SPYWARE BOOK (26 page)

Soon, he had to climb right out of the window and into the dark space he had created beyond it to get another scoopful of earth.

It was as he was climbing out the window that the ground gave way. From above, it appeared that a giant gopher had undermined a spot in the orchard. A sudden sinkhole appeared and a great wad of earth sloughed down into the van. Justin was swept with it, a helpless swimmer on a wave of wet sand and rocks.

His head struck the dash and he lost consciousness. The dirt didn’t cover his head, but it did cover his pitiful supply of food and water, and the bottom of the PVC pipe.

Far from freedom, Justin had plunged himself into utter blackness.

. . . 23 Hours and Counting . . .

Spurlock had managed to grab hold of the wheel and work the Ranger to a stop after he squirted three rounds into Ingles’ head. That was the only good news of the day, as far as he could tell. He’d dumped the body, but it was only a matter of time. The cops were usually lazy and good-for-nothing, unless it came to uncovering his crimes, he lamented. Then, they were fucking wizards.

“Murder One,” muttered Spurlock as he cruised down a residential street. “I finally did it, I’m in the big time now, and the bastard leaves me out of gas.”

The Ranger’s needle hovered over the E.

“E” is for empty,
thought Spurlock. He had to get gas, but he was penniless, and—guess what? That crazy fucker Ingles had not one dime in his bloodstained pockets.

That brought his fortune to exactly one quarter, three dimes and two pennies: fifty-seven cents in all. There were, of course, Ingle’s credit cards. Those he had already ditched miles away from the body. He wanted it to look like a robbery—a robbery and murder that Tom Spurlock hadn’t committed. Using the credit cards had been out of the question from the beginning.

Even the Ranger was very hot, too hot, but he needed wheels to get out of town. This whole thing had gone badly, it had gone so badly that he still didn’t quite believe it. He had come out of a list of crimes and a gauntlet of grim abuses with nothing.

Spotting another likely-looking house, Spurlock pulled the truck over about a hundred yards down the street from the front door and climbed warily out. He didn’t like petty con-jobs like this, but it was all he could think of short of just robbing someone. He walked up to the porch of a fairly new suburban home. The shrubs had hardly had a chance to grow in yet. As he walked up, he tugged his wallet from his back pocket and made an effort to smooth back his unkempt hair. It was still damp from his quick clean-up at the corner gas station restroom. Ingles’ blood had clouded the water as it spiraled down the drain.
A fitting end to the bastard,
thought Spurlock.

It wasn’t killing Ingles that really bothered him. It was the idea of paying the price for it. America’s prisons were nice places, relatively speaking. Especially in California. Lots of inmates had their own color TVs in their cells and plenty of workout equipment to keep themselves busy. They didn’t take you out and work you to death in the hot sun, either. Folsom did a bit of that, but not most of the others.

No, it wasn’t the prisons themselves that he feared. It was the other inmates. All the TV sets and weights in the world didn’t matter when you were caged with a pack of animals. The inmates were your true jailors and they had their own rules. Very harsh ones.

Even more than the inmates, he feared the ultimate penalty. The big one, the state’s grinning reaper. In California, it was the hiss of gas pellets. He always wondered if people tried to hold their breath to gain a few more seconds of life, or if they welcomed a quick end and just breathed deeply.

He shuddered and was startled as the door opened. He almost couldn’t recall having pressed the doorbell. The woman who answered it was pretty, if a bit on the chunky side. She had a baby on her hip and the clamor of cartoons in the living room behind her suggested that more children were present. She gave Spurlock a wary look.

“Hello ma’am,” he began, grinning, but not so widely as to show his worst teeth. “I’m your neighbor, from just three doors down.” Spurlock waved vaguely behind himself. “I was wondering if you could help me out.”

She tried to smile but it came off as a grimace. “What can I do for you?”

“Lovely kid you’ve got there, ma’am,” he said. “I’m expecting one myself this month. Is it a boy?”

