Hot Plastic

by Peter Craig

  “When she hears it, yes, she will. You might as well explain it to her. She’s going to get her hands on your share one way or the other.”

  “She doesn’t want to do it anymore.”

  “If you say so.”

  The tired wrinkles around his eyes, the curling wavelets of gray hair, there was something mythical about Jerry now, and his anger seemed less like a mood than a permanent feature. Kevin wondered if he had always been like this in some subtler way, if he had always plotted his heists with the same wrathful intensity.

  Kevin asked, “Is there some reason you want her to be in on this, Dad?”

  “She could be helpful. She’s good at reading people, always has been. Shit, I’d say she’s practically a genius at that. Yeah, I’d like her on the team. I need the talent. Tell her we don’t have to look at each other, we don’t have to say a thing. But I need you, I need her. And this is business now. Let’s try to grow up and be professional for once in our fucking lives.”

  “All right, Dad. Whatever the hell you’ve got going here, I’ll pass it on.”

  Three hours later, Kevin and Colette lay together on Melody’s foldout couch bed with painful springs beneath them. With their faces just a few inches apart, Kevin told her everything he had heard from his father. She listened, as if to a bedtime story, and he noticed how the prolonged whisper began to weaken his voice.

  He summarized Jerry’s time in prison, when after a brutal year in Lompoc, he was transferred to a minimum-security facility outside Baker, California, which he described as a “rough playground” filled with an amusing combination of armed robbers and terrified embezzlers. Jerry was a tough old man in that joint, and he sold protection to some of the “waterheads,” one of whom was a white-collar crook named, for the sake of convenience, Herb.

  “Was that his real name?” whispered Colette.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Herb had once worked inside one of the country’s largest TRWs—Equifax—where he was caught copying credit reports and selling them for forty dollars apiece to a gang of carders. What distinguished Herb from other corrupt low-level frauds was his incredible sense of loyalty. Throughout the time he was leaking sensitive information, he had been working with a partner—call him Steve—whom he had never mentioned during the arrest or trial.

  “Did your father come up with these aliases?”

  “Right.”

  Normally white-collar criminals panic at the first show of a badge, turning in everyone they’ve ever known; but Herb earned Jerry’s respect with this show of fortitude, and the two developed a strong friendship.

  A year passed and apparently the problems seemed resolved at Equifax. When Jerry was released on parole that spring, Herb repaid him for the protection and friendship by putting him in touch with Steve.

  Steve was a family man. He had a wife and three insatiable daughters and he sold the credit reports with the abject bitterness of a man who would never be able to satisfy their needs. Undaunted by his friend’s arrest a year earlier, he began selling reports at the same price.

  But Jerry had come out of prison feeling his age. A few years is enough to give an ex-con a sense of stepping outside and into the future. An entire new generation of con men had arisen. Jerry no longer had the energy to cultivate virgin credit and fence hot commodities; so he began peddling the stolen reports to his contacts around the West Coast.

  Jerry was making an adequate return, selling thousands at a 50 percent profit; but he considered the work a temporary job while he fulfilled his parole obligations on a construction crew. His contacts grew, however, and one day he was introduced to a group of young thieves, in their twenties, he guessed, Colette’s age, maybe even Kevin’s age. They were techies. Hackers. Computer geeks. Jerry had never done business with the new breed of hustlers, and he thoroughly disliked them all. He foresaw a world in which the con man was replaced entirely by a robot. He dreamed of computers robbing other computers. He saw a lifetime of firm handshakes and phony smiles go down the tubes.

  “What did they do?” asked Colette, smiling and wide-eyed at the bedtime tale.

  “They wrote a very sophisticated computer program,” Kevin whispered, his voice now hoarse. “It’s impressive but—even to me—it definitely takes the fun out of the game. Sort of like hunting deer with automatic weapons.”

