Geek Mafia: Mile Zero (3 page)

Paul motioned for her to put down the scrub brush and then pulled her to him. She turned around to face him as he drew her close and kissed her again. Then one more time. She nuzzled against him, nipping playfully at his neck. "You smell good," she said.

"Thanks," he replied, his hands roaming down her back to her ass. He gave her a squeeze.

"Actually, you smell like a stripper."

"Sandee says hi."

"I'll bet," said Chloe, still kissing his neck.

"You know the party's moved back to the Crawford place."

"I know."

"I like the Crawford place. It has those back rooms..."

"Oh, I remember." She pulled away from him just enough to make room for her hand to caress him through the front of his pants while she looked him in the eye. "I remember very well indeed."

"We did just watch the video last week," he reminded her, closing his eyes as he moaned in pleasure under her touch.

"That was you in that video?" she said.

"Not the Kennedy Assassination video, the other one."

"Oh right. That video," she laughed. "That was you, wasn't it?"

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"It sure was. Maybe we could..."

Then Paul's pocket started singing The Clash again. "Did I do that?" asked Chloe. Then her pocket started singing as well, although for her it was The Misfits.

"No," sighed Paul. "I think that must be Bee."

They both took out their phones and looked at the caller ID screens. Paul's read "Verizon." Chloe's read "Keys Taxi Disp."

"She loves that new trick of hers," said Chloe as she answered the phone. "Heya, Bee, what's up with the sheets?" Paul answered his phone as well and was instantly conferenced into the conversation.

"I'm having Pia bring them by. I picked something up on the cameras and I thought you might want to see it."

"What is it?" said Chloe. "We're almost finished here."

"I got a boat coming in at the marina. I'm pretty sure it's your friend."

"Really?" said Chloe, excited and nervous. "Are you sure?"

"Nope. That's why I thought you might wanna come take a look."

"You're right. We're on our way. Can you call Pia and tell her the key's under the rock by the back door?"

"Sure thing," said Bee. "See you soon."

Paul and Chloe hung up their phones and looked at one another. Chloe had a big smile on her face.

"Are you nervous?" he asked her.

"What? Are you kidding? Of course not. I'm just psyched to see him again. Aren't you?"

"Definitely. I still owe him a lot. He's the only person who ever got shot on my behalf," said Paul. "I just thought you might be nervous. That's all."

"Why? Because I'm going fucking crazy trying to get this place hospitable before he gets here?"

"No," he said. "That's just being a good host. I thought you might be nervous for the same reason I'm nervous."

She looked at him for a long moment. They'd been dancing around this subject ever since he'd told them five days ago that he was coming to Key West. "You're wondering why he's coming at all," she said.

"It's a long way to come. Especially in a boat."

"I'm sure he got the boat once he got to this coast."

"Either way, it's a long way to come. And people like him - which is to say, people like us - don't make long trips without a reason."

"And I'm sure he'll tell us his reason," said Chloe. "Fuck, that's why I'm so excited! I want to hear what he's Chapter 02

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got up his sleeve. We need a little damn excitement around here. We've fallen into a rut. I thought you'd be excited too..."

"I am, I am," Paul assured her, although she suspected that he might be lying. "I'm excited and I'm nervous.

You know what I mean."

"Like a teenager on his first date," said Chloe.

"Yeah, sort of."

"Well don't worry. I promise Winston won't try to cop a feel in the back seat." She kissed him then. "But I might, so you better watch yourself." Another kiss. "Come on, let's go. Bee's waiting." She disengaged, turned, and headed straight for the front door.

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Chapter 03

BACK at their house by the cemetery, Paul and Chloe found Bee in her room, what Paul referred to as her sanctum sanctorum - although no one else ever got the joke, and he refused to explain the comic book reference. As always, lighting was minimal (as opposed to Bee's workshop out behind the house, which was flooded with fluorescents). A bank of TV sets and computer monitors covered one whole wall, arranged on a precarious system of metal shelves that Bee had installed herself. A low, flat coffee table squatted below the glowing displays, supporting three keyboards, a bank of video editing tools and four different phone carriages.

