Interface (72 page)

He snapped back to the steamy reality of Miami. The gas station
kid was peering at him. "You okay, mister?"

"Yeah. How's the oil?"

"Fine." Then, continuing to pursue his endemic insanity theory,
he said, "It's the lead."

"Lead?"

"Yeah. Even though the lead mines are shut down, Cacher is
soaked through with lead pollution, and like we learned in school,
that will make you crazy."

Mel muttered genially, as if this information were fascinating,
and handed over his credit card. The kid took it into the battered
old station and swiped it through the electronic slot. Their building
didn't look like much but they had the latest point-of-purchase
electronics.

"You got something else, buddy?" asked the kid with a satisfied
leer on his face, waggling the card in the air. "You've got to pay
your bills from time to time, you know . . . just kiddin'."

Mel was too surprised to be embarrassed. He compulsively paid
every bill within twenty-four hours of receipt, especially the
national ones. You didn't let bills get overdue. Unlike the people who ran Washington, Mel understood that an overdue bill was a
club that other people could wave over your head.

"It's a mistake," he said, "but why don't you try this one." He
handed the kid another credit card. Once again, it was rejected.

"Shit buddy, don't you every pay your bills? What about cash?"

Mel looked in his wallet. It contained several hundred-dollar
bills, a ten, and a five. The bill was $16.34.

"Can you break a hundred? Mel asked, already feeling he knew
the answer.

The kid yukked it up for a little bit. "I can't remember the last
time I saw a C-note. We never got more than a few bucks in
change."

Down the street, set anachronistically into the sandstone facade
of an old bank, was an ATM machine with a familiar logo. Mel
took off his jacket, ambled slowly down the street, trying not to get
hotter than he was, and stuck his bank card into the slot.

The video screen said PLEASE WAIT.

An alarm bell began ringing on the side of the bank.

A siren began to sound from the direction of the police station in downtown Miami, two blocks away.

Mel lurched back down the street, got to the car, and turned on the ignition.

"Hold it right there, hot shot," said the kid. Mel looked over and
was astounded to see a twelve-gauge pump shotgun cradled in the
kid's hands. "You might as well wait for Harold to come."

The Miami P.D. patrol car, an aging Caprice, swung around the
corner. Mel knew that he could easily outrun it. But it wouldn't be
a good idea. Instead he shut off the ignition, and, as a good faith
gesture, took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them up on the dashboard, in plain sight. He rolled the window back down and put
both hands on the steering wheel.

A lean, small, pox-faced cop emerged reluctantly from the Caprice, winced from the heat, and walked over toward Mel,
moving with exaggerated slowness.

"Harold, I presume." Mel said, when he got close enough.

"What we got here li'l buddy?" Harold said to the kid.

"Looks like it's credit card fraud to me," said the kid.

"Come on out of there, fellow," said Harold, shooting a mean,
judgmental look at Mel. "Don't make a bad thing worse for you."

Mel was pissed off, hopelessly out of any chance to control
things. He eased out of the car, frustrated, frightened, feeling
helpless for the first time in years, and said, "I don't know what the
hell has happened."

"Nothing yet, and nothing will, unless you do something
stupid."

"All I want is to pay for my gas and go to Cacher."

Harold looked at the kid and said, "Why in the name of God
would anybody want to go to Cacher?" Mel knew what was
coming next, Harold said it anyway. "Ain't nobody there, but a
bunch of loony-tunes."

Mel said, "Let me talk to you straight." He had spent enough time downstate to know that this attitude might be appreciated.
"I'm not trying to pull a fast one, and I don't know why none of
my cards don't work. Look, take the AMEX, call the eight hundred
number and you'll see I've got a huge line of credit, and Texaco's
been all paid up, and I don't know why the ATM went crazy."

Harold looked at him and then at the kid. "He broke any laws?"

"Not exactly."

"Fella, you look decent enough. Let's go rescue your bank card
and send you on your way out of town."

They strolled down to the bank, which had closed at three
o'clock. Harold banged on the front door, and a Big Hair Girl peered out the door.

"Honey, your machine's done eaten this man's card. Think you
could dig it out so's he could leave to go to" - and here Harold
could not keep a straight face - "Cacher."

"Cacher," she shrieked, "who the hell would want to go there?" Mel by this time had heard all he wanted to about the deficiencies
of Cacher and simply said, "I've got some relatives out there."

Honey retreated into the bank, opened up the machine from the
back side, and retrieved Mel's card. "Before I can let you have this,
mister, I got to make sure you're who you say you are," she said.
She sat down at a desk, called Chicago, asked a few questions,
whistled, shook her head in wonderment.

"Buddy," she said, handing the card over, "I'm going to treat you with a lot more respect. You're one rich sucker."

Mel relaxed, realizing for the first time that he was probably
going to get out of Miami alive. "Could I get change for a hundred
so I can pay off boy wonder over at the Texaco?"

Harold didn't like that. "Now slick, you just be careful. That's my nephew over there, and you bad-mouth any of my kin, you
might be spending a night in jail."

Mel fumed at his own stupidity, considered a number of replies,
and decided to shut up.

Honey gave him his change. Mel thanked her and resolved to get out of Miami as quickly as he could, saying as little as possible. He
handed boy wonder a twenty.

