The fix

11

If you live in Miami and need to make millions and millions of dollars in a short period of time, but have no discernible skills that would allow you to either play quarterback for the Dolphins, first base for the Marlins or, with Shaq out of the picture, center for the Heat, you have three choices:

1. You can deal drugs. This is a good choice. Miami has a large transient population of Hollywood and New York types who like to ingest as much cocaine as possible over the course of a weekend and won't haggle over price. Miami also has a disproportionately large refugee population, which, while used to huffing glue, has become an equitable buyer of crack, meth and marijuana, as well, which is nice since it's hard to move glue these days. Selling drugs can be dangerous, of course, so if you're concerned about your life or liberty, you could just keep your business confined to the sixteen thousand members of the University of Miami's student body, at least a quarter of whom like to take some recreational drugs. And then there's the retirees who can't afford the really good Oxycontin or Vicodin on their fixed incomes, so if you had a contact or two in the retirement villages, you could probably make a nice living without ever being threatened at all. You need a million dollars? Get yourself some cocaine or heroin and move to Miami, set up shop, get to work. If you can't make your nut, you're using your own supply.

2. You can marry in. This is a better choice. Even though Miami-Dade County has a median income lower than the rest of the nation, it also has millionaires by the legion. You just need to know where to find them. Fisher Island, of course. Snapper Creek and Hammock Lakes in Coral Gables. Biscayne Park. Cocoplum. The entire stretch of the Keys. If you're a man, this might be slightly more difficult, though not impossible. If you're a woman, if you haven't been seriously deformed in an industrial accident, if your name is Star, or if it used to be, you could live a millionaire's life without any outlay of your own, apart from the cost of your belly-button ring and hair dye.

3. You can go into real estate. This is the best choice. The reason? Because people will give you money for nothing. People will give you money on the idea of land. The presumption of inflation. The chance that they'll be able to turn their own millions of dollars into millions of dollars more. The chance that when you promise them a huge, absurd return on investment-say, 20 or 30 percent-that you are just the finest real estate investment program in the history of real estate.

Of course, it helps if people think a former Green Beret is running the company, investing his own money in the venture, because an ex-Green Beret must be an honorable man. During this time of war, surely an ex-Green Beret wouldn't be defrauding people out of millions of dollars in fraudulent properties and mortgages.

But then, Eddie Champagne wasn't exactly an ex-Green Beret. Dixon Woods was. Eddie Champagne, not even a raspberry beret. But the people behind White Rose Partners didn't know that. They just knew he had money and reputation and stories. And he had connections to more money. And when things got dicey, when it looked like there might be a problem, well, he had a human ATM in Cricket O'Connor.

What they were running out of was time.

Or at least that's what Sam's source at the IRS told him. After Stan managed to drag his two partners back out to their boat, we got Cricket back to my mother's and let Sam work the phones to find out what he could on White Rose Partners and what more he might find on Eddie Champagne.

One of Sam's sources at the IRS was an investigator named Lenore. Like his source at the FBI, Kyle, Sam had never actually met Lenore face-to-face. But when an ex-girlfriend got into a bit of jam and was facing a potentially hazardous audit-one that would probably show her husband just how much money she'd spent out with Sam-Sam called in a few interagency chits and ended up on the phone with Lenore, who simply hit the delete key a couple of times, and Sam's girlfriend's problems disappeared.

Over the years, he'd found that Lenore was one of the more dependable people out there, if only because she never seemed to fall for any of his charms, which Sam found both admirable and baffling. He thought of sending her a photo of himself from his younger, more muscular days, but decided, ultimately, that if she worked for the IRS, she probably knew his financial portfolio pretty well and was sure that, charm-wise, that was a black mark.

Still, he always tried to put a dash of sugar into their conversations. He called her under the aegis of just checking into an investment opportunity, making sure all was legit. A perfectly reasonable thing for someone to do, Sam thought, if one had the connections. But as soon as he brought up the White Rose Partners, he could actually hear her training take over. "I'm going to need to call you back, Samuel," she said abruptly.

She always called him Samuel. She was the only person alive who called him Samuel. But this time it didn't sound remotely affectionate, like it usually did. Fifteen minutes later, she called him from a secure conference line, which required him to enter his social security number to gain access. That was the thing about talking to people at the IRS: A real paucity of secrets existed.

"Why do you want to know about White Rose, Samuel?" Lenore said when they were finally hooked back up.