Bee sat in her accustomed place - in the midst of a pile of cushions on the floor, fiddling with a mouse in one hand and typing on one of the keyboards while she talked quietly into her headset.

Paul and Chloe didn't bother to knock as they came in - Bee already knew they were there. Paul glanced at one of the screens mounted on the wall. Its display, divided into four quadrants, showed various images from inside the house, including the front door they'd just come through and the stairs they'd just climbed. The screen next to it - which Paul himself had salvaged from a bar on Duval that'd recently renovated into a finedining restaurant - showed images from four other cameras that covered the house's exterior. Nothing happened within fifty yards of their Crew's house that Bee didn't see, and if she had her way, that omniscience would soon extend to cover the entire island.

"So, Bee, how goes Project Big Brother?" Paul asked.

"I wish you wouldn't call it that," she replied.

"Sorry, but I have to call it something."

"You could call it something nice. Big Brother sounds so mean."

"What's mean about a reality show?" said Paul, joking.

"What isn't bad about a reality show?" countered Chloe, stepping in to defend her friend.

"Hmm, you got me there. Although there's an idea! Maybe that's how we can find more members for our Crew - have a reality-showstyle elimination contest. The winner gets a place in our outlaw life of crime."

"It's actually not the worst idea you've ever had," Chloe said. "I can think of worse, anyway."

"Are you talking about the turkeys? I thought turkeys could fly."

"Oh my God," said Bee. "Was that a WKRP in Cincinnati reference?"

"Guilty as charged," admitted Paul, chuckling.

"Fuck, you two watched too much TV as kids," said Chloe.

"What've you got for us, Bee-Bop?" Chloe asked, plopping down in the pile of cushions beside the short, stocky Asian engineer.

"Take a look," she said, eyes never leaving the screen, "at this."

Over the past six months, Bee had pressed the rest of the Crew into helping her plant hidden security cameras all over the most heavily trafficked areas of Key West. Paul had originally balked at the idea of so blatantly invading the populace's privacy. He didn't mind conning a select few of them out of their cash now and then, Chapter 03

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but the camera thing was so indiscriminate - it caught everybody. But Chloe had really liked the idea and pointed out that cops in other cities were putting surveillance cameras up and that she trusted herself a whole lot more than she trusted the police to use them responsibly. Sandee wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea, but Sandee loved being on camera and went along with Bee and Chloe in the end. Outvoted, Paul went along with the plan and had spent more than a few hours of late wearing a Verizon Telephone Services nametag and installing cameras hidden inside innocuous looking metal boxes on telephone poles all over old town.

Actually, he'd spent far less time doing this than the others had, mostly because he wasn't very good with the electronics part and Bee had to keep fixing his mistakes.

Right now one of those cameras was showing the entrance to Artist's Alley, a row of small galleries and shops near the marina. The image was tinted green because of the night vision (in fact, there were two cameras in the boxes - one for day, one for night), and it was hard to make out faces.

"What am I looking at?" asked Chloe.

"Watch this gallery here," said Bee, moving a cursor on the screen to point at the shabby front of one of the ships closest to the camera. "I think your friend's in there." They waited and watched.

"Jesus," said Chloe, "What's he doing, buying a painting or something? Are you sure he's in there?"

"I'm not sure - I've never seen anything but a sketch of him. That's why I called you over here, so you could see if it's really him."

"Why don't we just run the video back so we can see if it was him when he walked in?"

"That was going to be my next step - I was assuming he'd come back out any sec, but he's been in there a while," said Bee, mousing over the controls.

"Who would've thought he'd actually find something in one of those dumps to occupy him this long," said Chloe.

With a few quick clicks, Bee switched the adjacent monitor's display to show the same shot as the live feed.

Then she ran it backward at x16 speed for a few seconds before stopping it. "There."