  The program was able to run through thousands of stolen credit card numbers in under an hour, using rotating merchant codes to charge a revolving $49 fee to every account. The cash was continually funneled into different bank accounts, removed, and used to purchase larger lists of stolen numbers. The mysterious charge on the credit card bill would appear either as a “telecommunications surcharge” or “an installation fee,” and—to the credit card companies—would appear to be from a valid business.

  “The reason it’s even more disgusting,” whispered Colette, “is that they’re charging forty-nine.”

  “Right. Credit Card Fraud Act. Anything under fifty the cardholder has to pay. I think the basic idea is that the credit card companies won’t pursue them as aggressively if they’re not actually getting ripped off. I mean, there’s so much big fraud, why waste resources chasing down forty bucks here and there.”

  “It’s nasty though,” said Colette, and her eyes shone in a pass of headlights turning through the room.

  “It’s exactly like a scam my dad used to run when I was a kid. But he’d set up real-looking stores to fool the investigators, and they’d use numbers they’d actually swindled themselves. This has a computer doing it at about a thousand times the rate. And there’s no real store, but a bunch of phony services. They keep the program circulating, and over a few weeks it racks up hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  Despite his growing rancor, Jerry had continued selling the information to them, noticing that the capacity of the program seemed to grow exponentially. “Like a woman’s expectations.”

  “Did he actually say that?”

  “He’s not a happy man.”

  The three hackers cashed out every month, and they had accumulated a fortune. After a short hiatus, in which Jerry assumed they had been arrested, they returned suddenly to discuss a massive deal. They liked Jerry; they trusted him; they treated him like a harmless relic of a bygone age. Boasting that they couldn’t feed in the numbers quickly enough, they bought him drinks and patted his shoulders and apologized for confusing his feeble mind. Even when 20 percent of the fraudulent transactions were caught, the kids seemed impervious. They must have migrated from basement to basement, through college computer labs and public networks. They were the mice in a sprawling system. But they were ready to make a splash: they wanted fifty thousand credit reports at a discount of twenty apiece.

  Jerry talked them up to thirty.

  “One point five mil,” whispered Colette.

  There was one problem: Steve and his wife and insatiable daughters were gone. One morning he had packed up the station wagon and left town, leaving an empty house on the market and a new internal investigation at Equifax.

  “But the kids never knew anything about him,” she whispered.

  “Exactly. And Dad wants to sell them a briefcase full of garbage.”

  “Can we forge fifty thousand credit reports?”

  “If we work around the clock, get the same computers, the same paper, the same everything—sure. They’re easier than passports or cards or birth certificates.”

  “But these kids must check credit card numbers before they make the buy.”

  “Of course,” Kevin whispered, running his hand along her side under the covers. “But I’ve got a formula. The checksum algorithm. I can make ‘well-formed’ numbers that will show up as valid on their verification software.”

  “All that stuff you’ve been doing,” she said, deflecting his kiss. “You can do it now?”

  “Right,” he whispered and sank closer to her, burying his face alongside her neck.

  “But what if they call V
eriFone, or some other 800 number to check?”

  With his voice buried between kisses, he explained, “We’ll reroute the phones.”

  “A mobile phone,” she said breathlessly as his hands roamed up under her T-shirt.

  “Then we’ll get a signal jammer. They’re not much different than fuzz busters.”

  She tilted her head back and in the rustling of sheets breathed slowly and heavily through her nose. “All the technology,” she whispered. “It’s window dressing. It’s just an old-fashioned robbery.”

  He traversed down the warm pocket of covers, uncovering the hot skin beneath her clothes. “That’s right,” he whispered.

  “Shhh, Kevin—they might be listening. Not here, honey. It’s too weird.”

  He was kissing around her navel, folding down the band of her sweatpants, and he mumbled, “I said you wouldn’t be interested. It’s just a way for us to score enough cash to get out of the whole game safely.”

  “Kevin? I need to know something and I don’t want you doing that while I ask you.”

  He slid back up and faced her in the dimness of the room.

  She asked, “Did your father ask to have me included in this?”

  “Yes,” said Kevin.

