Geek Mafia: Mile Zero (29 page)

The observation post was two blocks away on Caroline Street in an empty timeshare they helped manage through Keys Condos and Estates. While Paul had been inside the hotel, Sandee had planted cameras covering all the entrances into the Hyatt, except the water side. But odds were Raff wouldn't be coming in by boat.

They'd set up two laptops in the apartment's dining room, where Sandee sat with his feet propped up on the table, watching the screens. They could've monitored all of this from the house, of course, but if they needed to try and follow Raff, assuming Eddie did kick him out, then they'd need to be close at hand to track him.

Paul had a wig, hat and sunglasses in a bag by the door for a disguise when he had to follow Raff. He knew he should put the costume on now to be ready, but he didn't relish the idea of wearing the scratchy wig longer than he had to.

Sandee, always prepared, had brought a cooler with fruit and Tupperware containers full of his famous brown rice salad. He didn't keep that figure of his without constant attention to diet and exercise. Paul, no lover of brown rice, had learned to actually kind of like the stuff, at least when there wasn't anything else around.

"How'd it go?" Sandee asked.

"Great," said Paul. "With every employee in the hotel looking for Raff, there's no way that Eddie can let him stay there. And if they aren't on real strong terms, he might well be pissed off enough to distrust Raff completely."

"And now we wait?" said Sandee.

"Now we wait," agreed Paul, opening a bowl of rice and digging in as he watched tourists stream by on the two laptop screens set up in front of them.

"I wanted to apologize," said Sandee, his voice even and pleasant as always. "I must not be very good at the spy thing."

"What do you mean?" asked Paul.

"I assume this Raff boy must have spotted me following him. I think I'm more cut out for the role of femme fatale than gumshoe."

"Don't worry about it," said Paul. "Raff 's been doing this a long time."

"Oh, I'm not too terribly worried," said Sandee. "I've nary a doubt that you and Chloe can handle him."

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"What on earth makes you think that?" Paul asked with a smile. "We haven't been paragons of competence lately."

"You're kidding, right?" asked Sandee.

"No. I mean, yes. Yes I think we can handle Raff, but I also thing we've been running around like chickens with our heads cut off."

"And here I was wondering how the pair of you got so good at this," mused Sandee. "You're saying I shouldn't be impressed?"

"You're saying you are?" asked Paul, although now he was smiling with a bit of pride at Sandee's kind words.

"This might be old hat to you and Chloe and Bee, but I'll tell you cowboy, this is way beyond my life experience - and I've experienced me some life."

"You've been with us for nine months now," Paul said. "You've done all kinds of cons with us. The party of course. The real estate stuff. That séance thing. The scavenger hunt."

"Oh, those little things?" Sandee said with a wise smile. "That was just theater. Putting on a show. Everything was planned down to a tee, and all I had to do was get into girl form and play my part. I never thought of those as anything other than a game."

"That's supposed to be the point. We do this because it's supposed to be fun. This crap," Paul said as he waved a hand toward the laptops, "this is the scary bullshit part. The part where people get hurt or end up in jail or worse. And where you can't plan every step down to a tee because you've only got five minutes to come up with what you're going to do next. I hate it."

"It's amazing then that you're so good at it," said Sandee, giving him a reassuring pat on the knee. "You managed to find Eddie and put together the hacker alert story in just a couple hours. And then all the stuff with that dead body... I don't know how you keep your cool."

"I had a good teacher," said Paul.

"Chloe? She is pretty amazing, isn't she? And I've never seen her as driven and focused as she has been since we got the word Winston was coming to town. She's been a bit of a madwoman in an endearing, obsessive compulsive kind of way."

"You noticed that too?"

"It was hard to miss; we do all live in the same house."

"Yeah, she's definitely got her game face on for this whole clusterfuck. I think she secretly thrives on this seat-of-your-pants shit. And I'll admit, the adrenaline rush of pulling off an improvised con like in the hotel back there gave me a pretty great high. Almost as good as sex."

"Oh, I don't know about that," said Sandee with a wink.

