by David Cole
“Come on, come on,” Theresa said to herself.
“Five minutes,” the driver said.
He caught Theresa’s face in the middle of the center mirror.
“Please move away from the center,” he said, and instead of moving she slid way down in the seat again. “Say what? Yeah. I’ll keep the line open.”
“Dealing drugs?” he said to Theresa. “In that camp?”
“Just a misunderstanding.”
“Three grams of coke is not a misunderstanding.”
“Momma was a turkey,” Theresa sang to her herself, ignoring him. “But she thought she was a duck. Lookin for another bird to get herself a fuck.”
“No no no,” the driver said. “You got that wrong.”
“Get out.”
“Momma bought a chicken, but she thought she was a duck.”
Behind them, breaking the monotonous, muted sound of vehicle engines in four lanes, a heavy rumble was working its way to the light.
“Put it in a pan and turned the oven up,” the driver sang. “’Long came sister with a spoon and a glass, scooping out the gravy from the yass yass yass.”
Looking out the back window, Theresa saw two motorcycles weaving between the northbound traffic lanes. Her driver leaned toward the door, cocking his head until he picked up the motorcycles in his outside mirror.
“Whoa!” he said. “Those are Ducatis.”
The first bike stopped just behind the Citation.
“A Multistrada 1000 Superbike. See the red wheels? Dark metallic gray body? I don’t believe this, I’ve never seen one except on the Speed Channel. No, can’t be a Superbike, not with that color, wow, it’s got to be the Monster.”
“Can you, like, get us going?” Theresa whined as the first bike came abreast of her window. “Like, please?”
For all his enthusiasm with the bikes, the driver kept checking his mirrors, checking out the other cars surrounding him, a slight frown at the blocked traffic.
“Helluva deal, you ask me.” Theresa rubbed a hand over the door handle, testing it, but the driver had somehow set all the locks. “I shoulda just ran, once’t I had the chance, shoulda ran.”
“So why did you try for a deal? Telling about the bones?”
“Did Darth Vader tell you to ask me that?”
“Curious. Yes. We don’t have much of a clue about you.”
“Curious.” She mimicked the comment in a singsong voice. “Well, it’s my ass on the line. I’d be dead back there, you didn’t pick me up.”
“Dead? Why?”
Traffic cleared enough so all vehicles started moving, but the light switched yellow as the Citation came to the intersection.
“For Christ’s sake,” Theresa said when the driver braked to a stop, “you could have run that yellow. We could be moving.”
“Wanted to see the second bike,” he said. “Yeah, oh, yeah. Another Monster. An 800. See? The wheels are metallic gray, and the tank and fairing are red, yellow, and black.”
“I’m going to get out and walk, Jesus, I can walk across the street faster than you can drive there.”
“Told you before, no rear door handles on these cruisers.”
“Yeah, well, you got me locked up too tight in here.”
“Almost there.”
Both bikes sat directly between the Citation and a red Mercedes 500 convertible, whose driver paid more attention to the bikers than the bikes. Theresa tried to see the bikers; one of her New Orleans boyfriends owned a Harley. The bikers leaned forward on the seats, knees bent and angled ahead like their helmeted heads, a short rubber-banded ponytail emerging underneath the helmet of the biker in front. Neither wore leathers, both had identical faded denim jackets, stonewashed jeans, and black Nikes. Small, Theresa thought, they’re both so small, they’ve got to be kids.
The light changed to green again. Reluctantly, the driver turned away from the bikes and started the Citation moving through the intersection. Both bikers let in their clutches at the same instant, Theresa expecting them to leap across the intersection, but the Mercedes kept pace with the bikes and the Citation, crossing Grant like a solid block, the Mercedes driver grinning at the bikers.
Ponytail waggled the lead bike slightly to the right, raising a hand to point ahead of the Citation, wanting to cut in. Theresa’s driver already had his left turn signal on, trying to move over behind the Mercedes, so he slowed the Citation and motioned the lead biker to get in front.
“That asshole in the convertible,” Theresa protested. “He’s really pissing off these guys on the bikes.”
Both bikers nodded their heads, maybe a slight thank you, maybe just relief that they could burst out of the jam, but the second bike sputtered, fell back, and turned sharply behind the Citation, the Mercedes driver now believing it was a game and keeping pace, slowing as the lead biker slowed. Cars honked from behind as suddenly the lead biker swiveled to a stop on an angle. The rear bike also stopped, the biker jumping off the seat and letting the bike fall to the pavement.
“It’s a hit!” the driver said into the cell, trying to pull out his weapon from a clip holster that was snugged tight by the seatbelt. He dropped the cell, fought with both hands to get out the weapon.
“Get down, miss, get down.”
“A hit? A hit?” Theresa screamed. “What the hell does that mean?”
