by Ann Macela
She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders. “Okay.”
One of her teammates came up to them. “You ready to go?” the woman asked, looking Clay up and down.
“Yep,” Francie answered. She introduced her friend to Clay, and they exchanged greetings. “I’d better go,” Francie told him.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said and watched the two women walk away. Damn. If he hadn’t stopped by the game, would she have told him about her computer shopping and wide-open apartment in time for him to mount a defense? Or, even if she thought about Brenner, would she have continued her avoidance tactics, not even wanting to talk to him on the phone?
How could she be avoiding him so much? Why? Her date with Tamara should have given her the perfect “excuse” to call.
A painful question struck him: despite all the evidence, especially her rubbing an itchy breastbone, was this woman really his soul mate?
Soul mates were supposed to practically fall into each other’s arms. Look what had happened to his own sister and her husband. What was going on with Francie? How could she be resisting him?
He walked toward the men’s locker room, rubbing the spot on his chest that was alternating between an itch and an ache. Maybe what he was feeling was not the attraction of his soul mate, but heartburn. Either way, he was going to have an ulcer for sure before this was over.
Wednesday night when the phone rang in Francie’s apartment at ten fifteen, she jumped, then scrutinized the instrument with trepidation. She had acted like such an idiot yesterday with Clay, not realizing the opening she had given Kevin. She had been so embarrassed. But she had to talk to him now. Sitting at her computer, she had activated the program that displayed Kevin’s shenanigans and had been studying his keystrokes. All the evidence proved he had been there again.
With a heavy sigh, she picked up the handset. “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me.” Clay’s voice came over the line, vibrated her eardrums, and resonated in every cell in her body.
“He was here again.”
“Yes. Have you called up the little application I left on your machine?”
“I’m looking at it now. You threw him all over the place, didn’t you?” She had to admit Clay could play Kevin like a fish on the end of his line. In fact, as she’d noticed before, Clay’s skill with the computer seemed almost magical. But she didn’t tell him that because his ego certainly didn’t need stroking. She did ask, “How do you do it?”
“Magic.”
“Oh, really.” She couldn’t help the sarcastic tone. What was it with Clay and this magic business? But wasn’t it just what she had been thinking?
“I’ll show you some time,” he said with a funny note in his voice she couldn’t identify. It wasn’t sarcasm. Teasing? No, it was more like he had a secret. But she didn’t have time to follow up because he was speaking again.
“Bill had one of his people take some photos of Brenner at your place again. From what the cop could see, Brenner was fuming when he left. He ran over a curb and almost had an accident. Did he do anything to your apartment in his frustration?”
“No, and I checked pretty thoroughly.” She had even left some spy-movie-type traps—tape or hairs on drawers, especially her lingerie drawers—to make sure Kevin hadn’t been searching her belongings. But that was too embarrassing to tell Clay. The last thing she wanted to discuss with him was her underwear.
“Good. If we do this right, it should be the last time he’s in your apartment uninvited. By the way, does Brenner know what Herb or anyone else at Brazos looks like?”
“I don’t think so, except he might know some of our salespeople, the ones he competes with directly. Tamara doesn’t know Herb or any of my coworkers, except by name when I’ve talked about them. Why?”
“Because I’m going to have someone with me at the bar tomorrow night so it will look like I met him there for a drink. The person will leave just after Brenner arrives so our hacker can approach me with no one else around. Herb wants to be the person.”
“Oh, puh-lease. Herb’s doing undercover work now?” She rolled her eyes at the very idea of her boss playing spy.
“I think he just wants a look at the guy. You know how he’s called the hacker every name in the book. I’m going to let Bill handle this. He can use the power of the police department to keep Herb out.”
“I hope Bill succeeds. What about you? Are you going to, what do they call it on the cop shows, ‘wear a wire’?”
“Yeah. Fortunately it’s a fairly quiet bar, according to Bill, so recording should not be a problem. Do you have any advice for me about Brenner?”
“No, not really.” She thought for a moment. “Oh, there is one thing you might like to know. I think Tamara may finally be getting tired of Kevin. You know I told you how she’s never with one man for very long?”
“Yeah. What happened?”
“Kevin evidently became the ‘big expert’ when he found out she had decided to get a laptop. Acted like she didn’t have a brain in her head. She and I had discussed the topic enough so she could tell he didn’t know what he was talking about. She said she finally convinced him she wanted me to go with her to buy it, not him. Then she complained how the zing had gone out of the relationship.”
“The zing?” Clay put in. He sounded delighted with the word.
“Tamara’s big on zing. If she’s not excited to see a man, doesn’t feel a zap to her system anymore, she drops him. I don’t know how she does it, but she usually leaves him thinking it was his idea to stop seeing her.”
“How about you, Francie?” His voice dropped to a low rasp that skittered along her nerve endings. “Are you ‘big on zing’? Do you like to feel a ‘zap to your system’?”
She was speechless for a moment as every synapse in her body seemed to fire at once. Zing, phooey. More like a lightning storm. Then a sudden feeling of euphoria and happiness made her giddy. “Uh . . .”