"I've got a buddy, name of Eddie Champagne, who told me they were a great investment group," Sam said. He heard her clicking away in the background, and for a long time she didn't respond. It always bothered Sam that people in government had such poor phone skills, that they couldn't pretend to have chitchat while they sourced your every word. It was harder to do back when everyone was still working on typewriters, Sam wagered, though he was sure he would have been annoyed by the sound of the dinging return and papers being shuffled, too.

"Samuel, you know you're not investing anything. You need to see about getting more in your 401 (k), you want my opinion," Lenore said finally.

"I was just going to give them a few thousand dollars," Sam said, not that he had a few thousand dollars. "My girlfriend, she's looking to put some seed into…" Sam didn't know what he was saying. He figured if he just let the words drift, Lenore would pick them up. She did.

"Let me put it to you this way," she said. "You give them money, you'll never see it again and, most likely, you'll be a plaintiff in about two months."

Lenore explained that White Rose was under investigation for mortgage fraud, but the problem was that no one had rolled on them yet. They were still making investors money, or at least enough to keep them hoping it was all legit. Right now, she said, it was the banks who were flagging them.

It was a classic scheme: White Rose used straw buyers to purchase land at full or slightly above full price; then they would bump up the price significantly on the contracts they sent to the mortgage lenders, thus generating huge extra fees on top of the mortgage. To make it all work, they had an accounting firm, two separate mortgage brokers and three different appraisers on the payroll. They had paperwork in order, she said, W-2s, pay stubs, everything, but it was all falsified. They ended up with the land, which they could resell, and which they usually did, flipping parcels within thirty days if they could, often for even larger profits based on the faulty appraisals, huge back-end fees and loans they'd have to touch. "They got people who got other people, too," Lenore said. "I wouldn't be surprised if they had a few flexible people at the banks, too."

"I guess I won't give them any money," Sam said, trying to sound as innocent as possible.

"Samuel," she said, "you can drop that ruse if you like. Our conversations are confidential."

"Are they really?" Sam said.

"Probably not," she said, "but if someone didn't want you getting this information, you wouldn't get it."

Sam knew that was one of the fringe issues related to working with me-there were forces on the inside working for and against me. And if I was being tracked, Sam was being tracked, and all of this was getting approved by someone.

"How not surprised would you be about persons in the banks?" Sam asked.

"Enough to know that it's going to ring some bells on Wall Street," she said.

That sounded fairly dire. If Sam actually had stocks or bonds or whatever it was people did on Wall Street, he'd figure out how to utilize that information. He made a mental note to tell Veronica, since he was fairly certain she actually knew about that sort of thing.

"You got anything on their investors?" Sam said, figuring, What the hell? Might as well just drop all pretense.

Lenore told him it was just as simple as could be. People were being duped, but paid. Investors put in their money, were probably promised a healthy return, and then, at least to start with, got it. The market in Miami was hot, just like in every other metropolitan area with a halfway decent view. And just like every other place, the market had turned to shit. "It's just a matter of time before they stop getting dividends on investment," she said. "They've been running this now for quite some time without a hiccup."

It made sense to Sam, knowing that they were coming to Cricket every two weeks for cash. They were probably seeding their largest investors to keep the money flowing in, waiting for the next explosion in the market. But that hiccup? It was here.

"So Stanley Rosencrantz," Sam said. "Ballpark net worth?"

"Enough to fill a ballpark," Lenore said. "Won't matter, though, when he's doing Fed time."

Sam liked it when Lenore threw out terms like Fed time. This got Sam thinking. "Would it be possible to get a few of the addresses they've bought and sold?"

"No," Lenore said, but he heard her clicking in the background, and in a second his phone beeped, letting him know he'd received a text. That's how the IRS worked. They said no, but they meant yes. "Before I lose my job, is there anything else you might need to know, Samuel?"

He wasn't going to do it, but… "You have anything on Brenda Holcomb?"

Lenore gave out a perceptible sigh. He heard the familiar click-clack of keys again. "She's not right for you," Lenore said. "You be good and stay with Veronica."

"You're a sweetheart," Sam said. "But it's not like that."

"It's always like that with you, Samuel," Lenore said. He had to admit that she had a point. She'd been looking into women for him for too long. It was just his policy to make sure women he slept with weren't sleeper agents for terrorist organizations, or, at the very least, didn't have husbands in the mafia. "And, Samuel? You might want to tell your friend Eddie Champagne, if you see him again, that he's now officially on the no-fly list, along with his friends at White Rose. In case you're curious."

