WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

obtained from the back-issue files of the Santa Barbara newspaper. “Yeah, I

remember him. He’s not one you forget. Not a foreigner looking to become an

instant American like half my customers. And not the usual sad-assed loser who

needs to change his name and hide his face. He’s not a big guy, and he doesn’t

come on tough or anything, but you get the feeling he could mop up the floor

with anyone who crossed him. Very self-contained. Very watchful. I couldn’t

forget him.”

“What you couldn’t forget,” said one of the two bearded boy wonders at the

computers, “is that gorgeous quiff he was with.”

“For her, even a dead man could get it up,” the other one said.

The first said, “Yeah, even a dead man. Cake and pie.”

Vince was both offended and confused by their contributions to the conversation,

so he ignored them. To Van Dyne, he said, “Is there any chance you’d remember

the new names you gave them?”

“Sure. We got it on file,” Van Dyne said.

Vince could not believe what he had heard. “I thought people in your line

of work didn’t keep records? Safer for you and essential for your clients.”

Van Dyne shrugged. “Fuck the clients. Maybe one day the feds or the locals hit

us, put us out of business. Maybe I find myself needing a steady flow of cash

for lawyers’ fees. What better than to have a list of a couple of thousand bozos

living under phony names, bozos who’d be willing to be squeezed a little rather

than have to start all over again with new lives.”

“Blackmail,” Vince said.

“An ugly word,” Van Dyne said. “But apt, I’m afraid. Anyway, all we care about

is that we are safe, that there aren’t any records here to incriminate us. We

don’t keep the data in this dump. Soon as we provide someone with a new ID, we

transmit the record of it over a safe phone line from the computer here to a

computer we keep elsewhere. The way that computer is programmed, the data can’t

be pulled out of it from here; it’s a one-way road; so if we are busted, the

police hackers can’t reach our records from these machines. Hell, they won’t

even know the records exist.”

This new high-tech criminal world made Vince woozy. Even the don, a man of

infinite criminal cleverness, had thought these people kept no records and had

not realized how computers had made it safe to do so. Vince thought about what

Van Dyne had told him, getting it all sorted out in his mind. He said, “So can

you take me to this other computer and look up Cornell’s new

ID?”

“For a friend of Don Tetragna’s,” Van Dyne said, “I’ll do just about anything

but slit my own throat. Come with me.”

Van Dyne drove Vince to a busy Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. The place must

have seated a hundred and fifty, and every table was occupied, mostly by Anglos

rather than Asians. Although the joint was enormous and was decorated with paper

lanterns, dragon murals, imitation rosewood screens, and strings of brass wind

chimes in the shapes of Chinese ideograms, it reminded Vince of the kitschy

Italian trattoria in which he had murdered the cockroach Pantangela and the two

federal marshals last August. All ethnic art and decor—from Chinese to Italian

to Polish to Irish—were, when boiled down to their essence, perfectly alike.

The owner was a Chinese man in his thirties, who was introduced to Vince simply

as Yuan. With bottles of Tsingtao provided by Yuan, Van Dyne and Vince went into

the owner’s basement office, where two computers stood on two desks, one out in

the main work area and the other shoved into a corner. The one in the corner was

switched on, though nobody was working at it.

“This is my computer,” Van Dyne said. “No one here ever works with it. They

never even touch it, except to open the phone line to put the modem in operation

every morning and to close it at night. My computers at Hot Tips are linked to

this one.”

“You trust Yuan?”

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