Shadow in Serenity (4 page)

Logan nodded. “I guess so.”

“No guessing, young man. You must be decisive. You must know what you want and how to get it. Indecision is the kiss of death in this business.”

Logan squinted at him. “What business did you say it was, again?”

“Moneymaking,” Montague said, dropping his keys into his pocket. “Now, come along. You’re my assistant, here to help me carry the load. I do the talking.”

Logan nodded and fell in behind Montague. The man walked with purpose, and the moment they were in
the bowling alley, he went directly to an automatic teller machine against the wall. Putting his glasses on the tip of his nose, he punched a few numbers into the machine’s computer, nodded his head at the string of numbers that filled the screen, and turned around as if looking for someone. Logan hung back as Montague cut across to the front desk.

“Hello, sir. My name is Sidney Moore, of the First Federal Bank of Birmingham. We installed this ATM machine late yesterday, but we had several complaints throughout the night on our twenty-four-hour line. I understand it isn’t working properly.”

“Yeah, it took a bunch of people’s cards. Told ‘em they had insufficient funds. One or two I could believe, but I doubt everybody who came in here was in the red. And on a Friday, too, when they just got paid.”

“Hmm,” Montague said, fingering his mustache. “I’m going to have to remove it and take it in for repair. We’ll make every effort to have a replacement here later today.”

“Sure thing,” the manager said. “We got along without it just fine until yesterday.”

“Please tell your customers that their cards will be sent back to them in today’s mail.”

The man nodded and turned to a customer needing bowling shoes. Montague strode back to Logan and the ATM machine. “All right, son, let’s load it up.”

“Load it?” Logan asked. “Load it where?”

“In the back of my van,” he said. “I assure you that it fits.”

“But it must weigh a ton. And isn’t it built into the wall or something?”

Montague winked and slid the machine easily away from the wall. Unplugging it, he said, “It’s no heavier than a small computer. But help me so that it looks heavier.”

Logan lifted his side and found that it didn’t weigh more than twenty pounds. Together, they carried it out to Montague’s van and slid it in. Before closing the back door, Montague leaned in, opened a compartment on the back of the ATM box, and retrieved two dozen or so ATM cards. Then, tearing off a printout at the back of the box, he nodded for Logan to get into the car.

As they slowly pulled out of the parking lot, Montague handed him the cards and the printout. “You see, my boy, having someone else’s ATM card means nothing if you don’t have their PIN numbers.” He reached over the backseat and patted the box affectionately. “But my friend here just took care of that for us. Look for the account numbers and match them to the PIN numbers the people punched in with them. The printout has it all. Then put the cards in order.”

Quietly, Logan did as he was told.

“We’ll have to hurry,” Montague said. “Since it’s Saturday, the banks aren’t open, but we mustn’t take chances.”

Montague pulled into a bank parking lot and idled the car for a moment. Logan watched, astounded, as he donned a big baseball cap, a pair of dark glasses, and a mouthpiece complete with a black mustache and beard. Tossing Logan a wig, he said, “Here, put this on. Just for the camera. We don’t want to be identifiable.”

Logan pulled the wig on, and Montague pulled up to the drive-through ATM machine. “First card,” he told him.

Logan handed him the top card.

“PIN number?” Montague asked.

“Three-two-nine-five,” Logan read.

Montague slid the card into the machine, waited for it to respond, then typed in the number. The computer asked him what amount he’d like to withdraw. Logan followed Montague’s fingers as he punched in two hundred fifty dollars.

Holding his breath, he watched, amazed, as the machine rolled out two hundred fifty dollars. “One more,” his mentor said, reaching for another card.

They repeated the steps and got two hundred fifty dollars more.

That morning, they hit ten more banks and drew two hundred fifty dollars out of twenty different accounts. By the time they were on the highway toward Atlanta, they had five thousand dollars.

Logan was charmed. “Do you do this all the time?”

