Point of Impact (19 page)

It was Susie. He saw her tiny picture appear on his virgil's screen, and he activated his own minicam so she could see him.

"Hey, yo, Daddy-o!"

" 'Daddy-o'? What happened to 'Dadster'?"

"Oh, that's
so
yesterday," she said. "You really did go to school with the dinosaurs, huh?"

"It's true. I had to hike a prehistoric trail ten miles long every morning, in the tropical heat, uphill both ways, and be careful of stepping into the tar pits. You have it easy, kiddo."

"So Mom says."

"How are you?"

"Fine."

"Everything going okay with, ah, Byron?"

"Yep. He's a good guy, really."

Michaels felt his belly clutch. He had thought he was going to lose contact with her after the nasty business with Megan, but somehow, his ex-wife had relented. Thank God for large miracles.

"I'm glad to hear it," he said. Boy, that came hard.

"He argued with Mom something awful about letting me see you."

Michaels felt the heat begin in him, threatening to rise and shut off his breathing and vision.
That bastard!

"Didn't like the idea, huh?" he managed to say, faking a smile. She could see him, after all.

"Oh, no, Daddy-o, it was
Mom
who didn't like it. Byron said it wasn't right to keep a father from seeing his daughter. He wouldn't give up until she agreed."

Michaels's anger turned to wonder. "Really?"

"Yeah, he doesn't like you much after you insulted Mom and knocked him down, but he tries to be fair. He's just not you. I miss you, Dad."

As always, that broke his heart. "Me, too. You tell Byron thank you for me, would you?"

He debated for a moment about whether to tell his preteen daughter that she was going to have a new little brother. Well, half brother. Then he decided she ought to hear it from him.

"I have some news for you. Did you know you're going to have a baby brother in a few months?"

"Mom told?" she said. "She told me I couldn't say anything to you. But it's not a brother, it's a sister."

For a moment, he couldn't track what she said, it was as if she had spoken words he understood but arranged them wrong. What she said made no sense.

Then it came to him:

Megan was pregnant!

"Daddy-o, where'd you go?"

"Huh? Oh, sorry, sweetie, I'm in my car, I had to, uh, switch lanes."

"Pretty cool, huh?" she said. "A baby sister. Almost none of my friends have any that little. Chellie's got a brother who's two, and Marlene's got a sister who's like one, but nobody else's mom is preggers."

"Pretty cool," he said. "Congratulations."

Susie's slip brought up a whole wave of things he didn't want to think about. He loved Toni, and she loved him in a way Megan never had. He was over his ex-wife, finally. Well, almost over her. There was always that little wonder about the road not taken, even though the roads they had traveled the last few years had been pretty ugly. But she was Susie's mother, and there had been some good times. Wonderful times, at the beginning.

Now that she was having another man's baby, the old jealousy tried to rear its viperlike head, and for a moment, he almost let it.

No. That serpent was dead.

And now what did he tell Susie about her half brother? Should he say anything? He didn't want to get into any kind of competition with Megan for his daughter's affection as much as he didn't want to lose it.

And yet, if he was going to continue to be part of Susie's life, Toni was also going to be a part of it, as would their unborn child.

Sooner or later, word would get back to Megan; somehow it always did, and he would rather Susie hear it from him.

"Well, Li'l Bit, it looks like you are going to be really cool."

"Huh?"

He smiled into the virgil.

Chapter
19.

Santa Monica, California

The Safari Bar and Grill was first on Tad's list. This was an old but little-known watering hole not far from Santa Monica City College. The food was good, the drinks generous, and the place was far enough off the main drags so the locals had mostly kept it hidden from the tourists.

Tad approached the assistant manager on duty and gave him the bullshit story he'd worked up.

"Say, man, I got a problem maybe you can help me with?"

The assistant manager, a smiling black guy of thirty with nice teeth, dressed in khaki safari shorts and matching shirt, said, "What's the problem, bro?"

"Okay, look, a while back, my brother and his wife were having some difficulties. I uh, got together with her to, you know, help them out. We had lunch here a few times."

"Uh-huh, so?"

"One thing kinda led to another. My sister-in-law and I, well, we, ah, stepped over the line, you know what I mean?"

"You punching your brother's wife? That's bad biz, bro. Gonna make Thanksgiving dinners a bitch."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. It just happened, you know. Anyway, they got their shit worked out okay, they're back together. But my brother, he's a jealous type, and he suspects that while they were on the outs, his wife maybe did some stuff she shouldn't have done."

"He's right, too, idn't he?"

Tad looked at his boots. "Yeah, and I feel like shit about it, okay? But he only suspects, he doesn't
know,
and he sure as hell don't know about
me.
The thing is, my brother is big and kinda mean, and he's with the cops, and if he starts poking around and finds out his wife and I spent any time together, I'm fucked."

"I hear that."

"So like I said, we were in here a few times, had a few drinks and a few laughs, and if he shows up here somehow and gets his hands on your security tapes, I could be in deep shit."

The assistant manager smiled. "Not to worry, my man. You here further back than a week, he won't find nothing. We record three days at a time. Nobody sticks up the place or starts a fight the police need to see, we start the disk over again. No permanent records."

Tad smiled. "Hey, man, I appreciate you tellin' me this." He pulled a couple of tightly folded twenties from his pocket and extended his hand. When they shook hands, the twenties pressed into the assistant manager's palm, and he grinned and nodded. "No problem, bro. You be more careful now, you hear? That pussy will kill you, you not careful."

After the Safari, Tad rumbled the big Dodge along surface streets to two other restaurants within a few miles of each other and ran the same story.

