Dangerous Friends (A Carlos McCrary novel Book 4)

by Dallas Gorham

  He glanced at the first one, turned it facedown. The second took another couple of seconds. The third one he hardly looked at. “Stock price charts for fifty-two weeks showing daily high, low, and closing prices, along with volume.”

  “Hell, Tank, an old country boy from Adams Creek knew that. Look at the notes handwritten on the charts.” I pointed to the circled area on the first photo and the arrow leading down to a series of cryptic figures. “Are these some kind of code? What do they mean?”

  He laid the three photos side by side and studied them. “Hmm.” He swiveled ninety degrees to the short side of his desk and pulled out a keyboard mounted on a sliding tray under the desktop. He put the first photo on the desktop between the keyboard and monitor. His fingers danced across the keys. “Hmm.” He grabbed a legal pad from a drawer and made notes. He brought over the second photo and did the same drill. Another “Hmm.” Same routine with the third photo. “Hmm,” again.

  “This is good coffee, Tank.”

  “For three thousand dollars, it better be.”

  “You paid three grand for a coffee machine?”

  Tank spread his hands. “What can I say? Only the best.”

  “I’d say you got your money’s worth.” I tasted the coffee again. “Did you figure out what this code means?”

  “Yeah. It’s quite clever. Diabolical even.” He turned the computer monitor so we could both see. “This is the fifty-two week chart of 4Square Properties for the same period in your photo there.”

  I compared the photo to the screen. “Yeah, the graphs have the same shape.”

  “This circle here…” he tapped the photo, “covers one week, five trading days from Monday to Friday. See that?” He took a pull on his coffee while I referred to the photo.

  “I’m with you.”

  “On Monday, 4Square traded from a $42.15 high to a $41.87 low, and closed at $41.96. That means that the day’s last price before the market closed was $41.96.” He zoomed in on the monitor screen to make the week look bigger.

  “I can see that.”

  He tapped the photograph. “This first set of letters and numbers here is the symbol for the $42.00 put option on 4Square stock which expired three weeks later.”

  “Say that again, but this time in English.”

  “Do you know what a ‘put option’ is?”

  “Not a clue. I’m the world’s greatest private investigator, not a financial genius like you.”

  “Very funny, Sherlock Holmes. A put option is a bet that the stock price will go down. An investor who thinks a stock will go down buys a put option on that stock. If the stock goes down, he wins the bet.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “It’s not only legal, pal, it has the federal government’s blessing. The guys who buy and sell these options pay a ton of taxes on them. There are even option exchanges that are like stock exchanges, except they don’t trade stock; they trade the options on the stocks. Billions of dollars change hands every day on these option exchanges.”

  “Anytime there are billions of dollars sloshing around, somebody crooked will scam some of it. Is that what’s going on here?”

  “You got it, cowboy.”

  “All these notations are about bets that 4Square stock will go down?”

  “They are bets on both 4Square and also Port City Power & Light.” He touched the other photos. “All the big corporations have options traded on their shares. Literally hundreds of stocks.”

  “So lots of people think these stocks are going to go down?”

  “No, no. Not only down; there are options for investors to bet that a stock will go up too. Those are call options. They are the opposite of the put options.” He saw me frown. “Look, for our purposes, let’s concentrate on 4Square Properties and Port City Power. Look at this first line.” He pointed a finger as big as a bratwurst. “This guy bought the $42.00 put option for $1.60 on Monday. See the date written here. And see this ‘1.60’ here?”

  “Yeah. What’s the second line?”

  “See here’s another date code—that’s Friday. During the week the stock dropped $2.00. See here? It opened at $39.85 on Friday. That’s about two bucks less than it sold for on Monday. That’s a good-sized drop in four trading days, but not so much you would notice. See this ‘2.00’ on this line? Just put a dollar sign in front of it. It means that he sold the put option for $2.00 on Friday.”

  I referred to the photo again. “And this third line is his profit of $.40. Right?”

  He reached across gave me a fist bump. “Right on. He made a profit of forty cents per share on the option.”

