Dark Angel, page 8
The two men, dressed comfortably in tee-shirts, cargo pants, and cross-training shoes, walked around to the back of the vehicle, popped the hatch, and dragged a living body out.
The body was that of a youngish man or woman, though it was hard to tell exactly what he or she might look like, or even its sex, since the body had long brown hair and the lower part of its face was heavily wrapped in silver duct tape.
The men dragged the tape-wrapped body to the bluff, and propped it in a seated position, its head against the rock.
When the body was in position, the third man got out of the truck. Unlike the two hard men, he wore a pale yellow dress shirt under a linen sport coat, light blue chinos, and tasseled loafers, suitable for lunch at a country club.
He walked to the bluff, picking up his feet, to keep the dust off the shine of his shoes, then squatted to look at the body. The body looked back at him, its face wet with sweat, although the day was not that hot. The man reached out and pulled tape off the mouth of the body.
“We would not be here, Daniel,” he said in excellent but accented English, “if you had given me the names back in LA. Now we’re going to give you a painful demonstration of what your very short future looks like. No questions, just the demonstration.”
He pressed the tape back across Daniel’s mouth, and gestured to one of the other men, who went to the SUV and came back with a red two-gallon gas can. The man in the yellow slacks stepped back and the man with the gas can poured a pint of gas on Daniel’s lower legs, and asked, “How’s that, Mr. Step?”
“That should do it.”
He leaned toward Daniel and said, “You should have talked to us last night.”
Daniel grunted something and Step pulled the tape off his mouth. “What?”
“Fuck you.”
“All right,” Step said. He took an antique Zippo lighter from his pocket, clicked open the top, and sparked up a flame. Daniel said, “Please . . .”
Step put the flame next to the gas-soaked legs and the flame leaped across them and Daniel began screaming and screamed for a long time, as the smell of gas fumes and burning pork spread across the desert landscape.
Step gestured to one of the other men, who stepped up with a fire extinguisher and sprayed it on Daniel’s legs; Daniel moaned and began to weep.
Step said to the man with the gas can, “Do it.”
The man poured the rest of the can over Daniel’s entire body, started with his head and hair, then down across his face, chest, and hips.
Step said, “Daniel, give us the names, or I swear to God, I’ll kill you. I’ll burn you to death. Right now, right here.”
“Please . . . don’t, please . . .”
The man in the chinos came back, squatted again, the end of a lit cigarette dangerously close to the captive’s gas-soaked shirt. He said, “Give me the names, Daniel, or you burn.”
Daniel began to cry uncontrollably, his body writhing and shaking, and the man in the chinos waited patiently, said, “Give me . . . the names. If you give me the names, we will walk away from you. We will not take the tape off. If you can’t get it off, then you’ll die here like a bug in a cocoon. But, we’ll give you that chance. On my word. On my honor. If you refuse, then you burn.”
Silence, a beat, then, “Loren Barron.”
“Spell.”
“L-o-r-e-n B-a-r-r-o-n.”
“And the woman?”
“Brianna Wolfe.”
“Spell.”
The body spelled the name.
“And their location?”
“Los Angeles? I don’t know the address, I’ve never been to their house. We always met at the place in Venice. The bar.”
“Okay,” said the man in the chinos. “I believe you.” He patted Daniel on a knee, stood and said to the other two, “Leave him. Let’s go.”
The three men walked back toward the vehicle, side by side. Ten feet short of the truck, the man in the chinos spun, drew a pistol from beneath the sport coat, and fired a single shot at the taped-up captive.
One of the other men whistled and said, “That’s some good shooting, Mr. Step.”
“Not that good,” Step said. Daniel had been hit just to the left of the bridge of his nose. “I’m out of training. I was shooting for his forehead.”
“But a one-shot kill,” one of the hard men said.