"You caught that?"

"I catch everything," Lenore said. "Patriot Act, Samuel-you should learn to embrace it."

What Sam opted to embrace, after he hung up with Lenore, was the list of addresses she texted him. In the last year, there were three houses on Fisher Island, two office parks in North Miami, a dentist's office in Coconut Grove, a nightclub, a T-shirt shop, a strip club and an address Sam recognized immediately, since he'd spent the better part of the morning looking at it on Google Maps, trying to figure out how he was going to get his goddamned car back: the offices of Longstreet Security.

He had to hand it to Eddie Champagne. He was a scumbag, but man, he had huge balls.

Early the next morning, Sam recounted all of this to Fiona and me as we drove around Miami in Cricket's Mercedes (which I figured probably wasn't being monitored by any satellites-it at least didn't have any tracking devices on it), looking at the properties Eddie Champagne had purchased, flipped and lured investors into. We saw homes worth only a few hundred thousand dollars that he'd managed to get loans on for nearly a million dollars. We saw the remnants of the Lyric Theater in Overtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Miami, but which had once been the hub of what was called Little Broadway in the thirties and forties, and which Eddie had managed to get a loan of four million dollars on, when its value was more historical than nominal. And finally, we drove past Longstreet.

"The one building he actually still owns," Sam said. "Or, rather, that White Rose owns. Longstreet pays them a sizable amount of rent each month."

"Not a coincidence, I gather," I said.

"It wasn't even for sale when he bought it," Sam said.

"How much did he pay for it?"

"Double its worth," Sam said.

"I admire his spite," Fiona said.

"Hard not to," Sam said.

I admired that he hadn't just done the easy job I thought he'd done: What I'd figured from Barry's description of Eddie's work and from what Stan had said, was that it must be a low-impact, high-yield operation. In truth, Eddie Champagne was just a few steps away from being a legit businessman-the steps being the ability to stay legit in a down-turning market, a desire to do things legally, that sort of thing. But like every other organized-crime syndicate that operates in the real world, eventually, they wanted to be taken seriously when they began to make enough money to not want to risk death.

At least he wasn't another drug dealer dreaming Tony Montana.

Dixon Woods, on the other hand…

We had other reasons to be at Longstreet, of course, in that I expected the elusive Dixon Woods would be coming in to mount up before meeting with his new best friend, Hank Fitch, and I wanted to be ahead of that, too.

Sam parked the Mercedes across the street from the facility in the lot of Clifton's Chips, a potato chip company, which, at only nine in the morning, was already like a hive of bees. There were men driving forklifts into and out of the warehouses with pallets filled with bags of chips. The parking lot was filled with Hondas and Toyotas and Saturns. There were already three women and one man-all wearing security badges and khaki on some part of their bodies, because security badges and khaki are like the uniforms for the depressed middle class- standing out front smoking around a trash can.

Two school buses pulled up then, and I watched as at least sixty children piled out and headed somberly to the front door. Nine o'clock is early for everybody.

"I always wondered how they got all of those chips in those lunch-sized sandwich bags without breaking any," Sam said, also watching the kids. "Now I get it. They have the kids put them in one by one. Ingenious."

"They're going on a tour," I said. I knew this because when I was a kid, I had done the exact same thing. I hadn't thought of it in years, and at the time the Clifton's Chips factory was in an older part of Doral, but I remembered walking through the factory and being transfixed by machines processing the chips, shooting them rapid fire onto conveyer belts, the women in hairnets plucking out burned chips one by one as they passed. I remembered how loud it all was, but how easy it was for me to concentrate in the noise, how some of the kids were crying and complaining of headaches, and I was just watching the machines, thinking about how they could be modified to spit fire instead of chips.

I also remembered that day because Nate got into a fight with a kid named Justin Pluck, and they had to shut down the whole facility because Justin stabbed Nate in the leg with a sharpened pencil, and Nate's blood got all over a batch of chips.

I also remembered that two weeks later, on Halloween night, Nate and I ambushed Justin Pluck and his friends with water balloons filled with Nair as they waited in the darkened parking lot at the evangelical church a few blocks from our house hoping to steal younger kids' candy. We spent all night searching, missing an entire night of candy gathering, just for the chance to get Justin.

It was worth it.

"That's the problem with education today," Sam was saying. "When I was a kid, we toured the armory. Generations of kids never get to see an armory anymore."

