Geek Mafia by Rick Dakan (beach read txt) 📖

“No worries. You’re welcome to the couch anytime.” She was wearing black cutoffs and a white tank top with a black bra. He felt a familiar stirring down below. Crap! Not what he needed right now. What he needed was his pants on.

“What’s going on?” Paul asked. “What time is it?”

“It’s about one in the afternoon,” she said. “As for what’s going on, well – it’s your plan in action!” She gestured to the boxes that now littered the room. Boxes. Not bowling balls at all. That made more sense. And they weren’t just any kind of boxes. They were long, rectangular boxes designed specifically to hold comic books. There were at least a dozen comics boxes stacked willy-nilly around the room.

“Are those comics?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Whose? Are those mine?” 

“Nope, I guess they’re mine,” she said. “Or rather ours. The crew’s. We bought them today.”

“What?”

“We bought them today so we could carry out your plot.”

Paul sat up, clutching the blanket around his waist. Chloe was talking about the fake comic book scheme he’d dreamed up last night. Were they crazy? “Are you crazy?” he asked. “That plan was idiotic. I should know, I came up with it.”

“I guess you don’t realize your own genius then. We all thought it was a pretty good plan ourselves. So we started looking into it. Then Raff and I went out and got a bunch of quarter and dime comics from some local comic shops, which is what you see here before you.” Paul just looked at the assembled boxes in confusion. Were they serious?

“Come on,” said Chloe. “Put your pants on and get up. I’ll fix you a sandwich and fill you in on your part.” Paul blushed as he realized that there hadn’t been a blanket last night when he’d passed out. Someone had no doubt brought one out to cover him up and that someone was probably Chloe. Thankfully, Chloe has gone into the kitchen already, either tactful or disinterested enough to give him a moment to put his clothes on in privacy. He pulled his pants from between the cushions. He still didn’t see his underwear, but he pulled the pants on without them. Then he went into the kitchen to find Chloe making peanut butter sandwiches again.

“Did you sleep ok?” she asked.

“I must have,” said Paul. “I haven’t slept past noon in years.”

“Well, you had a busy day.”

“Yeah,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “So, what’s with all the comics?”

“I told you,” she replied. “We’re following up on your plan.”

“But why do you need all these old, crappy comics?”

“I thought about it some, and we can probably pull off counterfeits of the covers and what not, but I didn’t see why we should bother going through all the trouble of counterfeiting the whole thing. So we’re going to take the covers off of these here and put our fake ones on them. We just bought up all the cheap ones we could find so we’d have plenty to choose from when it came to matching size and age and condition or whatever.” This line of reasoning made a lot of sense to Paul, although he still didn’t really believe they were going to go through with it.

“The first thing we need from you,” she continued, “Is to have you pick out some choice candidates for counterfeiting. The way I figure it, we don’t want to do anything too famous or high profile, like Superman number one or whatever. Anything really well known like that and it’s going to attract a lot of unwanted attention. Instead, I’m counting on you to pick out comic books that’re worth, you know, between $100 and $300 each. I bet there’s a ton of those out there, right?”

“Sure,” he said. “A ton. It shouldn’t be that much of a problem. I just need a price guide and I can go through and pick out however many of those you need.” Already he was agreeing to help! Last night he’d wanted to leave, but now he felt guilty. He felt like he’d somehow betrayed Chloe by kicking her out of his car, which made no sense at all, since it was probably the only smart thing he’d done yesterday. Plus, Chloe seemed totally cool about it. Or maybe she was just playing it cool and inside she was really pissed or disgusted or annoyed. Paul didn’t know, but he did know that, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to let her down. She was counting on him. “I’ve got some good candidates in mind already,” he assured her.

She’d finished the sandwiches and brought them over to the table along with a glass of water and two aspirin for Paul. “Thanks,” he said. He swallowed the two pills with a gulp of water. He wasn’t really hungry though, so he let the sandwich be for the moment. “But how are you going to fake the plastic seals the grading company uses?”

“That, my friend, is the hard part. We’re still working on that angle. Raff’s out doing some research on these Comics Rating Group guys. Apparently they’re based out of LA, so we might have to take a drive down there tomorrow and check them out. Have you ever had any contact with them before?”

“No,” said Paul. “I was never much of a collector. I just like to read and draw them, so I never felt the need to seal anything up. Besides, I mostly read indie press comics that aren’t worth much. Not to a collector anyway.”