“Yes, but I fired too quickly. I didn’t want him to see it, to fear it, so I tried to move too fast and missed my target. I need some work,” Step said in his excellent English. He scratched the side of his face, gestured with his gun toward the body. “Listen, you two. If you want to go into business, you should know that this is bad business, this killing. Bad business. Bad for business. Sometimes necessary, but not often. Keep that in mind.”
He looked at his Rolex, which glittered gold in the sunrise. “Get the shovels. He doesn’t have to go deep; nobody will ever find him here. Then let’s get back. I promised Victoria I’d come out to the club and watch her ‘Old Girlfriends’ tennis match.”
Six
As Daniel was being murdered in the Mojave, Letty was getting out of bed, again, five minutes before the alarm went off. She killed it, cleaned up, and dressed. Again, when she left the bathroom, Baxter was sitting on the edge of his bed, elbows on his thighs, peering at the carpet.
Letty said, “Thirteen minutes.”
He looked up. “Are we in a hurry?”
“Yes. Harp has a nine o’clock class in Control and Dynamical Systems, whatever that is. He’ll be getting up soon and I want to talk to him before he goes to class.”
Baxter was out of the bathroom in thirteen minutes, and they were out the door in seventeen. On the way across town to Caltech, Letty said, “Banging.”
“What?”
“I’m going to use your crude sexist language on him, to add some weight to his predicament,” she said.
“Crude, yes, sexist, no,” Baxter said. “Predatory women are known to bang innocent young seminary students for their own animal purposes.”
Letty shook her head, watched the landscape go by: after three days in the car, including two days in the desert, it seemed unreal, too lush, too LA, too Disney-like, like one of the Seven Dwarfs might pop out from behind a fire hydrant.
* * *
Harp’s house showed a second-floor light and Letty wondered if the woman—Hannah Baldwin, according to her driver’s license and student ID—had stayed overnight. She’d rather not have to deal with that.
She mentioned the problem to Baxter as they did a preliminary cruise past the house, but Baxter said, “Nah, she didn’t stay. If you’re banging a student, you want her leaving in the middle of the night, not at seven-thirty in the morning. You don’t want the sun shining on her illegal ass, and all the going-to-work faculty seeing her.”
“Good point.” One thing she’d learned about Baxter, Letty thought, was that while he was personally unseemly, tatted-up and hairy, over-gelled and -cologned, looked like he bought his clothes from a tent maker, and was unselfconsciously cowardly, he was also wickedly intelligent. She wouldn’t fool him about much.
“You can drop me,” she said. “I’ll walk up to the corner of California when I’m done; I’ll call.”
“Whatever you say, my little blueberry muffin.”
“You can knock that shit off right now,” Letty said.
“I don’t think so. I’m tired of being bossed around . . . my little pink desert rose.”
“Yeah, fuck you, Baxter . . . No, wait . . .”
They were both laughing, sorta, when he dropped her off with her limp and her cane. She walked up the circular drive and knocked on the door and leaned on the doorbell to make sure she was heard.
Two minutes later, Harp answered the door barefoot, in sweatpants and an orange tee-shirt. He frowned at her and said, “You’re the girl with the crow tattoo . . .”
“Raven,” Letty said. “We need to talk. Right now. Urgently.”
“About what?”
“Your future at Caltech,” Letty said.
“What?”
“I’m not crazy. Do you have tea, or coffee? I’m feeling a little cranky,” Letty said.
“Why should I . . .”
“Because I need some information from you and I need it bad enough that I’m willing to blackmail you with Hannah Baldwin, the undergraduate student you’re banging.”
Harp’s mouth dropped open, but after a brief hesitation, he stepped back and let her in.
* * *
Letty walked through the entry and living room, to the kitchen. On the way, she paused at the couch and said, “I followed you into your house last night, after the party. While you were upstairs banging young Hannah, I took her student ID and driver’s license from her purse, posed them against that great custom backsplash tile in the kitchen, and took a photo that will show time and GPS location in the metadata.”