"I weep for them," Fiona said from the backseat. I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or if she was being serious.

After the children disappeared into the factory and the buses pulled away, I turned to Fiona, who had her laptop opened beside her. "Any word?" I asked.

"Nothing yet," she said. "At least not from anyone you're interested in. But I've heard from several men who sound very enticing."

I'd anticipated that, by now, Eddie Champagne would be trolling for a new woman on one of the widow sites, as Cricket called them, where Fiona now had her very own profile. I thought that my threat to Stan the day previous and the realization that Cricket's faucet had been turned off would get him scrambling. I figured that Fiona was bait he wouldn't be able to resist.

It wasn't for lack of trying on Fiona's part. She had posted several photos, including one that was just of her stomach, another that was just the curve of her right breast another still that was just her lips, which, admittedly, were hard to resist. Half of the e-mails were from other women telling her she wasn't being tasteful. The other half were from men who didn't seem to have a problem and were offering airfare to pretty much every major American city.

"Jealous?" Fiona asked.

"Gratified," I said.

The fact was, everything was otherwise working well. I had Cricket's house set up for battle. I just had to get all the participants there, and things would take care of themselves. All that was broken would be fixed.

All I needed was for nothing to fall out of place, but already I was getting a bit of a moral tug. The money Stan was likely to get back to me was covered in the blood of others who'd been duped, too. The difference, I suppose, boiled down to choice. The investors who tunneled their money to White Rose were guilty for being stupid, for being greedy, for not recognizing that what they were buying into couldn't be legit. Money can blind. It had, thus far, turned the investors mute, too. And soon it would all be moot. Maybe if it all closed down now, people would get some of their money back.

Maybe it was like Barry said. No one made a billion dollars by doing everything straight.

The money-or, rather, the appearance of it- would also help me out of my problem with Natalya. But Dixon Woods would have to cooperate to make that happen.

It was after ten o'clock before I realized that wasn't going to happen.

We were still parked across the street, watching the movements outside Longstreet. We saw Brenda Holcomb pull in for her day at work in a black Suburban. We saw another two dozen or so men drive onto the plant in their own Explorers and Expeditions, hop out in workout clothes and ten, fifteen minutes later come out dressed for work, which meant the same khaki pants the employees of the potato chip factory were wearing, except the Longstreet employees dressed the khaki up with navy blue sport coats and bulging necks. Office casual versus paramilitary couture. The men jumped into the company Hummers and sped off without even bothering to wave at the security guard, who, I noticed, was not the same man I'd dropped days before. Too bad. He was one of the only guys I'd gotten to do the vomiting trick.

After three Hummers left the lot, we could see that Sam's Caddie was right where it had been left. At least Bolts thought I was good for my word, even if she hadn't called me back. Before Sam could even comment, or begin complaining, five men came out of Longstreet in what looked to be black Armani suits accented by tight black T-shirts.

"Give me your binoculars," I said to Sam. He handed them to me, and I watched the five men stride across the lot. I only recognized one of them, but that was enough. Particularly since I also recognized that they were toting Hecklers to work, which seemed just slightly unusual.

I handed the binoculars to Fiona. "I wonder who their seller is," she said.

"Remind me and I'll ask," I said.

"Where do you suppose they're off to?" Fiona said.

"Salvation Army," Sam said. "The center cannot hold. They're our last defense against the forces of evil."

"Let me see your phone, Sam," I said. I showed Fiona the photo of the tacks on South Beach Sam took when he was in Bolts' office. "See the big guy in the middle?"

"They're all big," Fiona said.

"He was guarding Natalya when I met her at the hotel," I said.

"The Michael I first met wouldn't have let him keep walking," she said.

"It wasn't like we were in a bombed-out building in Beirut," I said. "I couldn't exactly shoot him in the knees while he stood in the lobby of the hotel."

"You should have shot him for wearing that shirt with an otherwise fine suit," she said. "I don't suppose this is all a coincidence."

"Bad people find bad people," I said.

"I can agree with that," Sam said.

"You don't actually believe Longstreet is an evil organization," Fiona said. "That's absurd."

"No," I said, "I don't think they are evil. I think they are in the business of making money. They don't have an institutional moral code or some kind of religious fanaticism to work against, so they just do what they do. I think they probably hire the kind of people who don't care how that money is made, provided they get their own cut."

"Say what you will about Bolts," Sam said, "but she was going to hook me up with a decent workers' comp package."

