Final justice - W.E.B. Griffin [64]
Couldn't be helped. Goddamn, this Cheryl's really going to be a good one!
He cleaned himself up with Kleenex, then took the CD from the drive and put it back in the hiding place, erased Folder STL from the hard drive, and then started the U.S. Government Approved Slack Wipe Program. That would run for a couple of hours. What the program did was overwrite and overwrite and overwrite again the slack space on the hard drive, so there would be no chance of anybody ever being able to recover the images of Karen he had just looked at.
Then he took a shower and went to bed.
At seven the next morning, he got behind the wheel of the Peterbilt, got on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and headed west. There was a guy in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who collected Rollses, and there was a good chance he'd be interested in some kind of a deal with the one now in the rig.
Three weeks, more or less, later, Homer had again stood in the shadow of the tree outside Cheryl Williamson's apartment. He had gone to Halligan's Pub in hopes of seeing her there, and when she hadn't shown, he'd gone to the apartment complex.
By then, primarily because of a credit check he had run on her, he knew a good deal about her. He knew where she worked, for one thing, and where she had gone to school, and that she had never been married, and that she owed fifteen payments of $139.50 on the Chrysler Sebring, and thirty-three payments of $105.05 on the furniture in her apartment.
The lights were on in her apartment, which meant that she was there, and that he could probably take the coveralls and face mask and Jim Bowie knife from his briefcase and get the job done. It was a temptation. He'd thought of her a lot.
But it was also possible that she wasn't alone in the apartment, and there was no sense taking any chances. All things come to he who waits. He had decided to wait.
It was a month after that that he stood for the third time in the shadow of the tree looking up at her apartment. This time, Cheryl had been in the Harrison Lounge, cock-teasing some poor slob who had no idea what a bitch she was, and when she'd left--alone, of course--he'd followed her home again. That night, he was sure, was going to be the night. He even went back to his car--this time a Plymouth Voyager loaner from Willow Grove, there being nothing better on the lot--and changed into the costume.
When the lights went out in Cheryl's apartment, he decided he would wait five minutes before climbing the back stairs to her apartment. Thirty seconds later, Cheryl came out of the building, got into the Sebring, and drove off.
There was no way of telling, of course, where the bitch was going. Or when--even if--she was coming back. If he continued to wait in the shadow of the tree, somebody might see him. And if he went back and waited in the Voyager, the cops might drive by and wonder what someone was doing sitting in a car at quarter to three in the morning.
When he got back to Willow Grove and the rig, he loaded DEN into the computer, and watched the sixteen pictures he'd taken three months before of an arrogant bitch named Delores in Denver. A not-so-arrogant bitch anymore, which was nice to look at and remember. But Delores was not nearly as pretty as Cheryl, and Delores didn't look nearly as much like Bonnie the Bitch as Cheryl did.
Tonight, Homer had the feeling everything was going to fall into place. Willow Grove Automotive had loaned him a dark gray De Ville--not the one he'd had before--and when he got to Halligan's, the minute he pulled into the parking lot, he saw Cheryl's Sebring, and didn't even have to go into the lounge.
He just sat in the De Ville and waited for her to come out. When she did, a guy came out after her, and they had a little argument in the doorway. The bitch was obviously telling the guy she'd been cock-teasing for the last hour, at least, that he had it wrong, that not only was she not that kind of girl, but even if she was, she wouldn't give any to a jerk like him.
The guy went back in Halligan's Pub, Cheryl got in her Sebring, and when she