"Seriously mister," the kid said, getting Mel's change, "take care
of yourself. We had people go out there and not come back. Those shafts go down a couple of miles, and those crazy people are not
accountable."

Mel got back in the Mercedes and drove carefully out of town, accompanied by Harold and his radar gun. That's all I need, he thought, to fall into one of Harold's speed traps. As soon as he got
out of radar range, he turned the car toward Cacher and put the
hammer down.

As he drove, the vegetation thinned away and vanished, and the rolling hills took on a steep, foreboding quality. The road itself was potholed asphalt that shook the Mercedes' frame. In the distance he
could see the malevolent tips of the mine tailings, looking much
like the Welsh coal tips that periodically unloaded and covered
small villages in sad valleys. There were no farms, no ranches, only
ancient weather-beaten abandoned shacks, a legacy of the thirties. Running along the road was a single telephone line. There was no
evidence of electricity. On the road was regional roadkill:
armadillos, 'possums, the occasional dead cat. As the evening
approached, the whole scene made Mel want to turn around and
go back home.

And as he approached the scattered buildings of the town, he did
just that. He stopped half a mile short of Cacher, turned directly
north on to a section line road, and drove north at a hundred miles an hour, turning up a rooster-tail of yellowish lead-saturated dust.
Mel prided himself on being a rational man. Usually that meant
controlling his fear. Today it meant giving into it.

The faster he drove, the more frightened he became, and as the crossroads flashed by every six miles, he did not look either way.
He was convinced that he was being pursued, and not until he
crossed the Kansas line did he begin to slow down. His heart was
pounding dangerously and his forehead was stiff from sweat, which
poured out of his body and was dried to a crust by the air
conditioner running full blast.

Cacher was made up of an old two-story brick school tilted at a
precipitous angle, undermined by a mine shaft that went to close,
or a water table that was drained. There was no sign of life, no dogs,
no cats, no lights. Gas stations were boarded up. The only inhabited
building was a shabby general store, the paint long since blistered
away from its rough, knotty wooden siding. In front was a set of
thirties-style, manually powered gas pumps, and, as an afterthought,
a U.S. post office zip code sign bearing the WE DELIVER FOR
YOU emblem.

Inside the store, it was as dry and hot as a sauna. The heat
strengthened the smell of stale urine that emanated from Otho
Stimpson, who was sitting in an old wooden swivel rocker with the
canes busted out. His son, Otis, was standing by the entrance
holding a small 9mm automatic weapon with a long clip. It was a
crude and awkward device, almost as clumsy as Otis himself, but he
had gotten good at using it. He would take it out among the mine
tailings and fire clip after clip, lead thudding into lead. No one was
around to complain about the noise.

If Mel Meyer had pulled into Cacher, the gun would have
turned his Mercedes into scrap metal in seconds. Otis would have
pushed the car down a mine shaft. It would have fallen a mile or
two into the earth and never been seen again.

"Looks like the little Jew got scared," Otis said. "Got some sense
in his head. Won't have much more trouble with him."

Otho said nothing. A couple of decades ago he would have
sighed hopelessly at the racial slur, but he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that his son was a product of his environment and
would never be as cosmopolitan as Otho was, with his fancy
education at the Lady Wilburdon School for Mathematical
Geniuses on the Isle of Rhum. "He's good," Otho said. "He's
gotten closer to us than anyone."

Otho was shaken. No one had ever come to Cacher before. The
very fact that Otis had been placed in this position - standing in the
door of the old general store with a machine gun, locked and
loaded - was disastrous. If the Network knew that they had been
reduced to such methods, they would probably be cut off, and
Otho's responsibilities transferred to someone else. Otho knew that
there were others - like Mr. Salvador - waiting to take his place as
soon as he slipped up.

"Should we kill him?" Otis said. It was a painfully stupid
question, but it was good that Otis had come out and asked it. Otis had spent an unhealthy amount of time watching spy movies and thrillers on HBO. Since he had become aware of the nature of the
current undertaking, he had let his imagination run away with him,
thinking that they were in the middle of some asinine James Bond
movie.

"That's not what this is about," Otho said. "This is not violence, son. It's not war. It's not espionage. The whole point here is to get
this country back to basics: contracts, markets, keeping your
promises, meeting your responsibilities. Meyer's an honorable man
and if we killed him we'd cut the ground out from under our feet."
Otho paused for a moment and stared through a dusty window-pane. "If we were killers, I'd kill Mr. Salvador."

"How come?" Otis said, astonished. "I thought he was doing a
real good job."

"If he was doing a real good job," Otho said, "Mel Meyer never
would have come here. He wouldn't even have known that
anything was going on."

43

William
A.
Cozzano's National Town Meeting, which took
place in Chicago in August, was the equivalent of a political con
vention. But because it was a pure media event, with no procedural
nonsense to gum up the works, it was a lot more entertaining.

The opening event was held in Grant Park, a green swath that
ran between the towering center of downtown Chicago and the
lake. At the cost of permanently alienating the animal-rights and
anticombustion constituencies, Cozzano's campaign managers had
set up a huge Sunday evening barbecue. The ten thousand
participants in the town meeting had been streaming into Chicago
all weekend, checking into the big downtown hotels and getting
themselves settled in the rooms where they would spend the next
week. The Grant Park barbecue was an informal way for everyone
to get together and goof around before the scheduled events got
underway at the convention center on Monday morning.