Geek Mafia by Rick Dakan (beach read txt) 📖

least. Don’t accept a penny less.” She tossed the sealed comic across the room to one of the waiting e-Slaves and pulled another from the box.

“Ooooh, here’s a rare but very cool book, one of my personal favorites, Tales to Astonish 46. Currently going for somewhere in the neighborhood of what? What would you say, Paul?”

“Oh, about $150.00, at least.”

Chloe tossed it to another e-Slave team member. “There you go. $150.00. Paul and I will go through the price guide and eBay and put post-its on all of these. Then it’s up to you guys. Remember, don’t flood the market all at once, but don’t take too long either. Raff’s got another play in the works, so we should try and wrap this up within a week, maybe two.”

“Sure thing,” said Popper, leader of the e-Slaves team. “We’ve got the accounts set up and ready to go. I’ve scouted out the most popular comic book forums and message boards too, and we’ve all established multiple ID’s on those, so we can talk up our offering there some. A little free advertising.”

“Great thinking,” said Chloe. “This is right up our alley now, kids. No different than when we sold ‘vintage’ clothes or rare Magic cards, so no excuses.”

“What’s the count looking to be?” asked Popper. This was obviously a question on everyone’s mind, as the whole room turned its undivided attention to Chloe. 

“Well, the way I see it, we’re looking at something in the neighborhood of $40,000 to $65,000. Maybe 85k if you work the auctions right. You think you guys can hit that? Can you make $85,000 out of $50 worth of crappy old comics?” She was practically shouting by the end, riling up excitement amongst the e-Slaves.

“$85,000?” said Popper. “Hell, girl, we can do that in our sleep. We’ll do 100k by the time we’re done. You just wait and see!” The other e-Slaves greeted this with enthusiastic support and a chorus of “Fuck yeah’s.”

“Ok, ok, we’ll see. That’ll be great if you can pull it off. If anyone can, you can. Just remember, this is a carry-over con. We’re not looking for the hugest score in the world, not if it attracts attention we don’t want.”

“Right, right, we know the drill. Don’t sweat it, Chloe, we’ve got this covered. You guys should get some rest.”

“Thanks Pops. This is in your hands now. Paul and I’ll price these books and then get out of your hair.”

Paul and Chloe sat down on the couch with a price guide and started sticking post-its on the forgeries with suggested starting bids. 

“Man,” said Paul, as he stuck a “$110″ post-it note on one of the plastic cases. “I need a vacation. This con-man shit is real work.”

“Oh, come one, you know you love it,” Chloe replied.

“Yeah, maybe I do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want a vacation. We should go somewhere.”

“We just got back from LA.”

“I meant somewhere fun.”

Chloe smiled at him. “Maybe you’re right. But first things first, let’s finish pricing these puppies.” 

“Yes ma’am, captain ma’am,” he said, but he only remembered getting through about twenty more of them before passing out from sheer exhaustion, his head in Chloe’s lap. She carefully pulled away the price guide from his hands and went into the kitchen to finish up, leaving Paul snoring blissfully away in the living room.

Chapter 13

“You were right, Paul. Let’s go on a trip,” said Chloe, standing over him as he lay on the couch, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. She wore another in a never-ending series of tight fitting t-shirts, this one with a picture of a gorilla dressed in army fatigues throwing a Molotov cocktail. 

“What?” he asked, blearily.

“Let’s go on that vacation you wanted. The operation’s in the hands of the e-Slaves now. They sure as fuck don’t need us here. Let’s go to the beach.”

“Great! But it’s your turn to drive.”

“Of course. Pack a bag – three or four days clothes and I’ll try and find a sleeping bag around here for you. We’ll take off as soon as you’re up and ready to go.”

“Sleeping bag? What beach are we going to?” Paul’s clothes were still stuffed in the suitcases he’d thrown them into when he abandoned his apartment. Packing should be easy.

“Up the coast a bit. Some friends are letting me use their beach house.” She started yanking on his arm, pulling him off the couch. “Come on, lazy bones! There’s coffee in the kitchen and a sexy con artist wants to go on a road trip with you! What more can you ask from life?”

“Not much, I guess.” Paul rose to his feet, cracking his neck and back. A sleeping bag probably wouldn’t be any worse than this old couch. 

An hour later and they were on the road, this time with Chloe driving a car Paul had never seen before: a red Saturn SUV that looked brand new. She said it was a friend’s car, which Paul was starting to figure out was Crew-code for “don’t ask where it came from, just be happy it’s here.”

