“I got him the loan that started this business. He owes me his good fortune.
And it’s pretty much a clean loan, nothing that can be linked to me in any way,
or to Don Tetragna, so Yuan remains an upstanding citizen who’s of no interest
to the cops. All he does for me in return is let me keep the computer here.”
Sitting in front of the terminal, Van Dyne began to use the keyboard. In two
minutes he had Travis Cornell’s new name: Samuel Spencer Hyatt.
“And here,” Van Dyne said as new data flickered up. “This is the woman who was
with him. Her real name was Nora Louise Devon of Santa Barbara. Now, she’s Nora
Jean Aimes.”
“Okay,” Vince said. “Now wipe them off your records.”
“What do you mean?”
“Erase them. Take them out of the computer. They’re not yours any more. They’re
mine. Nobody else’s. Just mine.”
A short while later, they were back at Hot Tips, which was a decadent place that
revolted Vince.
In the basement, Van Dyne gave the names Hyatt and Aimes to the bearded boy
wonders who seemed to live down there around the clock, like a couple of trolls.
First, the trolls broke into the Department of Motor Vehicle computers. They
wanted to see whether, in the three months since acquiring new identities, Hyatt
and Aimes had settled down somewhere and filed a change of address with the
state.
“Bingo,” one of them said.
An address appeared on the screen, and the bearded operator ordered a printout.
Anson Van Dyne tore the paper off the printer and handed it to Vince. Travis
Cornell and Nora Devon—now Hyatt and Aimes—were living at a rural address on
Pacific Coast Highway south of the town of Carmel.
5
On Wednesday, December 29, Nora drove into Carmel alone for an appointment with
Dr. Weingold.
The sky was overcast, so dark that the white seagulls, swooping against the
backdrop of clouds, were by contrast almost as bright as incandescent lights.
The weather had been much the same since the day after Christmas, but the
promised rain never came.
Today, however, it came in torrents just as she pulled the pickup into one of
the spaces in the small parking lot behind Dr. Weingold’s office. She was
wearing a nylon jacket with a hood, just in case, and she pulled the hood
over her head before dashing from the truck into the one-story brick building.
Dr. Weingold gave her the usual thorough examination and pronounced
her fit as a fiddle, which would have amused Einstein.
“I’ve never seen a woman at the three-month mark in better shape,” the doctor
said.
“I want this to be a very healthy baby, a perfect baby.”
“And so it shall be.”
The doctor believed that her name was Aimes and her husband’s name was Hyatt,
but he never once indicated disapproval of her marital status. The situation
embarrassed Nora, but she supposed that the modern world, into which she had
fluttered from the cocoon of the Devon house, was liberal-minded about these
things.
Dr. Weingold suggested, as he had done before, that she consider a test to
determine the baby’s sex, and as before she declined. She wanted to be
surprised. Besides, if they found out they were going to have a girl, Einstein
would start campaigning for the name “Minnie.”
After huddling with the doctor’s receptionist to schedule the next appointment,
Nora pulled the hood over her head again and went out into the driving rain. It
was coming down hard, drizzling off a section of roof that had no gutters,
sluicing across the sidewalk, forming deep puddles on the macadam of the parking
lot. She sloshed through a miniature river on her way to the pickup, and in
seconds her running shoes were saturated.
As she reached the truck, she saw a man getting out of a red Honda parked beside
her. She didn’t notice much about him—just that he was a big guy in a small car,
and that he was not dressed for the rain. He was wearing jeans and a blue
pullover, and Nora thought: The poor man is going to get soaked to the skin.