The Fool's Run

you’re welcome to it. It would be untraceable.”
    “That’s nice of you. Thanks.”
    “I have to talk to Rudy privately for a moment. I’ll be right back.” I waited in the hallway, heard the sound of their voices, then Anshiser laughed again, and a moment later she came out.
    “His sense of humor seems to be intact,” I said as we headed down the stairs.
    “You seem . . . not exactly to amuse him, but to make him laugh,” she said. “It’s good for him.”
    “What’d I say?”
    She glanced back at me, the smile extending to her eyes this time.
    “I told him I’d offered to let you stay at my place, in the spare bedroom. And how you said, ‘That’s nice of you.’ And he said, ‘God Almighty, Maggie, why don’t you take that boy home and let him screw your brains loose?’ ”
    “That’s when he laughed?”
    “No, he laughed on my line. He never laughs on his own.” She was ahead of me going down the stairs, so all I could see was that tantalizing neck, and not her face.
    “What was your line?”
    She’d reached the bottom of the stairs and crossed the short hall to the outside door. She turned at just the right moment, with one hand on the knob. “I said I planned to do exactly that.”
    I said “Oh” to an empty doorway.
     
    AS A TOP—LEVEL manager, and a large, athletic woman, she was surprisingly soft and yielding in the bedroom. While LuEllen went after sex with the enthusiasm of a beer-drinking cowgirl, Maggie was slower and looser and almost submissive. When we broke apart after making love the first time, she rolled onto her back. The skin of her stomach and breasts was shiny-damp in the dim bedside light, and she said, sounding satisfied with herself, “There.”
    “There, what?”
    She propped herself on one elbow and looked down at me. “There are some men . . . getting them in bed is a challenge, you know? You were such an arrogant asshole the first time we met, out on the sandbar, with your brushes and your paintings and your torn shirt and your tan. I was sweating like a pig, my nylons were full of holes, my hair was a mess, and when I try to make conversation about the hole you cut in your painting, you cut me off at the knees. What a jerk.”
    “Jesus,” I muttered.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. I’d just . . . heard something similar.”
    “Well, you’re the type who would.”
    “Not about me. About someone else,” I said. Time to change the subject. “Are you worried about the raid? We could call it off right now, and nobody would ever know.”
    She dropped flat on her back again. “Sure I’m worried. I’m paid to worry. I’m worried about Rudy, too. The way he talks about dying.”
    “Don’t ignore that,” I said. “Sometimes people know what the doctors don’t.”
    “That’s what worries me. That he might somehow talk himself right into the grave.” She looked sideways at me. “Tell me why this attack is going to work.”
    I thought for a moment. “Because it’s set up right,” I said. “We took some time, and we know what we’re doing. There’s a possibility that we’ll be nailed right away, that there’s some kind of invisible monitoring system in Whitemark’s software, but I’ve been careful and I haven’t seen it; and I’ve been deep enough into their system to know that they depend on it. When we corrupt that system, they’ll be effectively frozen.”
    “People will be hurt.”
    “Not physically. Like Anshiser said the first time I saw him, it’s either his company or Whitemark. Somebody’s got to lose. Whitemark cheated. That makes it a little more okay.”
    “But not completely okay.”
    “Nothing is completely okay.”
    “What about this problem with what’s-his-name, Ratface?” she asked. She knew about the incident with the woman from down the hall, and that we thought the landlord had been lying about Ratface.
    “I still don’t know what that was about,” I said. “Bobby’s watching him, but nothing’s happened. I have it in the back of my head that maybe it wasn’t a divorce thing, that maybe Ratface and the landlord were involved in some kind of blackmail business. You know, we’re not even sure that the technician was putting those bugs on the phones. Maybe he was taking them off. Maybe the landlord called them and said, ‘Hey, these guys are some kind of computer freaks, maybe you better get those bugs out of there.’ I don’t know. That doesn’t feel right either.”
    Maggie laughed softly. “It