Dead Watch

Goodman.”
    “That’d be illegal, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t copy his computer and then use it as evidence.”
    “If you know something for sure, the details of it, then it makes it a lot easier to find evidence outside the original source,” Jake said. “If I can do that, I could give it to a friend of mine in the FBI.”
    She thought for a moment and then smiled and said, “There’s a tunnel between the governor’s mansion and the capitol. I used to go down there with a friend and smoke. But . . . that’s impossible. There are guards, and there’s an alarm system that even covers the inside of the house. We weren’t allowed to go in before a certain time, because the system had to go off.”
    “And his office is impossible.”
    She nodded. “Yeah. It really is. There are the outside guards, the Watchmen, and the inside guards, and alarms. I mean, he’s the governor. And since I left, his secretary is the only other person in there, and she’s in love with him.”
    “All right.”
    “Would you have a problem breaking into a police car?”
    “A police car?”
    “Arlo gets driven around by a highway patrolman. Several of them, actually. They have this big black Mercury. He goes to lunch at Westboro’s almost every day, a little after noon.” They both looked at a wall clock. Ten-thirty. “It’s where all the legislators hang out. He goes there and meets people and they have lunch and do politics. He takes his briefcase and his laptop with him and he usually leaves it on the floor of the backseat when he gets out. The cop leaves the car in a parking garage. It’s pretty dark in there.”
    “You’re saying . . .”
    “You might be able to grab the bag and run. You wouldn’t be able to copy it without him knowing.”
    “Where’s the cop?”
    “In the restaurant,” she said. “He’s also a bodyguard, he eats across the room from Goodman. I ate with him a couple of times. The cop.”
    Jake thought about it for fifteen seconds. “That’s pretty iffy.”
    “That’s all I can think of,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
    Jake slapped his legs, said, “Well. Time to go to Plan B.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you what: you keep quiet about this visit, get well, stay away from Arlo, go to school like a good girl, and when everything quiets down, give me a call. I’ll get you something you’ll like.”
    “You promise?” The light in the eye again, just like when he told her that she’d be gorgeous.
    “We take care of people,” Jake said.

    Back in the car, Madison asked, “Get what you needed?”
    “Maybe.” He thought about it for another moment, and then asked, “Do you know a place called Westboro’s? A restaurant?”
    “Sure. Everybody in Richmond does. Political hash house.”
    “Let’s go over there,” Jake said. “I’d like to look at a parking garage.”
    “Who’re you meeting?”
    “No one, I hope.”
    He told her about the laptop. She said, “That’s pretty iffy,” picking the word right out of his head.
    “We’re hurting pretty bad here,” Jake said. “We need a way to break something out.”
    “Jake, there’ll be alarms . . .”
    “It’s all in the timing,” Jake said. Thought about the package. “Everything’s in the timing.”
    “Well,” she said, “whatever happens, it’ll be a heck of a rush.”

    Westboro’s was a low red-brick building four blocks from the capitol, with an old-fashioned lightbulb marquee out front, and under that, a red neon script that said, THE CAPITAL ’ S BEST STEAKS , CHOPS , SEAFOOD . The parking structure was an ugly poured-concrete lump fifty yards farther down the block. Jake looked at his watch: almost eleven.
    He took the car into the garage, saw the entrance, but no gate. “How do you pay?” he asked.
    “Parking meters inside. The meter guy enforces the meters.”
    “Excellent.”
    He turned into the ramp. As Cathy Ann Dorn had said, it was dark inside. He could see no cameras. The ramps were two-way; you went out the same way you went in. The first upward-slanting ramp was full;the next, around the corner, was only half full. A man walked past them, down the ramp, and out. Jake went onto the next four ramps, then turned around and started down again. On both the back and front walls of the ramps, there were staircases going down.
    He pulled into a parking space, let the engine run, stepped into one of the back staircases, walked down two floors and