The Fool's Run

computer.”
    “Fucking computer is right,” LuEllen said, walking from one picture frame to the next. “You could hurt yourself doing some of this stuff.”
    “Think it’s up or down?”
    “What?”
    “The computer, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Up,” she said. She peered closely at me. “You okay? You looked cranked.”
    “It’s okay. It was that dog.”
    The computer was in the first room at the top of the stairs, an efficient little office with an IBM, two big lockable disk boxes, both unlocked, and a desk made of a Formica countertop set on a half dozen two-drawer filing cabinets. The only odd element was the clock on the wall. The face of the clock portrayed a nude woman seen end-on, her legs representing the clock’s hands. The view was unblushingly gynecological.
    I brought the IBM up and was shuffling through the disks when LuEllen called.
    “Hey Kidd, take a look at this.”
    “Just a second.” I popped my cracker disk into the machine and started it loading. When I stepped out of the office, I found LuEllen in the hall, holding a wad of Kleenex against her bleeding shoulder, and gazing into a bedroom.
    “Look.” She pointed into the bedroom. There was a waterbed with black candles on the head-board, and a mirrored wall. The main attraction was a photo mural of a woman’s face as she performed oral sex on a man who was mostly, but not entirely, out of the picture.
    “Look at the size of that thing,” LuEllen said.
    “Shoot, I’ve seen donkeys bigger than that,” I said.
    “I meant the picture, not the guy,” she said, coloring a bit. “But I’ll tell you what, Kidd. These people aren’t a little weird. They’re a lot weird. There’s a picture like this in every bedroom. This might be some kind of whorehouse. Maybe that’s how they could afford to buy the place. Maybe that’s why they don’t have any alarms. They don’t want the cops coming in, no matter what.”
    “I got to get back,” I said. I returned to the office, and LuEllen started trashing the bedrooms. I loaded and reloaded the disks, looking for the communications program. The boxes were full of disks identified only by number. I was on the fourth or fifth one, all files, when LuEllen went past the door, stuck her head in, said, “Found two grand in cash, three guns, and six dildos,” and kept going. A second later, she went down the stairs to the living-room level.
    The communications program was on the seventh disk. I had pulled off the phone plate and was ready to wire in the bug, but took a minute to run through the program. There was a list of code words, but they looked too similar to the words used by Ebberly and Durenbarger. They might get me into all the system files, but I wasn’t sure they would give me access to the programming level.
    As the disk was being copied, I finished wiring the bug into the phone box, and put the plate back on. When the communications disk was copied, I dropped the copy into the tennis bag, and looked quickly at the rest of the disks. They were all files, mostly long lists of names and addresses. The files were protected by a commercial security program that wasn’t quite worthless: it slowed me down by about five seconds per disk.
    When I finished, I pulled out the file drawers under the counter and went through the paper files. Nothing of immediate interest. I was closing the bottom drawer when a flash of white on the inside front panel caught my eye. I pulled it all the way out, and found a piece of masking tape. Seven ten-digit numbers were written on the tape. That looked promising. I copied them out in the order they were written in.
    “Kidd!” LuEllen was shouting up the stairs. “C’mere, quick.”
    I pushed the drawer shut, shoved the copied disks and the list of numbers into the tennis bag, and headed down the stairs. There was no one in the living or dining rooms.
    “Where are you?” I called.
    “Down in the basement.”
    The windowless basement was divided lengthwise down the middle. In one half was the utility room, with a washing machine and drier, a tool bench, storage, and what looked like a small bathroom. With the exception of one room, the other half was nothing like the upstairs. It was a warehouse, a paradigm of efficiency, with fluorescent overhead lights and flat white tile floors.
    The exception was the neat little photo studio. It had a velvet couch, a pile of red and black velvet drapes, and a cardboard box full of sexual implements: