by Stephen Frey
“Can you be a little more specific about who these people are?”
The brunette Vincent has been checking out has now spied him, and he’s enjoying the attention. “Don’t worry, you’ll meet them,” he says absentmindedly.
I notice that the brunette’s companion, a petite blonde with blue eyes, is smiling at me. My gaze stays on her a moment longer than it should, and suddenly I get the guilts. Like I did this morning when I checked out Anna sitting behind Bedford’s reception desk.
“She’s cute, Augustus.”
“Who is?” I ask, looking away and taking another long guzzle of scotch.
“The blonde over there. I saw her smile at you. You saw it too.”
“I did not,” I say defiantly.
“There’s no reason to feel guilty,” he says, patting me on the back.
“I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” he says. “I can tell. Look, I’m just trying to help get you back into the swing of things.”
“By picking up women a few weeks after I buried Melanie?”
“Hey, this is a bar. That’s what you’re supposed to do here.”
“At least I wouldn’t try it at a memorial service,” I mutter.
Vincent gives me a strange look. “What do you mean by that?”
“I saw you talking to that redhead in the parking lot after Melanie’s service. You and she were getting pretty chummy.”
“I was comforting her.” He grins. “Who was she anyway?”
“You mean you didn’t get her phone number?”
“Nah, the Carlucci charm failed me. First time in a long time too.”
“You must be losing your touch. Or maybe she just had too much class.”
Vincent shakes his head like the whole thing is a mystery. “Weddings are such good opportunities to get numbers from chicks. All that emotion really gets to them. So I thought Melanie’s thing would be a good place too. Everybody being so sad and …” His voice trails off. “Sorry, Augustus. I didn’t mean to make light of what’s happened.”
“It’s all right.” Sometimes Vincent ought to think before he speaks. But that’s just not his style. He’s always been impulsive. “I—”
“Hey, Jack. Over here.” Vincent waves at a young guy wearing a sharp sports jacket and pleated khakis who’s threading his way toward us through the crowd.
Finally the guy makes it to where we’re standing. “Hey, Vinnie. How are you?”
“Good.”
“Thanks for those Oriole tickets you got me the other night. Christ, they were right behind the Birds’ dugout.”
“No problem.” Vincent nods at me. “Jack Trainer, this is a good friend of mine, Augustus McKnight.”
Trainer is an inch or two shy of six feet with light brown hair that falls below his collar in the back. He’s got a slim, tennis player’s body, and his Brooks Brothers clothes fit him perfectly. His shaggy hair seems like a hint of rebellion in his otherwise preppy good looks.
“Jack owns an Internet company that he’s selling to one of the big boys,” Vincent explains loudly over the hum of conversation. “He’s about to cash in on the American dream.”
“Keep it down,” Jack warns. “The deal isn’t done yet. You’ll jinx it.” He turns to me. “What do you do?”
“He’s a day trader,” Vincent answers, stealing my thunder.
“Oh.”
I can tell by Jack’s expression he isn’t impressed by my new career. He probably knows how few people succeed. “What kind of Internet company do you own?” I ask.
Without thanking him, Jack grabs the drink Vincent ordered for him. “It’s an Internet service provider.”
“Which one?”
“PlanetLink.”
Jack can tell I’m impressed. “I just read an article about your company in Washtech. It said you had signed up almost a million customers in less than two years. That’s tremendous.”
“Thanks.” Jack gulps the drink down, showing no appreciation for my praise of his company. “How long have you been day trading?”
“Just a few—”
“Augustus made big money on a company called Unicom,” Vincent interrupts.
“Really?” Jack moves a tiny step closer, worried that he might have underestimated me. “Did you get in on their IPO a couple of weeks ago?”
“Yes.”
“How the hell did you do that? I have a pretty big account over at Morgan Stanley and I couldn’t pry any shares out of them.”
“I—”
“Jack’s pretty connected in the technology world, Augustus,” Vincent says. “Not only here in northern Virginia, but out in California as well. Silicon Alley in Manhattan too. I don’t know much about this technology revolution, but I bet he could help you identify some interesting companies to invest in.”
I’m relieved not to have to answer Jack’s question. He would understand that I’m no mover and shaker if he found out how I got my Unicom shares.
“Couldn’t you, Jack?”
“Maybe.” But Jack doesn’t offer any immediate tips.
“Well, I’m going to chase some tail,” Vincent says. “Be back in a while.” He heads off toward the brunette and the blonde, who have worked their way closer to us through the crowd.
People automatically move aside as Vincent heads toward the brunette. I wonder if he knows more about the technology revolution than he’s letting on. He knew the difference between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley. Anyone who pays attention would be aware of the difference, but I didn’t think Vincent paid attention to much of anything except women.
“How did you meet Vinnie?” Jack asks.
The blonde glances in my direction as Vincent corners the brunette. “We lived on the same street in Richmond from the time we were in fourth grade,” I answer, watching her watch me. “How do you know him?”
