Work Done for Hire (10 page)

K
it's office was in the main administration building, a short walk from the cluster of student-oriented shops and restaurants downtown. It cost half as much as lunch to park anywhere nearby, so I found a place down in the student ghetto and walked the half mile through quiet streets, checking out every car that passed. This is where the bad guys would appear out of nowhere and tackle me and put a bag over my head and stuff me into the trunk of a car, and no one would notice.

In fact, every car seemed to be a student looking for a parking place. Perfect disguise.

I called Kit and suggested Hamburger Haven, not a ritzy place, but small enough so that no one could come in unobserved. I called her from the door, so I could just step inside to watch and wait.

There must have been something in my voice. She asked me what was wrong.

“Nothing. I just got pulled over by a cop,” I half lied. “No ticket, no problem.”

I sat down at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee, but then realized I was too fucking jumpy already, and changed it to a beer. “Breakfast of champions,” the waitress said, although it was after eleven. I guess I looked like someone who had just gotten up. And found an early Christmas present on the doormat.

I smiled at her and realized for the first time that I smelled like smokeless powder. Would anybody notice? With my current luck, I expected an off-duty cop to sit down next to me and say, “Been shootin'?”

Yeah, think I'll go assassinate some stranger so the bad guys don't give my girlfriend myelofibrosis. You ever have a day like that?

I finished the beer pretty fast, and the waitress was delivering my second as Kit walked through the door. She smiled. “Starting early?”

“You have no idea.” I picked up the beer. “Let's sit in the back.”

The waitress trailed us with menus; we waved them off and ordered burgers. Kit sat down with a pleasant expectant smile. “How's the bike?”

“Um, it's good, good. We have a real problem.”

“We?”

“Not like you and me. I mean . . .” Where to start? “I'm in deep shit. And I'm afraid you are, too.”

“What'd you do? We?”

“Nothing! It's just . . . right after you left this morning, the doorbell rang.”

“Before
dawn
?”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath and told her about the rifle, the phone call, the rifle range, and the state trooper, talking low and fast. She listened silently, eyes widening.

“And you haven't gone to the police?”

“They wouldn't believe me! It's too fantastic.”

“But you have proof. You have the rifle. The state trooper's report will verify that you took it straight out to the dump and . . . well, yeah. That's a problem.”

“Like why didn't I tell any of this to the Smokey? I guess it was the timing. Like he was part of it, following me.” Our burgers came and I took a bite and struggled to swallow it. Drank some beer. “I should've called the cops first thing, right after I found the rifle and the woman called. Hell, I shouldn't have picked up the phone when it rang.”

“Let me smell your hand.” She took my right hand in hers and sniffed it. “You still smell like gunpowder. If we went to the police right now, that would strengthen your case.”

I wasn't sure. “It'd mean I've fired a gun recently. But that's already on record.”

She frowned. “Guess so.”

“Am I just being paranoid? Maybe I
should
go straight to the cops. But the woman on the phone expressly told me not to, or they'd come after you. Like Timmy what's-his-name.”

“Jesus.” She sat back and looked around. “‘Damned if you do and damned if you don't,' my father would say.”

I bit my lip but then said it: “I've thought about your father.”

“What about him?”

“People who might have a reason to do this.”

She frowned and shook her head slightly. “No way. He
likes
you.”

“So he says, but he's not sanguine about my earning potential. And he's a hunter; he does know all about guns.”

“And a fellow veteran. He wouldn't do this—not to you, not to me.”

“Yeah, I know. Grasping at straws.”

“Grasp at a different one.” She touched both my hands. “Who else would do this?”

“No one, or anyone. You write a book and you sort of become a target.”

“Some of the characters in your first book were based on real people, weren't they? Maybe somebody didn't like what you said.”

I shrugged. “Not saying it couldn't happen. But an e-mail would get the message across better . . . besides, it's too oblique for that, and too expensive. You could scare me as much with a postcard, if you said the right thing.”