"I said almost," Paul pointed out.

"Speaking of which, how is the sex with you two?" Sandee asked. From anyone else it would've been an odd or presumptuous question. But Sandee was not only a dear friend and Crewmember, he'd also been teaching Chapter 23

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them some tantric sex basic positions and exercises.

"When we have time, it's amazing," said Paul. "But the sex has never been the problem. It's everything else."

"I have heard some shouting,"

"We're having a hard time..." Paul started, then stopped as he searched for the right words. "It's hard, you know. Living together. It's hard work. And it's not like our chosen lifestyle lends itself to a low stress environment, despite all the parties. This living a life of crime thing can be hard work too."

"Maybe you should talk more," Sandee said. "Air out your differences."

"Talking more isn't the solution," said Paul. "We talk plenty and air out pretty much everything. The problem's a little more unsolvable than that. Fact is, we want different things out of life and, well, those things are kind of incompatible."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I love it here," said Paul. "Current events aside, for me this is all just about perfect. Warm weather and parties and fun-filled scams, good drugs and great friends and free Internet access. Total freedom to do as we please."

"Amen, brother," Sandee said. "Sounds like paradise to me. So what's the problem?"

"Well, for you and me it's paradise - or it would be if there was a decent comic book store - but for Chloe, not so much. She's starting to feel penned-in here. It's too small for her."

"See, I love that it's so small but so alive and fun at the same time," said Sandee. "I mean, I've visited Miami and New York, but I keep coming back here."

"And I keep hoping Chloe will come to see it that way too," said Paul. "But I don't know if that's ever going to happen."

"It'll happen," said Sandee. "Key West gets to you. You just need to give it some time. And just because I love you kids, we could skip ahead in our lessons straight to the hour long orgasms. If that doesn't make her want to stay, nothing will."

Paul laughed. "Finally! That's why we signed up with you in the first place, you know."

"We've all got to crawl before we walk," Sandee chided with a smile.

They settled into a comfortable silence then, eating brown rice salad and watching the tourists waddle around on the laptop screens. Paul closed his eyes for a moment just to rest them. Just for a few seconds...

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Chapter 24

CHLOE worked the door's lock as quietly as possible, turning the knob with a slow, steady hand. She crept inside, the carpeting muffling her footsteps as she slid along the wall toward the living room. As she popped around the corner, she discovered all her stealth was for naught. There sat Sandee, smiling and waving at her while Paul was snoring in his seat in front of two laptops. She smiled and put a finger to her lips. Sandee nodded in response. Chloe moved up behind Paul, positioned her fingers just so on either side of his ribs and then started to tickle her boyfriend mercilessly.

"Ahhh!" shouted Paul as he jumped up from his seat while Sandee and Chloe descended into giggle fits.

"What the fuck...?" he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

Still laughing, Chloe gave Paul a hug and kissed him, which calmed them both down a bit. She kissed him again and then one more time just because she could. It was good to see him.

"Hey, babe," she said.

"Hey yourself," he replied, his hands around her waist. "How'd it go with Bee?"

"She's pretty shaken up," said Chloe. "Raff was... well, Raff was Raff. He knew all the right things to say to push her buttons. It was hard for me to watch. I can't imagine how tough it was for her."

"He gave her shit for killing that PI fuck?" asked Paul.

"It's practically all they talked about. And then he tried to get her to come with him to some secret meeting with the guy's wife or some bullshit. That's when I pulled her out."

"She wasn't going to go, was she?" asked Sandee from his seat.

"I don't think so," Chloe replied. "She said she was just playing along, and maybe she was. She did manage to slip an RFID tag into the inseam of his shorts though, so mission accomplished there."

"Where's Raff now?" asked Paul.

"Bee's been tracking him by the tag and the cameras for the last half hour. He's just been wandering around Duval and slowly working his way back toward the Hyatt. Probably trying to shake the tail he assumes we put on him." Chloe glanced at the two laptops. "How're things here?"

"Great!" said Sandee, with an enthusiasm Chloe found kind of cute. "Paul was awesome in the hotel."

