The Fool's Run

the sandwich, silently cracked the door to the garage, closed it slowly behind me, walked around the Ford Taurus now parked in the garage and out the back. In another ten seconds I was beside the house, between the pool fence and the garage. LuEllen was walking down the driveway with her bag, waving and smiling at Denton. I heard the front door close.
    “Are you following that lady?”
    The voice was only a couple of feet away, and my heart almost stopped. I looked down, toward the fence, and found a pair of small, blue eyes peering between the woven boards. A little girl, not more than four.
    “Yeah, we’re playing a game,” I said.
    “What kind of game?”
    “Like hide-and-seek,” I said. “But it’s a secret.”
    “Are you sure?” she asked suspiciously.
    “Of course I’m sure. Haven’t you ever seen television?”
    I left her with that to chew on, figuring Denton had had more than enough time to get his sandwich and head downstairs again. I walked straight out the driveway, looking neither right nor left, into the street.
    LuEllen was fifty yards in front of me. When we were out of sight of the house, I jogged until I caught her.
    “Don’t talk to me,” she said.
    “Thanks for pulling me out of there.”
    “Don’t talk to me; I’m too high to talk.”
    We were back at the car in two more minutes. LuEllen hit the coke as we pulled out from the curb. “Goddamn, that feels good.”
    “The coke?”
    “The whole thing. Going in, getting out. God, I’m so high I could fly.”

    WE MOVED INTO a downtown Washington hotel with a handy automated switchboard. That night we called into the bug at the Dentons’, but nothing went out. I lay on the bed reading an Artnews and listening for the tone that signaled a data transmission.
    LuEllen was washing her hair. She left the bathroom door open, tossed her clothes on the toilet seat, and went back and forth past the open door, pleasantly pink as always. We slept in the same bed again that night. The next morning we were in spoons, and I woke up with her moving against my stomach. She was still asleep, I thought, until she muttered, “Geez, feels like somebody dropped a pencil in the bed.”
    “Pencil your ass,” I said.
    “Oh, God, not that,” she said, and rolled away, smiling. The smile slowly faded when she saw my face and she said, “Not yet. It’s hard not to tease you, but I’m afraid if we made love, Dace’s face would come up. That might ruin it forever. . . .”
     
    WE SPENT THE day around the hotel, in the pool, in a shopping arcade, buying books, and watching movies on television. That night, just after eight o’clock, Denton went into the NCIC. We watched the entry transaction come up on our screen, and I was flabbergasted. There were virtually no screening protections at all. He signed on with his own name, a backup code—“weaver”—and an account number. Then he was in.
    What?
     
    Got NCIC entry codes. Would prefer you do search, all known execs Anshiser and associated companies.
     
    Send codes.
    We slept in the same bed again that night, and it was easier, but shorter. The computer started beeping for attention shortly after seven in the morning. Bobby said there would be multiple dumps. I plugged in the printer and routed the incoming data to paper as it arrived.
    It was all there, in the NCIC files, if you knew where to look. Anshiser was involved with the mob all the way back to his teenage years. His father had been an accountant—a banker and money-mover for half of the organized crime syndicates in the country. He was trusted, with impeccable books.
    Anshiser took his father’s methods a step further. He laundered the mob’s dirty cash with a variety of money-making and money-losing ventures: vending machine companies; trash-hauling concerns; hotel casinos in Atlantic City, Reno, Las Vegas, and the Caribbean; hotels in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, Freeport, and a half dozen other tourist destinations. Federal cops suspected him of recirculating big-time drug money through his casinos. The process was simple enough. A drug dealer has, say, a suitcase full of ten-dollar bills—an awkward way to carry your money. Take it to Anshiser, pump it through the company, and out comes a handy pocket-size packet of thousands, ready for a trip to the third world. Less, of course, a ten percent handling fee.
    More sophisticated opportunities were available for investors in the trash-hauling