Chapter 37

"I'll tell you, Harris, it isn't often that you get a check for twenty-five big ones and then get stuck for coffee," McMullen told Harper not too long after he said goodbye to the singer. Harper's home wasn't far away, and he wanted to share the news.

"It's a pity that it's Saturday," Harper said. "We can't get that check to the bank before Monday, and we're going to lose some interest."

"Really, it's kind of a consolation prize," McMullen conceded. "If I'd been able to talk her into really speaking out on the issue, then we could have really stacked it away. But, if you figure that we're going to have to ante up ten grand for the television surveillance, and maybe five to support Heather there for three months, it's not really a bad deal, especially since it gives us something to do with Heather for a while."

"Oh, I'll agree, the money is green," Harris said. "And, if we keep Heather on the office staff account, we can double-dip her paychecks and deposit one in Switzerland, so realistically, our net take is closer to twenty than it is to fifteen. It requires a little shuffle, but nothing the auditor's ever been able to catch before. It makes for a nice Saturday morning, doesn't it?"

McMullen leaded back in the deck chair, and stared out over the Pacific. "Sure is nice up here, today," he said. "How long have we been grubbing around like this? Twenty years?"

"Closer to twenty-five, and that's not even counting the civil rights demonstrations, back in the early sixties," Harper said. "But, the first years were rather lean, if you'll remember."

"God, we ate a lot of hamburgers from drive-throughs, going from one thing to another," McMullen said. "But we paid our dues. You know, some day, I'd like to just hang it up, maybe get a boat and take a couple of babes and go sailing. Just kind of be the kind of revered elder statesman sort of thing. Maybe stir something up once in a while, just for fun."

"I feel that way too, sometimes," Harper admitted. "The hell of it is, I'm afraid I'd miss the excitement of it, the thrill of the hunt."

"Yeah, me too," McMullen said. "God, this morning was about as easy a score for that kind of money that I've had in a while. Remember when we dreamed about getting a thousand bucks to play with?"

"We've gotten past that," Harper said. "We could both retire on what we've got in the bank. Just live off the interest, and have damn comfortable lives. But, you know what would happen. Let some sucker poke his nose out of the woodwork, and we'd be off and running again. It's in our blood."

"Just out of curiosity, what would it take for us to get rid of all this?" McMullen wondered. "Hand the Defenders over to someone else, say, someone like Heather, and do it in such a way that there'd be no way of telling how much we'd skimmed?"

"I've thought about it," Harper admitted. "It would take three years at a minimum of running clean before we could destroy the old records, so there'd be no proof. Probably closer to five years, because we'd have to phase into running clean, but we could maybe let some cash build up in reserves, and give us each a big golden parachute when we jump out the door."

"In five years, we're both going to be pushing the hell out of sixty," McMullen said. "Not there yet, but getting there. If one of us drops dead, it's going to be that much worse for the other one. Maybe we ought to think about pulling the plug, maybe get started when we get the cream out of this Jenny Easton promo thing."

"You're dreaming, Dale."

"I know it, Harris. But, it's something to be thinking about."