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

laurels, and take the money and run, now there was no more money, only a ton of questions.
    I figured I might have some trouble getting through to Kennedy if all this was going down, but he was right there.
    "Yeah, it's true, they busted a bunch of them today including Big Tony, but it wasn't us," he told me, sounding more than a little irritated at that fact. "Turns out the FBI was running a parallel operation and we almost queered it with this Whitlock business. Seems they found out about him and his kinky double life, and used him to go up and down the chain. A few of the middle fish haven't been rounded up yet, but the organization's broken but good. This one, anyway. There's always ten more to replace it, unfortunately.''
    "What about Little Jimmy Nkrumah? He on the list? He was the guy who hired us—and just fired us."
    "Huh? Nkrumah? Nope. Don't see that name here anywhere. You're sure this guy was involved?"
    "Positive. He was the middleman in the money tree, and it was his money that Whitlock skipped out with."
    "Hmph! That's funny. Maybe they're just leaving him out to dry or something, since they say they traced the money all the way, or maybe they've turned him as one of their boys. I don't know, Horowitz. We're all one big happy federal family, right? Only we don't tell each other anything at all. Well, what's the difference? You did as good as could be expected, so there's nothing more between us, and you've lost a client and our quarry turns out to be the Bureau's man, so it's over."
    "Uh—Kennedy? If it's over, what's Whitlock doing in Oregon with a woman who looks enough like him to be him in drag? Who is she, and what the hell are they doing out here leaving his wife and kids hanging."
    "Who knows? Witness protection, maybe. We got an order to lay off him, and you do, too, if you don't want to get back in trouble with us again. I admit there's a lot of funny, unexplained stuff with this, but I don't know it all; it's not my case anymore. I got a thousand more in the active file, so that's it. By next week some rival mob will move in and cover Big Tony's whole network, and nobody using stuff on the streets will even notice the difference. Just let it go, Horowitz— for your own good."
    That was almost as unsatisfying as the call to Little Jimmy. All of a sudden everybody from the mob to the DEA was telling me that Whitlock was an untouchable, all the questions were better left unanswered, and all we needed to do to find the land of milk and honey was take the next plane out to anywhere at all but here. It stunk.
    "So what do you want to do?" Brandy asked me.
    "What can we do? I mean, right now our boy's gone from being the most wanted by everybody to being a total untouchable for all sides. For all we know, he's up in Hicksburg negotiating a new bank loan."
    "But you don't believe that, and neither do I."
    "No, but Little Jimmy wasn't scared of the feds; and one good reason was that the feds didn't know about Little Jimmy. They also think Whitlock passed the whole two and a quarter million down the line as per plan, but we know he skipped; and Little Jimmy did the passing of his own money and wanted Whitlock tracked down without his own boss, Big Tony, knowing he got skimmed. Little Jimmy would rather risk prison than write off almost his whole fortune, so either whatever scared him is worse than prison or somebody covered his losses. Who the hell would spend that kind of bread to buy out and protect a shark like Nkrumah?"
    "Maybe it's the hand of G.O.D., Inc. Wanna go find out?"
    "No, but I won't be able to sleep nights ever again if I don't anyway. Not when we're only three hours away from the answer. I just hate being my own client, that's all. The client's a cheapskate who'll stiff us."
    "Maybe, but I'm game. I want to see these whackos, anyway. Move out of the booth. I got to call San Francisco."
    "Huh? Who do you have to call there?"
    "Overnite Courier. They got a box of mine I got to get forwarded up