Geek Mafia: Mile Zero (13 page)

The faded gray wood exterior hadn't seen a paint brush in years, and it would require a lot of work by the owners before it would be fit to sell. Inside it wasn't too bad though, with scuffed but attractive hardwood floors and a wellappointed kitchen. Plus it had a large, ivy-covered fence around the yard and a screened-in porch out back.

They did their research before approaching the property manager (by breaking into the house to take their own tour). The company, Keys Condos and Estates, was a two-person operation consisting of Norm Lilianfield and his personal assistant Quincy. Norm was an aging gay hipster who'd lived in Key West for thirty-four years.

He loved his afternoon cocktails and his evening wine and his late night brandy. He had no love at all for property management, but tourism and real estate were the only games in town, and he needed to put drinks on the bar somehow. He was a laissez-faire property manager who specialized in laissez-faire owners, putting in just enough effort to keep the places clean and generating vacation rental incomes.

Paul and Chloe had never seen a riper target for their machinations. As it turned out, they didn't even have to con Norm. After digging through his financial records, cutting deals with his drug suppliers and secretly videotaping him in compromising and illegal positions, they'd confronted him. It turned out that Norm was as laissez-faire about blackmail as he was about everything else. He was more than happy to be a figurehead, as long as he got his cut. Surprised but pleased, Paul and Chloe had made a deal.

Now they ran Keys Condos and Estates, and all Norm had to do was sign the odd check and field an occasional phone call. He didn't even have to go into the office anymore. Every week he and Paul met for dinner at Pisces, and Paul gave Norm an envelope of cash while Norm filled in Paul on all the latest gossip from around town. Paul of course always picked up the check, but after the first night he didn't let Norm order caviar anymore. The foie gras was pricey enough.

Their own house got moved off the list of available vacation homes. Chloe and Paul falsified records of occasional renters to keep the owners in New England from asking too many questions. After deducting their management fees from the quarterly checks, they ended up paying about $300 a month for the entire place, about one-tenth of what it would have commanded on the rental market. Paul had at first figured that they should be able to get away with paying nothing, but Chloe had pointed out that sometimes it was much easier to pay just a little and so avoid the questions paying nothing invariably raised.

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they could divert some of the funds to cover their activities with other properties. The house they'd gotten for Winston and Lilly was one example, but they seldom entertained out-of-town guests. Usually, they just made money. The other rentals were used for Paul's attempt at doing a good deed.

When he and Chloe and Bee had decided to move to Key West after they were forced to flee San Jose last year, they'd planned on making their living on the con, just as Chloe had done for almost half her life. But Paul, less comfortable with stealing for a living, no matter how much fun it was while he was doing it, had insisted that their crimes have some sort of socially redeeming element to them. He was perfectly happy thinking of himself as a modern day Robin Hood, but he had no interest in becoming another Al Capone. At first Chloe and Bee had seemed as enthusiastic about the stealing from the rich and giving to the poor thing as he was.

As it turned out, being Robin Hood was harder than he'd imagined it would be - they were having enough trouble just keeping their heads above water and their asses out of trouble without being too terribly picky about where the money came from. Certainly they hadn't taken over Key Condos and Estates with any charitable intentions. They'd made the play because real estate, restaurants and tourists were the only sources of money on the island, and they needed to get a piece of all three just to survive.

It was while they were cultivating contacts in the restaurant business that he'd had his Robin Hood-esque brainstorm. The thing restaurant workers complained about more than anything else on Key West was not the long hours or the stingy tourist tips (although they complained about these a lot). It was the sky high rents on the island, with monthly rates that rivaled those in Manhattan or London. Most lived three, four or five to a house, converting dining rooms and sun porches into bedrooms. All of them could use a break from the rent every once and a while, especially if they lost a job or in the summers when money was scarce.