  “There’s gotta be more to it than this, Tank. You can’t buy a jawbreaker from a gumball machine for forty cents.”

  “Keep your shirt on, pal. I don’t want to overload you. Your brain could explode. Look at Port City Power.” He shoved the next photo to me. “This first circle covers two days’ prices, a Wednesday and Thursday. See it?” He turned to the keyboard, punched a few keys and zoomed the monitor picture on the two days.

  “Okay, let me see if I can figure this out.” I compared the screen to the photo from Wallace’s file.

  “Stock traded in a range of $54.52 high to $53.93 low on Wednesday and closed at $53.99.”

  When Tank smiled, it seemed bigger than when other people smiled. “I’ll make a financier out of you yet, Chuck.”

  “Not on your life, buddy. I’d never get a chance to rescue beautiful princesses and chase bad guys.” I looked closer at the monitor. “The stock opened on Thursday at $51.85 and closed at $52.23.”

  “That’s a drop of about four percent. That is a big drop overnight, often caused by bad news involving the company.”

  I read the cryptic notes in the bottom of the photo. “Does this first line mean that he bought the $55.00 put option for $.90 on Wednesday?”

  “You’re a quick study.”

  “And this next line means that he sold it for $3.10 on Thursday.”

  “Right again. Profit of $2.20, over 200 percent in one day.” Tank grinned at me like I was his prize pupil. Right now I was his only pupil.

  I pulled over the final photo. “Next chart shows Port City Power ten months later, right up to a week ago. Pull up the chart like you did before and zoom it for me. Let me see if I can track this, now that you showed me how it works.”

  His fingers flew and the monitor switched views. “Okay, Chuck, lead me through this trade.”

  I ran my finger across the photo. “Monday, March 27, the stock traded in a range of $64.63 high to $63.89 low and closed at $63.92… Whoa. The stock opened the next morning at $59.85 and closed at $61.23.”

  “That’s a drop of six and a half percent—a huge drop. That was right after the railroad bridge bombing hit the news. Very bad for the company.”

  “Not to mention the two dead railroad employees and their families. This first line means he bought the $65.00 put option for $1.30 on Monday the twenty-seventh.”

  Tank nodded. “And the next line…”

  “The next line means he sold it for $5.10 the next day.” I stared at the stock chart. “Profit of $3.80 in one day. That’s a lot better than the forty cents he made on 4Square in one week.” I drank the last of my coffee. “Tell me how a guy makes a killing, both financially and literally, with a measly $3.80 profit.”

  “Here’s where I drop the other shoe, Chuck. Each option contract is for one hundred shares.”

  “Still only forty bucks on the first trade, big guy. You can’t take your date to dinner for that. And the last trade gained only… three hundred eighty dollars. There’s got to be more.”

  “I’m not finished. See this number here?” He pointed to a note on the 4Square Properties stock chart.

  “It says ‘1K’ on the line beside the profit per share.” The light went on. “One thousand? He bought options on a thousand shares. One thousand times forty cents a share is four hundred bucks profit. Better, but not worth breaking the law.”

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p; He shook his head. “The ‘1K’ means one thousand option contracts. It covers one hundred thousand shares.”

  The light went on again and started flashing like a neon sign. “Geez. He made forty thousand dollars’ profit on the 4Square deal.” I checked the first Port City Power trade. “It says ‘5K.’ Five thousand contracts. That’s five hundred thousand shares… times $2.20 is… $1,100,000. In one day.”

  Tank waved his legal pad. “Read the third trade, Chuck.”

  I flipped to the final photo, the one showing the profit of $3.80 per share. “It says ‘10K.’ That’s a million shares. This bastard cleared $3,800,000 by murdering two railroad employees.”

  My stomach churned when I remembered that Wallace’s file cabinet had two whole drawers filled with similar files.

  Chapter 53

  “We come bearing gifts.” I set a box of pan dulces on the conference room table between Kelly and Bigs.