The biker in front snapped open the carrier bag on the back of his seat and pulled out a chrome pistol, firing it deliberately at the Mercedes, the man frantically braking, throwing himself halfway over his door trying to get away until a shower of blood blossomed from his chest and right shoulder. The Mercedes jumped the divider strip, careened through southbound traffic until smashing into the tall neon sign of a Chinese takeout restaurant. The biker then turned the pistol toward the Citation. The driver cramped the steering wheel hard left, trying to run past the motorcycle but the biker taking careful aim, targeting the driver, hitting his shoulder, then his forehead. The Citation lurched sideways, the driver curled over the steering wheel, foot jamming the accelerator in the same moment so the Citation smashed hard against the biker, crushing one leg against the bike, knocking off his mirrored helmet.
The Citation’s rear window disintegrated as the other biker, a pistol in each hand, fired one weapon after the other, thrusting each pistol slightly forward with the trigger pull, stalking after the Citation as it ground up over the curb into a strip mall, pushing the Ducati relentlessly ahead of it, the biker clawing up the hood of the Citation, but getting no purchase on the smooth metal. Theresa huddled on the floor, fingers stuck in both ears to shut out the noise of the bullets, the flying glass, her shrieks. The rear passenger window exploded, sunlight flooding into the Citation now that almost all the tinted glass had fragmented.
The Citation groaned relentlessly into the front of a music store, engine and tires screaming, but the storefront brick and steel construction held the Citation solid, unmoving. Theresa rolled on her back, hands crossed in front of her face, palms outward, pleading as the biker thrust both hands inside the car and hit her chest thumpthump with a double tap and then one last bullet in her head.
The biker turned around, firing several shots randomly toward all the cars and people on the streets. Releasing the clips of both pistols, calmly inserting new clips, he fired again at the cars, drivers abandoning them or ducking on the floor. The biker ran around the Citation, looked down at the second biker, trapped between the Citation and the storefront, one leg bent almost perpendicular out from his hip, raw stumps of bone sticking out of the jeans, a bloodied young face nodding at the biker, who shot the injured boy in the head.
Firing again and again at nothing in particular, the biker ran to his machine, cranked the engine into life, and roared down Campbell, swiveling the bike at high speed around parked cars, the biker low on the seat, and abruptly disappearing in a right-hand turn onto a side street.
laura
5
“What do you know about 800
number call centers?” Don asked.
“Computer help lines?”
“Ordering merchandise.”
“Like…Land’s End? Call an 800 number, order a pair of pants?”
I noticed that Don had his Moroccan leather briefcase stuffed into a pocket of his wheelchair.
“Sure. Whatever. Say, a pair of pants,” he said, ignoring the question. Typical Don Ralph. He’d tell you only what he wanted you to know. “You dial the number. Order the pants. What happens?”
“I give them my credit card info.”
“And your shipping address.”
“And my billing address.”
“Plus a phone number. All of that for some pants or tee shirts or pajamas. You call that number and you trust that somebody, somewhere, takes down all that personal info and the company keeps it private. Keeps it secure.”
“Somebody you don’t know,” I emphasized.
“Exactly right. Somebody you don’t know, you’ll never meet.”
“So you’re here about credit card theft. Identity theft. Same old, same old.”
“Not exactly.”
“What? Exactly?”
I shifted my chair out of the sun. He didn’t even touch his wheels, didn’t unlock the brakes to move into some shade. Once Don was on scent, he rarely noticed what happened to his body.
“In time. In time.”
“I’ve got months,” I reminded him. “Maybe forever. But we’re not talking about pajamas. So where are these calling centers?”
“Exactly right. Do you know how they work?”
“I’ve ordered. A few times. From some fake ID. Like, say, a credit card that’s untraceable.”
“But you’ve seen the catalog. You’ve seen the pajamas.”
“At the bottom of the catalog page, there’s an 800 number. I call it.”
“Unless you ask the operator, you have no idea where they are.”
“North Dakota,” I said, thinking about it. “Some state that’s mostly in the boonies. Not in a big city. Wages are good. Cubicles. Headsets.”
“Private enterprise. Capitalism at its best.”
“What makes our country great. We’re not talking North Dakota, are we?”
He smiled. Gotcha, I thought. One of Don’s very few tells. When you had that ace in the hole, when you knew he only had a ten or a three, and you called him on it, he smiled. He knew it was a tell, he couldn’t help smiling anyway.
“In the U.S.,” he said.
“In the continental U.S.”
“Of course. The 800 numbers are cheapest to rent in the mainland.”
“So…where?”
“You’ve hacked into a few call centers, I know that.”
“Kansas city, one time. That’s all I remember.”
“Ever heard of them being in a prison?” he asked.
I had to think about that one.
“Upstate New York, maybe. Or…guess I don’t really know.”
“How about closer to home. In Florence?”
“North of here? That Florence?”
“Arizona Department of Corrections,” he said. “Florence facility.”
“But that’s a maximum complex. Hard timers there. And the death house.”
“Yes, it’s a big complex, with several different facilities. Much of it is for level five inmates. The nasties. Thugs, rapists, murderers, they can be level five or, if they’re on good behavior, they can be lower. Level three, say.”
“Don, wait, wait. So I call Land’s End.”
“They don’t handle that company. But yeah. Somebody reputable.”
“I really want those pajamas. Nobody else has the style I want.”
“From the looks of you half an hour ago, you don’t even wear them.”
I blushed. That’s really hard to do, make me blush.
