“Taken into protective foster care.” Serge skidded around a corner. “And we should probably change his name to Mickey.”
“Why?”
They took off in the Firebird. It was noon along the countless finger canals that characterized the city.
A landscaping crew was putting in yeoman duty. Three trucks with trailers and the heavy rigs. Constant buzzing and sawing and people riding other noisy things around. A tiny one-man tractor grunted to a stop.
A ’78 Firebird pulled up to the curb.
Serge approached the man climbing out of the safety cage. “What are you going to do with that?”
“Probably make mulch.” The man wiped sweat and dirt off his forehead. “Why?”
“How much?” asked Serge.
“You want to buy it?”
Serge nodded.
“Okay, fifty bucks. No, a hundred.”
Serge opened his wallet. “Split the difference at seventy-five, and you help me load it in the car.”
“Cool.”
The yardman deftly maneuvered the tractor into position behind the Firebird. He threw a black-knobbed lever, flipping down the front-loader claw and dropping the item into the trunk. The car’s back end bounced on the suspension. Not a remote chance of closing the hood, so it was tied with twine.
Serge dusted dirt off the top of the fenders. “Got a business card?”
“Sure, it’s somewhere in here”—going through one of those thick hoarding wallets on a chain. “There we go.” He handed it to Serge. “What kind of work are you thinking of having done?”
“Stump removal.”
“Huh?” The landscaper narrowed his eyes, staring at the trunk of the Trans Am and the protruding, recently purchased stump.
Serge grabbed his door handle. “Pleasure doing business.” They drove away from the competing whines of small gas-powered engines.
The phone rang. Serge recognized the number in the caller ID.
“Hey, Mahoney, what’s going on?”
“Mahoney mulled the lowdown he was about to lay on Serge like a dirty ward boss with a case of the crabs and a day-old racing form.”
“Mahoney,” said Serge. “You’re doing third person again.”
“Serge was a sharp cookie, like a broad in a gin joint who sees all the angles, from acute to obtuse—”
“Mahoney, look, if it’s about the cases, we’ve been working round the clock. I just picked up a stump.”
“Serge made as much sense as wearing a belt with suspenders.”
“What I could use is a little help on your end,” said Serge. “Call some of your old contacts and get all the police reports with similar dating-bandit MOs. As for the newest victim who hired you, I already told you I only need—”
“Mahoney was sly to Serge’s jones and ready to roll Romans like loaded crap dice that always come up boxcars.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Serge grabbed a pen. “I’m ready for that phone number.”
Mahoney gave it.
“Thanks, I’ll let you know how it works out.”
“. . . Like a one-legged unicycle jockey . . .”
Serge began closing the phone—
“Hello?”
“Yes, I’m calling about the yellow Corvette for sale in the paper.”
Chapter Eight
MEANWHILE . . .
Cheeto-encrusted fingers tapped a keyboard in an otherwise sterile cubicle.
A mug shot popped up on the screen.
An e-mail was forwarded.
Another file of random statistics opened.
It was an anonymous cubicle, and it could have been anywhere, but this one was in Tallahassee. The man behind the keyboard had an engraved brass nameplate on his desk: WESLEY CHAPEL. It sat on the front of his desk, which was pressed against one of the walls of the cubicle, and the nameplate could not be seen. But that was okay because Wesley wasn’t a people person, which meant he was perfect for his job.
Here’s what Wesley did: He made sense out of nonsense.
And he was the best the company had, sifting and crunching and correlating the white noise of meaningless numbers and GPS coordinates until patterns emerged. One entire floor of the company housed huge mainframes filled with raw, non sequitur information that had been dragnetted from every corner of the Internet. Some were free public records; others databases purchased from numerous companies who valued their customers’ privacy.
His was one of a growing number of firms in a field that had endless buyers lining up for a geometric progression of knowledge. The nascent industry had plenty of niches in which companies could specialize. They variously offered millions of searchable newspaper and magazine articles, indexed scientific papers from leading research universities dating back to 1888, legal precedents and up-to-the-minute Shepardized case law for all fifty states and the federal districts.
Wesley’s company specialized in prying, and it easily had the longest line of clients clamoring for their product: networks wanting to know the volume of cable subscribers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, test marketers seeking the median age of people who bought laundry detergent with credit cards, municipal planners looking for the neighborhood that voted least so they could locate the new sewage transfer station.