  She clicked her tongue, and said to the ceiling, “All right then. I’m in.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Among the water heaters, rusted tools, and ice coolers, Jerry set up a makeshift office space in his garage. The printer scraped continuously for days off an Eagle computer with a screen that wavered whenever the main house received a phone call. Jerry, Kevin, and Colette lived on coffee and peanut butter sandwiches, which Melody left on a platter in the driveway, too afraid to approach the vermin-infested office. She complimented Jerry’s new show of initiative, believing some fatuous story that he was starting a company that would repair and install used water heaters.

  The three cautious partners worked late into the night. Past four in the morning, from the garage, Kevin watched Colette’s cigarette flaring and fading across the dark yard. They had all fallen off the nicotine wagon, smoking like prisoners. When Kevin saw another orange light move toward her, like the beacon of a passing ship, he rushed out into the darkness to make sure she didn’t have time to talk, fight, or plan anything with Jerry.

  By the end of the third night forging reports for an entire fictional population, they were ragged and paranoid, hypnotized by the steady whir of the printer, light-headed from the smell of toner and copier exhaust. They drank cold coffee and watched the sun rise through phone wires and palm trees. Dogs bellowed, sprinklers bloomed on the empty lawns, a paperboy bombed the doorsteps. They each stood on the driveway with thinned lips and clenched fists.

  “My favorite hour,” said Jerry.

  At fourteen thousand reports and counting, Jerry introduced the fourth member of the team. His name was Lenny Hutsinger, an old associate, and apparently Colette had known him during her worst months as a runaway in Los Angeles. He was a big, awkward man with a long ponytail and shaggy sideburns, whose sweaty T-shirts smelled like day-old pot smoke and who seemed, from his languid demeanor, to be in a constant mesmerized state.

  For the most part, the past few days had been businesslike and uneventful, but something in the loaded silence between his father and Colette had made Kevin too vigilant to tolerate this new addition. He complained that Hutsinger threw off the dynamic; he accused his father of plotting to hide and funnel away the cash; and he asked Colette what her relationship had been with the overgrown hippie back in the early days.

  “Kevin? I don’t think I’ve ever hidden anything about that. I had a bad six months in my life. What do you want me to do? Magically turn into your little virgin?”

  “See. Don’t say something like that, because now my head is just all over the place—”

  “I find it very distressing that with all of what’s going on, you would fixate on that idiot.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying there are bigger things to worry about here.”

  “Oh, I’m worrying about those things too. I’m just heading up the foothills first, you know—before I climb fucking Mount Everest.”

  The only release for the crystallizing tension of the long hours was the daily meeting in the garage. While Jerry paced in front of a blackboard, the other three sat in foldout picnic chairs, showing off their skills and ideas. They surprised each other. Years on the grift had given each of them an effective and particular style. Kevin was the technical advisor; Colette was the psychological profiler; Jerry was the grumpy tactician. “All right—if that’s a problem, then how do we solve it?”

  “Let’s trail them and see what kind of mobile phone they’re using,” said Colette.

  “If it’s something like an NMT 900, an Ericsson,” added Kevin, “then it’s basically a converted police radio. You can tune a scanner to the frequency and you’ve just tapped the phone.”

  “His Ukrainian girlfriend taught him that.”

  “She wasn’t my girlfriend—she was just—”

  “All right, all right,” said Jerry, holding up his hand. “But in case that doesn’t cue you soon enough, we should go with the earlier plan. I’ll wear a wire. It’ll make it seem more like a bust. You hear my cue—run up there and play FBI. The most important thing is we get these kids to shit their pants. It only needs to look authentic until someone panics.”

  “It wouldn’t be the FBI,” said Kevin. “It would be the Secret Service.”

  “Why?”

  Kevin shrugged. “The Secret Service investigates computer crimes.”

  “We’re not killing the president.”

  “It’s just the way it is,” said Kevin. “They do a lot of financial crimes.”

  “You can’t show up and yell ‘Secret Service.’ Even if it’s true, it doesn’t sound right.”

