Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [105]
When it became obvious that the Mole wasn’t going to be any more conversational than usual, I told him what I wanted. “I need you to take out the security system in this house I have to visit.”
The Mole blinked a lot of times. “What kind of security system?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’ll draw you what I have from the plans, but I think there’s also a hookup to the police station. I want the whole damn system to go down, and only at a certain time. Like at eight o’clock, bang! nothing works . . . okay?”
“You want a bang?”
“No, Mole. That’s just an expression.”
The Mole stared at me as he would any lower form of life. “Does it have to be restorable?”
“No, I don’t care if the system stays down forever. You set it up so you can kill the whole thing at a certain time, right? Then you do it, and you leave. That’s all.”
“In the city?”
“Westchester County.”
“Multiple dwelling?”
“No, a big house.”
“Access?”
“Up to you. No guards, no dogs that I know of. But a wealthy neighborhood—the Man will be around all the time.”
“How about a Con Ed Total?”
A Con Ed Total is when the Mole shuts down the utilities for an entire community, but it wouldn’t play here. I just wanted Goldor disarmed from calling help, not the whole neighborhood alerted that something was going down.
“No,” I told him, “just this one house. And not the lights either, just the special communications systems and especially the phone lines. Can you do it?”
The Mole refused to acknowledge such a stupid question. He came closer and I knelt in the dirt and began to draw the plans of Goldor’s place that I had gotten from Pablo and his people. I gave the Mole the exact address and he nodded like he already knew it—maybe he did. He asked an occasional question, and we finally settled on nine o’clock that night. I would have to take a chance on catching Goldor at home, and alone, because once the Mole was programmed to act there was no way to stop him.
We walked through the junkyard until we found a steel-gray Volvo sedan, somewhat battered around the edges but apparently quite serviceable. The Mole said he had good papers for it, but it was actually a cannibal job of several cars and impossible to trace even if I had to leave it on the street when I was done. We kept walking until we found two current license plates, which the Mole sliced up with his cutting torch. He then welded the halves together to make a single license plate with nonexistent numbers. If somebody did manage to read the plates while I was working, the computer wouldn’t help them.
The Mole gave me a set of keys to the car, kept one for himself, and said he could drop it off by late afternoon near the Twenty-third Street parking garage I use for alibi operations. I gave the Mole five hundred bucks and we had a contract. I was as sure of the car being there and Goldor’s communications system not being there as I was of anything in this world.
The Mole went back underground or wherever he goes and Simba-witz walked me back to my car. In twenty minutes I was climbing over the Triboro to the East Side heading for my office to give Pansy the good news.
39
AS SOON AS I got back in the office I checked for hippies and dialed Flood. I told her to be ready to move out at around four that afternoon and hung up on her questions. When Pansy came down from the roof I told her I didn’t have a lot of time to screw around just then, but I had lined up a date with the famous Simba-witz for her, to take place on his suburban estate sometime later in the year. She gave me a lot of crap about blind dates but she finally said it was okay so long as I didn’t plan to leave her there.
The four corners of time were coming in