Steven Gore - Power Blind

Gage watched Brandon glance at a middle-aged, dark-skinned woman wearing a grimy overcoat pushing a grocery cart filled with cans and bottles. Brandon turned north on Larkin and fell in behind an obese hooker, his eyes fixated on her thong-cinched butt extending below a silver miniskirt.

“Take her, take her,” Viz pleaded into his cell phone. “I want that picture.”

The cart lady stopped to search the garbage can, then continued up the street.

“What about the one with the grocery cart?” Gage asked.

Viz laughed. “I know for sure she’s not his type.”

Gage started up his truck.

“I’ll swing around and try to get a couple of blocks up the hill above him.”

He skirted Larkin until he got into position, then Viz came on:

“He just turned left on Geary.”

Brandon had disappeared by the time Gage found a place to park on the crowded street. He punched a number into his cell phone as he watched the cart lady slip into a recessed doorway. She answered on the second ring.

“Where’d he go?”

“The McCall Hotel,” Tansy answered in an excited whisper. “This is a kick. Why haven’t you let me do this kind of thing before? It’s like being invisible.” She laughed. “Except for the smell.”

“Did he meet anyone?”

“No. He didn’t even stop at the desk. He just walked right past and to the elevator.”

“Good work. Why don’t you go back to the office and get cleaned up.”

“You sure you don’t want me to hang-”

“No. Viz and I’ll take it from here.”

T he thirty-something clerk behind the bulletproof reception window of the residential hotel glanced up at the sound of Gage’s knocking. He leaned forward in his chair and put down a worn paperback on the desk. Gage saw it was Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Only in San Francisco, Gage thought, do hotel clerks read French philosophy.

The clerk reached for a registration card.

“You don’t need that,” Gage said. “I’m looking for someone.”

The clerk offered a bucktooth grin.

“Everybody’s looking for somebody, pal, but I can’t help you, unless you got a warrant or something.”

“We’re not cops.”

“Tough break.”

Gage heard the hotel door swing open fifteen feet away, then stayed silent as a skinny sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl in pink hooker shorts walked behind them and toward the elevator. Two men sitting on soiled couches along the opposite wall tracked her like homeless men watching a ladle of mashed potatoes heading toward their plates at the Salvation Army dining room.

Gage looked back at the clerk. “How much for her?”

The clerk shook his head. “She’s taken.” He pointed toward the rooms above. “Got a regular. Maybe you can catch her on the way out.”

Gage shook his head. “Looks like jailbait to me.”

“I wouldn’t know. We don’t check IDs.”

“What about the ID of the guy in the Giants jacket who came by here a little while ago?”

The clerk’s face hardened. “What about him?”

“You know who he is?”

“Yeah, asshole. His name is John-Doe-who-pays-his-rent-on-time.”

“Hey, man,” Gage said. “Don’t get your back up. This isn’t about you.”

Gage reached into the inside pocket of his windbreaker, then made a show of looking at the clerk’s paperback. He pulled out two hundred dollars and held it against his chest so the men behind him couldn’t see it.

“You ever read Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego?” Gage asked, then set the bills in the tray at the bottom of the window. “You should buy a copy.”

The clerk grinned and reached for the cash.

“Room 923.”

Viz took his phone out of his pocket as they rode the elevator and set it to take video. He cupped it in his hand when they stepped out on the ninth floor. Television shows and muffled arguments reverberated down the hallway as they walked along the stained and cigarette-burned carpet. Gage put his ear to the door when they arrived at 923, but couldn’t make out any sounds. He wondered whether they were a few minutes too early for the heavy breathing.

“Can you pop the door without kicking it?” Gage whispered. “Too noisy.”

Viz braced his shoulder against it. He gave it a push, but it didn’t budge. He straightened up. “It’s too solid.”

Gage nodded. Viz took a step back and then kicked the door just above the handle. The frame exploded and the door flew open. Viz rushed in, phone ready to take video.

Gage remained in the hallway, scanning up and down. He pointed at every face that appeared, then toward the inside of the resident’s room. Each in turn ducked back inside.

Only then did Gage step into the room. A condemned man strapped to a gurney in a gas chamber couldn’t have looked more terrified than Brandon Meyer.

Viz stood over him.

Gage reached for his cell phone.

“Joe, I’m at the McCall Hotel. You need to come over here.”

“Is it about Meyer?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t. The U.S. Attorney told me-”

“Forget what he told you. It isn’t his career on the line.”

Gage helped Brandon off the bed and into the desk chair. Brandon’s body trembled. He bore the shell-shocked expression of men who get snagged in undercover john operations or pedophiles who walk into news camera lights in suburban juveniles’ homes.

“Anybody else here?” Gage asked Brandon.

“No.”

Gage pointed at the closed bathroom door and Viz started toward it.

“I told you,” Brandon said, “there’s no one here.”

Viz glanced inside, then shook his head. The bathroom was empty.

Gage walked to the dresser and turned down the sound on the television. It was tuned to a news report about the pending confirmation vote.

A monitor on the desk showed an online stock trading Web site.

Flowcharts tacked to the walls tracked the money flow to Pegasus, then to Mann Trust, then to senatorial candidates. Next to them hung oversized spreadsheets titled “Confirmations” and “LM.”

Bookcases of slim binders stood next to the window: fourteen bearing the name Pegasus, eight in the star names, two labeled TIMCO, and dozens of others in the names of Fortune 500 companies.

Gage walked over and pulled the OptiCom binder off the shelf. He leaned against the wall as he thumbed through it.

Finally, Gage said, “I had it backward.”

Brandon didn’t say anything.

“What do you mean?” Viz asked.

“He sold short. He held on to the search warrant long enough to borrow and sell a million shares of OptiCom stock. Then he signed the warrant, Casey kicked in the door and the stock price collapsed. That’s when Brandon bought cheap shares to repay the expensive ones he’d borrowed. He cleared ten million dollars.”

Gage glared down at Brandon. “Is that about right?”

Brandon still didn’t say anything.

“The only question,” Gage said, “is whether you’re going to bring your brother down, too.”

This time, Brandon responded:

“Landon didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t. He thought we were still doing it through insurance.”

“What changed?”

Brandon lowered his head.

“I’m going to find out one way or the other,” Gage said.

Brandon looked up again, his eyes darting about the room. They paused for a second on Viz blocking the doorway, then focused on the window.

Gage stepped in front of it. “Suicide isn’t an option.”

Brandon swallowed hard, then licked his lips.

“We had to stop because of an IRS investigation. But…” He took in a breath. “But Mann Trust was overextended and the bank regulators went after us for not keeping large enough cash reserves. They threatened to shut us down. The whole thing would have collapsed.”