"We'll see," said Paul. "We have no way of knowing if Eddie bought our little ruse."

Chloe sat down in Paul's seat and leaned close to the laptop on the left. She recognized one of the people on the screen. It was Marco, Eddie's right-hand man whom she'd met at the bar when she tempted Eddie to the party. "How long has this guy been standing here?" she asked, pointing to a man leaning against the wall outside the hotel, reading a paper and smoking a cigarette

"Oh shit..." said Paul. "That's Marco."

"He's been there about ten, fifteen minutes," Sandee said. "Just sitting there smoking and reading and catching some rays I guess."

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"From there he can cover the main entrances to the hotel," said Paul. "He might be standing watch for Raff."

"I guess we'll see," said Chloe. She saw the empty containers of food and the cooler next to Sandee's chair. "Is there any food left?"

"Of course," said Sandee, reaching into the cooler. "Would you like some mango?"

The three of them only had to wait another twenty minutes before Bee called to let them know that Raff was approaching the hotel. And sure enough, a cab pulled up in front of the entrance and out stepped Raff, scanning the street around him. Marco had seen him too, and they locked eyes. Some unseen signal passed between them and, instead of going into the Hyatt, Raff came over to Marco and bummed a cigarette off him.

The two men talked for a few moments, and Chloe watched their body language closely. She'd worked with Raff for two years and knew a lot about his quirks and tells. Unfortunately the camera she was watching didn't have the resolution to give her a good look at his eyes, but even from his body language she could tell he was frustrated and maybe indignant. Marco remained calm and relaxed throughout the brief conversation, and in the end Raff seemed resigned to his fate. He shook Marco's hand and then walked away from the Hyatt, headed up Simonton.

"That's right, fucker," said Paul. "You got no home now."

"Ok," said Chloe, dialing Bee's number even as she talked to the other two. "Let's get going. Sandee, you take Whitehead Street. Paul, get on your wig and stuff and take Duval. I'll go along Elizabeth. That way, whichever way he goes we can..." She heard Bee answer the phone on her end. "Bee, he just got rebuffed at the... yeah, of course you were watching, sorry. Anyway, you play director and tell us where to go. We're going to track him down."

Two minutes later they were out the door, earpieces in and phones conferenced together, with Bee giving them directions. Between the RFID readers and cameras, it was easy for the three of them to stay at least three blocks away from Raff at all times and still keep him boxed in between them. He took a circuitous route through the city, working his way deeper into Old Town as he did so. The cameras and readers were fewer and farther between here, but so were his options - no stores or restaurants to duck into, just houses and guesthouses.

It took them an hour, but even Raff had his limits, and in the end he led them right to his secret location - a house at the corner of Leon and Duncan just a half-block down from Bayview Park. It was a newer place, built in the past couple years, probably on top of the ruins of some place that hadn't survived hurricane season.

From down the street, Sandee reported by phone as he watched Raff enter the house. Chloe and Paul moved in closer, and together the three of them watched the place for another hour. As it got dark and the street lights came on inside, they all agreed - this had to be where Raff and his Crew were staying. The question now was, what were they going to do with that information?

"WE need to see if Raquel's murderer is in there with them," said Chloe. "He's got to be hiding somewhere, and if he's in there then we know Raff is behind this whole thing. Isaiah and the others will have to act."

They were stationed in a car parked three blocks away from Raff 's house. They'd moved their wireless cameras so they covered the front and rear of the house (or rather, the front of the house that sat to the rear of Raff 's house) as well as two more cameras at each end of the street. All were on batteries since they didn't have time to tap into a power source. That meant they only had a few more hours until they had to replace them, but every time they went near Raff 's place, the odds improved that Raff or someone else would spot them. So far they'd seen signs of movement in the house, but the blinds were shut, and they had no idea who or how many people are inside.

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"We could just knock on the door," said Sandee from the backseat of the old Honda Civic. "Ask to look around - tell them who we're looking for."

"They'd never let us in," said Chloe. "Why would they? And then we'd have tipped our hand."