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Harp’s house showeda second-floor light and Letty wondered if the woman—Hannah Baldwin, according to her driver’s license and student ID—had stayed overnight. She’d rather not have to deal with that.
She mentioned the problem to Baxter as they did a preliminary cruise past the house, but Baxter said, “Nah, she didn’t stay. If you’re banging a student, you want her leaving in the middle of the night, not at seven-thirty in the morning. You don’t want the sun shining on her illegal ass, and all the going-to-work faculty seeing her.”
“Good point.” One thing she’d learned about Baxter, Letty thought, was that while he was personally unseemly, tatted-up and hairy, over-gelled and -cologned, looked like he bought his clothes from a tent maker, and was unselfconsciously cowardly, he was also wickedly intelligent. She wouldn’t fool him about much.
“You can drop me,” she said. “I’ll walk up to the corner of California when I’m done; I’ll call.”
“Whatever you say, my little blueberry muffin.”
“You can knock that shit off right now,” Letty said.
“I don’t think so. I’m tired of being bossed around... my little pink desert rose.”
“Yeah, fuck you, Baxter... No, wait...”
They were both laughing, sorta, when he dropped her off with her limp and her cane. She walked up the circular drive and knocked on the door and leaned on the doorbell to make sure she was heard.
Two minutes later, Harp answered the door barefoot, in sweatpants and an orange tee-shirt. He frowned at her and said, “You’re the girl with the crow tattoo...”
“Raven,” Letty said. “We need to talk. Right now. Urgently.”
“About what?”
“Your future at Caltech,” Letty said.
“What?”
“I’m not crazy. Do you have tea, or coffee? I’m feeling a little cranky,” Letty said.
“Why should I...”
“Because I need some information from you and I need it bad enough that I’m willing to blackmail you with Hannah Baldwin, the undergraduate student you’re banging.”
Harp’s mouth dropped open, but after a brief hesitation, he stepped back and let her in.
Letty walked throughthe entry and living room, to the kitchen. On the way, she paused at the couch and said, “I followed you into your house last night, after the party. While you were upstairs banging young Hannah, I took her student ID and driver’s license from her purse, posed them against that great custom backsplash tile in the kitchen, and took a photo that will show time and GPS location in the metadata.”
“I should strangle you and dump your body,” Harp said, taking a half step toward her.
“No. If you tried, I’d use this cane to beat you to death. Take a look at that point...” She twirled it in her hands so he could see both the sharp and hammer-ends of the cane head. “So, you got tea?”
He did.
He had an electric Cuisinart kettle and made them cups of English Breakfast tea; they both took four packets of sugar. Watching him do it, quick and competent, he struck Letty as unconventionally attractive. She could see why Hannah Baldwin was with him, even if he was too old for her. He put the cups on the kitchen table, and they sat across from each other, and he said, “Talk. What do you want?”
She took a sip of the boiling-hot tea, and said, “I’m here from Gainesville, Florida, with a friend, who happens to be a computer genius.”
“Those are a dime a dozen around here, if you’re bragging,” Harp said, crossing his legs and sipping his own tea. “You can’t throw a rock without hitting one.”
“Yeah. Well, this particular one is mine. We’re poor. We tried to fix that a few weeks ago by locking up the computers at the Confederate Memorial Medical Center in Willow Branch, Georgia...”
A look of amusement crossed his face. “That was you? There’s a rumor that you screwed the pooch.”
“Yeah. We did. The feds are all over us. They don’t know who we are, but they’re still digging and they know where the Bitcoin is. Half million dollars.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“Some time back, a hacker combine called Ordinary People, which rumor says comes out of Caltech, held up the Russian railsystem for fifty million dollars. Another Bitcoin deal. We need to get in touch with Ordinary People and we think you can help us with that.”
