The Bad Place Part 3

Bobby had never been the kind who liked to hang out with a bunch of guys at a bar or ball game-partly because it was difficult to find other guys in their middle thirties who were interested in the things that he cared about: big-ban music, the arts and pop culture of the '30s and '40s, and cla.s.sic Disney comic books.

Julie wasn't a lunch-with-the-girls type either, because not many thirty-year-old women were into the big-band era, Warner Brothers cartoons, martial arts, or advanced weapons training. In spite of spending so much time together, they remained fresh to each other, and she was still the most interesting and appealing woman he had ever known.

"What's taking them so long?" she asked, glancing up at the now-lighted windows of Decodyne, bright but fuzzy rectangles in the mist.

"Be patient with them, dear, Bobby."

"They don't have the dynamism of Dakota and Dakota. They're just a humble SWAT team."

Michaelson Drive was blocked off. Eight police vehicle cars and vans-were scattered along the street. The chill night crackled with the static and metallic voices sputtering out of police-band radios. An officer was behind the wheel of one of the cars, and other uniformed men were positioned at both ends of the block, and two more were visible at the front doors of Decodyne; the rest were inside, looking for Rasmussen. Meanwhile, men from the police lab and coroner's office were photographing, measuring, and removing the bodies of the two gunmen.

"What if he gets away with the diskettes?" Julie asked.

"He won't."

She nodded. "Sure, I know what you're thinking-Wizard was developed on a closed-system computer with no links beyond Decodyne. But there's another system in the company, with modems and everything, isn't there?

What if he takes the diskettes to one of those terminals and sends them out by phone?"

"Can't. The second system, the outlinked system, is totally different from the one on which Wizard was developed. Incompatible."

"Rasmussen is clever."

"There's also a night lockout that keeps the outlinked system shut down."

"Rasmussen is clever," she repeated.

She continued to pace in front of him.

The skinned spot on her forehead, where she had met the steering wheel when she'd jammed on the brakes, was no longer bleeding, though it looked raw and wet. She had wiped her face with tissues, but smears of dried blood, which looked almost like bruises, had remained under her right eye and along her jaw line. Each time Bobby focused on those stains or on the shallow wound, a pang of anxiety quivered through him at the realization of what might have happened to her, to both of them.

Not surprisingly, her injury and the blood on her face only accentuated her beauty, making her appear more fragile and therefore more precious.

Julie was beautiful, although Bobby realized that she appeared more so to his eyes than to others, which was all right because, after all, his eyes were the only ones through which he could look at her. Though it was kinking up a bit now in the moist night air, her chestnut-brown hair was usually thick and l.u.s.trous. She had wide-set eyes as dark as semi-sweet chocolate, skin as smooth and naturally as toffee ice cream, and a generous mouth that always taste sweet to him. Whenever he watched her without her being fully aware of the intensity of his attention, or when he was apart from her and tried to conjure an image of her in his mind, he always thought of her in terms of food: chestnuts, chocolate toffee, cream, sugar, b.u.t.ter. He found this amusing, but he always understood the profundity of his choice of similes: She reminded him of food because she, was more than food, she sustained him.

Activity at the entrance to Decodyne, about sixty feet away at the end of a palm-flanked walkway, drew Julie's attention and then Bobby's.

Someone from the SWAT team had closed the doors to report to the guards stationed there. A moment later one of the officers motioned for Julie and Bobby to go forward.

When they joined him, he said, "They found this Rasmusen. You want to see him, make sure he has the right diskettes?"

"Yeah," Bobby said.

"Definitely," Julie said, and her throaty voice didn't sound at all s.e.xy now, just tough.

KEEPING A lookout for any Laguna Beach police who might be running graveyard-s.h.i.+ft patrols, Frank Pollard removed the bundles of cash from the flight bag and piled them on the car seat beside him. He counted fifteen packets of twenty-dollar bills and eleven bundles of hundreds.

He judged the thickness of each wad to be approximately one hundred bills, and when he did the mathematics in his head he came up with $140,000. He had no idea where the money had come from or whether it belonged to him.

The first of two small, zippered side compartments in the bag yielded another surprise-a wallet that contained no cash and no credit cards but two important pieces of identification: a Social Security card and a California driver's license. With the wallet was a United States pa.s.sport. The photographs on the pa.s.sport and license were of the same man: thirtyish, brown hair, a round face, prominent ears, brown eyes, an easy smile, and dimples. Realizing he had also forgotten what he looked like, he tilted the rear view mirror and was able to see enough of his face to match it with the one on the ID. The problem was... the license and pa.s.sport bore the name James Roman, not Frank Pollard.

