Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [49]
‘You shut the hell up and keep still,’ he said. He grabbed hold of the jacket and ripped it open, sending buttons popping off into the snow.
This was the point at which Peri, her back braced against the car, lifted her right foot and extended her leg like a harpoon tipped with a high-heeled shoe right into Officer Moustache’s beefy groin.
He bent over and uttered a stream of imprecations that I’m not gonna repeat in case there are ladies reading. As he came back up his hand was reaching into his holster.
I applied my trusty right hook, aiming for just below the moustache. He went down into the gravel and slush without another dirty word.
Peri crouched and snatched the gun out of his holster. She held it like it would explode at any moment. ‘You take it,’ she gasped.
I went to the police car, pulled the keys out of the ignition, wiped them and the gun clean with the inside of my pocket, and locked the gun in the trunk. Then I chuckcd the keys out into the valley as far as they would go.
‘Whoah.’ Peri was bent over a little, her hands on her knees, like she couldn’t get her breath. She was looking down at the policeman we’d knocked out. ‘Whoah, shit. What the hell was that all about?’
‘I don’t want to know what the hell that was all about.’
‘You know, he never even noticed the cable.’
We looked at one another, and both of us ran to the railing, waving our arms and shouting, ‘Doctor! Get up here! You get up here now!’
65
One
I switched off the radio when Long Distance Runaround came on. Peri, who had been dozing, woke up with a start in the abrupt silence. ‘Can’t stand that album,’ I muttered.
We had been driving since early morning. Peri offered to take a shift behind the wheel, but I could see how much she needed a nap, so I chivalrously insisted she try to get some Zs in the Travco’s small bunk. She had switched on the radio, keeping it down low, saying that the familiar music would help her to sleep.
The Doctor sat on the bunk bed. He was building something back there, and had been for hours. He had interrupted our journey three times to run into stores he spotted out of the window. The bunk was strewn with bits of metal and tools, probably arranged in a careful order that the Doctor understood but which, to anybody else (me, for example) looked like a jumbled mess.
We had dropped Bob off in a motel in Frederick. The Doctor insisted that someone should stay near a phone line while we made our great expedition down the Delamarva Peninsula. Bob would stay connected to his email account via an Anderson Jacobson A211 acoustic coupler – a chunky beige modem with padded rests for the phone receiver. He set up the tap on Swan’s phone to forward to his home answering machine; if she made a call, it would be recorded; and he could play back the messages by calling the machine. (Before we paid for the room, Bob checked that its phone was touch-tone and not rotary-dial.) Every two hours, we would call to see if our efficient spy had any new information.
It was the tap that had sent us on the long drive eastward.
She had phoned Luis Perez to let him know she’d be away for a day or so. She said she was going to ‘visit’ Charles Cobb, the deceased collector, in Ocean City (The Doctor was at first disbelieving and then amused when Bob assured him there is a place called Ocean City.) Neither Swan nor Luis mentioned what was living in Luis’s bathroom: for that sort of exchange, they’d use payphones or a face-to-face meeting. We didn’t have a phone book for Ocean City, so I bullied Mondy into coughing up Cobb’s address. ‘His number’s been disconnected,’ the phreak reported. ‘But I looked at the last couple of bills.’
Bob had been happy to stay wired to the network in the motel, but the Doctor had also wanted to leave Peri behind.
‘This expedition is going to involve not just a tedious trip from one side of the state to the other, but some real-life breaking and entering,’ he told her. ‘There’s not only the risk of another confrontation with the police, but with Swan. I’d rather you kept Bob company