“‘I'm going to trash your book in the
New York Times
.'”

“That might work. But I sort of favor ‘I will get you when you least expect it.'”

“You've given it some thought.”

“Well, yeah. Trying to put myself in the head of someone who would do this.”

She chewed thoughtfully. “Maybe it's not personal.”

“
You're
the one they're threatening to murder. That's not personal?”

“What I mean is, think of it as a business proposition. They want you to do something illegal and probably dangerous. So they offer incentives, positive and negative. If the money isn't enough, then maybe saving my life would be.”

I felt a tight squeezing in my chest. If it were just me being threatened, I'd have wiggle room; it would be hypothetical, and I could bargain with them—kill me and you won't have anything. But I wouldn't gamble with Kit's life, and they knew that.

Kit took a paper notebook out of her purse and scribbled on a page. Tore it out and showed it to me:
Assume we're being watched and listened to. Pay the bill and follow me and don't say anything about it.

“Yeah, sure.” I left a twenty on the table, nice tip, and followed her out the door. When we got to my car, she tugged on my sleeve and we kept walking. Her car was at the end of the block. I slid in on the passenger side. She got in and wrote another note:
Could your clothes be bugged?

I shrugged and wrote
possible
.

She drove wordlessly to the Kmart on the outskirts of town. Parked in the fire lane and wrote,
Get clothes and cash, change clothes. I'll be back.

I'd already emptied out my cash card's account, and maxed out advances on AmEx and Visa. Good thing Kmart takes cash.

I got some prewashed jeans and a plain shirt. On impulse I went back to the sporting goods section. They had plenty of firearms there, but I'd read about the new two-day waiting period.

So I couldn't get a real gun, but there was a CO
2
-powered pellet gun that looked just like a service Glock, except for a bright orange nose, which I could spray-paint black.

I didn't think these people would bluff too easily. But it was better than nothing.

There was no way I could just change clothes in the Kmart dressing room and walk out. So I paid for the jeans and shirt and took them to the adjoining McDonald's. Broke a lifelong vow and bought a Coke there, and went into the men's room. Changed into the new clothes and stuffed my old ones into the trash, must happen all the time. I got back to the Kmart entrance just as Kit pulled up. There was a big pink suitcase in the backseat, a red sock sticking out like a limp tongue.

She looked at me and smiled. “Okay. So let's do a disappearing act.”

“What about your job?”

“I e-mailed him, death in the family, don't know how long I'll be gone.”

“Get some money?”

“Yes. I emptied out both accounts, about four grand.”

“Wow. I just had a little over a thousand.”

Her mouth made a small O and we stared at each other for a second, then it clicked. “Remember?” I said. “I don't have the Hollywood money yet.”

“Shit, of course. I knew that and spaced it.” She faced forward and put the car in gear. “Left or right?”

“I-80, I guess. Put some miles between us and them.”

She hesitated. “Maybe back roads would be better.”

“Just a second. Let's think.” She put it back into Park and looked at me with a forced expression of patience, or resignation.

“We leave my car in Iowa City, gun in the trunk, and head off to parts unknown. What happens to the car?”

“I think after two tickets they tow it away. Then wait for you to come bail it out. Auction it if you don't show up.”

“But I don't think so. Not in my case. They'll run the license plate and find I was stopped by Smokies this morning. They'll read about the gun and pop the trunk, and voilà, I'm a fleeing criminal.”

“But you aren't a criminal.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I mean really. They can't search your car without a warrant. You didn't break any law this morning—but even if you had, could they just pop your trunk and rummage around looking for nothing in particular? Don't they have to have ‘probable cause'?”

“Hell, I don't know. If a car's impounded that means a law was broken. There's probably another law that allows them to break into it and sell everything on eBay. I mean, who makes the laws?”

We sat for a few seconds, breathing hard, maybe thinking hard. “Wonder how far we could go,” she said, “on five thousand dollars. I don't have a passport.”

