The Fool's Run

do you want to do?” I asked, looking at LuEllen. “You’re the skeptical one. If you don’t want to do it, we’ll call it off.”
    She chewed on a thumbnail.
    “A half million bucks,” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    “All right,” she said. She pointed a finger at me. “But one more problem and I’m outa here.”
     
    “WE HAVEN’T DONE enough research on these guys,” LuEllen said. It was the next day, and she was draped over an easy chair, looking at the final list of Whitemark burglary targets. All of them, Bobby thought, had access to Whitemark computers from their homes. “We’re going in semi-blind. It bothers me.”
    “We don’t have time for more,” I said.
    “If you get caught, the whole job goes up in smoke,” said Dace from his perch on the arm of a couch. He had a tin can of Prince Albert in one hand and a pinch of tobacco between the thumb and forefinger of the other.
    “That’s why LuEllen’s here. To keep risks to a minimum.”
    “But you’re not taking her advice,” Dace argued. “She said we need more research. You’re pushing to go in now.”
    He was right, but there was no help for it. Every day that passed brought Whitemark’s version of String closer to completion. If we didn’t move quickly, there wouldn’t be any point in doing it at all.
    “Look, couldn’t we spend a week scouting all of them, and then pick the best two or three?” Dace asked.
    “We don’t have a week,” I said. “We have to take our best shot and go into the computers and see where we are. Maybe we’ll only need one or two, and all the other scouting would be a waste of time.”
    “But . . .”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” LuEllen said, waving us down. “It makes me nervous, but I didn’t say we couldn’t do it. We have to be careful, that’s all.”
    “I don’t like it,” Dace said. “I hate sitting around here. I wish I could come along and drive. Or something. Anything.”
    “We already talked about that. Having you along wouldn’t help, it’d only make things worse,” LuEllen snapped. “Let’s just work on this list, okay?”
    We wanted to do three specific things inside the Whitemark computers. We wanted to interfere with the programs used to design the Hellwolf. We wanted to destroy Whitemark administrative systems. And we wanted to attack the computer itself, to fundamentally bollix up the way it operated.
    The best way to do that was to get the entry codes of the top systems programmer. With those codes we would be able to move through the whole system. But going after a systems man was dangerous. Computer experts are paranoically sensitive about security: if we broke into the top man’s house he might change his codes as a matter of routine. It would take only a few minutes, and he could do it himself, so why not?
    Instead of going after the systems programmer first, I decided to go after an engineer and a manager and hope we could get into the programming levels through their terminals.
    “We want a suburban neighborhood of single-family houses, not an apartment complex, because there are fewer people around. We don’t want kids, because kids get sick and stay home from school, or come home at odd times. And if there aren’t any kids, both the husband and wife are probably out during the day, at work,” LuEllen said, ticking off the points on her fingers. “If the neighborhood and the house are right, the Ebberly woman ought to be our top target. Bobby’s credit report says her husband is an executive with the Postal Service, which is a nine-to-five job. The other ones, where the husband works for Whitemark and the wife works somewhere else, it’s hard to tell how important they are. They could be working late shifts or early shifts.”
    “So we go for the woman, the personnel evaluator. Samantha Ebberly. Samantha and Frank,” I said.
    LuEllen nodded. “We’ll give them first look, anyway.”
    That night I did a few spreads with the tarot, but couldn’t find anything significant. The Fool was in hiding.
     
    WE LEFT THE apartment at nine o’clock the next morning. The day was already thick and sultry, with thin, morose clouds sliding off to the south. We were dressed in tennis whites and court shoes. We carried tennis bags with racket handles sticking out of the side pockets.
    “White folks think burglars are these big black dudes with panty hose on their heads, who come in the middle of the night. They won’t look twice at a white couple