“Okay, Don. So you’ve seen my boobs.”
“I’ve seen them before,” he said. “Remember that contract in Houston?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“I saw it all,” he said. “So have we got your boobs out of the way now?”
“Pick up the phone, call the 800 order number. No idea, really, who I’m talking to. But I assume…I assume, ’cause it’s the American way, that they’re company people. That I’m talking to a company rep. Paid with a company check.”
“Wages are going up. So. Some companies, some very big companies, contract out the call center.”
“To prisons like Florence.”
“It’s a test contract. A new contract. But far from the first in a prison.”
“How long have they been up and running?” I had no idea where he was going, but so far I couldn’t see what he needed me for.
“Half a year. Eight months, outside.”
“Don, that’s…this is…you run one of the top legit security-penetration companies around. We are talking some kind of hacking, right?”
“Right.”
“This doesn’t compute,” I said. A stupid cliché. “This doesn’t make sense. If a credit card call center is running inside a prison, no legit company is going to allow convicts to take down personal information. Credit card numbers.”
“When the operator enters data—”
“The inmate.”
“When the convict, I mean, when the inmate enters the data, first of all, he sees just asterisks.”
“Like a log on password.”
“Just like a password. You log into MSN, AOL, whatever, type your password and all you see is a series of asterisks. Because you can’t read it, you have to enter it twice. In the Florence call center, there’s a small script running on the main data servers that verifies the credit card number and the inmate never really sees it.”
“Networked computers?” I asked.
“Closed network. Each inmate has his workstation. Networked with several data servers. But entirely combined within that operation.”
“But you just said the data server verifies the credit card number. How does it do that without dialing outside? Without some Internet connection?”
“It doesn’t. It just verifies that the inmate has entered the right number of digits from a credit card.”
“Who sees the real numbers?”
“Prison officials, Correction Officers with special computer training, they burn encrypted CDs with the data. They take the CDs to a completely separate computer network. Orders go to the company.”
“What am I missing, Don?”
“Missing?”
“Oh, don’t get cute. You’re stringing me along here. You’re trying to sell me on something and I don’t have a clue what. But in ten minutes I’m going to get my running clothes on and go out for ten miles or so.”
“Two more things, then.”
“Let me ask two more things. Number one,” I said. “Somehow, all these pajamas getting ordered are winding up in credit card theft.”
“And identity theft.”
“How much damage are we talking about?”
“Don’t you mean, how is the data getting out of the prison?”
“I figure that’s why you’re here, Don. You can’t figure it out, you decided to come down and titillate me with something different.”
“Something unusual. That’s for sure.”
“Working for a prison. That’s not just unusual, that’s weird.”
“Not why I’m here. Laura, I realize I’m giving you pretty thin stuff.”
“Thin? It’s so goddam thin it’s invisible.”
He grinned, wide, showed his teeth.
“Gotcha,” he said. I usually didn’t start swearing until I was aggravated about not getting the right details.
“Fucking goddam A,” I said, but we both laughed.
“Come on, Don,” I said finally. “You’ve got all those people in your new building up there in Scottsdale. You’ve got somebody else that can handle this.”
“We.”
“You. We. Whatever.”
“Laura, you’re a partner
. You and I go a long way back. We did the work that made enough money to set up this company. So we’re partners. You get a third of the profit. Whether you ever go back to work full-time or not.”
“What’s the hook, Don?”
“Hook?” he said innocently.
“However you figured you’d get me back to computer hacking.”
“Ah,” he said. “That hook. You feel it?”
“Jesus Christ, Don! It’s hanging right in front of me, I guess. So put your goddam bait on it, I’m sure not going to swallow bare metal.”
“Nobody else can fill this contract,” he insisted.
I snorted.
“No. Really.”
“Really. Come on. Identity theft is minor league stuff these days for people like you. Right?”
“Right, yes. We mostly do security penetrations, offer contracts to guarantee high level computer and database security. But this time…a client asked for you.”
“That’s hardly a first. People have been asking for me a long time.”
“You, Laura. It has to be you.”
“Who’s the client?”
“Don’t know.”
Sunset came out of the shrubs, finally hot enough to quit chasing birds and rodents. She sprawled at my feet, moved to get into the shade under the table. Put both paws over her eyes, her invitation for play, but I ignored her. Finally, Sunset scratched her left ear, slowly, languidly, gave a big yawn showing her yellowed teeth, and settled into rest mode.
“See a vet,” Don said. “Get your dog’s teeth scraped.”
A tail whacked at his leg. He reached down to rub Sunset’s muzzle. She let him, but I wasn’t giving off the right vibes, so she didn’t give her affection yet.
“Here’s the deal,” Don said.
“I haven’t accepted any deal.”
“If you do, no coming to the office.”
“Get this over, Don. What’s the hook? What’s the real hook?”
He scratched Sunset’s nose, rubbed the back of his hand gently back and forth across her nose, and scratched under her jaw until Sunset dropped her head next to the metal platforms holding Don’s feet.
“You know who the client is,” I said. “Don’t you.”
“Can’t tell you that.”
“It’s somebody I’ve worked with before?”