Six months ago, Autumn Schekler, a bartender at Costa Verde and casual friend of Paul and Chloe's, had lost her job. In tears and deep in debt, she'd laid out all her fears to Paul over drinks. They'd just gotten everything set up and were running smooth with Keys Condos and Estates, and Paul knew for a fact that they had a dozen beautiful vacation homes sitting empty all over the island. He offered Autumn and her roommate one of them.

They'd stayed there a month, then moved to another when that rented out. Then they moved to a third, a fourth and were now in their fifth. They hadn't paid a dime in rent - just chipping in for utilities.

At Paul's insistence, Autumn had spread the word to other restaurant workers around town. People whom she trusted and who'd lived on the island for at least four or five years. There were now almost two dozen of them living off the books in various Crew-run properties. Stealing rental time from wealthy absentee landlords caused not even a hint of guilt in Paul. It was their propensity for buying up property at inflated prices that had driven the housing market so high that many service workers had to be bussed in from Miami because they couldn't afford to live here. It was the one thing he'd managed to accomplish in Key West that wasn't entirely selfish.

Chloe had been happy to help Autumn. She was a friend. But Chloe was much less thrilled with having twenty-three "freeloaders" living in their houses. They'd argued about it several times and might never have resolved the disagreement were it not for Sandee, who pointed out that having a corps of friendly bartenders and servers in this town was sometimes worth its weight in gold. The servers heard and saw everything, and likely as not, the people they were serving never gave them a second glance. Paul and Chloe had both been surprised at how right Sandee had been. Time and again their "tenants" proved useful, including earlier tonight when one of them had helped Paul find Raquel's guest house.

From the living room of his own house, Paul called Isaiah and Winston to let them know that the police wouldn't be a problem. In both cases he got voicemail, which made it easier for him to be vague about the details and his assurances that everything was going swell. Upstairs he found Chloe in Bee's room at the top of the house, all of her monitors live and switching between various views of the city. The bars didn't close Chapter 11

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until 4 a.m. in Key West, but the crowds had definitely thinned, leaving just the hardcore partiers.

"I thought I should go back through today's tapes and see if I can find Raquel on any of them," said Bee. "That new facial recognition software I downloaded last week might help us out. I haven't had any results yet, but this is a relatively limited search."

"Sounds good," said Chloe. "Anything from the cameras we put in Raquel's room?"

Bee clicked her mouse a few times and one of the monitors flashed a night-vision green view of the guest house room. "Nope," she said. "Nothing but you guys getting the body out of there."

"You should probably erase that," suggested Paul, not liking being on record covering up a murder.

"Gotcha," agreed Bee, mousing and clicking a few more times, deleting the fragment of video.

"Can you bring up the cameras Sandee put in the La Concha?" asked Chloe.

"Yeah, I should..." Click. Click. There it was, the hallway in the La Concha leading to the elevators. Also, shots of the front door and side door.

"Rewind?" asked Chloe.

Bee nodded and the image started playing backwards at 16X speed. Moving backward through time, they saw Amelia and Isaiah leave. Then their man at the bar. Then some other customers and workers Paul recognized from upstairs. Then he saw himself and Winston. Then Eddie and Marco. Paul identified them for Chloe and Bee.

"Can we follow them outside?" asked Chloe. "I'd love to see where they ended up."

"Sure."

They watched Eddie and Marco walk out the front door of the La Concha and turn left. Bee clicked and tabbed her way through her camera network. Along Duval Street she had cameras at every intersection and in the middle of each block. Most of them looked like small electrical junction boxes. Others were hidden in light fixtures. Some were set up inside shop windows, part of a security system. At Bee's insistence, the Crew had bribed and cajoled and snuck their way into every place they could get a camera. The coverage was great, but now half of Bee's week was spent maintaining the network she had, as the cameras were very finicky and went black all the time.

