Geek Mafia (26 page)

"It's weird, you know?" said Paul after he'd finished his breakfast platter. "Chloe says she wants me around.

CHAPTER 19

118

Says she cares about me. But she doesn't want me in the group. She doesn't realize how hard that is. I mean, while you guys were busy on this last thing I felt like a ghost walking around the house."

"I know exactly what you mean. I saw what you were going through, but there wasn't much I could do." Raff paused and looked down at his plate. He looked as if there was more he wanted to say. Paul took a guess at what it was.

"That's why you called me in isn't it?" he said. "You didn't need me to make the pickup - but you wanted to include me in the job."

Raff didn't say anything for a long time. Paul pressed him. "Why do me a favor like that? Doesn't that go against the code of the Crew or whatever? Why cross Chloe like that?"

"Listen, Paul, I think you'd be good at this. You've got a great imagination. A great imagination. And that's a vital commodity in this business. The comic book thing you thought up was brilliant, mostly because it was so off the wall. Who would imagine counterfeiting comic books - especially without actually bothering to make real counterfeits! We've got great, great technical skills in the group. And I've only met one person in the world better than me at the fast-talking and that's Chloe. But we're getting stale; all our cons are kind of the same. Steal something from a computer. Blackmail someone into doing something for us. Lather, rinse, repeat. I think we need you for the very thing I've been talking about - to make this more fun."

"But Chloe doesn't agree."

"Chloe's not the captain of our pirate band, Paul. She's just the best at making us get our shit together. We don't have a leader. No gods, no masters, as the saying goes. If the rest of us want you in the crew, she'll let you in. The trick is convincing them when Chloe so obviously doesn't want it. She might not be their master but we all respect the hell out of her opinion."

"So what're my options then? Keeping in mind that I don't want to piss Chloe off or undermine her position or anything like that. I don't want to push her away."

"It's tricky. You have to prove to the rest that you're committed. That you really want to give up everything and join this group. Not only join this group, but join this life."

"What's the distinction?"

"Well, like we talked about earlier, in order to make this lifestyle work you have to pass without leaving any traces behind. No taxes, no credit cards or bank accounts in your own name. Nothing like that. You'll never lack for anything you need and more often than not you'll get everything you want, because we share what we take and take whatever we need. You need to prove that you're that generous."

"Huh," said Paul, "That's a tough one."

He had just realized where Raff was going with all this. The money. Raff wanted Paul to share the money they'd extorted from his old partners. If he offered everyone a split of that big payoff, then he would be welcomed into the fold. Or would he? Would just paying the others off really buy him any respect? Would it buy Chloe's? He didn't think so. Giving up his money didn't sit well with Paul, but he decided to let Raff believe he was really considering it.

"I hear what you're saying," Paul continued. "It's something to ponder."

"Well, take your time and think about it some," said Raff. "But I wouldn't push Chloe anymore until you have CHAPTER 19

119

an idea of how you want to proceed. Take it from someone who's known her a long time. She doesn't like the hard sell and she's stubborn as hell. She won't change her mind once it's made up unless there's some new dynamic that wasn't there before."

"Thanks, Raff. I really will think about it. I appreciate you laying everything out for me like this; it really helps me understand how everything works with you guys."

"No problem, man, glad to help. If you're finished, we can get out of here. Maybe if you're lucky Chloe will have calmed down by the time we get home and you two can kiss and make up."

CHAPTER 20

120

CHAPTER 20

Paul didn't go back into the house when he and Raff returned from breakfast. Instead he went and found his own car (which one of the Crew had brought back from the park for him). It was parked three streets over from the house, so Paul just had Raff drop him off there, explaining that he needed to run a few errands and think some things through. He said that he'd be back around dinnertime and that he'd talk to him then. Raff seemed very understanding and, like any member of the Crew, knew better than to pry too deeply into a friend's private affairs.

He got on the highway and then made his way to 17 South, headed back towards Santa Cruz. He'd left his things in the motel room there and hadn't actually bothered to check out yet, so he figured he'd better do that before they charged him for another night's stay. He didn't want to run up unnecessary charges on the credit card Chloe had given him. It also gave him some time to think about what the fuck he was going to do next.

