"Chalker, Jack L - G.O.D. Inc 1 - Labyrinth of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

those older middle-class apartment houses with sixteen apartments in the place,
and there was only so much you could expect even from Divine Providence. You
could use a hundred scams to talk to the neighbors, but I once tried the
insurance-agent ploy and half the people wanted to talk policies. It was easier
just to fall back on the old reliable and flash the badge while Brandy cased the
joint. It wasn't too hard to find their apartment; it was the one couple nobody
knew much about and everybody thought a little nuts.
That left getting into apartment 2-09. I wasn't much good at petty burglary, but
when it was clear that the place was dark and unoccupied, I turned things over
to Brandy. She had that nice, big safety lock picked in about two and a half
minutes of sweat. I did the sweating, of course.
At this stage, our pair had been pretty casual. They never expected to be coming
back, and they never expected anybody to be able to find the place. At the end
of the lease, which was prepaid only to the end of the month, the landlord would
use his master, open the place up, get a cleaning crew in, and rent it out
again.
These weren't furnished apartments, but it's tough to make a smooth getaway in a
moving van. Most of it appeared to be rental furniture, with the stickers still
on, pretty much like I figured. It wasn't terribly full of stuff, though; a
couch and a couple of chairs in the otherwise barren living room, a queen-sized
mattress and box spring in the bedroom, and a dresser. Most of the clothes and
some of the toiletries were gone, but the small fridge was still reasonably
full -- fortified skim milk, Perrier, some never-to-be fondue, and even a couple
of bottles of sixty-buck-a-fifth champagne. Overchilled, but not bad. Brandy
took care of the small tin of beluga caviar; I never could see the appeal of
solid-salt fish eggs that cost ten cents a pinhead-sized egg. Just your average
lower-middle-class apartment dweller's emergency rations.
Then we started looking under mattresses and behind furniture. It didn't take
very long, considering the underfurnished nature of the apartment, but we came
up with a whole bunch of junk. It's amazing what falls in back of dressers, and
there is some sort of law that states that anything left for any period of time
will migrate to spots where you will never see it or find it. Most of it was the
ordinary debris -- a plastic hair curler, a couple of combs, some loose change, a
magazine sweepstakes form, that kind of thing. One very crumpled little piece of
tissue-thin paper, however, stood out and Brandy carefully unwrapped it. "Aha!
The master detectives strike!" she announced with a flair and handed it to me.
It was a credit card slip.
The thing was hard to read and seemed to be fairly old, but I could read the
name and the number and the expiration date, and it was still current. Amanda W.
Curry, and a card good until the end of this year. Now, for the first time, we
had a name and a way to track them. Whitlock just wasn't the type to go around
packing suitcases full of cash, and he could hardly walk in and ask to buy two
and a quarter million bucks in American Express traveler's checks without
attracting a little attention. He would keep most of the money in dummy accounts
probably spread all to hell and back, and contract with a money manager to pay
the bills on this new set of credit cards. Little Jimmy had provided me with a
sample of Whitlock's handwriting, and I took it out of my wallet and compared
it. The charge slip was definitely signed in a woman's hand, yet there were
certain similarities in the way the letters were formed, particularly the W. I
handed them to Brandy. "If it's not the same, then they grew up together and