a full-blown belly laugh.
Bobby wanted to laugh, too, but didn’t want to further piss off Spud. He looked uncertainly at me, the corners of his mouth twitching. “They parked it about a block from where we originally left it. We had driven back to make sure it was good and gone before we called the cops to report it stolen, and there it was! They left the key in the ignition, but cleaned out the glove compartment and the trunk. Went through about half a tank of gas and dinged up the rear bumper when they took it for a joyride.” He ate a hush puppy and almost spit some out when he started laughing. “They took the twenty, too!”
Flabbergasted, I wondered if I was really Spud’s birth daughter. I tried to summon up some anger but Ox started chuckling and the laughter was contagious. Everyone joined in except for my father.
“Oh, to hell with you all! Every last one-a-yas,” Spud said as though we’d betrayed him. He reached down, feeling blindly for his cane. Sensing that my father needed some companionship, Cracker trotted up to him and pushed an exuberant nose into his hand, demanding to be petted. Spud scratched a spot behind the dog’s ears and mumbled something unintelligible about being unable to find decent thieves these days. As though he understood and was sympathetic, Cracker tilted his head sideways and studied Spud. The attention from man’s furry best friend had a calming effect and
Spud scooted his chair back up to the table. “Guess they needed some written instructions,” he grumbled to nobody in particular.
“Good hoodlums are hard to find,” Ox said.
“Spud,” I told him, “cars stolen by juvenile delinquents are usually recovered within a couple of weeks. You should know that from your days on the force. Your insurance company wouldn’t have paid off until after their mandatory waiting period. Chances are, the Chrysler would’ve turned up before then anyway.”
He sullenly stared at the tabletop and I felt like a parent scolding a child.
“Jeez, we didn’t think of that,” Bobby said. “So then basically, Spud would have just loaned out his car for a month to some thieves? For free? Then it would turn up, like they’re giving it back to Avis or something?”
“Yep,” I said, and ate a hush puppy. It was still warm and melted in my mouth. Ox had a cook who made the batter with the usual cornmeal, but added beer, honey, and freshly grated sweet corn. The Block’s hush puppies were decadent. Spud methodically chewed one of the cornmeal morsels, concocting a new plan.
“I’ll just hire somebody,” he finally proclaimed.
“To do what?” Trip asked.
“Steal the car, that’s what!” Spud answered. “If your average street criminal doesn’t have enough brains to steal a car when it’s handed to him, I’ll find me someone who will. And pay him to make sure it’s not recovered.” Bobby nodded his head in agreement and Trip shrugged his shoulders as if to say, why not?
“Don’t mean to be a spoilsport, Spud,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure that’d be illegal.”
“Illegal-schmegal! Not renewing a man’s license ought to be illegal, for crying out loud.” His face reddened as his blood pressure rose. I couldn’t argue with his logic and wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more about his newest caper to rid himself of the LHS, so I left my father to consort with his buddies and found my best friend.
Ox gently turned my face to look at the side that had been hit. “A little red, but no bruise,” he said, giving my cheek a quick caress before bringing up the impending SIPA transfer date. I brought him up to speed on Barb Henley and her ongoing blackmail with Jared and we discussed Soup’s counterhacking skills.
T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 01 - Southern Fatality Page 16
