Found Money - James Grippando [2]
Amy watched her mother cross the dark room. The door opened. Her mother turned as if to bid a silent goodbye, then closed the door.
Amy rolled on her side and gazed out the window. No more telescope tonight, but this was one of those incredibly clear nights when the heavens were awesome even with the naked eye. She watched for several minutes until her vision blurred and the stars began to swirl. She was getting drowsy. Twenty minutes passed. Maybe longer. Her eyes closed, then opened. Her head sank deeper into the pillow. The strip of light from the hallway disappeared beneath her bedroom door. Mom was apparently going to bed. It comforted Amy to know that. The last few nights, her mother hadn’t been sleeping.
She glanced out the window again. Beyond the trees, she saw the lights go out in the house next door. With eyes closed, she imagined the lights going out in house after house as the neighborhood, the city, the entire country went to sleep. The lights were off all around the world. But the stars burned bright. Amy was nearly asleep.
A loud crack pierced the night—like thunder, but it wasn’t thunder. Amy jackknifed in her bed, as if kicked in the belly.
The noise had come from inside the house.
Her heart raced. She listened for it again, but there was only silence. She was too frightened to scream. She wanted to call for her mother, but words wouldn’t come. It had been an awful sound, enough to make her fear the dark forever. Yet it took only a second to pinpoint the source. She knew the sound. There was no mistaking it. She’d heard it before, far from the house, the time her mother had driven her out to the woods and Amy had watched her practice.
It was the echoing clap of her mother’s loaded handgun.
Part 1
Summer 1999
1
Amy wished she could go back in time. Not way back. It wasn’t as if she wanted to sip ouzo with Aristotle or tell Lincoln to duck. Less than a fortnight would suffice. Just far enough to avert the computer nightmare she’d been living.
Amy was the computer information systems director at Bailey, Gaslow & Heinz, the premier law firm in the Rocky Mountains. It was her job to keep confidential information flowing freely and securely between the firm’s offices in Boulder, Denver, Salt Lake City, Washington, London, and Moscow. Day in and day out, she had the power to bring two hundred attorneys groveling to their knees. And she had the privilege of hearing them scream. Simultaneously. At her.
As if I created the virus, she thought, thinking of what she wished she had said to one accusatory partner. He was miles behind her now, but she was still thinking about it. Driving alone on the highway was a great place to put things exactly as they should have been.
It had taken almost a week to purge the entire system, working eighteen-hour days, traveling to six different offices. She had everyone up and running in some capacity within the first twenty-four hours, and she ultimately salvaged over 95 percent of the stored data. Still, it wasn’t a pleasant experience to have to tell a half-dozen unlucky lawyers that, like Humpty Dumpty, their computers and everything on them were DOA.
It was a little-known fact, but Amy had witnessed it firsthand: Lawyers do cry.
A sudden rattle in the dashboard snagged Amy’s attention. Her old Ford pickup truck had plenty of squeaks and pings. Each was different, and she knew them all, like a mother who could sense whether her baby’s cry meant feed me, change me, or please get Grandma out of my face. This particular noise was more of a clunk—an easy problem to diagnose, since torrid hot air was suddenly blowing out of the air conditioning vents. Amy switched off the A-C and tried rolling down the window. It jammed. Perfect. Ninety-two degrees outside, her truck was spewing dragon’s breath, and the damn window refused to budge. It was an old saw in Colorado that people visited for the winters but moved there for the summers. They obviously didn’t mean this.
I’m melting, she thought, borrowing from The Wizard of Oz.
She grabbed the Rocky Mountain