“Ok,” she said. “Well, Raff’ll turn up some good solid info. He always does. When he gets back we can plan our next move from there. Hey, are you going to eat that?” She nodded towards the sandwich. He shook his head and she took half for herself. He scarcely noticed; his thoughts had already turned to choosing comics.  

After lunch Paul helped Chloe sort through the boxes of comics, just to make sure there weren’t any hidden gems in there that were actually worth money already. There weren’t – it was pretty rare for a store to make that kind of mistake these days. Paul suggested they might try garage sales this weekend – they don’t often have comics for sale, but when they do, you can occasionally find some goodies. He pulled out some of the better-preserved issues, especially if they were from the seventies or early eighties, figuring that this would be the period where most of their counterfeits would come from. After a few hours, Paul had collected a good pile of about fifty issues ready to donate their insides to fraud.

Raff showed up around seven, and he had a bucket of fried chicken with him. “Chow time!” he said, as he came through the door. Bee suddenly appeared from one of the back rooms, much to Paul’s surprise. He hadn’t even known she was in the house. She must have been hidden away in one of the bedrooms, no doubt engrossed in some technical project or on the computer doing something. The four of them sat down to dinner with chicken and beer. Raff tucked a paper towel into the neck of his black polo shirt, covering up the Cisco logo, and then filled them in on what he’d found. 

“Ok, here’s the deal with the Comics Rating Group.” Raff said between bites of chicken. “They’re based down in San-something or another, one of those suburbs in the LA area. Normally they don’t take submissions directly, you have to give your comics to a normal comic book store and then they send them on to CRG to be graded and sealed. But, they do make exceptions for big-time clients. If you’ve got a huge collection of valuable comics that you want graded, they’ll let you come in person. Just like any business, the big whales get special treatment. Most people are only having one or two books graded at a time – remember is costs $30 per book. But someone comes in and says they’ve got 500 or 1000 rare comics they want rated and sealed, well, now we’re talking real money. So I think that’s got to be our in.”

“Makes sense,” said Chloe. “We send in a face to play the big shot. That gets us in the door and into their system.”

“Ok,” said Paul, “But why do you want to get in the door? Can’t you hack their computers from the outside?”

“Well,” replied Chloe, “We want to figure out how they do the sealing process so we can fake it ourselves. And yes, we do want to get into their network, but that’s a lot easier to do if we can get into the building.”

“It’s important that we make sure the finished product looks just like the real thing,” Raff chimed in. “So ideally we’ll order our supplies from the same place they do and have their every move down exactly.” 

“You guys are really going to do this, aren’t you?” asked Paul. Raff gave him a look that was somewhere between annoyed and surprised. Having Raff and Bee around had at least partially broken the spell he’d been under when it was just him and Chloe. He liked Bee and Raff well enough, but as a group it all seemed much more sordid. The past six hours had been a fun diversion. He’d spent the afternoon in a room full of comic books and a beautiful woman – every geek’s dream. But now he was starting to wake up.

 “Hey Paul, listen a minute,” said Chloe. “We’re not asking you to do anything illegal here. We’re really not. This is just what we do for fun, ok? I’d like you to help us out with some of the prep-work because, well, we don’t know anything about comics. Your idea sounded good, but we don’t have an expert like you. Sure, I mean, we’ve all read a ton of comics and stuff, but you were actually in the business. You know that side of things. If you can help us get through this, I’d really appreciate it.”

Paul wasn’t sure what to do. He did owe them. Certainly from their perspective he owed them. He bluffed for time. “I’m just surprised is all. I mean, is there really that much money in this? Why go to all this effort?”

“Honestly Paul, it’s just to see if we can,” Chloe said. “Like yesterday, when we helped you out. We’d never done that before. Never pulled a score with so little prep and never played it so fast and loose. I have to tell you, I haven’t had that much fun in years! It’s a real high, you know? Sticking it to those assholes that fucked you over. I love fucking with real bastards like that. It’s kind of what we live for. Do you see what I mean?” Raff and Bee were grinning as Chloe talked, watching her. They seemed to feel the same way she did.

Paul nodded. He did see what she meant. In all honesty, getting even with his “partners” was far and away the most dangerous, thrilling thing he’d ever done in his life. And while he had some regrets now, he still relished the shocked looks on their faces when Chloe had laid into them. She’d been brilliant – the whole Crew had been. And now he was more than a little flattered that they actually thought his scheme worth pursuing. It made him feel like one of them. Maybe it would be a bit of a lark to do this comics scam. 

“Besides,” said Raff, pulling another drumstick from the bucket, “This is