Smith's Monthly #24 Page 7

  “Not really,” Ben said. “Just call us the neighborhood clean-up committee and we have drafted your help. I could buy the homes myself and fix them up, but to be honest, I’m having more fun getting companies like your employers to do it for me.”

  At that moment Stephanie came back in the front door. “Wow, it’s hot out there. We need to send the painters home.”

  “Address first,” Ben shouted to her.

  “Twenty-seven-thirty-seven,” she said and then went back outside and closed the door.

  Ben typed in the address and brought up all the paperwork for the property. It showed the property had been sold to First Trust and Loan two months ago.

  “Time for a little trading around.”

  As Caro watched, his mind trying to grasp what he was seeing, Ben’s fingers flew over his keyboard and within ten minutes Caro’s company owned that property and it was the address on the work order he had. Caro’s company had exchanged an equal value property to First Trust in a small town outside of Boise.

  And Ben and Stephanie’s house was no longer Caro’s problem. The lien his company thought they had on it vanished as quickly as a few keystrokes, along with all the filing paperwork, purchase agreements, and state filings.

  Caro stood up straight and tried to take a deep breath to clear his head. It almost worked. “I think you just broke about fifty laws.”

  “More like a hundred,” Ben said, smiling. “But there is no way of tracing any of it and trust me, in this world, who is going to care that a few properties got switched around?”

  “I’m sure someone can trace it if they wanted,” Caro said.

  Ben chuckled. “The banks these days can’t even find the paperwork on a large percentage of the homes they actually do own. You know that.”

  Caro didn’t want to nod, but he did. Ben was right. Mortgage paperwork was a mess in the best of times.

  “So you made up the lien on this property out of whole cloth?” Caro asked.

  “I sure did,” Ben said. “We had this place paid off five years ago.”

  “And just to get my company here in your neighborhood to clean up other properties to make your street nicer?”

  “You got it,” Ben said, smiling. “We got a guy showing up here in a week from a savings and loan out of Utah. But since you made it first, you get the worst of the houses along the street. Trust me, the Bensons didn’t go easily when they left.”

  “So what makes you think I’ll go along with you?” Caro asked.

  “For a start, you have no evidence of anything different,” Ben said.

  “Except for the original paperwork in my car,” Caro said. “And the files back in my home office.”

  “I already printed off all the new work orders for you with the new address and Stephanie replaced them in your car while you were in here.” Ben pointed at the screen. “I’ve changed all your companies official records. They think they own the house down the street and that’s where you should be going.”

  “You’ve thought of everything except how to keep me quiet,” Caro said, now feeling more annoyed than anything else.

  Ben hit a key and on one of the previously dark screens an image of Caro’s home in Portland came up.

  “That’s a nice place,” Ben said.

  “You wouldn’t?” Caro asked, stunned.

  “I wouldn’t want to,” Ben said. “Honestly, I wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t except as a last resort. But you’ve seen what I can do. I would rather have your help with making our street beautiful again.”

  Caro knew exactly what the man could do. All the years of making those payments could vanish in a few keystrokes. Caro would spend years trying to dig himself out of a mess that Ben could create in two minutes.

  Caro had heard of it happening to other poor souls and he had no desire to be one of them.

  And no one would believe his story of a mad hacker putting his own home in foreclosure to help clean up his neighborhood. That was just too crazy to even try to explain.

  Ben shut off his computers and stood, pushing Caro back toward the kitchen. “Come on, let me get you something more to drink and we can sit and talk and Stephanie can work on that salad after she sends the painters on their way. After that I can put on the steaks.”

  Caro took another long drink from the cool lemonade. Then he dropped onto the stool and looked at Ben who had returned to his stool and was smiling.

  “You really are crazy,” Caro said.

  Ben shrugged. “One person’s craziness is another’s sanity. You can’t tell me you think this banking and home mortgage mess is sane. I’m just trying to clean it up a little.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” Caro said. “Not one bit of it. You could have changed the work orders before I got here, sent me to that other house first.”

  Now Ben was really smiling and nodding as Stephanie came in and joined them. “I could have. You are right.”

  He looked at Stephanie and smiled. “He figured it out.”

  “I knew he would,” Stephanie said, going to the sink and washing her hands.

  “So why didn’t you?” Caro asked.

  Stephanie poured herself a glass of lemonade and put the pitcher back into the fridge.

  “You want to tell him,” Ben said to her.

  “Because of your daughters,” she said. “They need their father to be home.”

  Caro stood, pushing the stool back, panic ramping up and his heart pounding. “What do you know about my daughters?”

  Ben for the first time looked serious. “I needed to know as much as I can about a man I’m going to offer a job to.”

  “You hate this travel,” Stephanie said, moving over with the glass of lemonade and sitting down on a stool next to Caro. “Your daughters and your wife hate having you travel so much. It’s all over your oldest daughter’s Facebook page and in the e-mails your wife sends to her parents and to you when you are traveling.”