“I should strangle you and dump your body,” Harp said, taking a half step toward her.
“No. If you tried, I’d use this cane to beat you to death. Take a look at that point . . .” She twirled it in her hands so he could see both the sharp and hammer-ends of the cane head. “So, you got tea?”
* * *
He did.
He had an electric Cuisinart kettle and made them cups of English Breakfast tea; they both took four packets of sugar. Watching him do it, quick and competent, he struck Letty as unconventionally attractive. She could see why Hannah Baldwin was with him, even if he was too old for her. He put the cups on the kitchen table, and they sat across from each other, and he said, “Talk. What do you want?”
She took a sip of the boiling-hot tea, and said, “I’m here from Gainesville, Florida, with a friend, who happens to be a computer genius.”
“Those are a dime a dozen around here, if you’re bragging,” Harp said, crossing his legs and sipping his own tea. “You can’t throw a rock without hitting one.”
“Yeah. Well, this particular one is mine. We’re poor. We tried to fix that a few weeks ago by locking up the computers at the Confederate Memorial Medical Center in Willow Branch, Georgia . . .”
A look of amusement crossed his face. “That was you? There’s a rumor that you screwed the pooch.”
“Yeah. We did. The feds are all over us. They don’t know who we are, but they’re still digging and they know where the Bitcoin is. Half million dollars.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“Some time back, a hacker combine called Ordinary People, which rumor says comes out of Caltech, held up the Russian rail system for fifty million dollars. Another Bitcoin deal. We need to get in touch with Ordinary People and we think you can help us with that.”
“How could I . . . ?”
Letty noticed that he didn’t blurt out something about not knowing who the Ordinary People were. “My computer genius looked at Vernon Pastek’s phone records about the time he was extorting the Russians, and then did a search of the phone records of Caltech staff, and guess what? Yours matched up. You’re either a member of Ordinary People, or you’re close enough to them that you could act as a contact between Pastek and OP. So. We need names, five hundred thousand dollars’ worth. If we don’t get some from you, I’m going to call the Title IX people.”
“C’mon, goddamnit, Hannah and I . . . there’s real affection. She’s not in any of my classes anymore . . .”
“Affection? Anymore? There you go. You’re banging a good-looking chick and when you’re done with her, you’ll throw her away,” Letty said. “You know it, and I know it.”
“How do you know it?” Harp asked.
“Because I’ve been there,” Letty said. “At Gainesville. Getting banged by a postdoc.”
Harp stared at her for a moment, then said, “I’m begging you, don’t call anyone. I don’t know Ordinary People, but I’ve heard of them and I know they’re local. I can ask around without anyone getting suspicious. If you give me a number . . .”
“The feds have grabbed a bunch of Bitcoin accounts. They’re getting good at it. We need to move fast. You’ve got twelve hours to call me,” Letty said. She took a slip of paper from her hip pocket and pushed it across the table. “I’ve got a burner. Call me at that number. No point in trying to track it, you’ll only get back to Walmart.”
“I’m not sure I can—”
“Twelve hours.” Letty took a last sip of tea, pushed the cup away, walked out the front door—he made no attempt to catch her—and turned left, up the hill, and down California Boulevard, where Baxter was waiting in the shade of a ginkgo tree.
* * *
After confronting Harp, Letty and Baxter spent part of the morning at the motel, where Letty worked out on the drums and Baxter remained glued to his laptop; they spent the other part of the morning prowling around Pasadena in Baxter’s truck and walking around the buildings at Caltech.
Baxter slipped into the Caltech computer stream like a long-time native. Letty got curious looks, and with her spaghetti-string blouse, her raven wings got even more.
“How did I get a fake name like Paul Jims?” Baxter asked at one point. “Makes me sound like I should be out shooting woodchucks.”
“Probably picked by a computer program,” Letty said. The ball of tape behind her knee was intensely annoying. “They fed in six hundred desirable fake name characteristics, and it spit out Paul Jims.”