“Yes,” she said, softening a fraction. Spurlock smiled back. Women always went for it when you complemented their brats.

“You see, ma’am, I hate to bother you like this, but I’ve got to pick up my brother and his kid in Livermore. There’s a baseball game there today. And, well anyway, they went off leaving me with an empty tank and no cash. Can you believe it?”

“I see,” she said, stiffening. They always did that as soon as you mentioned cash. A Frisbee lost in the backyard? Sure, no problem. Ten bucks? Different story. Sometimes he thought it was easier to get into a woman’s pants than it was to get a few bucks off her.

“I’m real embarrassed to have to ask like this, ma’am. I just need a small loan, see, until I get back. Just two hours, then you’ll have your money. If you want to ask my mother about it, I could take you over there. She’ll back up my story.” Spurlock didn’t even sweat the ‘meet my mother’ line. When he had first come up with it a couple of years back he had figured on taking them to an empty house where he had previously knocked and play some bit about mom not wanting to get out of bed. These days, he didn’t even worry about it. He had learned that no one wanted to follow you down the street to meet your old mom. They would give you the cash or they wouldn’t, but they wouldn’t follow you down the street.

“I don’t know,” she said.

On cue, he pulled out his wallet and showed it was empty. “See ma’am? If you could see your way to helpin’ your neighbor, I would really appreciate it.”

Reluctantly, she lifted her purse from a side table and slowly dug into it. She shifted the brat’s weight from one hip to the other. Spurlock watched her and fantasized about doing her. It had been quite a while since he had had a nice clean housewife like this one. Too bad he was on the run.

She looked back up at him and she must have seen the leering glint in his eye. She looked flustered. “Here,” she said, shoving a five at him.

Normally, he would have taken it and left. But this was the fifth house he had hit. He needed more than five friggin’ bucks.

He took the five and conjured a look of vast disappointment. He chewed his lower lip. “My truck gets good mileage, ma’am, but there’s no way I can make it to Livermore on a five.”

She was silent and so was he. He didn’t look at her. He let the tension build. She had already sprung for five to get rid of him, so why not ten?

“I’ll have to ask my husband,” she said, “that’s all I have.”She left the door ajar behind her.

Spurlock waited with mild trepidation. He slipped the five into his front pocket and looked back at the Ranger. He thought about bolting, but that might lead to a call to the police. He didn’t need that right now.

Men required a slightly different touch. As the door opened again, he put back his grin and shoved a hearty hand at the guy. He was a fairly big, blond guy in shorts and a tank top. He ignored the offered hand and frowned. Spurlock knew right away he was screwed.

He began his story again, but could tell it wasn’t working. The guy listened in stony silence.

“Look,” Spurlock finally said. “I can tell that I’m bothering you folks and maybe I should just be on my way. I don’t want to be a bad neighbor.”

The blond guy seemed not to hear him. He slowly pulled out his wallet and flipped it open. “So, you’re looking for a little loan, eh?” he said.

Spurlock looked down at the wallet and his heart fell away into his shoes and died there. A big flashy badge all but filled the guy’s wallet. He was a cop, and Spurlock knew he had been caught. Still, the beauty of this scam was that it was very hard to prove any wrong-doing. He took a breath and pasted his smile back into place. He would bluff it through.

“Yes sir, if you could spare a five, that would do it for me. You’ll have it back in two hours—three tops.”

The cop glanced at him as if surprised he was still going for it. The bastard looked a bit off-balance and it made Spurlock sing inside to see it.

“Forget it,” he said, snapping his wallet shut.

So, the prick had been just baiting him. Spurlock nodded and smiled some more. “I’ll be on my way, then. And thanks for your time. I’m sure I’ll see you around soon.”

“Hold it a moment, please,” said the cop.

Right then, Spurlock could see the door of his Ranger. It was just a hundred yard dash away. It seemed like a mile. He kept walking, with a curt wave of the hand over his shoulder. The best was to play that he was a bit pissed and done talking.