She had to answer him somehow. What could she say that wouldn’t push her into deeper trouble? She decided to fall back on a tried-and-true tactic: ignore the question and divert the questioner. “You know how red-heads are, much more volatile than the rest of us. Look, what time will you call me tomorrow?”
She heard what sounded like a sigh or a chuckle on his end, but his voice was normal when he answered, “I don’t know how long it will take Brenner to get down to the question, but I expect I’ll be home by nine. I can’t see us becoming drinking buddies.”
“Good. I want to know what happened.” She didn’t give him time to respond, just kept talking. “I’d better get to bed now. I have a lot of work to do tomorrow.” She was almost weak with relief he had not pursued the “zing” question.
“I’ll call. Sleep well. Good night.”
“Bye.” She hung up the phone and slumped back in her chair, one hand held to her solar plexus where a distinct pain made itself felt—again. What was going on? First an itch, now a pain. Was she really coming down with an ulcer from all this anxiety? She drank some hot chocolate before she went to bed. It seemed to help.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thursday evening about six, Clay and Bill Childress sat at a table in a Market Square bar, located in one of the few original buildings left in the northern end of downtown. A mix of business people and blue-collar construction workers occupied many of the tables and all the stools at the bar. The lighting was only slightly subdued, and everyone could be seen clearly. The hum of conversation was low.
“I hope Brenner gets here soon,” Clay told the detective. He shifted the props, a notebook and file folders open on the table, and then took a handful of the popcorn for which the bar was known and ate some of the fluffy kernels. “I’m filling up on this stuff.”
“Relax. The man just walked in the door. Remember, the microphone is picking up everything just fine. Don’t lead him too much. Let him initiate the offer.” Bill pretended to look at the papers in front of him.
Clay and Bill waited until Kevin had said hello to a couple of people and ordered a beer at the bar. When Kevin turned around to survey the crowd, Bill rose, closed the folders, picked them up, and held out his hand. “I’ll be calling you, Clay,” the lieutenant said, loud enough to be heard at the bar.
“I’ll look forward to it.” Clay rose to shake hands, then sat down as Bill exited. He closed the notebook and, settling back in his chair, picked up his Scotch. He hoped to God he looked like he was in no hurry.
“Clay?” a voice asked beside him. “Clay Morgan?”
Clay looked up to see Kevin standing there. “Hi, Brenner. How’s it going?”
“Fine, fine. How’s business?”
“Okay. I just met a prospective client for a drink. Now, if he will only make up his mind about using me. . .” He let the sentence fade off.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Waiting to know if you made the sale is the hardest part.”
Another man went by Kevin and lightly punched him on the arm. “Hey, Brenner, how’s it hangin’?”
“Fine,” Kevin threw over his shoulder and turned back to Clay.
“You come here often?” Clay asked.
“Yeah, usually on Thursdays when Tamara works late at her shop.”
“It’s a nice place,” Clay said, glancing around. “Why don’t you join me if you have no other plans? I hate to drink alone.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Brenner took the chair Bill had been using. He took a couple of swallows of beer. “How’s Francie?”
“Good. How’s Tamara?”
“Fine. That was a nice dinner Francie fixed.”
“Yeah. We had a good time.”
“We did, too.”
Clay ate some more popcorn. “How’s business?” he asked.
“Pretty good.” Brenner shrugged and shook his head. “But this being a manager sucks. I wish I was still out in the field. Some of the guys on my sales team can’t make a sale if it’s handed to them on a silver platter, know what I mean?”
“Man, how you can sell all the time, wait for somebody to decide to buy, face rejection over and over, is beyond me,” Clay said, shaking his head. He pointed at the notebook on the table. “Take this meeting I just had. Bill’s company needs me. They need me bad. But all they care about is how much I’m going to cost, and he’s trying to nickel-and-dime me to death. If that’s not bad enough, I think he’s talking to one of my competitors, trying to play us off against each other. That ever happen to you?”
“All the time. All the friggin’ time.” Kevin frowned at his beer.
“If I knew what the other consultant was charging, I’d be able to undercut him, I’m sure. But . . .” Clay shrugged his shoulders.
“Can’t you find out?”
“Not easily. Not unless I have a friend in the company with access to the information. If any of this made it into the company’s computer system, I’d have a chance, but all this is done verbally, maybe a few e-mails, but mostly with proposals on paper, and by the time the contract’s entered, it’s too late.”
“How would you find out? If you had the chance, I mean.”
“There are ways, my friend. There are ways,” Clay said with what he hoped was a sly smirk. He finished his drink and signaled the waitress for another round for them both. “But these bozos will just fart around and not make up their minds for another two or three weeks. I don’t have the time. There’s a big game coming up in Vegas in three weeks. I’m going to have to hustle up another client pretty quick if I want to make it.”
“How’s your luck been holding?” Kevin asked. “You said something last Saturday about having a bad run.”
“Man, it’s worse than bad. My ready cash is tapped out. I was hoping this guy I met tonight would be able to bring me in tomorrow, Monday at the latest. The job’s not a difficult one. I figured I could be well into it, probably halfway done, by the end of next week. Then I could bill them for work done to date. Knowing the money’s coming in would allow me to dip into my reserves and head for Vegas. But, no billing, no Vegas, no game. A chance to make a heavy score and I’ll miss it, damn it.”