  Kelly stifled a yawn. “You jokers had a good night’s sleep, didn’t you? That’s why you’re cheerful this morning. Gimme a pan dulce and forget the diet for now.” She ripped open the box, grabbed a pastry, and passed the box to Bigs. “I didn’t get to bed until four this morning. Don’t expect me to be little Miss Sunshine.” She gulped her coffee.

  Snoop and I sat across the table from the two police detectives.

  “You find anything interesting on the cellphones we took off the dead men?” I asked.

  “We have someone working on that. First, let’s take your statements about last night’s shootout.”

  That lasted an hour and a half.

  When we finished, Kelly said, “What made you two estupidos think you could take on four gunmen—especially after the earlier attack on Snoop? You knew they carried automatic weapons.”

  I shrugged. “It is what it is. We offered them a chance to surrender. We won; they lost.”

  “That’s the kind of macho bravado that could get you both killed,” said Bigs.

  “Don’t be wishy-washy, Bigs,” I said. “Go ahead and tell us what you really think.”

  Kelly shook her head. “Let me see if Terry’s finished analyzing the phone records.” She left the room.

  My heart flipped. How many cops named Terry can there be? It could be a man named Terence. Or a woman named Teresa Kovacs. She’s stationed at the North Shore Precinct. She’s a patrol cop. Of course, that was last year. Maybe she’s been promoted to detective.

  Kelly came back. “She’s on her way. Let’s move over here where we can all see the whiteboard.”

  It was her; it was my Terry. I hadn’t seen her in months, but I remembered her scent, the feel of her skin, the sound of her voice as if it were yesterday—or last night. “Hello, Terry. It’s good to see you again.” Understatement of the year. Seeing her made my heart ache.

  She set her coffee cup and her notebook on the conference table and stuck out her hand. “Hey, Chuck, how are you?”

  I shook her hand. “Are you a detective now?”

  Terry blushed. “I’m working on it. I’m training to analyze evidence. That’s what I’ve been doing since sunup.” She shook hands with Snoop, who had stood up when she came into the room. Such a gentleman. “How are you?”

  “Fine, Terry.” He sat back down.

  Kelly frowned. She was in no mood for chivalry this morning. “I understand you have a report for us.”

  Terry handed us each a sheet of paper. “This is a printout of my findings. There are eleven hoodlums in Port City on three different teams.”

  Eleven bad guys, not just seven. I had a queasy feeling in my stomach.

  “There were four flip phones and four smartphones in the trunk of the Ford. The smartphones were their personal phones—pictures of the kids, the wife, and so forth. Nothing of interest there.”

  “That’s what Snoop and I figured.”

  Terry smiled. “I analyzed the phone contacts and call logs. I pinged the numbers on the call logs and traced their locations back a minimum of two weeks or to their activation dates.” She glanced at Kelly and continued. “The flip phones had substantially identical address books. Each phone had the other three phones in their contacts along with eight other numbers, a total of twelve entries in all, since no phone had its own name in its contact list.”

  She picked up her copy of the printout. “As you can see, all entries are first names only, except there are two Johnnies, a Johnny J. and a Johnny R. The four phones I analyzed belonged to Al, Artie, Deuce, and Yank.”

  She perused the colored markers in the whiteboard tray and grabbed a black one. She wrote the four names in a column on the board. She drew a bracket to the left of names. “It was easy to determine that Al was Alberto A. Echeverria.” She added the name beside her first entry. “Artie was Arthur Caprese, Deuce was Lawrence R. Lambert, Jr., and Yank was William J. Yankelowicz.” She added each name to the list. “I refer to those four men as Team Dead.” She drew a line across the board above and below the four names.

  She wrote Team Dead in the space to the left of the bracket. “These sheets summarize the findings on each of the twelve phone numbers. Seven of the other eight entries were also first names, except, as I said, for the two Johnnies.” She leaned over and looked in the box of pan dulces, but didn’t say anything. “The next seven contact list entries: Johnny J, Ted, and Forte…” She wrote the names in the space below Team Dead and continued down the board. “…Harry, Johnny R, Lou, and Willy.”

  I said, “That’s a total of eleven names. What about the twelfth name?”

