Stephen Cannell - King Con

"What's it matter if you buy it today? Look, big purchases don't happen like this. You don't roll in with a suitcase full of cash and plunk it down. That's insane. Do it the way Joe would do it. Do it smart." Alex had finally found the right tune to play, and Tommy was listening and nodding.

Beano handed the note to Ellen. She read it and stood up. "You can wait in Mr. Spencer's office while Miss Luna gets the approval for you to attend the meeting," she said, as she showed them to a nearby office.

They entered and looked out of the huge plate-glass window. Across the street, the Exxon double locking x's were shining. Ellen left them in the office and closed the door. Then she handed Beano's note to her husband, Steve. Rig a chill and play the cross-fire, the note read.

There was a computer in the office where they were waiting. Tommy watched as Beano turned it on and booted it up.

"I'm telling you," Alex went on relentlessly, "we can hold our dirt. If they're really in cash trouble, time is working for us, not against us."

Beano had the Quotron stock report up, and he motioned to Tommy and Alex.

"Look't this," he said, and he punched in FCP amp;G and they watched the stock ticker report. "This stock was trading at ten yesterday, this morning it's down to five and seven eighths and whoa, no… look't this…"

Tommy leaned in and, as they talked, he saw the stock drop from five and seven-eighths to five and three-fourths. Again, Victoria's program had overridden the real Quotron ticker, and Fentress County fell right before their eyes.

"This fucking thing is dropping faster than a bad tit job," Tommy said, glaring at the screen.

"Mr. Rina," Beano said, "I don't mean to stand here and argue with Mr. Cordosian, brilliant in legal matters as I'm sure he is, but I've been in the oil business for fifteen years. This stock is about to get frozen by the Vancouver Exchange. An insider is obviously dumping stock without notifying the Board. They've gotta be looking at this. A stock goes from ten to five and three-quarters, loses almost half its value in one day, and you don't think the Exchange is gonna stop trading and delist it? Once that happens, we are absolutely out of the game. Maybe your brother thinks if there's a clock in a deal there's a problem, but I'm sure he wasn't contemplating a foreign stock exchange taking the whole transaction out of our hands. We have one hell of an opportunity here. But we've gotta suck it up, be a little brave, and move now."

Then the door opened and Ellen Bates stuck her head in. "Miss Luna says you can join the stockholders' meeting. It's on the floor below, in the big conference room. I can show you down."

Tommy picked up his briefcase and they all followed her out of the office to the elevator.

The stockholders' meeting was more of a shouting match than a meeting. Miss Luna, a.k.a. Victoria Hart, was trying to maintain some control, but the Bates point-out players were screaming at her and each other.

"You can't be serious!" Leonard X. Bates was shouting. "If we don't make a move now, take this into our own hands, we're going to get frozen. One or more of us is selling and killing the market for everyone else. We have to move now, Laura. Sell the Tennessee land, dispense the assets. I understand we have a buyer on that property."

Everybody started talking at once.

"Mr. Lacy had very strong opinions about liquidating that asset, and the offer on the table is ridiculous," Victoria yelled out. "Once we do that, we're basically out of business. That property is leveraged against our bank loan. Besides, we feel we have certain development fields that show wonderful promise. We're not in a crisis situation here, at least not yet."

"If we're not, I'd sure as hell like to see your definition of a crisis!" Theodore Bates barked.

"I'm holding way too much of this paper. I'm not gonna stand here and eat it, sheet by sheet," another sharper yelled.

"This is the worst quarterly P and A field report I've seen in twenty years," another interrupted.

And then everybody in the room started shouting over one another and Victoria was clapping her slender, out-of-proportion hands to get them all to quiet down. "If we can please speak one at a time," she yelled, but arguments were raging all around the table.

Beano leaned toward Tommy. "This thing is so ripe. We won't even need the whole five mil. Make an offer."

Tommy looked over at Alex, who shook his head, and Tommy leaned back. He was going to wait, like he thought his brother Joe would do.

Beano was stuck, so he flashed a sign at Theodore. It was time to play the cross-fire.

"Miss Luna, I want to adjourn for a while. I have partners in Texas I need to speak with. Could we have a few minutes, please?" Theodore yelled.

The din in the room lessened with planned orchestration, so Victoria could give her line. "Okay, I think we all need to cool down. Weil take five."

"I know this fat broad from someplace," Tommy said. "I fucking can't pin it down, but when it comes to pussy, even ugly pussy, I got fucking unbelievable instincts."

"Let's go find a room to talk," Beano said.

He moved with Tommy and Alex out of the conference room. All of the sharpers were growling and arguing at the turn of events, cursing the falling stock and the stockholder among them who was selling. They filed out into the hallway. Beano led Tommy and Alex to an empty office.

All the offices on twenty-four were less impressive than the ones on twenty-five. The offices had half-walls with decorative, frosted glass up to the ceiling to create an open feeling.

Beano motioned them into an office, then hesitated. "I gotta take a quick leak," he said. "Be right back." He closed the door, counted to ten, then opened the door and quickly re-entered the office.

"Fuck! I knew it!" he exclaimed, turning Tommy and Alex around. "He's here. He's fucking here. I knew it!"

"Who's here?" Tommy said.

"Dr. Sutton. He's talking to that old guy, Theodore Lanaman, the guy who called for the recess. They just went into an office across the hallway."

"You think he's making a deal with that guy?" Tommy said, concern crossing his feral features.

"Of course. Whatta you think? He's not at this stockholders' meeting to give a geophone report. We're fucked," Beano said, totally defeated. He pointed at Alex. "If you hadn't listened to this guy, we could've already owned this thing."

"Where is he? Let's go see," Tommy said, then opened the door and walked out. Beano and Alex followed.

Beano pointed to the office across the hall; then Tommy saw that there was a door right next to it. He opened it. It led to a secretarial area which was between two executive offices. One was the office that Duffy and Theodore were in. The other was empty.

They walked into the secretarial area and looked through the frosted-glass dividing wall that separated them from Duffy and Theodore. They could see Duffy talking animatedly, but his voice and image were muffled by the decorative glass partition. Beano finally found the secretary's speakerphone and hit a button. Immediately they could hear the conversation, because Beano had connected the speakers between the two phones:

"… I been doing it just like we planned," Theodore was saying, and through the distorting glass they could see him holding up a piece of paper. "These are the trading slips."

Duffy was standing facing him, his Einstein hair frizzy in the distorted backlight. Beano grabbed a miniature tape recorder out of his pocket to record the conversation.

"I'm telling you, Mr. Lanaman, they won't find out you're the one selling… The price is going down. It's already in the mid-fives."

Beano, Alex, and Tommy were hunkered over the speakerphone, eavesdropping, while Beano recorded the "betrayal."