“None of our clients do. We’re strictly a Dark Web business.”
“But with what he did know, with your app and the synthesizer, the FBI had enough to find you.”
“They’ve found Jimmy Radburn, not me.” He allowed himself another Oreo, but turned it between thumb and forefinger instead of eating it. “Jimmy’s not the real me any more than Carl Bessemer was the real him. When I flush this place, I’ll flush Jimmy.” He studied her for half a minute, and she allowed herself to be studied, and he said, “You don’t worry for a second that I might flush you, too.”
“I saw how you handled that blunderbuss. There’s no killing in you. You don’t care if anyone gets whacked as collateral damage to your business, but you don’t have a taste for it yourself.”
He smiled and nodded. “I’m a lover, not a killer.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Do my excellent winnitude and intelligence turn you on?”
“No.”
“Some girls are turned on by that.”
“I’m just here to get what I need. I gave you a chance to skip arrest, court, and jail. You owe me.”
“I always pay my debts. It’s just good business.” He stopped turning the cookie between thumb and forefinger, popped it into his mouth, made a production of consuming it with much lip licking, and said, “I could eat you up like a bag of Oreos. I leave the offer on the table. Now, what is it you want?”
16
* * *
THE MAN CURRENTLY KNOWN as Jimmy Radburn had no self-esteem deficit and an excess of self-confidence. He always knew what he wanted and how to get it, and there wasn’t a problem for which he couldn’t find a solution. If he’d ever had doubts about his chosen career, he apparently vaporized them long ago. If anything had ever puzzled him previously, he seemed to have erased the experience from memory, because the intense puzzlement that he expressed over Jane’s requests was like that of a precocious child encountering for the first time something that bewildered him.
Paging through the list she’d given him, he said, “Thirty-two coroners?”
“That’s right.”
“City, county, small-town coroners?”
“Yes.”
“Why so many?”
“There’s no need for you to know why anything. I could’ve given you ten times thirty-two. It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s weird, that’s all. It’s creepy. You’ve got to admit it’s creepy. It’s bizarre.”
“I’ve given you their names and websites. Work your way in from there, or however you do it.”
“Just suicides. Why just suicides?”
She answered him with a look.
“All right, okay. My interest is epsilon.”
“Good.”
He put the pages on the snack table and with a pen made notes. “All suicides during the past year in these jurisdictions. A full coroner’s report on each. You want details of brain examinations if they went that far. All this stuff is public record, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but there are privacy issues. And using the Freedom of Information Act can take months—years, even. Besides, there are some difficult people who won’t like this being looked into. I don’t want to draw their attention.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Difficult meaning badass?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“If you’re worried about it, maybe I should be, too.”
“I’m not a hacker, you are.”
“The word cracker is more accurate. Derived from safe-cracker. It just never caught on.”
“Cracker, hacker, whatever. If I go poking around, they know it. You can slip in, slip out with what I want, and they never know you’ve been there.”
“This is a lot of work.”
“Put your entire crew on it. I want it all by noon tomorrow.”
“You’re one demanding bitch. I kind of like that.”
His gray eyes were as pellucid and direct as those of a small and innocent child. If he had made a career of conning elderly women out of their life savings, his victims would have been charmed by his eyes, though Jane saw in them the sharp intention of a predator.
She said, “Don’t flirt. You’re not good at it. I really mean noon sharp.”
“I heard. Okay, you’re the big dog right now. We’ll tool it till it’s done. What’s this name on the last page?”
“David James Michael. He serves on the boards of those two nonprofits. I want to know everything about him, all the way down to bank-account numbers, shoe size, whether he suffers constipation.”
“If you want a stool sample, you’ll have to get that yourself. I’ll have the rest by noon, but we’ll need to pull an all-nighter.”
She rose from her chair. Jimmy remained seated.
She said, “Don’t hand it to me on a thumb drive. I’ve gone primitive. I need printouts.”
He grimaced. “There goes a forest. Besides, we don’t do volume printouts, ’cause we don’t have a mumble line or a foo switch.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“It was worth a try. All right, no thumb drive. Come around noon, we’ll have your package.”
“You’ll deliver it to me in Santa Monica. You yourself. Alone.”
“You’re a woman accustomed to a lot of personal service. I’m the ace of personal service.”
“But you suck at double entendres. Santa Monica. Palisades Park. Somewhere between Broadway and California Avenue. Get one of those helium-filled metallic balloons. Easiest place to find one is a florist. Tie it to your wrist so I can see you coming from a distance. You won’t have to find me. I’ll find you.”
Jane went to the circular desk on the platform. She retrieved the Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum that he had put there.
“Hey, what’re you doing?” Jimmy rose from his chair, alarmed.
“Relax. When I leave, I’ll put it on the floor by the front door. I don’t want it here to tempt you when I turn my back.”
“You’re the one who said there’s no killing in me,” Jimmy reminded her.
“Once in a great while I’m wrong.”
She walked to the head of the stairs and turned to him. He was still standing at his chair, but she could see how badly he wanted to come after her, nail her. Although he had seemed not to be stung by the needles that she’d stuck in him during their conversation, Jimmy didn’t take commands or mockery from a woman without at least fantasizing revenge.
“If instead of doing this job for me, you try to melt out of here tonight, I have someone watching the place,” she lied. “I’ll call the local FBI office, do my civic duty. You won’t get ten percent of your operation in a truck before they drop a rapid-mobilization unit on you.”
“You’ll get what you want,” he assured her.
“Good. And don’t forget the balloon.”
With the .44 Magnum in a two-hand grip, she crabbed down the stairs sideways, back against the wall that lacked a railing. Her attention was largely on the door at the bottom, but she glanced repeatedly toward the second floor, just in case the Colt hadn’t been the only gun Jimmy kept up there.
At the ground floor, she opened the door and saw no one in the back room, just the boxes full of old phonograph records.
The door stood open to the front room. No music. She could hear Jimmy’s crew talking animatedly, which they wouldn’t be doing if they were lying in wait for her.
She didn’t make a production of clearing the doorway, though neither did she amble through it unconcerned.
They were all gathered toward the farther end of the sales counter. On this side, Felix sat on Britta’s stool. The girl was on her knees, dressing his scraped shin with a roll of gauze. Another member of the crew stood with them. The remaining five were on the customer side of the counter.
As Jane went through the gate, they watched her in silence, like a gaggle of undisciplined and petulant children who had been temporarily put in their place by an adult against whom they were conspiring to commit all manner of wickedness.
She unlocked the front door, put the Colt on the floor, and stepped outside, surprised to find it still daylight after that realm of boarded-and painted-over windows.
17
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