  “You can get to all of that?” Caro asked, his head spinning.

  “You would be surprised what Ben can do,” Stephanie said, smiling at her husband.

  “Not any more I wouldn’t,” Caro said.

  “So I’ve been planning on getting into real estate in the Portland area,” Ben said, “and I need someone who knows houses, knows the area, to run my Oregon branch.”

  “You get to stay home with your children,” Stephanie said.

  “I’ll pay off your home as a signing bonus and double your salary,” Ben said.

  “And if I don’t agree?” Caro asked.

  “We have corn, steaks, salad, and you go back to work tomorrow on that house two doors down. It’s just an offer, nothing more.”

  “Actually,” Stephanie said, “we’d like you to get that fixed up before you quit your current job.”

  “And why would I quit one job to do the same job with you?” Caro asked, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.

  “It wouldn’t be exactly the same job,” Ben said, smiling.

  “So what exactly would it be?”

  At this point Caro was convinced, completely convinced, that he was facing two of the crazier people he had ever had the misfortune to run into. And every part of his brain said he needed to get out of that house quickly.

  Stephanie was beaming and Ben’s smile couldn’t get any bigger.

  Two fruitcakes. They were both nuts. Caro stood and backed a step away from the counter. Now even with air-conditioning he was sweating.

  “This was Stephanie’s idea,” Ben said.

  “I thought of it after we watched the Bensons get evicted,” she said. “We liked them.”

  Ben nodded. “Yeah, good people. So I decided I could use the money we have, plus some money from the banks that I can get access to, to work to keep people in their homes.”

  “He’s made a lot of money in stocks,” she said, smiling.

  Ben laughed. “I’m good at shorting bank stocks at exactly the right time.”

  “So
we want you to meet with families who are about to be evicted,” Stephanie said.

  “I’ll buy up their mortgage if you say they are solid people,” Ben said. “You figure out what they can really afford and we’ll set that up for them to pay. Make sure they stay in their home and the bank doesn’t make a profit from their hardship.”

  “Can I think about it?” Caro asked, taking another step back. These two weren’t just nuts, they were living in a fairy tale land.

  “Of course,” Ben said. “Take all the time you like. The job is yours if you want it.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and turned for the door.

  The heat hit him in the face like a slap and he made it to his car and got it started as fast as he could, getting the air-conditioning running. On the seat where he had left them was the paperwork he had brought from Oregon, but now the address was two doors down the street.

  An address he never would have questioned an hour before.

  FOUR

  He headed the big rental up Bryant Street until he found a shady place to park out of sight of good old Ben and Stephanie.

  Then leaving the car running, he grabbed up his cell phone and hit speed dial. Denise at the home office in Portland answered. She was one of the best there was at computers and tracking housing paperwork. If anyone on the planet could find records that had been tampered with, it was Denise.

  “I need you to pull up some paperwork on a house here,” Caro said. “I want to make sure everything is in order before I move one more step on it.”

  “Smart thinking,” Denise said. “You never know in these days.

  “You got that right,” Caro said.

  Over the next thirty minutes, with the air-conditioning blowing on his face, he had her search every record the company had on the house on Bryant Street in Boise, Idaho.

  No sign of tampering, no sign of anything different. The address he needed to work on was the empty house with the damaged garage door. The company had bought it eight months before at auction.

  “Looks all square to me,” Denise said finally. “State filing is all confirmed as well. We own it all fair and square.”

  He thanked her and hung up, then sat staring down Bryant Street.

  Ben had been for real, or the entire thing had been an ugly heat vision. Or Caro really had fallen into the Twilight Zone.

  Right now he needed to believe that Ben and Stephanie were for real. That they were two people with more money and skills than sense who just wanted to help people.

  He hit speed dial again on his phone and this time got his wife.

  “Wow, this is a pleasant surprise,” Mary said.

  “Where are you at?”

  “Picking up Cindie,” she said. “I got ten minutes before she gets out of school. Something wrong? You sound stressed.”

  “Sort of am,” Caro said.

  Then, as he had done with everything since they met, he told her what had happened with Ben and Stephanie.

  “They want to save people’s homes for them?” she asked after he had finished giving her the story, job offer and all. Everything but the threat against their house.

  After working with Denise in his home office, Caro was convinced Ben would never do that unless really, really pushed. He didn’t need to. He could cover his tracks completely and make anything Caro said look like a nut job talking. So Mary didn’t need to worry about that happening. Caro had no thoughts of pushing.

  “It sure seems that way,” Caro said.

  “He’s really that good on computers, huh?”

  “He’s the best I have ever seen,” Caro said.

  “And you would be at home and getting twice your salary?” she asked.

  He could hear the excitement in her voice. He had no doubt which way she was going to go.

  And now that he had stopped and thought about it and proved to himself that Ben could do what he seemed to appear to do, Caro was starting to like the idea more and more.

  “It seems that way,” Caro said. “It would be nice to be home with you and the girls every night.”