On the one hand he wanted to stay with the group and with Chloe. But he knew that unless they welcomed him into their inner circle fully, staying with them wasn't a tenable option. Either he'd get too frustrated with his position or they'd become so annoyed with him that he wouldn't be welcome anymore. He could get his own place of course and try to just date Chloe like a normal person, but that didn't sound very plausible either.

Chloe didn't lead the kind of lifestyle that lent itself to casual dating.

The only option left was to try and find a way to force/convince Chloe into letting him into the crew without alienating her in the process. He could take Raff's thinly veiled suggestion and try to buy his way in. But that money was his security blanket, and right now it was about all he had going for him. He had no intention of splitting it up with fifteen other people, no matter how much he envied their renegade lifestyle. Besides, he doubted Chloe would respect him if he did pay the others off. Nope. Buying his way in was out of the question.

He much preferred the other option: coming up with a scam of his own that would be so brilliant that the rest of the Crew couldn't resist it. Then, as Raff had explained, Chloe would have to come along. His problem was that he hadn't really liked much of what he'd heard about the last job they'd pulled. Sure, this programmer guy, Gondry, sounded like a real asshole and maybe even deserved to have his stuff stolen. But what really disturbed him was the way they'd treated the red tie guy, the CFO. Paul understood why they chose him as their entry into the company, but the business with pretending to kidnap his daughter left a really bad taste in his mouth. The poor old guy hadn't done anything wrong and they'd put him through a week of hell for it.

He blamed Raff for this streak of cruelty in the job. Although as a leader Chloe had claimed joint responsibility for everything that went down, he got the feeling that she never would have gone along with it if she'd been involved in the planning from day one. In a way, her cooperation in the con bolstered Paul's faith in his own strategy for getting into the Crew. If she had bowed to the group will on something as potentially cruel as blackmailing the CFO, then she'd surely go along with his brilliant plan. As soon as he figured out what that plan was.

Paul thought back to Chloe's deep admiration for Winston and his crew. She'd really connected with the way the aged hippie and his cohorts pulled off jobs that had some sort of larger political meaning. He also recalled that she'd wished that her crew had more of a social conscience with its cons. Maybe if he could think of something along those lines, he'd have a better chance of coming up with something he could live with but that will still impress everyone. He'd certainly have a better chance of sleeping at night if he could tell himself he was stealing for the greater good. Like Robin Hood or something. If he could come up with a target worth taking down, and maybe even divert some of the money to a worthy cause, then he would have the perfect plan. And he was pretty sure Chloe would think it was the perfect plan too.

CHAPTER 20

121

The motel management had never noticed Paul's absence and he found all his stuff where he'd left it in his room. Apparently, maid service was running behind today, as it was already well after noon. He'd missed checkout by an hour and a half, but they were cool about it and didn't charge him for the extra day. This was Santa Cruz after all - hippie central - and the locally owned businesses tended to be pretty easy going about stuff like that. After checking out he drove downtown to Pacific Avenue to look in the shops and bookstores and hopefully find some inspiration for this grand scheme he kept telling himself he had hidden away in his brain somewhere. Not even the comic shop had anything for him (which didn't stop him from loading up with the past week's new comics). Becoming a criminal mastermind wasn't turning out to be as easy as he'd thought it would be.

He found a seat in a coffee shop called Latitude 23.5 and plopped his sketchbook down on the table. Maybe his pen would provide some inspiration, since his brain seemed to be failing him just now. He started sketching the panoply of interesting people that walked by on the sidewalk. Everyone from homeless hippies to dotcom millionaires wandered up and down Pacific Ave. Across the street a man in a clown suit set up shop with a cart full of balloons. Paul sketched him as he started making inflated animals for passing children.

