Free 01. Labyrinth of Dreams by Jack L. Chalker Page B

pair of jeans and a tee shirt, maybe old tennis shoes, and with some difficulty gets the stuff. We can forget the blond shit, though. He knows he was conspicuous, so he'll ditch 'em or at least stick 'em in the trunk and use something else. Big beard, shaved head, maybe tinted contact lenses, and he's off. Dead end, babe. We don't even know the name he was using in northeast Philly—if that was where he was doing whatever he was doing—and there's only three quarters of a million people out there. It'd take us years to canvass enough to find this pair."
    Brandy grinned. "You won't have to. See, they thought she was one of them, and they smelled somethin' real odd about this dude even if he did have the handwriting and all. After all, Whitlock was their sugar daddy or mama or whatever. So when he left, they tailed him. I have the address."
    I almost jumped across the table to kiss her. Naturally, this spilled my coffee and her Coke, but I didn't care. Finally I said, as the waitress and several patrons stared at us in disgust, "I think we go out there—after I make two phone calls."
    "Little Jimmy and who else?"
    "Agent Kennedy. I'm gonna give 'em both everything up to the sex change. If they're any good, they might get further, but maybe not. In the meantime, I'm in good with them and we'll be the first there."
    There were still several hours of setup and work involved. The place was one of 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