Now, while April showers lashed his basement windows, Benny took a digital head-and-shoulders photograph of Avery standing against a blue background. He stored this on one of his computers, together with the scanned “Andy Hardy” signature Avery had used on the credit card. Loading the template for a Connecticut state driver’s license, Benny first called up the photograph, hid it, and then revealed a stored Department-of-Motor-Vehicles signature. When he revealed the photo again, the signature seemed superimposed along its right hand side. Then, in repeated mouse clicks that first hid and then revealed successive layers, Benny replicated the Connecticut state seal, and a shadow image of Avery’s head shot, and the Andy Hardy signature.
Filling in the blank spaces on the template, he typed in the name HARDY, ANDY and an address he pulled from a Connecticut phone book, and below that Avery’s actual date of birth, September 12, 1969. Just beneath that, he typed in a date of issue, which he fabricated as July 26 the previous year, and to the right of that the letter M for Avery’s sex, and the abbreviation BR for the color of his eyes, and 6’1" for his height. He typed in a false identifying license number across the top of the template, and then an expiration date that was on Avery’s birthday, two years after the date of issuance. Lastly, he hid everything he’d already done, and revealed only the bar-code Connecticut had conceived as a security feature. When he revealed the license again, the bar code was running along the bottom of it.
Voilà!
He now had on his computer a document virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. All he had to do was print it and laminate it, and Avery would be in possession of a Connecticut state driver’s license bearing his own photograph alongside Andy Hardy’s name and signature.
The fake license cost Avery three hundred bucks.
For $2,300, he had become Judge Hardy’s son.
Everything else was free.
That was because everything else had been stolen.
Including the girl, too, when he thought about it.
Cal was the experienced thief here, experienced in that he’d never been sent away for Auto Theft, of which there had been plenty, believe me, him having started taking cars on joy rides when he was but a mere sixteen. It was a shame his record had to’ve been marred by that one botched bank holdup, but nobody’s perfect.
The first car they’d used was the black Explorer, which they’d driven to and from the marina, and which they’d already ditched this morning after they’d dropped the girl and Kellie off at the house. Scoped the early morning streets searching for a vehicle parked in a deserted area, found one that looked reliable enough, parked the Explorer behind it while Cal jimmied the door of the prospect car, opened the hood, jump-wired the ignition, and off they went into the wild blue yonder. Nice roomy Pontiac Montana, too.
Avery found it amusing that all these city dwellers owned or leased these big gas-guzzling SUVs with names that sounded all macho woodsy and outdoorsy. These people lived in apartment buildings, and they took the subway to work, and they probably never drove the car further than the nearest movie complex on weekends, but they were all dying to have these big monsters they could drive “off-road.” Off-road
This was the big bad city, man. You didn’t need an Explorer or a Montana or a Durango unless you wore leather chaps and a cowboy hat. Or unless you were transporting merchandise worth a quarter of a million bucks. They would use the Montana when they picked up the ransom money tomorrow, two hundred and fifty Gs in crisp new hundred-dollar bills. By then, Cal would have stolen the third and final car—probably another one with a name like Caravan or Forester or Range Rover—which they would use to drive the girl from the house to wherever they decided to drop her off.
At first Avery thought he might have some difficulty finding a suitable house. They needed something isolated, but they all wanted to get out of here as soon after the exchange as possible. Cal would be heading for Jamaica because he dug black girls. Kellie was heading for Paris, France; she had already begun taking French lessons. Because traveling together might be dangerous, Avery would be going to London first, and would join her a week later.
The house he’d found was in the direct flight path of the city’s international airport, perched on the edge of South Beach, not one of the county’s better resort areas. Even so, during the summer, and because of its location on the sea, the house would have carried a price tag of five, six thousand a month. A big old gray ramshackle structure furnished with rattan furniture and lumpy cushions that smelled of mildew, it was flanked by two similarly dilapidated buildings, empty now during the transitional days of April and May.