The kids seemed happy with the clown's creations, and the parents dutifully paid the man for his work. In the pages of his sketchbook however, the clown was a terrifying creature, his teeth ragged and broken, with tusks like a wild boar. His wild wig had insects crawling in and out of it, and his ragged costume had ominous stains on it. He had a barrel of toxic waste at his side, which he used to fill the balloons before twisting them into demonic forms and hurling them at terrified children. After an hour or so, Paul looked back at his dozen or so toxic clown sketches and shut the sketchbook in anger. They were good, very good even. But they weren't a plan and they wouldn't get him in the crew. He decided to head back to Chloe's.

Back on Highway 17, Paul tried putting his iPod on shuffle. Maybe when he heard the right piece of music, inspiration would finally strike. Highway17 is a four lane highway that winds up and over the Santa Cruz Mountains and back down into Silicon Valley. It can be treacherous in fog or rain, but on a sunny day like today, between rush hours, it was kind of fun to drive. Hints of vertigo overtook him on some of the tighter turns; especially when the road dropped off precipitously to his right. A flat-land Florida boy by birth, he still wasn't quite used to all this three-dimensional road stuff.

Near the halfway point, at the highway's summit, there's a brief run of nearly flat road before it starts its descent towards Los Gatos and points north. A large, late-model Ford Taurus that Paul had been oblivious to chose that moment to stop following Paul and instead run him off the road.

As always on this road, Paul was in the right-hand lane. The sedan sped up suddenly and then whipped around Paul's left before pulling back into the right hand lane and slamming on the breaks. Paul had just enough time to notice the faded pro-Rush Limbaugh sticker (RUSH is RIGHT) on the car's bumper before he slammed on his own breaks and involuntarily spun his wheel to the right then back to the left. Both cars skidded and screeched to a halt; Paul's own vehicle showering sparks as it ground against the guardrail.

When Paul finally stopped screaming he realized that he wasn't careening off the cliff side and therefore was going to be ok. He rethought that assessment a moment later when he saw the driver of the offending Taurus fling open his car door and come running back towards him. It was the older, gaunt man who'd tackled him yesterday.

"Oh shit!" he said. The car had stalled out and Paul quickly restarted it. But before he could throw it in reverse the man was at the car door that, he only now realized, was not locked. With his left arm the attacker swung the door open. With his right he grabbed Paul by the hair and yanked him out of the car.

Two years of Tae Kwon Do in college had taught Paul one thing - he didn't know how to fight worth a shit.

He flailed at the surprisingly strong man, who still wore the same suit and shirt Paul had last seen him in.

CHAPTER 20

122

There were even grass stains on the left side. Somewhere in his mind Paul suspected that the man probably hadn't slept nearly as well as he had last night. But most of his brain was working right along with his mouth and screaming "FUUUUUCK!" as he got slammed hard into the side of his own car.

"Where is she, you little shitbrain? Where is she?" He didn't give Paul a chance to answer before he slammed him into the car once more. "Where's Erica?" That would have to be the CFO's daughter, he assumed.

"She's fine!" Paul tried to shout, although he found shouting difficult between the man's hand on his throat and the fact that he'd had the wind knocked out of him. "They never really kidnapped her! She's in Hollywood! On vacation!"

"What?" said the attacker, his voice a mixture of anger and confusion. "Say that again."

"They never kidnapped her!" croaked Paul. "They just sent her on a free vacation and gave her a new cell phone!"

The attacker looked, at best, confused. Still angry of course, but also confused. "Where? Where can we reach her?"

"I don't know! I was just the pickup guy."

Not happy with this answer, the attacker slammed Paul back against the car and ever so slightly tightened his grip on Paul's throat. He really was in great shape for his age, and he had to be pushing sixty. For the first time in his life Paul thought that maybe he should've stuck with that whole martial arts thing. If he got out of this he'd look into taking lessons. Assuming he got out of this.

"Excuse me, guys. Can you give me a hand here?" asked a female voice from far, far away. Paul thought he recognized it, but the lack of oxygen in his brain was starting to make everything seem kind of dim. "I'm so glad I found someone stopped here!" the voice continued, getting closer. "My car broke down and I can't get any reception on my cell up here. Can you guys give me a lift?"