Dead Watch

car’ll turn in . . .”
    “There haven’t been too many . . . ,” she said anxiously.
    “I’m going.”

    This time he went, walking on one tiptoe. He was ten yards from the garage when another car pulled in. “Shoot.” He stopped and walked back down the block, past Madison, forty yards, fifty yards, then headed back toward the garage. Two men walked out into the sunshine, turned away from him, toward Westboro’s. He closed into the garage, was twenty yards away, his tiptoe foot getting tired, when they went into the restaurant.
    A minute later he was inside, walking up the ramp, feeling the hammer heavy in his pocket. Watching behind for another car. Hurrying now. Up the first ramp, around the corner. He thought about the scarf, thought fuck it , then got it out anyway, did a quick wrap around his lower face. Pulled on the gloves. Between that and the hat, nothing would be visible but his eyes. And it was dark.
    He got the cell phone out, pushed the button, heard it start to ring. Madison would be moving.
    He took a deep breath, listened for a car, heard nothing, started counting, “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two . . .” stepped quickly over to the Mercury, pulled the hammer out of his pocket and hit the back window with it. The glass exploded inward, and the car alarm went. He knocked out the rest of the glass with the hammerhead, reached through the window into the screaming wail of the alarm, pulled open the back door, spotted the briefcase on the floor, grabbed it, and ran.
    Down to the back door. Nothing coming up the ramp at him. Down the stairs and around, counting, “One-thousand-nine, one-thousand-ten . . .”
    He stopped at the door, pulled down the mask, pushed it under his shirt collar, and stepped out. Madison was just cruising along the street, pulled over. Jake got in the car, still counting, but now, aloud. “One-thousand-fourteen, one-thousand-fifteen.”
    He looked out the back window.
    Nothing moved around the parking garage. They turned the corner and were gone.

    “I had a thought,” she said. She was cool, contained, but with a little pink in her cheeks. “If Arlo thinks about this and thinks, ‘Jake Winter,’ what if he has the Highway Patrol look for us? Stop us on some phony drug charge? Search the car.”
    “Huh.” He considered the idea for a minute, then said, “We can’t take a chance. Let’s go to the airport. We can rent another car, you can follow me back. If you see me get stopped, you can keep on going.”
    “I’m so scared I could pee my pants,” Madison said.
    “Those are obscenely expensive leather seats you’re sitting on,” Jake said. She started to laugh, and then he started, and he said, “I’m sweating like a horse myself. Let’s get the fuck out of Virginia.”

17 

    Russell Barnes was a double amputee with a mop of red hair tied in a ponytail with white string. A long, thin red beard straggled down the front of his green army T-shirt. He met them at the front door, took a long look at Madison, and said, “Jake, nice to see you. How’s the leg?”
    “Not bad. How’s the pain?”
    “I’m so hooked on the drugs that even if it goes away, I’m gonna have to deal with the drug problem. I don’t know if I can do that,” he said.
    As they talked, they followed him, in his wheelchair, back through the dimly lit tract house to what had once been a family room, now jammed with computer equipment. A ten-foot-long wooden workbench, littered with electronic testing equipment, three keyboards, and a half dozen monitors of different sizes, was pushed against one wall, under a photograph of a man in an army uniform posed as the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The workbench was low, made for a man in a wheelchair; the room smelled of Campbell’s tomato soup.
    “Whatcha got?” Barnes asked.
    “Laptop,” Jake said, taking it out of his bag. “Password protected.”
    He handed Barnes the HP laptop. Barnes looked it over, plugged it into an electric strip on the top of the workbench, brought it up. “This might take a couple of minutes.”
    There was no place to go, no place to sit, so Jake and Madison stood and watched as Barnes played with the computer. He said, “Commercial password program. That’s not good.”
    “You can’t get around it?”
    “I can get around the password, but I suspect that a lot of the stuff on it is going to be encrypted. Encryption is part of the program.”
    “Can you beat the encryption?” Madison