"You caught that?"
"I catch everything," Lenore said. "Patriot Act, Samuel-you should learn to embrace it."
What Sam opted to embrace, after he hung up with Lenore, was the list of addresses she texted him. In the last year, there were three houses on Fisher Island, two office parks in North Miami, a dentist's office in Coconut Grove, a nightclub, a T-shirt shop, a strip club and an address Sam recognized immediately, since he'd spent the better part of the morning looking at it on Google Maps, trying to figure out how he was going to get his goddamned car back: the offices of Longstreet Security.
He had to hand it to Eddie Champagne. He was a scumbag, but man, he had huge balls.
Early the next morning, Sam recounted all of this to Fiona and me as we drove around Miami in Cricket's Mercedes (which I figured probably wasn't being monitored by any satellites-it at least didn't have any tracking devices on it), looking at the properties Eddie Champagne had purchased, flipped and lured investors into. We saw homes worth only a few hundred thousand dollars that he'd managed to get loans on for nearly a million dollars. We saw the remnants of the Lyric Theater in Overtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Miami, but which had once been the hub of what was called Little Broadway in the thirties and forties, and which Eddie had managed to get a loan of four million dollars on, when its value was more historical than nominal. And finally, we drove past Longstreet.
"The one building he actually still owns," Sam said. "Or, rather, that White Rose owns. Longstreet pays them a sizable amount of rent each month."
"Not a coincidence, I gather," I said.
"It wasn't even for sale when he bought it," Sam said.
"How much did he pay for it?"
"Double its worth," Sam said.
"I admire his spite," Fiona said.
"Hard not to," Sam said.
I admired that he hadn't just done the easy job I thought he'd done: What I'd figured from Barry's description of Eddie's work and from what Stan had said, was that it must be a low-impact, high-yield operation. In truth, Eddie Champagne was just a few steps away from being a legit businessman-the steps being the ability to stay legit in a down-turning market, a desire to do things legally, that sort of thing. But like every other organized-crime syndicate that operates in the real world, eventually, they wanted to be taken seriously when they began to make enough money to not want to risk death.
At least he wasn't another drug dealer dreaming Tony Montana.
Dixon Woods, on the other hand…
We had other reasons to be at Longstreet, of course, in that I expected the elusive Dixon Woods would be coming in to mount up before meeting with his new best friend, Hank Fitch, and I wanted to be ahead of that, too.
Sam parked the Mercedes across the street from the facility in the lot of Clifton's Chips, a potato chip company, which, at only nine in the morning, was already like a hive of bees. There were men driving forklifts into and out of the warehouses with pallets filled with bags of chips. The parking lot was filled with Hondas and Toyotas and Saturns. There were already three women and one man-all wearing security badges and khaki on some part of their bodies, because security badges and khaki are like the uniforms for the depressed middle class- standing out front smoking around a trash can.
Two school buses pulled up then, and I watched as at least sixty children piled out and headed somberly to the front door. Nine o'clock is early for everybody.
"I always wondered how they got all of those chips in those lunch-sized sandwich bags without breaking any," Sam said, also watching the kids. "Now I get it. They have the kids put them in one by one. Ingenious."
"They're going on a tour," I said. I knew this because when I was a kid, I had done the exact same thing. I hadn't thought of it in years, and at the time the Clifton's Chips factory was in an older part of Doral, but I remembered walking through the factory and being transfixed by machines processing the chips, shooting them rapid fire onto conveyer belts, the women in hairnets plucking out burned chips one by one as they passed. I remembered how loud it all was, but how easy it was for me to concentrate in the noise, how some of the kids were crying and complaining of headaches, and I was just watching the machines, thinking about how they could be modified to spit fire instead of chips.
I also remembered that day because Nate got into a fight with a kid named Justin Pluck, and they had to shut down the whole facility because Justin stabbed Nate in the leg with a sharpened pencil, and Nate's blood got all over a batch of chips.
I also remembered that two weeks later, on Halloween night, Nate and I ambushed Justin Pluck and his friends with water balloons filled with Nair as they waited in the darkened parking lot at the evangelical church a few blocks from our house hoping to steal younger kids' candy. We spent all night searching, missing an entire night of candy gathering, just for the chance to get Justin.
It was worth it.
"That's the problem with education today," Sam was saying. "When I was a kid, we toured the armory. Generations of kids never get to see an armory anymore."
"I weep for them," Fiona said from the backseat. I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or if she was being serious.
After the children disappeared into the factory and the buses pulled away, I turned to Fiona, who had her laptop opened beside her. "Any word?" I asked.
"Nothing yet," she said. "At least not from anyone you're interested in. But I've heard from several men who sound very enticing."
I'd anticipated that, by now, Eddie Champagne would be trolling for a new woman on one of the widow sites, as Cricket called them, where Fiona now had her very own profile. I thought that my threat to Stan the day previous and the realization that Cricket's faucet had been turned off would get him scrambling. I figured that Fiona was bait he wouldn't be able to resist.
It wasn't for lack of trying on Fiona's part. She had posted several photos, including one that was just of her stomach, another that was just the curve of her right breast another still that was just her lips, which, admittedly, were hard to resist. Half of the e-mails were from other women telling her she wasn't being tasteful. The other half were from men who didn't seem to have a problem and were offering airfare to pretty much every major American city.
"Jealous?" Fiona asked.
"Gratified," I said.
The fact was, everything was otherwise working well. I had Cricket's house set up for battle. I just had to get all the participants there, and things would take care of themselves. All that was broken would be fixed.
All I needed was for nothing to fall out of place, but already I was getting a bit of a moral tug. The money Stan was likely to get back to me was covered in the blood of others who'd been duped, too. The difference, I suppose, boiled down to choice. The investors who tunneled their money to White Rose were guilty for being stupid, for being greedy, for not recognizing that what they were buying into couldn't be legit. Money can blind. It had, thus far, turned the investors mute, too. And soon it would all be moot. Maybe if it all closed down now, people would get some of their money back.
Maybe it was like Barry said. No one made a billion dollars by doing everything straight.
The money-or, rather, the appearance of it- would also help me out of my problem with Natalya. But Dixon Woods would have to cooperate to make that happen.