“You think you’re joking, but you’re probably right,” Baxter said.
At one o’clock, they were eating burgers and cherry pie at a place called Pie ’n Burger when Eugene Harp called. “I have an address for you. Not names. Blond man and a redheaded woman. They’ll meet you on the outdoor patio of Balls’ Café on Colorado.”
Letty: “What time?”
“Where are you?” Harp asked.
“A place called Burger ’n Pie.”
“Pie ’n Burger,” Harp corrected. “They’ll be at the café in ten minutes, and they’ll wait for ten minutes after that. If you don’t show up by then, they’re gone. You’ve got twenty minutes to get there.”
“How far away are we?”
“Maybe five minutes, but parking can be a problem,” Harp said. “Look at the mapping app on your phone.”
He clicked off; Letty took a last bite of cherry pie and said, “Let’s go.”
On the way to Balls’, Letty repeated to Baxter what she’d been told by Harp. “You’ll go in by yourself. I’ll hang back with the camera. If we’re not going to get names, maybe we can get some facial recognition material.”
“Ah, boy, this is it. This is it,” Baxter moaned. “You’re supposed to be there with the gun, to cover me.”
“I’ll only be a minute or two behind you,” Letty said.
“How long does it take to shoot somebody?” Baxter asked. “Lot less than a minute, huh?”
* * *
The café, as it turned out, was on the left side of the street as they drove east; the outdoor patio was a small alcove with a half-dozen tables, only one of them occupied, and that by an aging hipster with a gray man bun. As they drove past, a blond man and a redheaded woman, both wearing sunglasses, were walking down the sidewalk toward the café.
“Gotta be them. Don’t look, don’t look,” Letty said to Baxter. “Go up a couple of blocks and turn around, cruise by again. If they’re on the patio, I’ll shoot them from the truck, then I can come with you.”
Baxter nodded. They made an illegal U-turn two blocks down Colorado, Letty checking for cops as they did it, then Letty rolled down her window, propped the GX8 against her arm, and looked straight ahead as they passed the café. The camera, in burst mode, fired off a series of frames.
When they were past, Letty checked the camera’s screen, and found five frames that caught the pair with good resolution and from slightly different angles.
“Find a parking spot,” she said. “We got what we need.”
They lucked into a car vacating a space just around the corner from Balls’. Baxter hurriedly parked, and they were out and down the sidewalk, Letty clomping along with the cane and the limp.
“I’ll do the talking, you answer the computer questions,” she said. “Remember, you’re nervous about this.”
“I am nervous, won’t have to fake that,” Baxter said. “You got your gun?”
“I do.”
“Ah, man, I don’t want this. I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
“That has been my understanding,” Letty said.
* * *
As they approached the café, the redheaded woman saw them coming and said something to the blond man, whose back was to them. A waiter had just walked up to the couple, and as Letty and Baxter stepped onto the stone patio, the redhead said, brightly, “Here they are. Could we get a couple more menus?”
The waiter went away, and Letty and Baxter scraped back two of the metal chairs and sat down, and the woman said to them, “I’m Sue, and this is Bob. Who are you?”
Letty: “That’s really funny. We’re a Bob and Sue, too.”
The woman smiled. “That is a funny coincidence. Our mutual friend . . .”
“You mean Professor Harp? He’s not a friend of ours.”
The waiter came with two more menus, and they ordered lemonades and Cokes, and he went away again.
The blond Bob said, “You’re not cops? You have to say if you are.”
“Well, Bob, that’s complete bullshit,” Baxter said, to Letty’s surprise. She was supposed to do the talking. “You should look it up sometime. There’s this thing called Google. They don’t have to admit anything. There have been undercover cops who went so deep they had children with their targets. Anyway, we’re not cops and we’re only here to ask you for advice. How do you get Bitcoin out of a wallet that you have an address for . . . but that somebody else might be interested in? We’re told that you would know.”