"All we know about Dixon Woods is rumor and innuendo," Fiona said.

"When did that ever bother you?" I asked.

"It doesn't," she said. "But I thought at least Sam would require a burden of proof."

"What I've been told is enough," Sam said. "Besides, a schmuck like Eddie Champagne knows you're a bad enough guy to use your name, that's like getting a notarized document from J. Edgar Hoover. Let's stick the fucker in Camp X-Ray and be done with it."

"We closed X-Ray in 2002," I said.

"Then let's bury him under it," Sam said, "whatever gets me my car back sooner."

Fiona's point about coincidence was well taken. But I knew I wasn't just seeing things.

With money came the need for security-that much I understood about Miami. In the case of Cricket O'Connor, her position in society, her affiliation with the war, and her ability to be manipulated by a person like Eddie Champagne opened the door to exploitation. That Eddie had taken on Dixon Woods' name was no coincidence-he held a grudge against a guy who'd beaten him, caught him at his game, and he harbored it enough to be creative with it, if for nefarious purposes.

That Longstreet was protecting Natalya was a coincidence in the barest sense: The Oro was owned by Russians with a pedigree for the drug trade. It was only natural that they'd hire private security for their staff, particularly those ex-KGB agents who probably would be wise not to find themselves in dangerous situations stateside, lest someone spike their sushi with polonium 210 when they got back home. And Longstreet, with their affiliations with the drug trade in Afghanistan, were probably happy to just take the check and not ask questions.

Dixon Woods was a fulcrum, even if he wasn't aware of it. My plan was to use that against him.

Then my phone rang. The number was blocked. At least I knew it wasn't my mother.

"Talk," I said. I'd spent some time thinking about shortening my sentences to sound more menacing when the moment called for it. I figured it would make people mind the gaps in my speech; thought they'd think I was of so few words because my time was better spent planning on ways to kill them versus ruminating on tours of potato chip factories and Nair-filled Halloweens.

"It's Woods."

"Welcome to Miami," I said.

"We've got a problem," Woods said.

"We don't. You might. We don't."

"You don't seem to exist," Woods said. "I don't like to do business with people who don't exist."

"Hank Fitch doesn't exist," I said. "But his money does."

"You got any proof of that?"

I didn't. Not yet. I'd need Stanley Rosencrantz to come through. "This afternoon," I said. "My friend from the East is staying at the Hotel Oro. Are you familiar with that hotel?" Woods said nothing. I'd tried to play my hand too early, but now I had to keep bluffing. "We could meet there this evening, handle all of our business, and by morning you could be back on a plane for Afghanistan tending to your fields."

"It's off," he said and hung up.

I'd had conversations like that in the past. They were never good news.

"What was that?" Sam said. I told him. "Did it sound like he was in town?"

I thought about it. "Hard to tell," I said. "He wasn't bouncing. There was no delay. Phone sounded like a cell. He could be in the PR for all that's worth."

"What now?"

"We make him show," I said.

I called Nate, whom we'd left at my mother's so he could watch over everything, in case any Communists showed up again, and to keep an eye on Cricket, who, for whatever reason, perhaps the same poor judgment that got her in this problem to start with, confided to Fiona that she felt safe around Nate whereas I scared her. "What time is it?" Nate asked when he finally answered his cell.

"It's after ten," I said. "Listen. Plans have changed. I need you to go to Cricket's and get the tear gas from the garage."

"I don't do business until noon," he said.

"It's already tomorrow in Australia," I said.

"So it's ten a.m. tomorrow," he said.

Nate's socialization process ended right around his sixteenth birthday. I had to constantly remind myself of this so that I didn't end up shooting him. "Nate," I said, "go to Cricket's. Now."

"Can I shower?"

"I don't know, Nate, can you?" Problem was, my socialization process as it related to dealing with Nate had stopped at around twelve. That was when we decided it would be easier to just fight over everything.

"Fine, fine," he said.

I gave him some specific instruction on how to handle the tear gas. And upon reflection, told him to dig up the Malibu lights Sam had installed, too, which made Sam grunt with displeasure. I'd hear about that. But I thought we'd be able to use them in a more guerrilla-style soon. I should have known things were too perfect.

"You clear on everything?" I asked Nate. Asking Nate to do something came with a particular hazard: His involvement always made things worse. I was trying to learn to trust him, but I also knew that the definition of madness is repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result.

"How much am I getting for this job?" Nate asked.

