The Fool's Run

dildos, handcuffs, a whip, masks. And dolls. The Army dolls that boys play with, and two old-fashioned fat, plastic baby dolls that cry when they sit up. There were three lights with umbrella reflectors, pulldown seamless paper, and a pair of Hasselblad cameras, each with its own tripod. Next to it was a professional color darkroom.
    The rest of the basement was stacked with cartons and envelopes. LuEllen had opened the cartons and held a sheaf of slender, full-color magazines.
    “Take a look at these,” she said.
    The magazines ran the gamut of the sexual activities usually portrayed by porno magazines, with one significant difference. In each picture, one of the participants was a child. And the shots had been taken in the neat little photo studio.
    “These are those child-porn assholes you hear about,” LuEllen said. She was wearing a pink blouse, not her own, holding her shoulder, and shouting. “I’m going to burn this fucking place down.”
    “No, you’re not,” I said, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her tight. “We can use this. You get everything you’d normally take—guns, money, jewelry, and grab those Hasselblads and all the lenses you see; those are worth a bundle. Let’s hurry. Take one copy of each magazine, but don’t mess them up. And for Christ’s sake, don’t get prints on them.”
    I ran back up the stairs and started making copies of all the file disks. If they were what I thought, I’d have a complete mailing list for the child-porn ring. It took fifteen minutes to copy the files. While I did it, LuEllen went through the place with a vengeance. She came into the office once, to get my tennis bag, and when I finished, I found her with two fat garbage bags in the kitchen.
    “We’ll take twenty grand out of here,” she said with satisfaction.
    “Jesus, if a cop sees us carrying those bags, he’ll stop us for sure,” I said. “There’s way too much stuff.”
    “I know. So we leave them here in the kitchen, except for your disks, and go get the car, come back, load them up, and take off,” she said.
    “Oh, man, I don’t know.”
    “It’s what a doper would do with a load this size,” she said defiantly. “He’d take the risk.”
    So did we. We brought the car back, and I jumped out, while LuEllen waited with the car running in the driveway. I walked up to the front door, knocked, pushed through, got the bags, brought them out, tossed them in the backseat. On an impulse I walked back to the house, took the Schiele off the wall, carried it out to the car, and handed it across the seat to her.
    “That was stupid,” she said fiercely as we drove away. She was hurting.
    “Yeah.”
    A few minutes later she said, “I feel bad about the dog. He was doing his job.” A minute later, she punched me on the arm. “Saved my ass, Kidd.”
    LuEllen went up to the apartment ahead of me, and when I came in, carrying the bags, Dace had her wrapped up in his arms.
    “We’ve got to get a doctor,” he said.
    “Can you handle that?” I asked. “Somebody who’ll keep his mouth shut?”
    “Yeah. I know a guy.”
    “Tell him the dog was a neighbor’s, and we’ll make sure it’s quarantined, and not to sweat it, we don’t want any trouble, no reports,” I said.
    “I knew something was going to happen,” he said. “Sooner or later.”
    “What are you going to do about those freaks?” LuEllen asked.
    “If the number codes get me into the system, I can make some changes that will give me the same status as the systems programmer,” I said. “I’ll be able to go anywhere in the system. After the operation is running, we’ll write to the cops. Tell them the truth. That we broke in, what we found. I got a copy of their whole subscription list, we’ll print it out and include that, say we found it with the magazines. Child pornography is not appreciated in the state of Virginia. They’ll be looking at ten years in the joint.”
    “What if the burglary scares them so much that they dump all the stuff?” LuEllen asked.
    “They’ll freak out, but they won’t dump it,” I said. “There’s too much money involved. Especially if they think they were hit by a crackhead who wouldn’t be any further threat.”
    “What about the kids who get fucked between now and then?”
    I shook my head. “It’s not a perfect world. If you want to nail these people, put them out of business, this is the way to do it.”
    She wasn’t happy. Dace, on the other hand, was