“I met him one night a few months ago at a club downtown,” Jack explains, reaching into his shirt pocket and handing me a business card. “I’ve got a dinner reservation, so I need to get going. Give me a call sometime.” He turns to leave, then hesitates. “So you want a hot tip?”
My attention snaps away from the blonde. “Sure.”
“Buy shares of Teletekk. The company designs and produces next-generation regenerators for fiberoptic networks.”
I raise one eyebrow and nod as if I’m intimately familiar with next-generation whatevers. “Sure.”
Jack leans closer. “The company is based out in the Valley and the CEO is a good friend of mine. He told me confidentially that in the next few weeks Teletekk will announce its first product with applications in the satellite arena. The fiberoptic business has stalled lately, but the satellite stuff is the sizzle. The stock’s trading at around twenty right now, but he thinks the price will triple after the announcement.” He pauses. “But don’t hold it long. Don’t try to ride the pop to the top. Take a quick profit and run. Remember, buy on rumor, sell on fact. You’ll never get better advice.”
I commit the name Teletekk to memory as Jack heads toward the dining room. My new coworkers—Slammer, Mary, Daniel, and Roger—will be impressed if I score big during my first few days at Bedford. The question is, do I share the tip with them, or do I keep it to myself? And how much of my Unicom profits do I risk on Teletekk? After all, I just met Jack Trainer. How do I know if I can trust him?
“Hi, I’m Laura.”
It’s the blonde. “Hi.” I try not to seem interested. Laura’s attractive but I still feel like I’m married. Like Melanie’s watching me from across the room.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Augustus.”
“That’s an interesting name.”
“Mmm.” I notice that Laura seems suddenly distracted by something behind me, so I turn around. And there’s Frank Taylor, Melanie’s old boss, right in front of me. He’s not a small man—six feet and maybe a hundred and ninety pounds—but he’d be no match for me in a fight. I’m sure of that.
; Taylor glances at Laura, then back at me, his eyes narrowing as he comes to his mistaken conclusion. “My God, Augustus, you just said good-bye to Melanie forever and here you are, already out chasing women.”
“You’re wrong,” I snap.
“Couldn’t take it, could you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You couldn’t take the thought of Melanie and me together,” he says, “so you killed her.”
“I’m warning you, Taylor.”
“I was tempted to ask to speak to Melanie all those times you picked up the phone on weekends, but I didn’t. I hung up like she asked, but now I wish I hadn’t listened to her. You didn’t deserve her consideration. You didn’t deserve her.”
“Get out of here!” I shout, my anger spiraling out of control.
“You killed her before she could sign her will, didn’t you? Now you get the insurance money instead of her parents. She wanted them to have it.” Taylor glances past me at Laura, whose mouth has fallen open. “Two weeks ago this man killed his wife, then dumped her body in an alley downtown,” he says to her. “You sure you want to get involved with him? You never know, he might do the same thing to you.”
The room turns crimson as my fist splits Taylor’s upper lip and smashes his nose. But before I can hoist him up to hit him again, I’m wrestled to the floor by two huge men. All I hear are people shouting and screaming, then I’m lifted to my feet roughly, my left wrist wrenched up my back almost to my neck, sending searing pain through my shoulder. The two men hustle me past astonished patrons and into the building’s lobby, then out the front door and into the summer heat.
“Don’t ever come back here!” one of them yells as they hurl me down on the pavement. They stand guard at the door until I’ve made it back to my feet and staggered away toward the parking garage connected to the building.
The cashier eyes me from inside her glass-enclosed booth like I’m O.J. as I slip around the end of the flimsy yellow-and-black-striped gate. I head toward the stairs in a far corner of the building and walk to the third floor, where I parked my Toyota. As I make it up the last flight of steps and come through the door, I spot my heap at the other end of the garage.
I’m halfway to it when I hear the screech of tires and the whine of an engine. I stop and instinctively turn toward the noise. Racing around a pillar close to where I came out of the stairway door is a sleek silver Mercedes with darkly tinted windows. As I watch in disbelief, the car fishtails around the pillar, straightens out, then swerves so it’s coming directly at me.
The alcohol has made me light-headed and unsteady, and the parked vehicles I sprint toward don’t seem to get any closer. I hear the Mercedes’s high-performance engine growing louder as the car quickly closes the gap. There isn’t much time.
I put my head down, sprint the last few yards, and hurl myself desperately at the first vehicle in line—a huge Suburban—sliding across its dark blue metal hood and tumbling onto the cement floor between it and the next vehicle in line, jamming one wrist as I hold out my arms and try to cushion my fall. A split second later the silver Mercedes roars past, grazing the Suburban’s front bumper.
I hear the squeal of tires as the Mercedes makes another 180-degree turn, then disappears down into the parking garage’s next level. As the whine of the engine fades, I’m left to wonder if there are any more surprises waiting for me out there in the eerie silence—pierced only by the sound of my pounding heart and terrified breath. Left to wonder if that five-thousand-dollar emergency loan Vincent arranged for me a while ago from some “friends” has anything to do with what just happened.