"Nothing," I said.

"You have to be kidding," Nate said. "Cricket gets her money back, she could float us a couple Gs no problem. You want me to talk to her about that?"

"No," I said. "I just want you to do what I've asked."

"If there's some back end, I expect to be remunerated," Nate said.

"Consider that truck of suits your salary," I said.

"You're not nice," Nate said.

"Call me when you're back on the road," I said and hung up.

Next, I called Barry, who unlike Nate was awake and alert, if still Barry. "I need you to set up two bank accounts for me," I said. "But put them somewhere close. Nothing Swiss."

"How does the Dominican sound? I'm getting great rates there."

"Fine," I said. "I need one for Cricket O'Connor, one for Hank Fitch."

"Real ones or fake ones?" he said.

"Real for Cricket, fake for Hank," I said. I gave Barry Cricket's social security number, driver's license number, everything he might need.

"This Hank Fitch is a bad guy," Barry said.

"Yeah, I know," I said.

"He shot a guy I've done some business with in the past," Barry said.

"You don't say," I said.

"Heard things went down on the Fish," Barry said.

"Where'd you hear that, Barry?"

"Around," he said. "This might surprise you, but you aren't the only person who talks to me."

"Nothing surprises me," I said.

"People are moving money around on account of this Hank Fitch," he said. "Lots of it."

"Maybe the Fed is cutting the interest rate next week," I said. "How long to get this done?"

"Couple hours. What about that other favor? The loans? Or did that idea get shot up?"

"Funny," I said, again trying with the limited words thing. "I want you to set up an account for Eddie Champagne. See if you can fund a loan for him using this address as financial collateral," I gave him the address of Longstreet. I then gave him all the information contained on the police report Sam had finagled out of his guy at the FBI, which was enough to set up a legit account, except that Eddie Champagne's felony sheet would never allow him the loan without some fudging on Barry's part. "Run it through a real bank. Just keep yourself as out as possible. This is going to wake up some heat."

"Heat I can handle," Barry said.

"IRS heat," I said.

"Those guys are puppies," Barry said, but he actually had a touch of uneasiness in his voice. "Took them a decade to catch up to Barry Bonds. What do you think they'll do with me?"

"I appreciate it," I said.

Barry told me everything would be up within a few hours. "I'll text you all the numbers," he said, "but this phone is in the Atlantic. You need to find me, you know where to look."

"Keep whatever you can for yourself," I said.

"Implied," he said and was gone.

I had one more call to make. To Natalya.

"You think that's a good idea?" Sam said.

"It's not an idea," I said. "It's a trigger."

"You should just use a real one," Fiona said.

I dialed the hotel's general number, opting not to use the 800 number provided for me earlier. I told the operator I was calling from Palm Life magazine about doing a photo shoot at the hotel the following month and absolutely had to speak to the GM.

"This is Ms. Copeland," Natalya said, her accent perfect again.

"I have your money," I said.

"Smart," Natalya said. "Better for everyone that you come clean."

"Six o'clock," I said, "poolside at your lovely establishment. That way everyone goes home alive. I assume you have an account I can wire to?"

"Of course," she said.

"Good," I said. "And, Natalya, just so you know? I'm bringing my pit bull with me." I turned to see how Fiona took that.

Elated.

"What a nice reunion," Natalya said. "I haven't seen her since you and I slept together, Michael. At least not up close. We'll have much to discuss. Does she know about that spot under your left ear?"

"She knows them all," I said. "There's only going to be the two of us, so maybe call your friends at Longstreet and tell them they can leave their Hecklers at home for the night shift. We'll move the money and then I don't intend to ever see you again, correct?"

"It depends," Natalya said. "You seem to be doing well in business. Maybe you'd like to extend your reach?"

"Six o'clock," I said and hung up.

Now, all I'd need was the money, Dixon Woods and Eddie Champagne.

I looked at my watch. "Let's go," I said to Sam.

"What about Dixon?"

"He'll follow the money," I said. "That's what assholes do. Plus, he knows I took care of Eddie. Or at least that I told him I had." The truth was that I thought by the time I heard from Dixon that Eddie would no longer be a problem. "My guess? He's just taking some time to find out what Eddie has been doing. When he finds out he's been using Dixon's name, Eddie might stop being our problem entirely."

"Where to?"

I pulled out Stanley Rosencrantz's card and handed it to Sam. "Here." If I was going to get Cricket's money back, I was going to make sure I saw it happen.