Chloe and Paul both leaned forward to look closer at the screen. It showed a couple walking down the alley from the direction of the marina. On the left was a broad built, attractive woman in her 30s who wore a nondescript sweatshirt and jeans with a backpack slung over one shoulder. Paul recognized her as someone who'd been introduced to him as Lily. Next to her stood an older man, long, stringy hair tied back in a ponytail, his potbelly protruding beneath a flower-print shirt. He smiled broadly and said something funny as the two walked past the Southernmost Wedding Chapel. It was, without a doubt, their old friend Winston.

"That's him!" said Chloe, excited. "Did you see how he got here? Which boat he came in on?"

"Yeah, hold on, lemme switch over to those cameras." A few clicks and keystrokes switched a third monitor away from its live feed of the marina to a moment in time twenty-seven minutes earlier. This camera, mounted in a plastic owl perched atop the Key Wharf Bar and Grille's roof not only kept the seagulls at bay, it provided video coverage of the dinghy docks. Here the many locals who lived on sailboats offshore could rent small slips for their boats, allowing them a reserved place to tie off when they came back onto the island.

They watched a small Zodiac putt-putt up next to the dock. As it got closer, they saw Winston and Lily sitting in the boat, along with another, older woman Paul didn't recognize. They clambered out of the small rubber boat and waved goodbye to the boat's pilot. He reversed his outboard engine and pulled away from the dock, Chapter 03

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turning back out into the darkness. Lily and Winston looked around and stretched their backs and necks, as if they'd been sitting for quite a while. Or they might've been contorting themselves for show, giving them an excuse to look in every direction and take in their surroundings. Finally they started walking, heading toward Artist's Alley.

"No sign of what boat they came in on?" asked Chloe.

"I can look around, but probably not," said Bee. "They're most likely anchored out there somewhere, beyond my cameras. Of course, if we installed on the channel markers like I said..."

"One thing at a time, Bee," said Chloe. "Great catch though. Did you use your facial recognition software on that?"

"No," said Bee "I've just been watching the waterside cameras while I do some other stuff. You said he was coming in by boat."

"And so he has," said Chloe. "We should go surprise him! Before he comes out of that place."

"Good plan," said Paul. "I wonder though, how would Winston like the idea that he was being watched by a network of hidden cameras, à la Big Brother?" Paul asked. Winston wasn't his real name, of course. He'd taken the alias decades ago when he first went underground, naming himself after Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's novel 1984.

Chloe stared at Paul for a moment, thinking about what he'd said. "Good point. Nobody mention the cameras."

"Agreed," said Paul. "Now let's hurry. I know the old stoner who owns that place. If we leave those two old hippies alone, they'll talk for the rest of the night." He held out a hand and helped Chloe out of Bee's cushion pile.

"We'll be back in a while, Bee," said Chloe. "You have the con."

"Aye, aye, captain," Bee said. "I'll watch your back."

And Paul knew that she would. Sadly, that's almost the only thing that Bee did these days - watch.

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Chapter 04

OLD TOWN - the heart and soul of Key West and the place most visitors spend their time - is only one mile by two. The Crew's house by the cemetery was less than half a mile from where they'd last seen Winston.

Walking, it might've taken ten minutes to get there, but on Chloe's Vespa it was a hair-raising three-minute ride away. When they got there, Paul saw no sign of either Winston or Lily, so he assumed they were still inside the rundown shack that passed for a gallery. They parked a block away and approached at a brisk walk, Paul almost jogging to keep up with Chloe's excited strides.

Winston was Chloe's mentor in what they referred to as "The Life," this being a euphemism for a whole range of different activities, groups and lifestyles that fell under the general category of living underground and off the information grid. Paul, after defrauding his former partners and then running afoul of the law in a very public way, had been living The Life for almost a year and a half now. Chloe, as near as he could tell, had been doing it for almost a decade. Winston had started in the late '60s as a 16-year-old member of the notorious Weather Underground. He not only led his own Crew, he was also in contact with dozens, maybe scores of other such groups all over the world, including Chloe and Paul's little Crew of four. On top of all that, he'd once taken a couple bullets while helping Paul out, so, like Chloe, Paul had a soft spot in his heart for the old man.