The Fool's Run

take off for work, or go into the city or out to the beaches. It’s empty, nobody home.”
    She glanced up at me and grinned. “You’re twitching.”
    “I’ll be okay,” I said, irritably. The words were strangled in my own ears.
    “It’s a trip,” she said. She put her hand up to her face as though she were coughing and took another hit on the cocaine.
    Nothing moved along the street as we came up to the house. LuEllen looked casually around. “Let’s do it,” she said hoarsely. Halfway up the drive, we could hear the phone ringing. On the front step. LuEllen pushed the doorbell with a knuckle, and then knocked. Nothing. She took a silent dog whistle from her pocket and blew on it, hard. There was no answering bark.
    “Probably okay,” she said, looking around again. We’d been at the door for fifteen seconds. She took a short, curved bar from the tennis bag, and I stepped back to cover her with my body. She shoved one end of the bar in the crack between the door and the jamb, and threw her full weight against it. There was a loud crack, and the door popped open.
    “Goddamn. That was loud,” I muttered.
    “Nobody ever looks,” she said. She pushed the door open with the back of her hand, and we stepped inside. We were in a short hall off the living room. The kitchen was to the left, with coffee cups and cereal bowls still on the table. The living room was furnished with a couch and easy chair, a piano, a couple of tables. There was a cheap Art Barn—type oil painting over the couch.
    “Let’s move. Get the gloves on,” LuEllen said. She handed me a pair of latex surgeon’s gloves from the tennis bag.
    “The computer’s probably upstairs in this kind of house,” she said. “You go up there. Check all the bedrooms before you do anything. I’ll check the basement.” As I headed up the stairs, she picked up the phone in the kitchen to kill the ringing.
    The computer was in a converted bedroom. I checked the rest of the rooms, found nobody, and went back to the computer. It was a standard IBM-AT with a Hayes modem. An inexpensive plastic disk box sat next to it. I brought the computer up and started flipping through the disks. All but three were neatly labeled—Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Files, and so on. The three unlabeled disks were from different manufacturers, so Ebberly probably kept track of the contents simply by remembering the brand names. I took a box of blank disks and a special disk-cracking program of my own out of the tennis bag. When the computer came up, I loaded my cracker disk, and stripped the directory out of the first unnamed disk. Games.
    I loaded one to make sure, and a popular baseball game flashed on the screen. Pirated, of course. I killed it and shoved in a second disk. It was a custom communications program. After a little manipulation it coughed up a short list of seven-letter words. Code words.
    “That’s the baby,” I muttered to the machine. It took two minutes to duplicate the disk on one of my blanks.
    As I made the copy, LuEllen was working in the other parts of the house. From the sound of it, she was trashing the place, but there was no time to look.
    When the code disk was copied, I dropped it in my bag and pushed in the third disk. More games. I put in another disk, labeled as Files. I opened one and found personal letters. I opened another, and an accounting program showed a list of personal accounts. The Ebberlys were doing well, according to the accounts—and I was pretty sure that they weren’t being clever with mislabeled disks. As I put the original disks back in the storage box, LuEllen came to the door. She was panting.
    “How’s it going?”
    “Halfway there,” I said. She nodded and disappeared, and I looked at the phone outlet where the modem was plugged in. It was a standard AT&T connection. I got a screwdriver from the tennis bag, removed the wall plate, and pulled out the tangle of wires behind it. It took a minute to find the right wires, isolate them, and strip a half-inch length off each. The bug, a piece of exotic hardware about the size of a beer bottle cap, clipped onto the bare wires. The work was not difficult, but it was delicate. Every move took an eternity.
    When it was done, I put the wall plate back in place and screwed it in tight. If a knowledgeable phone tech took the plate off, the bug was hanging there like a great, fat leech. With any luck, it wouldn’t happen for years.
    “We’ve been in ten minutes.