Blood Red

It still wasn’t any of his business what she did with her life, but that didn’t change how he felt. He was in love with the girl next door. The only reason she lived across the courtyard from him was because, once he decided he liked to see her, he found out where she lived and moved in. Elegant, beautiful, quiet, studious; she was all of those things and that, more than anything else, had caught his attention. She could have been a truck driver and he would have felt the same way. She was a prostitute and he knew he could deal with it. All sins were forgivable when faced with love.

Once she went inside her apartment, he sighed and let himself breathe again. Then he turned on one of the cell phones he’d purchased to deal with Brian Freemont and plugged it into the modem of his laptop. He was done with Freemont. The sick bastard would be suffering plenty in the near future.

His hand ran along his ribs and he winced. He was not done with Thomas Alexander Pardue. The long list of research notes he’d written down earlier was on his left and the computer was on his right.

“Fuck with me, Tom? Trust me; you don’t know what being fucked is.”

It was just possible that Pardue would figure out who was behind it when the time came, but long before then, Ben would be done with him. His fingers tapped keys with the skill of a surgeon and he started his own symphony; a song just for Tom, a special song of desperation and financial ruin.

He blinked away a few tears as he worked. They were not tears of sorrow, he was beyond that and had been for a long time. They were tears of rage. Ben had been a victim plenty of times in his life. Pardue was hardly the first man he’d ever run across who felt the need to kick his face in and he likely wouldn’t be the last.

He was just the first one Ben decided to play dirty with. Oh, he’d certainly hacked a few accounts in the past, that was true enough, but he’d always done it for what he considered a good reason. When his uncle Dominick had run into troubles paying his house notes, Ben had fixed the problem long enough for the man to recover and go about his life. When the insurance companies had refused to pay a few claims that were due to his father, he’d fixed that too. It was easy when you had the right equipment and the proper tools.

Ben had both and knew how to use them. Danni had been the latest trick he turned. He’d even promised himself he’d stop after that, because sooner or later even the best hackers got themselves busted and he wasn’t dumb enough to think it wouldn’t happen to him if he kept it up.

But this was different. He could deal with an occasional beating; they happened every day to people just like him. He could even deal with the threats of more beatings, because he never intended to announce what Maggie did; if she’d thrown rocks at him and called him the worst names she could come up with when she found him on the sidewalk the night before, she still would never have had to worry about that.

So she was a prostitute. It was a job. He could deal with that and he would pretend the knowledge didn’t bother him in the least, because he never wanted to hurt her.

But Tom? The very thought that Pardue would ever strike her in anger, would ever touch her or know her body . . . that was exactly enough to make him want the man to suffer.

He started with the bank accounts. After that he moved on to land deeds and credit cards. When he was done there, he moved into the police databases in the area and added a few minor, niggling warrants to the list of outstanding orders; nothing that would get Tom on “America’s Most Wanted”; just the sort that would cause him to be pulled over. He also cancelled Tom’s car insurance and revoked his driver’s license.

When he was done, Pardue had twelve thousand dollars to his name. It was enough to let a few days or even weeks pass before the man discovered he was broke.

All of Pardue’s money went into a series of legitimate trust funds. They’d been established a long time ago, under several different names.

When he was finished, Ben set aside his laptop and disconnected the cell phone. He stared out the window and squinted against the glaring reflection of the sun on Maggie’s side of the building.

“Fuck with me again, Tom. Fuck with me again, and you’ll see how nasty I can get.”

Ben closed his eyes and went to sleep on his couch. It had been a long night and he was tired. In his dreams Maggie was with him as she had been the previous afternoon: she was sleeping and he watched her while she dreamed.

IV

The International House of Pancakes was paradise: The food was plentiful and fattening and the coffee flowed in great rivers of caffeinated pleasure.

Boyd needed the caffeine and so did Holdstedter. Old Danny was looking about as white as toothpaste from lack of sleep. Real toothpaste, not that gel shit everyone thought was so cool.

“This shit ever gonna stop?”