Chapter Five

AT TEN O’CLOCK that morning, the bedside alarm went off. I sat up, disoriented for a moment, in a bed at the Days Inn across Interstate 55 from the La Quinta. I ’d dropped John just before five, then crossed the highway and rented a room.

When I checked in, I told the clerk that I’d intended to arrive earlier, but I’d gotten stuck in a casino, and then in the rain. He did a desk-clerk’s indifferent chuckle-nod-and-shuffle-he could really give a shit what I’d been doing-and told me I had to be out by noon anyway, or they’d have to charge me for another day.

That was fine. I’d just wanted to get on the record, at the same time hoping I didn’t smell like gasoline. When I woke up at ten, I slapped the clock to kill the alarm, turned the TV to the Weather Channel, and called LuEllen on my cell phone.

LuEllen answered just as a satellite picture of Hurricane Frances came up on the TV. “Where are you?” she demanded. “Is everything okay?”

“Well, our friend is gone,” I said. “We went into his house and found some DVDs.”

“I know he’s gone.” She wasn’t shouting, but she was emphatic. “I assume that’s him that’s been all over CNN and Fox. Was that you? My God, what were you thinking?”

We were not mentioning names or actual incidents. “Hey, hey. Slow down,” I said. “I just got up. I’ll tell you everything when I see you. The hurricane looks like it’s getting closer.”

“That’s the other thing. They’re saying landfall in twenty-four hours, somewhere between New Orleans and Panama City. We’re right in the bull’s-eye. People are closing up.”

Rule of thumb: bad weather always comes at the worst possible time. “What about the casino?”

“They’re open until six o’clock tonight,” LuEllen said. “I called them, but I haven’t been over today-I was too worried about you guys, I was afraid I’d miss your call. Why did you turn off your cell phone?”

“I didn’t want it to ring last night, in the middle of things. I forgot to turn it back on.” I started clicking around the channels on the television, and stopped when I got to Headline News.

“Jesus, I was afraid you were in jail or something,” LuEllen said.

“Listen, this thing up here is a mess-I might have to get more involved. But we’re close on the slot-machine research. Get the assignment notes and get over there and start dropping coins. I can be there by two o’clock, I think. You oughta be about finished and we’ll throw our shit in the car and get out.”

“Where’re we going?”

“I don’t know. Figure something out. I’ll be in the car on the cell phone. You say there’s a lot of TV?”

“Can’t get away from it. The big guys have been called in.” She meant the FBI.

“We were hoping for that,” I said.

“What?”

“I’ll see you in three or four hours, and explain.”

DONE with LuEllen, I called John on his cell phone. “I’m on my way to an Office Depot,” he said. “Buying supplies for the city. Just got up, tried to call, but I kept getting your answering service.” He was out establishing an alibi. He added, “If you look at TV… it worked.”

“That’s what I hear. I haven’t seen it yet-have you called Marvel?”

“Not yet. Should I?”

“Probably. I just talked to LuEllen and she’d about laid an egg. If Marvel sees it before you call…”

“I’ll call her now. The report is on CNN and Fox.”

“CNN’s stuck on sports,” I said. “I’m heading back-I’ll call you at home when I figure something out. I’ll be on the cell phone full-time.”

“Good luck,” he said. “Oh, one other thing. I was thinking about it last night.”

“Yeah?”

“You oughta jump back in the sack with LuEllen. You’re acting like a kicked puppy and it can be pretty fuckin’ tiresome.”

I WAS shaving when the Bobby story came up, and I stepped back into the main room to watch. The anchorwoman, who was wearing an amazing lilac shade of glitter lipstick, had one minute earlier been laughing excitedly about the lame excuses of a Hollywood celebrity charged with drunken driving, and had now wrenched her features into a semblance of solemnity as she told about the cross-burning. Though she took almost a minute to relate the story, she had nothing but the fact that a cross had been burned and a dead man found. The FBI was investigating. I finished cleaning up and took off.

In the daylight, Jackson didn’t look too much better than it had at night, though I’m probably not giving it a fair shake. All I saw were the highway sights, the usual run of discount stores and fast-food joints and quick-lube garages, and that was it for Jackson.

Going south, into the hurricane-all right, into a ten-mile-an-hour breeze-was a lot quicker, even with the rain, than the drive up the night before. I was in my sort-of-new car, an Olds Aurora, the most anonymous V- 8 in Christendom, and not a bad car except for the soggy suspension, numb steering, and underpowered engine. I’d had it modified at a tuner shop in Wisconsin, squeezing maybe 300 horses out of it, and the suspension was now reasonable and the custom seats were actually good. A new passenger, riding in a straight line, with his eyes closed, might think he was in a BMW 540i. Cornering, though… you can only do so much with front-wheel drive.

I pushed hard, out of the motel by 10:20, staying on the gas, and pulled up to the Wisteria at 1:30. Now the coastal highway looked like hurricane season. Pickup trucks full of plywood, and even sedans with plywood roped to their roofs, were rolling up and down the beachfront, and people were boarding windows and moving boats. Big rollers were coming in from the Gulf, kicking up chest-high spray.

I’d had a pack of chocolate-covered doughnuts and a Diet Coke for breakfast, so I was an unhappy camper when I boarded the Wisteria. LuEllen was back in the slots, four machines down from a guy who looked like he’d just climbed off an oil rig.

“How’re we doing?” I asked.

“Another hour,” she said, slamming a quarter in the slot. “Another half hour, with you here.”

“I gotta get a sandwich,” I said. The oil-rig dude was giving me the hard eye. “Are they still talking about closing at six?”

“They’re talking about five, now. The hurricane is picking up speed.” She slammed another quarter, the last in her bucket, dug a notebook out of her pocket and entered a number.

“Just a quick sandwich.”

“I’ll come with you. Won’t make any difference on the time. We’re almost done.”

“You’re gonna bum out your fan club,” I muttered.

“I know,” she said, with a smile. “He’s kinda cute, too, in a razor-fight way.”

We went back to the aptly named poop deck, where I got a meatball sandwich and I filled her in. She’d done something to change the look of her hair, or maybe she’d just gone to smaller earrings, little diamonds that sparkled against her dark curls. She was curious about Bobby, since he’d been involved in two or three incidents where she’d nearly gotten her ass killed. I told her how fragile he looked and about the wheelchair.

“So we’re dealing with some kind of incredible asshole,” she said when I finished.

“Yeah. An incredible asshole with a laptop that’s got God-knows-what on it.”

“I gotta believe that Bobby was careful.” One of the reasons LuEllen hung out with me was that I was careful. She worried when people weren’t careful. She was perfectly willing to break into a jewel merchant’s house in the middle of Saddle River, New Jersey, at three o’clock in the morning, knowing that place had more alarms than Wells Fargo… but she was careful about it. “He always seemed careful-you didn’t even know his name or where he lived, and you guys have been working together for years.”

“I hope he was,” I said. “But we can’t take the chance. He knows all about Anshiser, about what happened in Longstreet, about the whole deal down in Dallas-and if Microsoft ever finds out about the XP trapdoor, about that whole thing up in Redmond, they’ll probably hire a couple of killers.”