Hurrying with him alongside the pool, Leigh Ann said, “Nothing is gonna be smooth ever again, is it?”
“Sure it is. It will be. This is just a hiccup.”
“Why did you have to be so cute and so nice? I wouldn’t have slept with you, wouldn’t be here now, if you weren’t cute and nice.”
“It’s my curse, I have to live with it.”
To the right of the guesthouse was a solid wood gate in the brick property wall. It featured a gravity latch, but not a lock.
A wide alley served walled properties. They turned right, north. To avoid looking suspicious, they hurried but didn’t run.
Strung from utility poles, power lines stirred in the breeze, humming softly as they passed through strain insulators.
Kenny and Leigh Ann came to a residential street, crossed it, and entered a continuation of the alley. He stopped at a drainage grate in the pavement and took his iPhone from a jacket pocket.
“Who’re you calling? Let’s keep moving,” Leigh Ann urged.
“A smartphone is a GPS, a locator. It tells him where we are.”
“You don’t really think he’s got that kind of reach, he can nail us by our phones?”
“What I think is he’s the überultimate, king of the black hats, and if we underestimate him, we’ll deserve what we get.”
Movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye caused him to look up as one plump rat followed another along a power cable, their long tails held straight behind them to aid their balance. The rodents paused to peer down, but then scurried on faster than before, as though instinctively aware that they were at greater risk by just being in the vicinity of this man and woman.
Wondering if the rats were an omen, surprised to be capable of such a thought, Kenny dropped his phone into the street drain. It clattered on the floor of the concrete conduit below.
Leigh Ann said, “This can’t be right.” She turned her attention to the sky, perhaps on the lookout for the 747 that, mere minutes earlier, Kenny had not believed could be made to crash on them.
“We’ll buy burner phones,” Kenny said. “If he doesn’t know the numbers we’re using, he can’t track us.”
She met his eyes. “You make it sound like we’re on the run.”
“Because we are. At least for the short term, a few days, until we track this sonofabitch to source and deal with him.”
She was smart and quick. “But if we use credit cards, maybe he’ll still know what phones we bought. We need a lot of cash to be on the run, even for a few days.”
“That half-gallon container in the tote isn’t ice cream. It’s full of rolls of hundred-dollar bills. Ninety thousand bucks.”
Her blue stare scanned him with the intensity of a laser. “You said you were a white-hat hacker.”
“I am. But even good guys need to prep for a shitstorm. I knew this loser who didn’t prep, and some MS-13 types cut his head down the middle with a chain saw.”
That claim silenced her for a moment. Then: “I never knew a guy who knew a guy who got his head chainsawed.”
“Adds a little glamor to my résumé.”
“Not in the least.” She took her iPhone from a jacket pocket and considered it. “Maybe I should go my own way, take a chance this freak will be satisfied with you. After all, it’s you taking on the Montana job that pissed him off.”
“He burned your house down.”
“Like I could have forgotten that.”
“Point is—you’re no less a target than I am.”
“Just because you and I were skin to skin once?”
“Who knows why? If we could understand him, we’d be as crazy as he is.” Kenny hesitated, then said, “Anyway, it was only once, yeah, you and me, but it meant something.”
She regarded him with a don’t-scam-me expression. “Meant something? What did it mean?”
Her eyes were windows beyond which lay a mystery that he suddenly felt compelled to explore.
“I don’t know,” he said, and he was for the first time in his life bewildered by his own feelings.
“So that was—what?—just something to say?”
“No. It meant something, all right. Even when we were . . . when we were doing it, it was different, the sex. Don’t you think so?”
“Different?”
“It was different, better,” he insisted, “and then everything after that hasn’t been what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”