The Fool's Run

with an autopsy. He’s now in what they call a vegetative state.”
    “Tough. It’s a bad way to go.” I nodded at the dark man. “Is this the new boss?”
    The dark man smiled, his even teeth glittering against his olive skin. With the broken nose and the good teeth, he would be devastating with women.
    “I’m afraid you’ve got that backward, Mr. Kidd,” he said mildly. “The board has chosen Ms. Kahn to run Anshiser. She’s asked me to work as her executive assistant. Essentially, I have her old job.”
    “What about Dillon?”
    Maggie shrugged. “Dillon is Dillon. He does the same thing. That’s all he wants to do.” When she first came in the room, her face was deathly pale. Now the color was coming back and the tension was seeping out. The situation was under control. The red numerals of the digital clock on the bedside table said 3:52.
    “How’s LuEllen?” Maggie asked.
    “She’s fine. She went back home.”
    “Was she the one who shot at me, back at the cabin?”
    “Yeah. She was pissed about Dace.”
    “I thought it was she. I knew you were in the Army, and when I heard that machine gun going, and I didn’t hear Frank’s shotgun, I had an idea what happened. When I saw you coming around the corner with LuEllen and those guns, in those camouflage suits, I thought, Dear God, he’s going to shoot me in the back.”
    “I thought about it,” I said. “I had the scope right on your shoulder blades.”
    She shuddered.
    “What happened to Frank and Leonard?” asked the dark man.
    “I’m afraid they’re, uh . . .”
    Maggie glanced at the dark man and then looked back to me.
    “Most of the people involved in the decision to shoot Dace now agree it was a mistake. But it’s a mistake that will be hard to walk away from. You and LuEllen could cause us an infinite amount of damage with a letter or a phone call, and you may have reason to do it. To get back for Dace,” she said. She was using her business voice. The small talk was over.
    I shook my head at her. “We won’t do it. We want to cut a deal. You don’t mess with us, ever, and we’ll never mess with you. We’ve got our money and it’s all over.”
    She glanced at the dark man again, and he said, “Ms. Kahn has suggested that you were too smart to expose yourself this way unless you had done something that would give you protection. Would you like to tell us what it is? A letter with a lawyer or something? A letter in a safety-deposit box?”
    “Ah, no.” I glanced at the clock. 3:56. “That, I’m afraid, could be managed. People could be bought, the charges denied, especially if LuEllen and I weren’t around to back them up. Somebody might say the whole thing was a fantasy . . . and even the people who would believe it wouldn’t have any way to prove it for sure. Besides, the instigator of the whole thing is a vegetable. You can’t put a vegetable on trial.”
    “So what did you do?” Maggie asked.
    I shrugged. “Same old shit you saw in the Washington apartment. A computer blitz. The fact is, if you mess with me or LuEllen, our friends on the computer net will take Anshiser right down the toilet. Right down.”
    Maggie glanced at the dark man again. He frowned and tipped his head back and stared at me, figuring, and finally said to Maggie, “I don’t know.”
    She thought she did, though. She had decided it was a game, and looked at me with what may have been genuine regret.
    “I’m disappointed, Kidd. We thought you’d be better than this. Let me tell you what we’ve done. We have the best people—the very best, better than you—watching every move that’s made on those computers. It has been a major inconvenience, and it cost us a lot of money, but we’ll get it back with the Sunfire contract. In any event, we know you’re not in there. Just in case, we have backups of all our software, and all the daily work. We can shut down and sterilize our system in half an hour, and be back up with completely clean software. Everybody who does anything on the system is logged in and out, and the input is studied by the security crew. There isn’t any way you can reach us. You just don’t have the leverage for a deal.” She shook her head and stood up. “I think it’s time to leave,” she said to the dark man.
    The clock said 3:59.
    “By the way, don’t try to use your telephone. It won’t work,” she said, showing a few teeth. “I couldn’t figure why you stayed in an Anshiser Hotel. You must