Eddie and Marco walked amiably down Duval, looking to all the world like two fraternity brothers on vacation. Paul watched as they found their way into the Oasis mega-bar. He wondered if they were going to see the girls at the Pirate's Den. Bee had two cameras in the Oasis, both of them there thanks to help from one of their "tenants" who tended bar there. They watched as the two men went upstairs to the open air bar on the second level and took a table that was just out of view of the camera there. They watched the video at fast forward as occasionally one or the other of the two men would appear on camera as they went to the bar or the bathroom. Then, all of a sudden, the speeding video slammed into first gear. They'd reached real time.

"They're still at the damned bar," said Paul. "Jesus, those guys aren't acting like they're too concerned about Raquel or the conspiracy or anything else."

"Would we look any different in public? We've got to assume they're good at their jobs," said Chloe. She watched the screen in silence for a moment. "I wish we could see who all they're drinking with."

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"Yeah," agreed Paul. He pointed to the bartender on the screen, who they could see. "That's Eli."

"He's our tenant," said Chloe.

"Used to be. He's living with his girlfriend now. What's her name? Ileana..."

"And he's been there all night. He might know something."

"He might," Paul agreed. "Certainly who all they've been drinking with."

"I'm going over there," said Chloe.

"You want me to come?" asked Paul, nervous about Chloe mixing it up with Eddie and Marco and their Crew.

"No, they know you from tonight. I don't want them making a connection between us yet. You guys watch from here. Do you remember where the camera is?"

Bee brought up a database of all her cameras. "It's hidden in an oversized display bottle of Captain Morgan's, up on the top shelf," she said, reading off the screen.

"I'll see if I can get it turned toward them better," she said.

"You want me to call Sandee?" Paul asked.

"Why? I don't think I need backup for this."

"I wasn't thinking backup. I was thinking that maybe you might like to invite them to a party." He smiled, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

"Ooooh, you're a devious one, aren't you." Chloe grinned. "Yeah, call Sandee. Definitely. These guys look like they're ready to party."

Paul looked at the screen, where he could just make out the top of Marco's head. Eddie and Marco had no idea what was about to happen to them.

Chapter 12

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Chapter 12

CHLOE liked Key West best at this time of night - less than an hour before last call. No blazing sun beating down on her, the night as cool as it ever got, and the tourist hordes thinned down to just the most desperate, drunk and credulous. She sped along on her scooter to Duval street, enjoying the wind in her face, although she kept her head bent forward lest it blow her blonde wig off. Eddie looked like the type who fell for blondes.

The Oasis Bar complex was practically empty. They'd closed up most of the smaller bars, leaving only the pizza by the slice window and the bar facing the street open at ground level. There were three die-hard drinkers here, a young tourist couple smashed out of their gourds and a guy in a white dress shirt who was probably a waiter just getting off duty. She nodded and smiled to the downstairs bartender, whom she didn't know, and went back to the main staircase, which took her up to the dance floor and the sprawling deck area.

Here, too, only one of the three bars was open.

Chloe risked just one, quick glance across the bar to where Marco and Eddie were sitting at a corner table with a third, heavyset young man she didn't recognize. He wore a backward-facing baseball cap, matched with a red and blue rugby shirt and khaki shorts and was in the midst of laughing uproariously at something Eddie said. Drunk, she thought. Good. None of them seemed to have noticed her yet.

She sat down at the bar, recognizing the bartender as one of their tenants, but he had no idea that she was one of his "landlords." Chloe kept out of the day-to-day aspects of Paul's own private little version of subsidized housing. She flashed the man her best smile.

"Vodka tonic," she said.

"Sure thing," he replied. "Well or top shelf ?"

"Well's fine," she said, although the thought of drinking low-end vodka made her stomach turn. But she wanted to give the impression of a waitress just coming off her shift, not a liquor connoisseur. She assumed that Eddie or Marco or both of them were watching her now, so every little detail mattered. Before she'd left she'd thrown on a fresh, white shirt like waiters wore, but she'd only buttoned the middle three buttons, exposing cleavage up top and tying the bottom of the shirt up into a knot that exposed her navel. She wore low slung black jeans she knew exposed the top of her panties as she leaned forward on her bar stool.