“I said hold it a moment, sir,” said the cop. He had followed him out onto the driveway.

Spurlock whirled around and put on a slightly annoyed look. “Yes?”

“I’d like to meet this mother of yours.”

“Why? Look, if you don’t believe me, that’s fine. I’ll have to find some other way to get there. Here, here’s your wife’s money back.”

The cop looked down at the five in mild surprise. For just a second, Spurlock thought that he had him. Then his pig-instinct took back over and he refused the money. “Let’s go meet mom.”

Spurlock looked at him as if he was a nut. “Look man, I’m really in a hurry here. If you don’t want to help me out, then please take back your money and let me find some other way to solve my problem.”

The cop set his jaw. “I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of it. I don’t recognize you and I know this neighborhood.”

Spurlock laughed in disbelief. “Look man, I’m new here, that’s all. I’m staying with my mom and looking for work, that’s all.”

“Let’s see the address on your ID, then.”

“I told you, man:
I’m new here.
”

“I’m off-duty, so I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest here until I can get back up.”

Spurlock argued and reasoned until his throat hurt, but the cop bought none of it. He got the cell phone from his wife’s and called in a car to come pick them up. While they waited Spurlock thought about bashing the guy, but he was pretty tough-looking and he decided that he’d rather take his chances with the system. For exactly this kind of emergency, he had no ID on him, and he had already buried the gun.

With luck, he’d just get released on the street within hours as a transient with a court date for panhandling. Davis was a liberal town. He’d have to trust to his luck.

. . . 21 Hours and Counting . . .

 “We needed a break, this was a good idea,” sighed Johansen.

Vasquez glanced up at him without moving her head, then returned her attention to the report in her hands. Despite her bad mood, she allowed herself a private smile. Johansen was always complimenting his own ideas. It had been his idea to go to Black Angus for a prime rib dinner and she had consented after token complaints. Underneath it all, of course, she had to admit to herself that he was right. They both needed a break. In police work, you could drive yourself for days and weeks to exhaustion, and it was often counterproductive. Always, she had to remind herself of her instructors’ words in Quantico: “Better to sleep for eight hours and solve the case in one, than to stay up all night and be unable to think at all.”

Around them, the activity in the restaurant was subdued. It was after nine now, and most of the dinner crowd had already left. They sat together in a darkened private booth that would have been romantic if she hadn’t been in such a sour mood. They had lost track of three suspects now—Vance, Ingles and Nog—and still the internet was burning. Johansen ordered two margaritas without asking her if she wanted one. When the drinks arrived, she stared at hers for a moment, then took a gulp. The frozen slush pained her sinuses at first. Then it tasted good.

“This report is grim,” she told him. He watched her expectantly. His margarita was half-gone, but she knew from experience that alcohol had little effect on his bulky body.

She spoke in a hushed tone. “The internet has sustained significant damage. Approximately forty percent of the known servers have suffered some form of attack and it is estimated that most of the rest have a latent form of the virus hiding on disk, waiting to strike.”

Johansen nodded and leaned back a bit in his chair. “It’s like we’re fighting a thousand viruses at once, rather than just the latest one of the month,” he said. His hand slid down to his waist, and—although she couldn’t be sure—probably popped open the top button of his pants. Immediately after this move, he faked a cough and touched his hand to his mouth. There were a lot of large dishes stacked on his side of the table, and he had cleaned them all. Vasquez smiled down at her report.

“Let’s go over tomorrow’s checklist,” she said.

“Again?”

“Again,” she replied firmly.

Nodding, he produced a notepad. Even from across the table, she could see his neat, dark strokes of pen and pencil. The man really knew how to take good notes, and that had always impressed her. Vaguely, she wondered if that made her an obsessive-compulsive. She supposed that it did, but argued with herself that such a trait was often an advantage for a cop.