Tad looked at his boots. “Yeah, and I feel like shit about it, okay? But he only suspects, he doesn’t
“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
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.
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.”
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.
To Jay, such a debate was a yawner, about as exciting as eating a bowl of cold oatmeal while watching paint dry, but the buzz in the room was certainly enthusiastic.
The reason Jay was here was because the DEA agent Brett Lee and the NSA agent Zachary George had both attended this conference as teenagers. It could have been a coincidence — there were hundreds of students here,
