Stephen Cannell - King Con

"Call him. He can help," Paper Collar John replied; then he turned, and with tears still on his face, he walked out of the Big Store and took the elevator to the street.

Victoria Hart stood there with her heart pounding. The FBI was outside and fifty Gypsy roofing sharpers were inside. She was caught in the middle and left to deal with the sting alone.

BEANO WAS TEN MINUTES LATE GETTING TO THE PAcific Air Private Jet Terminal. The Challenger was already chocked and Tommy was standing out in front of the Pacific Aviation Flight Service Company, looking pissed at being kept waiting. He had rented a tan Lincoln Town Car and the two leather bags with the five million dollars were already in the trunk.

"The fuck you been?" Tommy said. His anger at seeing the geek physicist brought up bile he could taste.

"This entire experience is so nerve racking. I can't find Dr. Sutton. I've looked and looked," Beano whined, as he pushed his tortoise-shell glasses up on his nose and squinted through them. He had changed his clothes in the car and was now wearing a short-sleeved pink shirt with a plastic pen protector and a clip-on bow tie and was carrying a scarred briefcase.

Tommy looked at him and remembered that, when he had first seen him in the bar at Sabre Bay, he had actually thought the geologist was handsome, a threat to his campaign to fuck Dakota. That was before he'd heard him wimper and plead. Once you got to know Dr. Clark, he was about as sexy as leather pants on an insurance executive.

"Who the rack cares about Dr. Sutton?" Tommy said angrily.

"Well, uh… how to put this… uh…" Beano took off his glasses, pulled up his shirttail, and cleaned them before slipping them back on his nose. "Dr. Sutton was never, as I'm sure you remember, all that excited about your inclusion as a financial entity," he stammered weakly.

"Who the fuck cares what that bag of bones thinks?"

"Well, I'm not saying this is really going to happen, but… well, Dr. Sutton took all the graphs and three-D seismic shots. The biotherms and the anticlines, along with his geophone resonance material, and he… well, he left."

"So he left. Fuck him. Who needs him? We got what we need from him."

"Well, you see, Mr. Rina, I don't think he took all that material with him because he wanted to frame it and hang it on his wall, so to speak…"

"So, why did he take it, shithead? I'm tired of playing twenty questions. Spit it out," Tommy barked, thinking this fucking geek was beginning to annoy him worse than Calliope Love. At least he could park his Johnson in Calliope's mouth occasionally to shut her up.

"I'm very concerned that maybe he decided to seek out another partner. You see, if he could convince one of the major stockholders of the viability of our find at Oak Crest, well then, there'd be a competitive bidder."

Tommy's hand shot out and grabbed Beano by the throat. Beano was yanked forward, letting out a little squawk as he was pulled into Tommy's face. "You fucking people amaze me. I'm not some dink you can cut outta the play. I'm a real fucking sore loser. Don't you get that yet?"

"I get it," Beano squeaked. "Please, please… can't breathe."

Tommy let him go. Beano took several deep breaths and straightened his glasses.

"I'm not saying he did it; it's just he didn't like the sixty-forty split, kept complaining about it. I argued with him but he took his stuff and left. At first, I just thought he was going to drive around and pout and would come back. Now, I wonder. He might try and make another deal on this information."

"Get in the fucking car," Tommy demanded.

"I have my own car."

Tommy backhanded him.

Beano got in the car. Tommy drove, and they pulled out of the parking lot.

A few seconds after they left, Reo Wells turned on the headlights of his midnight-blue Lexus. He put the car in drive and followed Tommy's rented Lincoln Town Car out of the parking lot and down Airport Drive toward San Francisco. Nobody saw the FBI surveillance team on the roof of the American Airlines building across the street. They radioed their chase car, which was two blocks up the street, waiting.

Tommy and Beano pulled into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Stockton Street. Tommy's attorney was waiting for them under a huge crystal chandelier in the ornate, richly appointed lobby. Tommy checked in and was directed up to a large suite on the fifteenth floor. Tommy dropped the two bags next to the bed. He had refused to let the bellhop carry them or show him up to the room.

Beano found himself standing opposite Tommy's lawyer, whose most distinguishing feature was gray-black wisps of hair that were growing like ragweed out of all the wrong places on his face. It poked in bushy clumps out of his ears and nose. It crowned his eyebrows, which seemed to trumpet constant surprise as they curled in bushy splendor up on his forehead. To make things worse, he had dressed funereally. His name, Beano learned, was Alex Cordosian. Alex now pulled a huge folder out of his bulging briefcase and laid it down on the table. Beano looked at the tab and saw that it was marked "Fentress County P amp;G." Beano hoped that getting past Mr. Cordosian wouldn't be hard. He was banking on a proven fact: Once a mark was hooked, it was usually impossible to knock him off the con. The mark's greed and dreams of riches made him throw away all caution. Beano only had to fill in whatever holes needed filling and keep reminding Tommy of the billions of dollars at stake. Tommy wouldn't want reason from his attorney. He would want to be told he was right. At least, that's what Beano hoped.

"To begin with, I just found out about this three hours ago, so I've had almost no time to research," Cordosian complained. "I've tried pulling the Ten-K's off the computer for this outfit, but they haven't filed any recently. They're on the Vancouver Exchange, which has very lax listing requirements. They've been quite inactive as far as trading. Four years ago they were a penny stock and now they're almost up to nine and a half."

"Who the fuck cares?" Tommy said, as he fished in the mini-bar for some Scotch and ice.

"Well, sir, the float on the stock is very thin. Only four or five hundred thousand shares outstanding. You start buying it up in quantity and the stock is going to go up like a Chinese rocket. You'll be chasing it… paying more for each new share because of the pressure your own buying is putting on the stock. Furthermore, they haven't filed a Ten-K for years. It could even be a shell company that somebody has been buying back and forth to push the price up."

"Shell company?" Beano piped up from over by the window. "It's not a shell. What are you talking about? It's a closely held company, that's all. I worked there for six years. They own a pile of land in Fentress County. Here, look at this," he said and pulled some papers out of his briefcase.

"The fuck is that?" Tommy demanded.

"Stock analysts' reports," he said, handing them to Alex and reeling off the big brokerages' names. "Morgan Stanley; here's the Goldman Sachs report." The reports were all counterfeit on stolen letterhead. They all said the company was for real, but had been doing poorly of late. "The principal stockholders have taken the major position in the stock," Beano continued. "They control all of the Class-A Preferred so they don't have' to file Ten-K's." He looked over at Tommy. "Where'd you get this guy? Gee, it's always like this. I get something really good and then attorneys come in and screw everything up."

"I'm just saying there's some due-diligence stuff to do here. We don't want to throw five million dollars around without looking at this company a lot more carefully."

"Is it currently active on the Vancouver Exchange?" Beano challenged.