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Letty and Baxter didn’t go back to the motel but stayed in theSkyPort, in separate rooms for the first time in a week. Letty took a long, soapy, luxurious shower, washed her hair and checked the tattoo on her back, which, she admitted to herself, was awesome.
Baxter called at eight o’clock the next morning: “I’m worried about my truck. We can’t leave it on the street, it’ll get towed and God knows when we’d get it back. I need you to drive me over there.”
She was already up and moving: “We’ll stash the car somewhere and take the truck over to Able’s place. We need to cook up a story for him.”
“We can do that on the way. I’ll see you at the car. Five minutes.”
They’d left the car in the underground parking structure. Letty walked through the structure once, looking for a likely car to victimize. She spotted a dusty possibility that she thought probably belonged to someone who’d left the car at the hotel and had then flown out of LAX.
Checking for cameras, she slipped around to the front of the car and used a dime to unscrew the license plate. She carried the plate to the truck, where Baxter was waiting impatiently.
“What’s that?” he asked when she flashed the plate at him.
“I stole it. Two minutes ago. If we stick it on the front of the truck, Delores Nowak’s video goons can’t follow us. I don’t trust you NSA fuckers anymore.”
“Good. I don’t trust us myself.”
“Here’s what we tell Able,” Baxter said, as they drove out to the truck. “We almost had a problem with the FBI, when that fuckin’ Harp sent us to Bob and Sue. So we’re suspicious, about him and this unidentified couple who were paying us money to take down SlapBack.”
“So we followed Barron to his house...”
“Yes. We didn’t know his name, of course, but that’s what we did. While we were there, we saw a dark blue SUV circle the place, and then two guys jump the gate—and we could see that one had a gun in his hand. We called 9-1-1 on our burner phone, and told the cops about it, and gave them the license plate on the car. Before the cops got there, the two men came out, carrying a package, and drove away. We were too scared to follow them, so we sat. Then, before the LAPD could get there, a bunch of FBI showed up, wearing those blue jackets, like they knew where they were going. They went in the house and then the LAPD showed up. By that time, we knew something really bad had happened.”
“And then...”
“We changed hotels, in case somebody might have followed us or gotten our license plate number, and this morning we saw on television that a Loren Barron and his girlfriend had been murdered. We could see from the television clip that the house where the murders happened was the house we followed Barron to.”
“Is that true? About the TV news?” Letty asked.
“Yes. I saw it on a couple channels.”
Letty rubbed her nose for a few seconds, then said, “I can’t think of anything better. When we get to Able’s, we tell him we want my drums and then we’re out of here. We let him talk us out of leaving.”
“What if he doesn’t try? What if he wants us gone?” Baxter asked.
“Then we’ll have to talkourselvesout of it, while he listens... We can work all that out on the way to the motel.”
When they got backto the truck, they left the car on the street, put the stolen plate on the front of the Tundra, drove to Pasadena,and checked out of the La Rouchefort. On the way to Able’s, Letty put on her knee brace and got the cane out of the backseat. She’d be limping again. They got to Able’s at eleven o’clock and found him in a tee-shirt and Jockey shorts, just out of bed.
Able was astonished and appalled. “They’re dead? They were murdered? Loren and Brianna both?”
“Yes. The morning news on Channel 5 says the killers were Russians,” Letty said. “Their reporter said the FBI was all over these guys, they caught them in a garage on Ventura Boulevard. How they tracked them, I don’t know. It’s possible the killers were waiting for Loren and Brianna to come home, but it’s also possible that they were watching this place and they followed them to their house. We’re gonna get the drum set and get the fuck out of here and maybe you ought to do the same thing...”
“We’re not totally agreed on that,” Baxter told Able, following the script that he and Letty had worked out while driving to West Hollywood. “I’m kinda thinking, if we have to hide, we’re gonna need money. We might want to give SlapBack a call, see if they’d pay for the software that took them down.”
“Ah, boy... they’re still down, there’s all kinds of stuff on the Net about it,” Able said, running his hands through his thick hair. “The problem with getting money is always the same—how do you do it without the feds crawling all over you?”
Able didn’t think the SlapBack attack could have anything to do with the murders, because, he said, heknewwhy Barron and Wolfe had been killed.
He told them about Ordinary People’s attack on the Russian train system, and the ransom paid by the Russians to the organizer of the attack.
“I don’t know who financed it, but I know that Ordinary People got a good chunk of cash. Six or seven people did the heavy lifting, and Brianna and Loren were the coordinators. Rumors are that they each got more than a hundred K, maybe way more,” Able said.
Baxter looked at Letty, who raised her eyebrows, and he turned to Able and asked, “Are those people... Can you warn them? Do you know them?”
Able seemed to take a step back: “Look: I mean, you guys just showed up here...”
“And took down SlapBack,” Baxter snapped. “If we were FBI, would we take down a whole fuckin’ company? I don’t think so.” He jabbed a finger at Letty: “Does that look like an FBI agent to you?”
