Geek Mafia: Mile Zero (15 page)

The first such scam had been the Keys Condos and Estates racket, which had succeeded beyond their expectations. Then Chloe had found a broken-down dive guide who they'd cleaned up enough to be a front man for selling fake maps to lost gold from the Spanish galleon Atocha that famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher had somehow neglected to find. A few greedy, credulous tourists bought into that, adding to their working capital, but without any big scores looming on the horizon, they needed another regular source of income. So, as Paul had done most of his professional life, and now all of his criminal life, he turned his wild imaginings into a money-making enterprise. Just as his doodles had become comics which had become a video-game which had become a plot to extort his former partners, so did a sci-fi inspired daydream become a plan for an actual party that became the perfect tool for exploiting Key West's party culture to the Crew's advantage.

No party is successful unless the guests want to be there, and nothing breeds desire like forbidding someone from having something. People might or might not come to a 24-hour party that was open to all comers at all hours, but if they did, it would just be for a quick stop on their way to or from something else. But if the party was a secret - an invitation only, $100-or-more-at-the-door underground bacchanal - well then, people would beat a path to its door. On their way down to Key West, they'd stopped for a night in Miami Beach, and Paul had been both disgusted and impressed with the utter pretentious gall of the club owners there. Long lines of hopeful clubbers waited beyond velvet ropes to pay outrageous prices for the same drinks and techno-pop crap they could find anywhere else. All that mattered was the exclusivity.

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Well, there was no hotspot in Miami as exclusive as the no-name party Paul and his Crew ran in Key West, although they had several regulars who flew or drove down from Miami to attend. It was only after they'd met and recruited Sandee that the plan had really come together. Sandee was an island native who knew everyone in the bar and club scene, and whose contacts allowed them to line up the entertainment, drinks, food and drugs necessary to make an underground party really take off and flow, along with the word-of-mouth network necessary to recruit just the right kind of party guests. Now, three months into the party's planned endless run, everything was humming along just as Paul had dreamed it would. Like the spaceship that inspired it, the party moved from place to place, making a circuit around the island and out onto selected boats and outlying islands when the weather was right for it. Even as it moved, the party continued, never shutting down in one location until things were up and running in a new venue. Most were places they accessed through Keys Condos and Estates. Others were empty restaurants waiting to be refurbished or even vacant offices.

Tonight the party had made its way back to one of Paul's favorite venues - the Crawford House on Eaton.

Once upon a time it had been the stately home of a successful wrecker and salvage family (salvaging wrecks had been Key West's main source of income in the 19th century, at one point making it the wealthiest city per capita in the country). In the 1980s, a hotel chain had bought it from the Crawford family and turned it into an ultra-expensive guest house. After a decade of trendiness and full bookings, its popularity had declined, and by 2000 so had its standards. The parent company had spun off a boutique hotels division, which promptly declared bankruptcy six months later. The building had stood empty and unused for the last year while lawyers fought over ownership.

A month ago they'd managed to get their hands on a key and moved the party there for several days before the neighbors grew suspicious. Since then, Paul knew that Sandee had been working hard at setting things up there once again. With its many private rooms and large central dining space, it made the perfect venue. He and Chloe had spent a particularly memorable night there the first time they'd used the house.

"Let's dial up the party," Paul said to Bee as he hung up the phone. Chloe had just told him that she'd reeled Eddie in and was bringing him there. They'd watched Eddie "pick up" Chloe at the bar, and seen Marco and another man leave a short while later. Now one of the monitors showed Chloe and Eddie as they walked out of the Oasis and headed toward Eaton. Paul knew that Bee's spy-cams didn't cover much of the route to the Crawford house, so they'd have to wait until Eddie and Chloe arrived at the party before they could pick up their trail again.

"You want wall-to-wall coverage?" Bee asked as she clicked through her camera options.

"Pictures and sound," said Paul.