He unzipped the second of the two smaller compartments, and found another Social Security card, pa.s.sport, and California driver's license.

These were all in the name of George Farris, but the photos were of Frank.

James Roman meant nothing to him.

George Farris was also meaningless. And Frank Pollard, whom he believed himself to be, was only a cipher, a man without any past that he could recall.

"What the h.e.l.l am I tangled up in?" he said aloud.

He needed to hear his own voice to convince himself that he was, in fact, not just a ghost reluctant to leave this world for one to which death had ent.i.tled him.

As the fog closed around his parked car, blotting out most of the night beyond, a terrible loneliness overcame him.

He could think of no one to whom he could turn, nowhere which he could retreat and be a.s.sured of safety. A man with a past was also a man without a future.

WHEN BOBBY and Julie stepped out of the elevator onto the third floor, in the company of a police officer named McGrath, Julie saw Tom Rasmussen sitting on the polished gray vinyl tiles, his back against the wall of the corridor, his hands cuffed in front of him and linked by a length of chain to shackles that bound his ankles together. He was pouting. He had tried to steal software worth tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions, and from the window of Ackroyd's office he had cold-bloodily given the signal to have Bobby killed, yet here he was pouting like a child because he had been caught. His weasel face was puckered, and his lower lip was thrust out, and his yellow-brown eyes looked watery, as though he might break into tears if anyone dared to say a cross word. The mere sight of him infuriated Julie. She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, all the way into his stomach, so he could re-chew whatever he had last eaten.

The cops had found him in a supply closet, behind boxes that he had rearranged to make a pitifully obvious hiding place. Evidently, standing at Ackroyd's window to watch the fireworks, he had been surprised when Julie had appeared in the Toyota. She had driven the Toyota into the Decodyne parking lot early in the day and had stayed far back from the building, in the shadows beneath the boughs of the laurel, where no one had spotted her. Instead of fleeing the moment he saw the first gunman run down, Rasmussen had hesitated, no doubt wondering who else was out there. Then he heard the sirens, and his only option was to hide out in the hope they would only search the building casually and conclude that he had escaped. With a computer, he was a genius, but when it came to making cool decisions under fire, Rasmussen was not half as bright as he thought he was.

Two heavily armed cops were watching over him. But because he was huddled and s.h.i.+vering and on the verge of tears they were a bit ludicrous in their bulletproof vests, cradling automatic weapons, squinting in the fluorescent glare, and looking grim.

Julie knew one of the officers, Sampson Garfeuss, from her own days with the sheriffs department, where Sampson had served before joining the City of Irvine force. Either his parents had been present or he had striven mightily to live up to his name, for he was both tall and broad and rocklike. He held a little box that contained four small floppy diskettes.

He showed it to Julie and said, "Is this what he was after?"

"Could be," she said, accepting the box.

Taking the diskettes from her, Bobby said, "I'll have to go down one floor to Ackroyd's office, switch on the computer POP these in, and see what's on them."

"Go ahead," Sampson said.

"You'll have to accompany me," Bobby said to McGrath the officer who had brought them up on the elevator.

"keep a watch on me, make sure I don't tamper with the evidence, he indicated toward Rasmussen. "We don't want this piece of slime thinking they were blank disks, saying I framed him copying the real stuff onto them myself."

As Bobby and McGrath went into one of the elevators and descended to the second floor, Julie hunkered down in front of Rasmussen.

"You know who I am?"

Rasmussen looked at her but said nothing.

"I'm Bobby Dakota's wife. Bobby was in that van your goons shot up. It was my Bobby you tried to kill."

He looked away from her, at his cuffed wrists.

She said, "Know what I'd like to do to you?" She held one of her hands down in front of his face, and wiggled her manicured nails.

"For starters, I'd like to grab you by the throat hold your head against the wall, and ram two of these nice sharp fingernails straight through your eyes, all the way deep, real deep in your fevered little brain, and twist them around, see if maybe I can unscramble whatever's messed in there."

"Jesus, lady," Sampson's partner said. His name was Burdock. Beside anyone but Sampson, he would have been a better man.

"Well," she said, "he's too screwed up to get any help from a prison psychiatrist."

Sampson said, "Don't do anything foolish, Julie."

Rasmussen glanced at her, meeting her eyes for only a second, but that was long enough for him to understand the depth of her anger and to be frightened by it. A flush of childish embarra.s.sment and temper had accompanied his pout, but now his face went pale.

To Sampson, in a voice that was too shrill and querulous to be as tough as he intended, Rasmussen said, "Keep this crazy b.i.t.c.h away from me."