“Absolutely not,” Montague said with a note of pride. “I have many other ventures. With my knowledge of computers and printing, I virtually have people handing me money wherever I go. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that knowledge isn’t a wonderful thing. It’s your key, young man, to anywhere you want to go.”

When Montague handed him his cut — one thousand dollars — Logan decided he wanted to know everything Montague knew.

Over the next few years, Logan traveled with Montague under several aliases, and watched, ever amazed, as the man posed as an airline pilot, complete with a Delta uniform, and paraded around airports cashing counterfeit checks at the terminal desks. Then he and Logan went to the hotels that housed the pilots, checked in for the night on Delta’s tab, cashed another check the next morning, and went on their merry way. Some of them were payroll checks on Delta’s account, others were personal checks in the name of Lawrence Cartland, but they had all been created with Montague’s printer.

Sometimes Montague would dress in a bank security guard’s uniform, complete with an unloaded gun. As he proudly explained, white-collar criminals did not carry
loaded guns. He would padlock the night depository at airports and collect all the receipts of the day by simply standing beside the depository, looking official, and explaining to everyone who came to make a deposit that there had been several break-ins at the depository. He had been ordered to collect the receipts personally, he said. And they believed him.

Montague made Logan several fake birth certificates under various names and ages, which enabled him to get driver’s licenses in several states, and Logan became his getaway driver, his assistant in carrying machines and bags of money, his diversion when one was needed. He also learned how to counterfeit the most detailed documents as well as Montague.

But they both specialized in cashing counterfeit checks, with routing numbers at the bottom that would make the banks’ computers send them to banks all over the country before anyone realized the checks weren’t good. By then, he and Montague would be long gone.

They were victimless crimes, Montague always said. Crimes against airlines, corporations, banks. In the few cases where actual individuals took the losses, as in the ATM withdrawals, Montague kept their thefts to a minimum.

In one case, when the police had been close on their trail and Montague was desperate to escape, he had convinced a stranger he befriended in an airport bar to cash a check for five hundred dollars. The check was phony, but he’d saved the man’s business card, and when they reached their next destination, he’d sent the man a money order for the full amount plus interest.

Montague’s code of honor was strict, and by the time Logan was old enough to pull his own stings, his friend’s unwritten “commandments” had been drilled into his mind.

1.
Never fall in love
. The moment a woman got under your skin, you were to leave town. There was nothing more dangerous to their chosen career, Montague maintained, than the brain damage a woman could inflict on a man. It caused him to take unnecessary chances and make serious mistakes. That would jeopardize everything they’d worked for.

2.
Only take from those who deserve it.
Honorable men only took from those who could afford to lose something or those who were insured. But after that rule always came the qualifying caveat — “You can’t cheat an honest man.” Logan assumed that meant that anyone who fell for their schemes actually did deserve it.

3.
Never stay in one place too long.
They had to assume that the Feds were always on their scent, just a town behind them. One day too long could make the difference between freedom and years of incarceration.

4.
Never let your conscience slow you down.
There was no room for guilt or regret in this line of work. On the few occasions when Logan expressed those feelings, Montague made it clear he had little patience for it.

5.
Never allow your picture to be taken, except for counterfeit IDs or passports.
All it would take was one photograph sent to the authorities by a suspicious mark and shown to a past victim to land them behind bars.

6.
Always travel light.
Accumulation could be fatal.

In their business, one had to be able to leave things — and people—behind without regret.

7.
You can be forgiven any crime if you commit it with class.
Montague had outfitted Logan in a wardrobe fit for a Trump, forcing him to discard all his jeans, tennis shoes, and T-shirts. They were always to dress and carry themselves with class, and they slept in the finest accommodations and ate the richest food. “People will believe you are
whatever you appear to be, my boy. Your life is a blank slate, and you must imagine your past and future to be as grand as you wish it,” Montague said.

Armed with those rules, Logan concocted his first original scam at age sixteen. Posing as a twenty-one-year-old, which was believable since he now stood over six feet tall, he went into a tax-filing office carrying a fake W - 2 form and a stolen Social Security number and had his tax return done. When it was finished and his sizable refund was calculated, he requested “fast cash,” an immediate refund offered by the company at a nominal interest rate, much like a loan. Logan walked out with two thousand dollars in his pocket. When Montague tried the same scam, he netted even more.