  “It would be wonderful,” Mary said, her voice almost breathless as she said that. “But can these two afford to do what they are saying they want to do?”

  “I have a hunch that Ben can do pretty much what he wants,” Caro said. “But I will check to make sure.”

  At that moment in the background his daughter Cindie climbed into the car and Mary said hi and told her to get buckled in.

  Caro looked down the hot neighborhood street and wished beyond anything that he was there with them.

  Sometimes a guy has to take a chance when given to him, no matter how crazy that chance was.

  “Mary,” he said. “I think I’m going to go back and talk with them again.”

  “Oh, that would be so wonderful if this worked out,” she said. “Good luck. Say goodbye to daddy.”

  Cindie said in the background, “Bye, Daddy. Hurry home.”

  And with that Mary hung up.

  Caro was again alone in the air-conditioning of his rented car sitting on a hot street in a town he never wanted to visit again.

  FIVE

  He sat thinking for another five minutes, running everything through his mind, then headed back toward Ben and Stephanie’s home.

  He stood in the heat once again and rang their bell.

  And again both of them answered with wide smiles and invited him in and got him seated in their kitchen with a wonderful-tasting glass of lemonade in his hands.

  “I talked to my wife and did some research on just how good you are at changing the paperwork.”

  “He’s good, isn’t he?” Stephanie said.

  “Very good,” Caro said. “My company has one of the best computer people I know and she couldn’t find a thing wrong with your paperwork on the Benson house up the street.”

  Ben only nodded.

  “But if I did agree to work for you, I would need a few assurances.”

  “Go on,” Ben said.

  “I’ll need to know you have the money to do all of this,” Caro said.

  “Fair enough,” Ben said. “Stephanie, do you mind if I show Mr. Rosefield our accounts later?”

  “Not at all,” Stephanie said. “It’s a logical request since he has a family to protect.”

  “And you’ll do this all aboveboard?” Caro asked. “Last thing my daughters would need would be to have their father sent to jail.”

  “Ninety-nine percent of the time,” Ben said. “But I have to be honest with you, I’m not going to feel bad helping a bank help a family stay in their home. And that might take a little computer hacking, but no theft. That much I can promise.”

  “No theft, ever?”

  “Ever,” Ben said. “I couldn’t sleep if I did. Like cheating on my taxes. Not worth losing the sleep.”

  “And if he did I’d make him pay for it as well,” Stephanie said, smiling.

  “And she would, too,” Ben said. “It’s why I did the property trade so your company would be out no money and neither would the owner of the Benson place.”

  Caro nodded. He could live with a little computer hacking for the right cause.

  They talked for another thirty minutes and Ben and Stephanie filled in all his questions better than he had hoped, actually.

  He was convinced they were crazy. Crazy to even try something this stupid. But he was starting to like their kind of crazy and for the first time in years he felt excited about the coming work he would be doing.

  Finally, he had one more question. “You have a guy coming from Utah next week to do the same thing there?”

  “We hope so,” Stephanie said. “Someone has to do this.”

  “So all this was nothing more than a giant job interview, right?”

  “Basically,” Ben said, smiling. “It’s going to take a certain type of person to do what we are hoping to do. So we need to run each of you through this to see how each of you react.”

  “And I passed?” Ca
ro asked. “You’re still offering me the job?”

  “It is yours,” Ben said, extending his hand

  “You know, you both are crazy,” Caro said, shaking Ben’s hand and smiling for the first time in the day. “But I guess I am as well.”

  “Let’s hope you are the first of many crazies to come,” Ben said.

  “This is the Twilight Zone, right?” Caro asked. “Rod Serling is standing in the corner, smoking, talking about how sometimes it takes ordinary people to help out other ordinary people.”

  Stephanie and Ben both laughed.

  “Nope,” Stephanie said. “This is Bryant Street, a street like every other street in the country, where good families live and magic can sometimes happen.”

  Caro raised his glass of lemonade in a toast. “Rod Serling himself could not have said it better.”

  [Bad Beat cover]

  The Cold Poker Gang consists of a group of retired Las Vegas Police detectives getting together once a week to play cards and work to solve cold cases.

  Retired Detectives Bayard Lott and Julia Rogers stand at an unmarked grave in

  the desert, about ready to close a thirty-year-old cold case of a missing woman.

  But what appears from that grave keeps their case very much open, and shines a

  light on many other cold cases.

  Another twisted mystery that only the Cold Poker Gang can solve.

  BAD BEAT

  A Cold Poker Gang Novel

  PART ONE

  First Bad Beat

  PROLOGUE

  March 3rd, 1987

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  BECKY PENN TIED her long brown hair back away from her face and laughed as her mom stood in their bathroom door, arms crossed over her chest, the worried look on her face that Becky saw so much from her.

  Her mom had raised her since their father had left when Becky was three. The two of them were more like sisters at times and Becky loved that.

  Becky was dressed in a light skirt, a new blouse she had just bought, and had on sandals, since the weather was already starting to warm up.