Geek Mafia: Mile Zero, Rick Dakan [reading an ebook .TXT] 📗

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 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, local politics and, most useful of all, the bad habits and kinky preferences of more than a few Key West Police Department officers and workers. Sandee and the other hosts knew how to get guests to talk about the most interesting stuff without ever suspecting that they were being pumped for information. When they wanted to impress a beautiful girl, they all thought telling salacious secrets made them seem important or cool.

Chloe spent a lot of time with the data that came from this covert monitoring. Too much time, in Paul’s opinion. Every day she debriefed the hosts about possible choice encounters or intriguing sound bites, and she and Bee often watched the footage in fast forward, scanning for anything that caught their eye. Bee was supposedly working on finding some piece of software that they could use to search through the recorded dialogue for certain key words. She knew that government intelligence agencies used something similar for telephone intercepts, but so far she hadn’t found anything that worked.

Paul didn’t know what Chloe hoped to find in those tapes, but for the past few weeks she’d been listening to and watching them more and more. She would download them onto her MP3 player and listen while she exercised. She’d eat her morning Cocoa Puffs with the laptop in front of her, streaming images from the party. Whenever Paul asked her how it was going she said, “fine.” Whenever he asked her what she was looking for she said, “something good” and asked him if he wanted to help. At first he had tried it, but it was the most mind-numbing thing he could imagine. The difference between listening to tapes of lame pick-up lines and drunken boasting and actually being at the party was like the difference between reading a list of ingredients and eating a five-star gourmet meal.

He hadn’t been to the party in over two days and had been looking forward to visiting the Crawford House venue tonight. But it was Chloe who was going to the party, and as Paul and Bee watched on the monitors, they saw Eddie come stumbling through the front door. Chloe was right behind him, and Paul felt a stab of jealousy as he watched Eddie give Chloe a playful slap on the ass. She scowled in surprise, her face turned away from Eddie but toward the camera. Paul knew that in other circumstances Eddie would have gotten a taser to the chest for that, but Chloe was playing a role, and she never broke character during a con. She turned and smiled at him, giving him a playful wink in return.

Behind them came Sandee, who now wore five-inch spiked heels and a form flattering skin tight mini-dress. Sandee, ever the generous host, came up beside Eddie and put an arm around his waist and whispered something in his ear. Eddie nodded enthusiastically. Chloe made a gesture of apology, apparently excusing herself and turning Eddie over to the host’s tender care. As he stared long and hard at Sandee’s toned ass, Eddie didn’t seem to mind much. Chloe broke away and headed for the bathroom while the other two headed for the bar.

Bee clicked with precision, bringing up cameras in the main room so they could watch Eddie and Sandee on one screen and Chloe in the bathroom on the other. Paul had liked the idea of bathroom cams least of all, but they had quickly learned that some of the most interesting things happened when people thought they were alone in the toilet, including a number of private, revealing phone calls that they’d managed to overhear on several occasions (including one of an off-duty cop calling his wife with excuses while he snorted cocaine - a priceless piece of blackmail material if they ever needed it).

Chloe, of course, knew exactly where the camera was and was looking right at it (hidden in a clock) as she dialed her phone. Paul’s own cell started ringing, and he picked up immediately.

“I’m at the party,” said Chloe over the phone.

“So I see,” said Paul.

“Glad to know you guys are