The heady feeling Logan got from charming his way through his own scam was addictive, and soon he had more ideas. For each, he spent hours at the library, researching the ins and outs of the businesses he intended to sting, making phone calls and talking to people, and analyzing the ways that he could pull off the most lucrative con.

Montague was clearly pleased with Logan’s progress, and as Logan grew closer to adulthood, Montague became the closest thing Logan had ever had to a father. As the years passed, Logan realized that he hadn’t been that much help to Montague in the early days; rather, the man had wanted him along to combat loneliness. Their friendship served both of them well.

The older Logan got, the higher he lived, and the more money he and Montague needed to maintain their lifestyle. Logan put his mind to work on bigger schemes, looking for ways to sweep a town of all its spare cash and move on without looking back.

The idea came to him when he was lounging in a hot tub
one Sunday afternoon, watching television. He saw a documercial for a real-estate venture. “That’s it,” he said aloud.

Montague, who seemed to be sleeping in the bubbling tub, opened his eyes. “Did I miss something?”

“Seminars,” Logan said. “We need to give some seminars. You know. On real estate, or investments. Let’s say we come into a town, hold a seminar laying out some get-rich-quick schemes that would have the greediest people salivating. We tell them they have to invest that night, or it’ll be too late. Then we tell them that we have to go to the site — you know, Brazil or somewhere — and that we’ll be back with their deeds. Give them time to have their checks clear before they get suspicious.”

“Seminars,” Montague repeated, thinking it over. “My boy, I believe you may have something there.”

They did their first real-estate scam in Picayune, Mississippi, a small town near the Gulf Coast, where the residents showed up at their seminar, checkbooks in hand, ready to make the investment of their lifetime. They sold property in Brazil that would allegedly be developed into one of the most sought-after resorts in the southern hemisphere. They walked away that night with fifty thousand dollars.

It was the first of many. Montague lent a touch of integrity and regality to the act, and Logan offered unabashed enthusiasm, along with a zealous passion for his product, whatever it might be. Together, they couldn’t lose.

“This is the caper that could help us retire from this nefarious life we lead,” Montague said with a grin one night as he stacked his money into bundles and packed them into a suitcase.

Logan laughed.
“You,
retire? What would you do?”

“Buy a ranch in the Southwest,” Montague said without hesitation. “Find myself a nice little bride. Raise horses.”

“I can’t see you on a ranch, Montague,” Logan said.
“I’ve always imagined you usurping a prince and taking over his castle.”

“Much too high profile for me,” Montague said. “When I retire, it will be quietly. I’ll put it all behind me and hope the hounds never catch up.”

But the hounds — better known as the FBI — were always on their trail, inching ever closer, gathering more ammunition for the day they caught them. The pair had returned to their hotel more than once to find police waiting at their door, and once, as agents banged on the front door, they’d escaped out the back. It kept them moving, and it kept them careful. And it kept Logan tired, even though he found more happiness with Montague than he’d ever known since he was five.

But those happy times were soon to end. On Logan’s nineteenth birthday, just before they were to pull off one of the biggest scams of their career, Montague collapsed on the hotel room floor. Logan fell to his knees at Montague’s side, eyes locked with his mentor’s, crying, “What’s wrong?” Alarm colored Montague’s face, then confusion, then terror. Before Logan could decide what to do, his friend was unconscious. He was dead before Logan could get him to a hospital.

Logan buried his friend in the town they had been about to sting, then disappeared into the night alone, not sure where he would go, but eager to get there. For some reason, he wound up returning to his hometown. A little research led him to an aunt, his mother’s sister, who was not at all happy to see him. When he realized that she, his mother’s only relative, had known he was abandoned and allowed him to go into the foster care system at five years old, a deeper loneliness than he’d ever known set in.