  “Well, that’s just who investigates computer fraud, Dad. I didn’t make the rules.”

  “It’s fine,” said Colette. “The Secret Service wear better suits anyway.”

  “There you go. Got to keep the little woman happy,” said Jerry, prompting Colette to bat her eyelashes sarcastically.

  “The point is,” Jerry continued, “everything technical, all these gizmos and doodads, it’s just to get that money up into the room. Once it’s there, we come in with a show of force, guns blazing, and get them to lose track.”

  Lenny raised his hand like a listless student in traffic school.

  “Yes, Leonard?”

  “Are we using real bullets?”

  Colette shifted in her chair and replied, “With this group here, I’m going to cast my vote against live ammo.”

  On Thursday, Jerry had a preliminary meeting with the buyers in a coffee shop on Ventura Boulevard. Kevin and Colette sat beside each other at the far end of the counter, holding hands and carrying on a staged heartfelt conversation as atmosphere.

  “It’s not that I’m a jealous person,” said Kevin, slurping his coffee, “I just don’t want there to be too many secrets.”

  She stared ahead at the three young marks. Two of them were pasty kids who looked uncomfortable in direct sunlight. One of the two had a long black goatee, “like Lenin,” said Colette, and the other was a doughy, heavyset man in his early twenties with a distinct asthmatic shortness to his breath.

  “It’s the tall one that’s going to be trouble,” she said.

  When she pointed it out, one member of the team did seem more confident and poker-faced. He was tall and gaunt with a prominent Adam’s apple, and a short haircut combed flat over his long forehead. He had a long nose and aggressive eyes and watched Jerry with far more suspicion than his teammates.

  “I think what’s most important in any relationship is trust,” said Kevin. “And I’m just having some problems, you know, figuring out where you are in all of this.”

  “I agree completely,” she said, distractedly, then lowered her voice to add, “he’s from a whole different ba
ckground than the other two. He might have actually done some time before.”

  “I want you to know that if you ever had any doubts about us, it would be better to talk about them, than, you know, to do anything drastic.”

  “Of course, darling. You have my heart on a platter. Look at their faces. The other two don’t respect Jerry at all, but the big one is really paying attention.”

  “I’m going to come right out and admit something.”

  “Kevin, no one is listening. You can quit the routine.”

  “I don’t think it’s too late for us to change our minds about this project. We could back out. Maybe we have some marketable skills, you know.”

  “Shhh, hold on.”

  He watched only her eyes, which were narrow and focused, as if she were a cat sneaking up on a bird.

  “Your father just tells jokes, and the other two think he’s some harmless clown. The fat one is trying to talk the price down. That’s a good sign.”

  “Do you remember the story of the thief and two sharpers? I read it to you once when you were sick. From The Arabian Nights.”

  “God, what has the world come to when outlaws look like these kids? They couldn’t run up a flight of stairs.”

  “These two thieves are going to rob a traveling merchant. They make their plans, agree to divide the loot.”

  “It’s just a video game to the fat one.”

  “But on the night before the robbery, both of them decide to keep everything for themselves.”

  “You know, I bet he’s never been laid.”

  “So they poison each other. The merchant wakes up the next day, heads off on his way, and he never knows the difference.”

  Without looking at Kevin, she smiled mischievously and said, “I hear you, honey. Poison is out. But I think your father will be disappointed if we don’t each have a little contingency plan.”

  Sunday, two days before the scam, Kevin scouted the hotel alone.

  It was an art deco tower, faded pink, looking like an ancient beachfront resort now stranded inland, as if the ocean had receded to leave a tidal flat of freeways and billboards. Jerry and Kevin had explored it together several times and Kevin already hated the decor, like the coffin in a gaudy funeral. The walls were a dilapidated burgundy faded to a bloody shade. The elevators were scuffed gold. The corridors were long, dim, windowless tunnels lined with pictures of old celebrity tenants, smiling desperately, all dead or forgotten.