He snickered. “As if you’d even understand.”

“You want me to understand, Stewart, so I can appreciate the sophistication of your work and be duly impressed.”

With a blubbery sigh of acceptance, he left the room and came back dragging a stiff-backed chair behind him. He placed it well behind his own comfy swiveler, but I grabbed it and wedged it forward before he had a chance to plop down and completely freeze me out. That put our knees bumping together beneath his keyboard tray, something that I wasn’t crazy about but didn’t seem to bother him.

“So, you people are running hookers out of LA? That explains what’s been going on with the numbers.”

“Has her revenue declined?”

“Angel’s revenue never declines. It just hasn’t been going up as fast as before.”

Prostitution. An unlimited market driven by infinite demand. No wonder it was the oldest profession. Angel’s business was under heavy attack by a direct competitor, and she was still growing, only at a slower rate. I wondered what the depressed growth rate might be. Twenty percent? Fifty?

“We’ve heard about you in LA, Stewart.”

“You have?” He puffed up a little.

“We’ve heard that you’re the key to Angel’s success.”

He let out the long and lonely sigh of the unappreciated. “She couldn’t do anything without me. Until she found me, she was so small-time.”

“My only question is why put up with her?”

“What do you mean?”

“She takes all the credit for your work. She talks about you as if you’re some kind of trained monkey. You know what she calls you, right? Sluggo?”

His face clouded over, and his jaw jutted out. Stewart didn’t have much of a poker face. “Sometimes she pays me with sex.” He pouted. “That’s the only reason I stay with her is…is because she’s a great piece of ass.”

“Uh-huh.” I pulled back so that less of me touched less of him. He was lying about Angel, and I didn’t want him getting any ideas about me. At least none beyond the ones I wanted to give him.

His fingers hovered over the keys for half a second before he started pounding. His keyboard was dirty and his mouse stained dark from what must have been thousands of touches from his right palm, but the second he started typing, he became a different person. It was as if his hands on the keys completed a circuit, and the power that ran through the computer animated him as well. The slouch fell out of his shoulders, his breathing steadied, and everything about him was more grounded and confident.

“What do you want to see?”

“I want to see how your data are stored and organized, how you keep track of customers, activity, payments, schedules-”

“I’ll show you the tables and whatnot, but I’m blocking out all the data.”

“Without the data, I can’t get a good sense of how your system works.”

“There is no way I’m showing you anything about clients or hookers. No way. I don’t work for you, and I’m not giving up the goods until I see some green.”

Perhaps the whinier version of Stewart would have been preferable. I knew one thing: he was my last option, and I wasn’t leaving without that list of hookers.

I sat back in my chair and checked out my thumbnail. “You probably don’t have what we need, anyway. We have pretty advanced ideas of what we want to do.”

“Advanced?” He snorted. “What is it you think you need?”

“History. We’d like to keep a database of all of our clients’ activity to use for a loyalty program. Does Angel have that?”

“She doesn’t. I do. I know everything every one of her clients has done, where, when, and who with.”

“That’s sensitive information. We would want to make sure it’s totally inaccessible, for obvious reasons.”

“No one can get into my system. No one can hack me.”

“Why not?”

“Because”-big sigh, total exasperation-“I have firewalls on top of firewalls on top of firewalls. I designed and built them myself. If I ran Microsoft, they would never have any of those dumb security failures they have.”

“Can I see how you store the data?”

“Like I said-”

“I know, no names. Just the structure of the tables.”

He came into the program through a back door. There were no input boxes or other customer interface screens. Instead, he showed me a lot of tables and templates with rows and columns that had labels but no data. No names.

Stewart might have had the social skill of a sixteen-year-old, but he was clever about system design. I told him some of my ideas for the frequent fucker program, and he knew exactly how to implement them and, in some cases, improve on them.

“All we have to do,” he said, “is to assign an ID number to each customer, see? Some kind of a tag so that we can trace all their activity. Then we add a column to the customer tables.”

“Like the airlines’ frequent flier IDs.”

“The airlines’ programs are retarded. Mine would be a whole lot better.”

We worked our way into an uneasy truce based on his desire to strut his stuff and, I noticed, just how much contact our knees made. It was like flipping a switch. The more I rubbed up against him, the more forthcoming he was.

“We’re thinking of setting up a performance management system.”

“What’s that?”

“A way to evaluate the performance of the providers.”

“You mean the hookers? Like how many different ways they can do it?” He giggled and rubbed his shoulder against my upper arm. I got even closer, going with him on every subtle shift his body made.

“Sort of. Like how much revenue they generate and how many new customers they bring in. Some of the girls are really energetic. They work hard, generate lots of revenue, and bring in new customers. I would want to know who they are so I could reward them properly. Any ideas?”

“That’s easy. I’ll show you.” He stroked a few keys. “I can show you without giving you the names.”

He built a table with a column for standard rate, one for what he called average revenue per hooker, one for dates per hooker, and one for revenue earned to date for the year. Instead of names, he used numbered rows, from one to thirty-two.

“I can sort it any way you want. How do you want it?”

“Highest to lowest by rate.” I figured that way, the elites would be grouped right at the top, and they were. Only one woman made $2,500 per date. It had to be Angel. Several were just below her at $1,500 to $2,000, and on down the list in descending order.

“Now, can you put in a column that shows the date of each woman’s activity? And the city?”

“What for?”

“I want a way to tell who works how often and who travels the farthest.”

“Um…okay.” He whipped up a comment column that included the information. I checked for the date when I had taken the pictures of Angel and Sally. When I saw that the two hookers at the top had been in Pittsburgh on that night, I could barely contain my delight. This was exactly what I needed, data that could be matched to flight schedules and the surveillance photos we’d taken to tell a story that was compelling, traceable, and incriminating.

But only if it included the names of the women.

The clock in the lower right-hand corner of his screen read twelve forty-fiveA.M. I’d been there for two hours already, and I had taken him as far as he would go on the promise of a bungalow on the beach and a couple of cheap feels. To get the good stuff, I knew I would have to offer him something he really wanted, something for which he had no good defense.

I leaned over the arm of my chair to look at the screen and put myself well into his personal space. He took a deep breath, his face inches from my hair.

“Would you print all those out for me? I want to take them back to my people to show them what you can do.”

As the pages began to roll off the printer, I pulled one off and set it on his lap. “You know what would be really helpful for us? To see the names of these women, so we know who to recruit to our side.”