"She's not actually crazy," Sampson said. "Not clinically speaking, at least. Pretty hard to have anyone declared crazy these days, I'm afraid. Lots of concern about their civil rights, you know. No, I wouldn't say she's crazy."

Without looking away from Rasmussen, Julie said, "Thank you so much, Sam."

"You'll notice I didn't say anything about the other half of his accusation," Sampson said good-naturedly.

"Yeah, I got your point."

While she talked to Sampson, she kept her attention on Rasmussen.

Everyone harbored a special fear, a private bogeyman built to his own specifications and crouched in a dark corner of his mind, and Julie knew what Tom Rasmussen feared more than anything in the world. Not heights.

Not confining s.p.a.ces. Not crowds, cats, flying, insects, dogs, or darkness. Dakota & Dakota had developed a thick file on him in recent weeks, and had turned up the fact that he suffered from a phobia of blindness. In prison, every month with the regularity of a true obsessive, he had demanded an eye exam, claiming his vision was deteriorating, and he'd pet.i.tioned to be tested periodically for syphilis, diabetes, and other diseases that, untreated, could result in blindness. When not in prison-and he had been there twice-he had a standing, monthly appointment with an ophthalmologist in Costa Mesa.

Still squatting in front of Rasmussen, Julie took hold of his chin. He flinched. She twisted his head toward her. She thrust two fingers of her other hand at him, raked them down his cheek, making red welts on his wan skin, but not hard enough to draw blood.

He squealed and tried to strike her with his cuffed hands, but he was inhibited by both his fear and the chain that tethered his wrists to his ankles.

"What the h.e.l.l you think you' doing?"

She spread the same two fingers with which she'd scratched him, and now she poked them at him, stopping just two inches short of his eyes.

He winced, made a mewling sound, and tried to pull loose of her, but she held him fast by the chin, forcing a confrontation.

"Me and Bobby have been together eight years, more than seven, and they've been the best years of my life but you come along and think you can just squash him the way you'd squash a bug."

She slowly brought her fingertips closer to his eyes. An inch and a half. One inch.

Rasmussen tried to pull back. His head was against the wall He had nowhere to go.

The sharp tips of her manicured fingernails were less than half an inch from his eyes.

"This is police brutality," Rasmussen said.

"I'm not a cop," Julie said.

"They are," he said, rolling his eyes at Sampson and Burdock. "Better get this b.i.t.c.h away from me, I'll sue your a.s.s off."

With her fingernails she flicked his eyelashes.

His attention snapped back to her. He was breathing fast and suddenly he was sweating too.

She flicked his lashes again, and smiled.

The dark pupils in his yellow-brown eyes were open wide.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds better hear me, I swear, I'll sue, they'll kick you off the force-"

She flicked his lashes again.

He closed his eyes tight.

"-they'll take away your G.o.d d.a.m.ned uniforms and badges, they'll throw you in prison, an you know what happens to ex-cops in prison, they get the s.h.i.+t kicked out of them, broken, killed, raped!" His voice spiraled up, cracked on the last word, like the voice of an adolescent boy.

Glancing at Sampson to be sure she had his tacit if not active approval to carry this just a little further, glancing also at Burdock and seeing that he was not as placid as Sampson but would probably stay out of it for a while yet, Julie pressed her fingernails against Rasmussen's eyelids.

He attempted to squeeze his eyes even more tightly shut.

She pressed harder.

"You tried to take Bobby away from me, so I'll take your eyes away from you."

"You're nuts!"

She pressed still harder.

"Make her stop," Rasmussen demanded of the two cops.

"If you didn't want me to have my Bobby to look at, why should I let you look at anything ever again?"

"What do you want?"

Perspiration poured down Rasmussen's face; he looked like a candle in a bonfire, melting fast.

"Who gave you permission to kill Bobby?"

"Permission? What do you mean? n.o.body. I don't need-"

"You wouldn't have tried to touch him if your employer hadn't told you to do it."

"I knew he was on to me," Rasmussen said frantically, and because she had not let up the pressure with her nails, thin tears flowed from under his eyelids.

"I knew he was out there, tumbled to him five or six days ago, even though he used different vans, trucks, even that orange van with the county seal on it. So I had to do something, didn't I? I couldn't walk away from the job, too much money at stake. I couldn't just let him nail me when I finally got Wizard, so I had to do something. Listen, Jesus, it was as simple as that."

"You're just a computer freak, a hired hacker-morally bent, sleazy, but you're no tough guy. You're soft, squishy-soft. You wouldn't plan a hit on your own. Your boss told you to do it."

"I don't have a boss. I'm freelance."