He leaned back while the waitress served their drinks and continued when she was out of earshot. “One very important tip about gambling, Brenner. Always keep your reserves separate from what you gamble with. Never, ever bet your going-home money or the mortgage payment. Discipline, it’s all about discipline.” He stared into his Scotch and nodded sagely.
Kevin took a gulp of beer and frowned as he moved the mug around in a circle on the table. Clay could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s head.
“Can I ask you a question, Morgan?” he said finally. “About computers? Sort of off the record?”
“Sure. What do you want to know? I won’t even charge you for it,” Clay answered with a negligent wave of his hand.
“How would you find out about your competitor’s bid—if the info was in their system, I mean?”
“How do you think?” Clay repeated his smirk. “Remember what we talked about at Francie’s?”
“Yeah,” Kevin nodded. “That’s what I was thinking about. Is it difficult? Getting into a company’s files without them knowing it?”
“Like I told you on Saturday, it’s more tricky than difficult—when you know what you’re doing, of course. It’s a matter of routing yourself through several different servers on the other side of the globe. See, what you do is . . .” Clay continued his explanation, degenerating rapidly into technobabble until Kevin’s eyes were glazing over. “That’s basically how you do it,” he concluded.
Brenner hunched over his beer, moved a little closer to Clay. “What if I knew of a job right up your alley?” he asked in a low voice.
“Yeah? Who with?”
“Me. I need to get some information about one of our competitors. They’ve been eating our lunch lately, and we think it’s by their pricing, but we’re not sure. It could be some special delivery considerations. None of my salespeople is able to find out. I’m saddled with incompetent idiots who couldn’t sell refrigerators in the tropics.”
To cover his grin at Brenner’s statement about “incompetent idiots,” Clay sipped his drink, put the glass down, and leaned toward Kevin to place the microphone under his jacket closer to his target. “So, you’re looking for what, exactly?”
“I need someone to hack into our competitor’s customer files to see what they’re buying, at what price, and at what shipping costs.”
“You just want the information, right? You don’t want to change any data, mess anything up?”
“Right. I don’t want them to know I’ve seen the information.” Kevin took a swallow of beer as if his mouth had suddenly gone dry. “So, what do you think? Can it be done?”
Clay leaned back in his chair, stared at Brenner until the man began to fidget, then sat forward again. “How much?”
“How much?”
“How much are you willing to pay for this information?”
Kevin gulped, then assumed an indifferent expression contradicted by his tight grip on the beer mug. “Name your price.”
“Who do you work for, and whose pockets do I have my hand in, yours or your company’s?”
“Why?”
“Because theirs are deeper than yours.” Come on, Brenner, make the connection.
“Oh. You’d charge them more.”
Clay just nodded.
“Mine,” Brenner said, leaning a little closer. “I work for NatChem, and they don’t have anything to do with this. I have a real bastard for a boss. Man, he’s on my ass like there’s no tomorrow. I need the information to turn my sorry sales team into winners instead of losers. It’s my only ticket to a promotion.”
Clay gave Brenner a hard look. “If I agree to do it, I need to know something first.”
“Name it.”
“Did you try hacking on your own?”
“Yeah, but I got nowhere. Why?”
Clay shook his hea
d disgustedly. “Because I have to know how much crap you left behind. How did you get in? Whose computer did you use?”
“It’s okay,” Brenner said earnestly. “I used . . .” He paused. Clay could tell the exact moment when Brenner decided not to inform him it had been Francie’s. “I used someone else’s computer. There’s no way to trace anything back to me.” He held up his hand. “I swear.”
Clay ran his hands through his hair. “All right,” he said. “I’ll only do this one time. I’ll need you with me, showing me what information you want. And, in the meantime, you stay off the other computer. The last thing I need is for you to make a dumb-ass mistake and alert them about an intruder.”
“Fine with me,” Brenner said, his eyes beginning to light with excitement as he realized Clay was going to do his bidding.
“Five thousand,” Clay stated.
“Excuse me?” Brenner looked astounded.
“Five thousand, cash, hundreds is fine. Payable up front.”
“Oh. That much?” He took a big gulp of his beer.
“And,” Clay held up his hand and pointed his finger at Kevin, “nobody ever mentions this again.”
Brenner’s gaze fell to his beer, roamed the room, and finally met Clay’s. He shook his head as he said, “Uh-uh. Never.”
“Shit, do you want to do this or not?” Clay let his irritation show. Brenner looked like he finally realized the implications of what he had just asked Clay to do. Or maybe it was the cost. Either way, they had their hacker.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Kevin nodded and hunched over his beer again. “But it will take a couple of days for me to come up with the money.”
“We’ll do it next Wednesday, my place. I need to use equipment I trust.” Clay pulled out a card and wrote his address on it, under the phone numbers. He handed it to Brenner. “Be there at seven. With the cash. Know exactly what you’re going after. The less time we spend in their system, the better.”
