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Baxter spent the next four hours banging on his laptop while Letty messed with the drums and then took a nap. At six, they walked out to a McDonald’s across the street from the back of a Home Depot store. Letty was halfway through her Spicy Crispy Chicken Sandwich, uncomfortably watching Baxter devastate two Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese, when the Toyota cruised by.
“They’re still on us,” she said. “Don’t look out the window until I tell you...” The beige Toyota went past, and she said, “Okay, look now.”
Baxter looked. “That’s probably the single most common vehicle in California, not counting F-150s,” he said. “It does look the same, though.”
“And how many cars do you see going fourteen miles an hour past here? They were checking us out,” Letty said.
“If you say so. You gonna eat those fries?”
Back at the motel, Baxter shut the door and asked, “You think they’re coming tonight?”
“Almost for sure. They’ve got to worry that we’ll pull out, lose them, and then call Caltech and rat out Harp.”
Bob and Sueshowed up a few minutes after seven o’clock. Letty and Baxter both heard a car pull up outside the room. Letty turned to Baxter and said, “Underpants.”
She hustled into the bathroom, pulled off her jeans, blouse, and bra, and pulled on a faded rayon chemise that stopped at her navel. She wore a pair of the Ralph Lauren men’s briefs, which were fine, and the knee support.
As she walked out of the bathroom, carrying her clothes, there was a light rap at the door. Baxter, in a stained white tee-shirt and baggy Jockey briefs, looked at her, and she nodded and threw her jeans, with the Sig still in the pocket, on one of the beds. Baxter went to the door, opened it, leaving the security chain in place. Through the space in the partly opened door, he asked, “How’d you find us?”
A woman, whose voice Letty recognized as Sue’s, said, “We followed you. It wasn’t hard. We got a job. Open up.”
“I’ll get the chain,” Baxter said.
When he opened the door all the way, Bob stepped inside, glanced around the room—hung up for a second on Letty’s legs and the butterfly—and then Sue followed. Baxter said, “Let me get some pants on.”
Baxter went into the bathroom, and Sue said, “This place is a dump. It smells like old cheese farts.”
“We didn’t want to be in some superficial first-world capitalist place like a Malibu resort hotel,” Letty said.
Bob looked at the drum set, and checked out Baxter’s laptop, which was sitting on his bed. There were two chairs in the room, and Sue settled in one, and Bob dragged the other around to facethe bed, as Letty sat on it. Baxter came out of the bathroom in his jeans and asked, “What’s up?”
“We got a gig for you, if you guys are really good with machine controls.”
“I am,” Baxter said. He tipped his head at Letty and said, “Charlie wouldn’t know PLC from a jelly donut.”
Sue nodded. “Okay. Here’s the deal. You guys confess to that Willow Branch hit. I record it with my phone. If you try to turn us in, we give the recording to the FBI. We walk, you do time.”
Letty shook her head. To Baxter, she said, “As your spiritual advisor, I’d tell them to go fuck themselves. You don’t need a recording like that anywhere—they’d hold it over our heads forever. We’d be slaves.”
To Bob and Sue, Baxter said, “She’s right. No way in hell I’ll record a confession.”
“You already confessed to Harp,” Sue said. “What difference does it make if we know about it?”
“We’ve got Harp between a rock and a hard place,” Letty said. “You guys, we don’t know where you’re coming from. Or even your real names.”
Bob spread his hands. “Okay. So we don’t record it, but we need to at least hear it from you. We’re going to ask you to do something that’s illegal. You did take down Willow Branch, right? You’re willing to take a couple of risks?”
“Some, but not much,” Baxter said. “When we took down Willow Branch, there was no risk at all. The place was wide open, and we walked right in. The problem came when we couldn’t cash out.”
Sue shook her head: “Tell me how you did Willow Branch. If it fits, we have a job for you.”
Baxter gave them the details of the Willow Branch computer attack, claimed that Letty made him do it, if he wanted to continue their relationship.
Bob: “So you’re interested in screwing Charlie, and Charlie’s interested in screwing money out of hospitals. I didn’t see the attraction before now.”
Letty: “How’d you know my name is Charlie?”
“Because Bob just used it,” Bob said. “He said Charlie wouldn’t know a PLC from a jelly donut. He used it at Balls’, too.”