"You got it." She brought up a window on her desktop and selected a group of twenty icons, dragging them over into her control interface on the adjacent screen. The entire wall of monitors flickered and flashed for a moment as the feeds switched over. Then they were looking at two dozen different angles on the interior of Crawford House, where there was one hell of a party under way.

The party took a number of things with it wherever it went. These included a portable sound system, three digital projectors, seven wireless speakers, two collapsible projection screens, a half dozen lava lamps, three laptops, a collapsible bar and seven digital picture frames capable of displaying any images downloaded into them. Bee had mounted hidden cameras in every single one of these items, and there were microphones in about half of them. Sandee had become expert at setting them up just right so that they provided total coverage.

Sandee was nowhere to be seen. Probably waiting outside for Chloe to arrive, Paul thought. But lots of the other regulars were there, including both his stripper friend Erica and her dealer Bernie. Even though it had Chapter 13

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been less than eight hours since Paul had spoken to Bernie earlier that evening, it seemed like days. So much had happened since then. The Crew itself stayed out of dealing drugs. There were too many ways that could go bad and too many unsavory and dangerous people to deal with. At the same time, you couldn't have a successful underground party without some pot and ecstasy for your guests, especially if you wanted to loosen tongues and wallets in the course of the evening.

Most of the action was centered in the Crawford House's spacious common room, where Paul counted twenty-one guests and locals drinking, smoking and dancing to the music. The room had once been where the guest house served its continental breakfast and held early evening cocktail hours. There were still some tables and chairs and a couple of stained couches along one wall - furniture that none of the lawyers fighting over ownership had deemed worth taking the trouble to remove. They also brought in some oriental rugs and bean bags with them when they set up the party at larger locations like this one. In the center of the room was Jesse, a friend of Sandee who served as both DJ and bartender. He had a laptop hooked up to the sound system, playing his selections straight off the hard drive and into the surrounding speakers. Next to him was the portable bar, festooned with liquor bottles, mixers, and a cooler full of beer on the floor adjacent.

Also adjacent to the bar, as he preferred, sat Bernie. Paul was glad to see the funny old dealer there. He grew his own pot in his house and in those of a few friends. It was always high quality and he was always very easygoing with the partygoers. His presence made the whole mood lighter and meant that Sandee or Paul didn't have to go outside to a less friendly source. He dealt from the bar, selling loose joints while Jesse sold drinks, both at a premium. Bernie loved people and, especially, loved strippers. He flirted shamelessly, laughed loudly and didn't seem to mind too much that he never seemed quite able to get any of the girls into bed with him.

As for the girls themselves, there were five of them at the party right now. He spotted Erica curled up in a beanbag chair, wearing a loose fitting tank top and low-slung jeans. She was chatting with a good-looking, 20-something man Paul didn't recognize, her party guest he guessed, probably a customer from the club that she'd convinced to take her out after closing. Sandee paid a cut of the entrance fee to every local who brought in fresh fish to the party. The locals, especially regulars like Erica, were free to charge their guests whatever price they could, as long as it was at least $100. Anything above that they could keep for themselves. If she'd been plying him with drinks and lap dances for the past few hours, Paul knew that she'd probably gotten two or three times that much from him.

Paul recognized the other four dancers as well, three from the club where Erica worked, and two from T's up on Truman who were dancing lasciviously with each other in the middle of the room while a trio of salivating, middle-aged men in Hawaiian shirts looked on, clutching their beers. Off on one of the couches against the wall, two men were making out, alternating between languid kisses and sips from their cocktails. Paul recognized the younger, smaller man as Quincy, who was Keys Condos and Estates' sole employee and a good friend of Sandee's.

Against the far wall was Paul's personal pride and joy for the party, a large screen with a digital projector shining images of gun toting, armorclad warriors onto it. Sprawled out on the floor below were three men and one woman, game controllers gripped in their hands as they fragged one another with rocket launchers on the big screen. In the corner beside them, two drunk, scantily clad women laughed as they tried to keep the beat on the dance pads while playing Dance Dance Revolution. The video games had been a surprise hit, especially for the shyer or younger party guests who didn't necessarily feel like dancing but didn't want to just sit around either.