At the Sun'n' Shore, it played pretty much the same, except for the time. The security cams there recorded over the old stuff after only twenty-four hours. Not to sweat it.

At the Irish Pub, they had cams, but all they did was feed a couple of show monitors, no tapes or disks.

Tad was feeling pretty good about this. He had three more places to hit, and he was done. He could take the Hammer cap and get the trip rolling, they were all gonna be this easy.

But of course, just to fuck up that plan, the Berger Hotel, on the hill overlooking the ocean, was more of a problem. A lot of well-off people with well-known faces came here and got a room to get laid in, and the bar was dark and quiet. And when you had folks with fame and money in your house, you were smart to spend a little more on security to make sure the rich and famous didn't get ripped off. That was bad for business.

So at the Berger, they kept their recordings for a year on long-running superdense video diskettes, SDVDs. The system wasn't full-frame twenty-four-a-second vid, but blink cams that snapped stills every few seconds. You didn't get full motion stuff that way, but you could store a lot more time on a lot less space, and the cams were set to take snaps often enough so you couldn't walk across the lobby without being caught. A still picture that showed faces would do the trick.

Tad ran the sister-in-law number on the assistant manager of the hotel, some kid who looked like he was just out of college with a degree in hotel management, and got sympathy, but that was all.

The kid, a pale, green-eyed, dishwater blond in a dark suit and tie, said, "I'm sorry, sir, it is against hotel policy to allow anybody to see the security recordings."

"Even the cops?"

"Well, of course, we cooperate with the police in criminal matters."

"So if my brother shows up and flashes his badge, he gets the SDVD? And my sister-in-law and I get drummed out of the family? Not to mention by brother kicks the shit out of me, maybe breaks an arm or two?"

"I... I wish I could help, really."

"Look, if I knew the date we were here, couldn't you get that diskette out and, uh, misfile it? Accidents happen, right? Somebody could have put that into the wrong file drawer or something, couldn't they? It would have been like a month ago. If anything had happened on that day, the cops would have come looking for it by now, right?"

The kid was wavering.

Tad brought out the heavy artillery. "C'mon, man, I made a big mistake, but it's done. Nobody got hurt, and as long as it never gets out in the open, nobody ever will. I love my brother. What he don't know won't hurt him. Or me. Put yourself in my shoes."

The kid wanted to help, but he was skittish.

Tad went for the throat: "Enter it... nobody will ever know. I sure won't tell, and it's not like you'd be doing anything
criminal
. It would be worth a lot to me to keep my brother from finding out. Look, I just sold my car. I got enough for a down payment on a new one, plus about a thousand bucks extra. You get me the diskette, I give you the thousand. Everybody comes out ahead. My brother doesn't find out I screwed up, he and his wife live happily ever after, and even if anybody ever comes looking for the recording--which they probably won't--all they'll think is that it got mislaid. Hell, you could even put a blank one in the slot, and they'd probably just think the cams were out of whack... if anybody ever bothered to look. Cut me some slack here, please."

Everything Tad said made a certain kind of sense. And the bottom line was, who would know or ever find out? Not to mention that a thousand bucks tax-free cash was surely more than this kid took home in a week. A week's pay and then some for a thing nobody would ever miss? How tempting was that?

The kid licked his lips. "What was the date?" he asked.

Tad kept his face serious, even though he wanted to smile. One born every minute.

When Tad got back into the Dodge and cranked it up, he had the SDVD, a little silver disk about the size of a half-dollar coin. He broke it in half, broke those pieces in half, and stuck them in the ashtray. He lit a cigarette with a throwaway Bic, dialed the flame up to high, and torched the diskette pieces. They smoked but didn't catch fire, just melted into sludge after a minute. The greasy smoke coming off the molten diskette did stink up the car something fierce, so he rolled down the windows to let the smoke escape.

So much for that.

Two places left on Bobby's list, and neither one of them was going to be as tough as the hotel. One was a movie house the Zee-ster rented to show one of his pictures to a hundred of his closest friends at the moment, the other was a gym where Bobby and the Zee-ster had worked out together a couple of times. Probably neither of them even had security cams, but if they did, between his sister-in-law story and a pocket full of cash, he didn't foresee any problems. People would help you out if the story was good enough, and if they were a little reluctant, a fat wad of green went a long way to moving things along. Everybody had a price; you just had to find it.

So there was no reason not to pick up the Hammer that Tad could see.

He swallowed the big purple cap, washed it down with a swig of bottled water, and headed for the movie theater.

April 1992

Washington, D.C.

The ballroom at the hotel was crowded, mostly fairly well-dressed teenagers, with a sprinkling of teachers and employees here and there. Jay walked through the twenty-year-old scenario, looking at the students as they headed for their seats.

This was the quarter-final round for the debate, whose topic this year was: "Resolved--Imminent Threats to National Security Should Supersede Habeas Corpus."

Boy, didn't that sound exciting?

Jay had learned in his research that debate teams were given an issue at the beginning of the year, and that this issue would be the same nationwide. The teams-two on a side--had to be able to argue both sides of an issue, and the reason for that was that sometimes they might not know which side they were going to be assigned until the last minute. The topic, which certainly sounded like ends-justify-the-means to him, spoke to the idea of the scope of legal protection, habeas corpus, being a shortened version of the full term habeas corpus ad subjiciendum. Technically, he had just learned, it meant something like, "You can have the body to undergo the action of the law," or some such. What it meant was, you couldn't be thrown into jail without due process of the law. If you were suspected of a crime, then you had to be arrested, charged, given access to legal counsel, arraigned, and eventually brought to trial. The authorities couldn't just throw you in a jail cell and leave you there without offering a reason. As such, habeas corpus was the cornerstone of British and U.S. law.