“Maybe we shouldn't even leave Iowa. Cross a state line and we've got the feds on our tail.” I said that last like a movie tough guy, but she didn't smile.

“When do you expect the check?”

“Probably not till the end of the month. Let's not even think about it. We've got five grand of our own money and ten of the bad guys'.”

“With fifteen thousand dollars,” she said carefully, “we could do like that guy in your book. Manufacture new identities. Or is that all fantasy?”

“No, you really could do it. But it takes some time and planning. And a lot more than fifteen grand; call it a hundred. Each.”

She laughed without any humor. “That much. Buying off officials?”

“No, just side-stepping computers. Like, his first step was taking the identity of someone in another state who was born the same time as him, but died an infant. That won't work anymore. You're in the federal system from womb to tomb, no matter how little time you spend in between.”

“That's comforting.”

“Yeah, ‘Big Brother Is Watching You.' We'll be okay if we're careful. Don't use any credit cards or IDs, and don't go anyplace where they scan faces, like the courthouse.”

“Don't leave any fingerprints on corpses.” She had read my first book, all right.

“I'll wear gloves if we kill anybody. So you're the driver. Where to?”

“I asked you first.” She rubbed her face. “Damn. I was thinking get lost in a big city, Chicago. But as you say, face scanners. Liquor stores have them, banks. I guess convenience stores in high-crime areas.”

“So we go to a small town?”

“I'd say so. Stay in Iowa,” she said.

“The Amana Colonies? We'd eat well.”

“Not a tourist place, not too close to Iowa City. Sioux City? Is Davenport too big?”

“Davenport. We could hop on a riverboat and escape to New Orleans. Except I think they're all permanently anchored.”

“It's an idea, though,” she said. “It's one place in Iowa where you could get a G-note changed without drawing a lot of attention.”

“The casino, that's good. Find some mom-and-pop place out in the country, dash into the casino to change the bills, then move on.”

“No, wait. I'm sure they scan faces on the way into the casino. If anywhere. But they may not be looking for you.”

“Yeah. It's not as if there was a warrant out for me.” It still felt shaky. “Are there casinos on the Illinois side of the river?”

“Don't know.” She took the iPak out of her purse, shook it, and asked it, “Search. Riverboat. Casino. Illinois.” It came back with “Harrah's” and an address.

“Worth the extra couple of miles. That was a state trooper, and I don't imagine Iowa and Illinois share data down to that level. Not even a parking ticket,” I said optimistically. Just a murder weapon on the backseat.

We picked up bad coffee and a couple of McDeathburgers, compromising culinary standards for speed, and headed straight for I-80. Unlike mine, her two-year-old car had Supercruise, so once we got on the superhighway, she went all the way to the left, shifted it to Traction, and asked it for a Davenport warning. “Finish my coffee if you want,” she said, and cranked her seat back and closed her eyes.

I'd never had Supercruise, and it still made me a little nervous. But it really was safer than driving manually, especially at high speed, so I just watched the pastures and cows blur by and tried to think of something that wouldn't make me nervous. I closed my eyes and recalled about ten of Shakespeare's sonnets. I'd memorized all of them when I was sixteen, with a little help from Merck's Forget-me-not™, but that mostly evaporated after a few months. I could still bore people with the famous ones, and my favorite obscurity, “Oh truant muse / what shall be thy amends . . .” My muse was kind of truant, running for its life.

When the car chimed her awake, she stretched and took over, drifting slowly through three lanes of sub-cruise traffic to cross the Mississippi bridge in the slow lane and take the first Illinois exit. There was a big blinking billboard directing you to Harrah's Showboat West. “You want to go straight there?” she asked.

“Sure, let's do it. Run the money through and get back on the road. Be in Indiana by nightfall. Kentucky.” Panic and caffeine overdose, a real recipe for casino success. Take a couple of deep breaths.