By party tradition, almost every game involved a wager of some kind, either with shots or money or silly dares pulled out of a hat. Paul saw a pile of twenty-dollar bills tucked under an ashtray by the four first-person shooters and knew they were playing for money. He also saw that one of the four was his friend Javier, a busboy at Pisces and nearly unbeatable at any game involving kicks or explosions. Paul had lost enough Chapter 13

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money to know better than to challenge him.

Glancing at the other screens in Bee's array, Paul saw that several of the adjacent rooms were occupied as well. In a converted guest room, four people laughed and drank as they played spin the bottle on the floor, taking shots before and after each kiss. In a room that had once been the hotel manager's office, seven men sat around a poker table, playing for cash. Gambling was one of the party's main attractions for locals, and Paul had worked hard to cultivate a regular clientele of card players. He charged them nothing to play, other than the $100 to get into the party and whatever they ended up spending on booze and drugs.

All told, between what they charged for getting into the party and what they made off drinks, Paul knew they'd bring in around $6000 for the night, of which maybe $4000 was profit after paying for the drinks and cutting in Jesse for tending bar and covering other expenses. If there were cops to be bribed over a noise complaint, that could eat up another $500, but one of the joys of the Crawford House was that it had thick walls and enough distance from the neighbors that complaints were unlikely. For other venues they had portable sound dampening panels that they could hang on the walls to cut down on their audio leakage.

Making money was not, however, the primary purpose behind having the parties. More than anything, they were about cultivating contacts and gathering information. Now that the party had begun to establish a reputation amongst the Key West cognoscenti and cool kids, being allowed into the party had become a bargaining chip. Not just anyone with the $100 entrance fee could walk through whatever doors they were using that night. First of all, only a select few knew the party's location - just the one's Sandee trusted and passed the info on. And even then, Sandee still had to approve anyone before they could actually come in (having been screened against a picture database of every police officer in Monroe County that they didn't have dirt on or a relationship with, along with various and known undesirables). Piss Sandee or one of the regulars off, and you weren't ever coming back.

The cache this exclusivity gave them was a valuable bargaining chip in their dealings with locals. Everyone who knew about the party wanted an invitation, even those who had only heard rumors. More than a few assistant managers, night clerks and cleaning staff had allowed Crewmembers to come in and access a telephone junction box or alarm system or computer network. Of course none of them ever knew why they were letting these strangers in, but they seldom asked questions, especially if they'd ever been to the party. No one wanted to risk not getting invited back.

And then there were the cameras. They had, of course, been Bee's idea. She'd withdrawn into herself more and more since they'd moved to Key West, and after the first few nights she'd stopped going to the party. But she didn't want to be left out of the loop, and she was responsible for setting up most of the electronics and audio equipment anyway, so it seemed only natural for her to include hidden cameras in her creations. For Bee, including a hidden camera was like drawing another breath - nothing could be more natural. Chloe and Paul hadn't even known about the devices for the first few weeks, discovering their existence by accident when they were up in Bee's control room looking at some of her new camera feeds from Duval Street.

Once Chloe saw the party cams in action, she urged Bee to install more of them. She wanted complete coverage. Paul had wondered if having multiple records on disk of the numerous legal violations they committed at the party every night was a good idea. Chloe had countered that the chance to gain useful tidbits from their guests was worth the limited risk and, besides, their crypto was as tight as possible. Paul still hadn't been convinced by this argument, but some deep down voyeuristic part of him kind of thrilled at the thought of watching the tapes from those spy cams.

Since then, the cameras and microphones had provided a constant stream of interesting info. They certainly knew more about the financial affairs of every restaurant, bar and guest house in Key West than anyone else on the island, including most of the owners. Employees saw or surmised everything, and they repeated the most interesting bits when they got drunk or high. They'd learned similar inside info about real estate deals, Chapter 13