  “Ah, yes, the twelfth name.” She smiled. “I’ll explain that one in a minute.”

  She drew a bracket to the left of Johnny J, Ted, and Forte and wrote Team Two in the margin to the left of the bracket. She glanced into the pastry box again.

  “Terry, would you care for a pan dulce?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” There were two left. She took one. “Thanks.”

  Kelly gestured with her chin at the board. She mouthed the words “Team Two.”

  I walked to the whiteboard and picked up a blue marker. “May I?”

  Terry nodded, her mouth full.

  I drew a line through Team Two and wrote Three Stooges. “Terry, your Team Two names match the driver’s licenses and contacts entries on three phones that Snoop and I lifted from three guys who followed me on Friday, March 31. They’re not very smart, so we call them the three stooges. Kelly has their full names for your list.”

  Kelly pulled the three licenses from an evidence bag and pushed them across the table.

  Terry looked puzzled. She didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. All she knew about was last night’s gunfight. Kelly and Bigs had kept my confidence. “The three stooges followed you?”

  “Snoop and I got the drop on them and confiscated their driver’s licenses, cellphones, and guns.”

  “Is that the incident report I saw on those shots fired on South River Drive?” She turned to Kelly. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Terry smirked. “Those are the three guys that you ran rap sheets on last Friday and didn’t list in the evidence log, aren’t they?” She wagged a finger at Kelly. “You’ve been holding out on me.”

  Kelly lifted her hand. “Terry, there was no paperwork on the three guys following Chuck. Bigs and I are working the case off the books with Chuck and Snoop—with Lieutenant Castellano’s blessing, I might add. You okay with that?”

  “Sure, sure. If the LT says it’s okay, it’s okay.” Terry raised her eyebrows. “Wow, that explains something that had me scratching my head. When I pinged the twelve phone numbers on the list and traced them back to when they were activated, I discovered that all three phones for the three stooges were bought at a Walmart here in Port City on Friday, March 31 at 4:52 p.m. and activated at the same time.” She paused for another bite of pastry. “Wait a second. Three guys tried to kill Snoop yesterday. Was that the three stooges too?”

  Snoop nodded. “The same.”

  Terry scooped u
p the three licenses and added the names to the whiteboard.

  “What about the other four names?” Kelly asked. “The ones at the bottom.”

  I spread my hands. “The names don’t mean anything to me. But it means that there are four more gunmen out there that we didn’t know about. Call them Team Three for now.”

  Terry bracketed the names and wrote Team Three to their left.

  Snoop turned to Terry, who was finishing off her pan dulce. “What did you find when you pinged the phones?”

  She wiped her fingers on a napkin before she continued and washed down the last bite with coffee. “All eight phones for Team Dead and Team Three were bought and activated at a discount electronics store in Chicago on Thursday, March 30 at around ten a.m.”

  “What about the odd one?” I asked.

  “It was bought and activated at a different Chicago electronics store on Tuesday, March 28. The funny thing is, that store sold and activated four phones at the same time, but we haven’t found the other three. Are those the ones you took from the three stooges?”

  “Probably.”

  Kelly pulled out another evidence bag. “Here they are. Chuck took these phones from the stooges on March 31. Their contact lists each have three names. Each phone has the other two phones plus one other name, Redwood.”

  Snoop stood. “This calls for more coffee.”

  “Bring the pot,” Kelly said. “What’s your take on that, Chuck?”

  “The name Johnny J. on Terry’s list is in these earlier phones as Johnny. I’d bet a Porsche to a pogo-stick that the three phones I confiscated on March 31 are the three phones you’re missing. Kelly pinged them unofficially. Redwood is listed in all seven phones we’ve found. We’ll assume that he’s listed in Team Three’s phones too. Where have you pinged Redwood’s number?”

  “It never left the Chicago area, and the phone went off the grid at 8:30 last night.”

  “That agrees with what I found when I pinged the number a couple of days ago,” Kelly said. “Always in Chicago or a suburb.”

  Snoop came back with a fresh pot of coffee.