It was a Sunday morning and the usually jam-packed 880 was relatively car-free, allowing them to make good time through Oakland and Berkley before veering off into wine country.  Paul, wanting to catch up on the news he’d missed in his five day forgery fugue, tried to convince Chloe to turn on Air America, but she refused to put up with something as boring as politics on such a beautiful day. She set her iPod to shuffle and they listened in comfortable quiet to a succession of punk and Ska bands Paul had never heard of. They made their way past wineries big and small, headed towards a small beach community near where they’d filmed Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. 

“You know, I’ve never been up here,” said Paul.

“Really? I thought you liked wine.”

“I do, but I never made it up here. Never had anyone who wanted to go with me. It was so easy to get wrapped up in work, I hardly ever made it out of San Jose.”

“Which is a shame,” said Chloe, “Because San Jose is a hole.”

“It’s kind of like one big strip mall, gone bad,” agreed Paul. “But if you hate it too, why’re you here? Couldn’t you guys do your stuff, whatever it is, pretty much anywhere?”

“Yeah, we could. But this is where the action is. We’re a tech-heavy group of geeks for the most part. I’m more the exception than the rule. I know the face-to-face cons, but most of my Crew are tech-heads to the core. And there’s no better place for that than here.” 

“I would’ve thought most of your hacking and what have you could be done from anywhere. Isn’t that the point?”

“Sure, that’s one way of doing things. It’s even one of the ways we do things, but it’s not the only way. You can sometimes hack a system from the outside and get access and maybe even make some money using that access, but not always. Like the play we just made with the comic book stuff. We couldn’t have done all that digitally – or at least it wouldn’t have been so cheap and quick.”

“Being in Silicon Valley lets me use my skills and those of people like Filo and Bee much more effectively. It gives us a lot more options. If we left it to just Raff and Kurt and the other hacker kids, we’d have a limited number of moves in any situation. And variety isn’t just the spice of life; it also keeps you out of jail. Since we can play things so many different directions, we don’t have any easily discernible patterns. And no pattern means it’s hard for the police to home in on us. Plus, it’s a hell of a lot more fun to play dress up and con people than it is to just sit in front of computer and rob them with ones and zeroes.”

“There are hackers out there who break into systems and fuck with them just for the fun of it. Just to be a pain in the ass or to prove to themselves that they can. That’s not what we’re about.”

“You’re about the money,” said Paul, uncomfortable with the fact that he was getting used to the idea of falling for a thief.

“Yes. Fuck yes, we’re about the money, but not because we want to get rich. Selling fake comics isn’t going to make us rich, but it is going to pay the bills and put food on the table and no one ever has to be the wiser about where that money came from. And by no one, I mean the IRS, the government, and anyone else who wants to stick their noses in my business. We’re living totally off the information grid, which is what we’re REALLY all about.”

“So you don’t pay taxes or anything?” asked Paul. “I mean, I figured that you didn’t report stolen income, but how do you stay completely ‘off the grid’ as you say? How do you rent a house or get a driver’s license or credit cards?” Paul found the concept incredibly compelling. He’d long dreamed of disappearing from public and government scrutiny. In fact, that dream had been one of the driving themes in his comic book Metropolis 2.0.

Chloe, keeping one hand on the wheel, dug her wallet out of her pocket and pulled out her driver’s license, handing it to Paul. “Take a look at that,” she said. The license showed a picture of a smiling Chloe, with her name but a different address on it. It looked perfectly legitimate to Paul.

“What, is it fake or something? Why the wrong address?”

“It’s not fake. But it’s not real either. The address is obviously wrong, but I never carry around anything that has my real address on it. That’s easy – it’s not like they check up on you at the DMV when you move. And that is a real, official California driver’s license. But it’s not my real name. And it’s not the only one I have. Same for the social security card in there. They’re not fake, but they’re not me.”

“Identity theft?”

“Sort of. Sometimes. Typically it’s dead people – use an old birth certificate right and no one’s the wiser. So yeah, that license there is for Chloe Carmichael. And I file a tax return every year for Chloe too. She makes minimum wage as a freelance house cleaner and just barely gets by, which means she ain’t paying much in the way of taxes. But it’s a clean cover if I ever need it.”

“That’s all pretty much what I figured,” bluffed Paul, handing the license back to her. In fact the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. Who was she, anyway? “But now something new’s bugging me. What the hell’s your real name?”

“Chloe.”

“Just not Chloe Carmichael, right?”

“For the world, for my friends, for you, I’m Chloe. That’s my real name. What does it matter what name I was born with? Who the fuck cares? Whatever it was, I didn’t choose it. My parents did. I chose Chloe, and that’s all you need to know.” She said this matter of factly, although Paul detected a hint of annoyance beneath her words and decided to drop the subject. 

“Cool,” he said, although he wasn’t at all sure if it really was.

They rode along in silence for a few minutes, before Chloe spoke again. “Speaking of parents,