CHAPTER 6
“Look at this stock price. It’s falling off a cliff and I’m getting massacred. The shorts are screwing me. This is bullshit!”
Now I understand why people at Bedford call Max Frasier “Slammer.” He pounds his desk and curses constantly as he rides the stock market roller coaster. “You all right, Slammer?” I ask, rubbing my wrist as I stand up to stretch. It’s Monday morning, a week since I started at Bedford, but my arm is still sore from my tumble off the Suburban’s hood.
“The shorts are baking me on this penny stock I bought Friday afternoon,” Max gripes, banging out a message on the stock’s Yahoo! chat board as he watches its price tick down another few basis points. On the chat board Max can complain to other traders out there in cyberspace about the early morning dive in the price and speculate with them about the cause of the sudden dip. “I knew I shouldn’t have held this thing over the weekend. Jesus Christ, look at this!” he shouts, pointing at the spot on his screen where the ticker blinks its bad news. He sends out another quick message. “I knew this was a mistake,” he bitches, slamming his desk hard. “Damn the shorts.”
“By shorts, you mean the people who want that company’s stock price to go down, right?” I observe tentatively, trying to learn whenever I can.
To really grasp the equity markets, it’s important to understand that not everyone out there wants to see a stock’s price go up. Not everyone is a bull. It may seem strange, but some investors—those who believe the outlook for a company is poor—expect to see the price go down, and so they invest that way.
To execute this bearish strategy, shorts borrow a block of shares from a market maker—usually an investment bank—then sell the borrowed shares to someone like you or me through a broker, get the proceeds from the sale, and invest that cash in other opportunities. At some point in the near future they’ll have to get the shares back to the market maker to satisfy the loan so, in essence, while they’re borrowers, they are “short” the shares. The shorts are hoping that the price of the borrowed shares will drop quickly so they can purchase other shares more cheaply in the open market and deliver those newly purchased shares back to the market maker to satisfy the original loan. When the loan is satisfied, the shorts’ profit is measured by the amount the price dropped while they were borrowing the shares.
“Isn’t that what you mean, Slammer?” I ask again when he doesn’t respond.
Of course, if the shorts are wrong and the price rises after they’ve borrowed the shares, they’re screwed because ultimately they’ll have to buy a new block of shares at a higher price, losing the difference between that price and the price where they originally sold the borrowed shares. Plus they’ll have to pay interest.
Selling short is a risky strategy because there’s no limit to an investor’s risk. The price of the borrowed shares could go way up while they’re short. But the rewards can be substantial too. The neat thing is that, as a day trader, you can be active whether the market is going up or down, or the price of a particular stock is going up or down. So you can make money no matter what the economy is doing, or what a particular stock is doing.
“Slammer?”
Max’s frantically moving hands finally pause for a moment over his keyboard, his fingertips trembling slightly. He looks up at me, teeth clenched. “Of course that’s what I mean, you idiot. And don’t call me Slammer again. I hate that name. You hear me, Gus?”
From where I’m standing I have a clear view over the chest-high walls of everyone in our five-cubicle group, and I see Mary glance up from her computer screen and roll her eyes.
“Be nice, Slammer,” she chides delicately. “Let’s all just try to get along. There’s enough stress in here as it is without us being mean to each other.”
“Shut up, Sassy,” Max snarls, pounding on his keyboard again. “I’m gonna double down,” he says loudly. “I’ll teach the shorts not to screw with me. And if they keep doing this, I’ll find out where the fuckers live, and then they’ll be sorry.”
“Keep it down, Slammer,” Daniel warns, staring at his screen. Daniel is the most intense trader in our group—what they call a “banger”—executing a new transaction every few minutes. He rarely leaves his desk all day, methodically buying and selling from the opening bell to the close. “I’m trying to concentrate.”
Slammer jumps out of h
is seat and points angrily past Mary at the younger man. “You say one more thing like that to me, Freak Show, and I’ll come over there and teach you a lesson. I’ll dye that purple hair of yours bloodred, and I’ll yank that damn piece of jewelry out of your eyebrow. Then we’ll see how big and bad you are.”
Daniel mutters something I can’t hear and continues to trade.
“What did you say, you little coward?” Slammer demands. “Hey, maybe I ought to show you what we did to people like you down in Nicaragua.” Slammer glances at me. “What the hell are you staring at, asshole?”
My temper flares instantly, but kicking Slammer’s ass right here on the trading floor probably wouldn’t be a good idea, even though I know most of the people in the immediate area would love to see it.
“Easy, Max,” Mary says soothingly, standing up and patting Slammer’s hand. “There’s no need to get upset. I’m sorry that position you took over the weekend isn’t working out, but it’ll come back. You know it will. Your instincts are always so good.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Slammer glances down at Mary’s hand. “Lunch today?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I have some errands to run, but why don’t we get a drink after work? Just you and me.”
Slammer takes a deep breath and nods. “Okay, yeah, that’s a good idea.” At the prospect of drinks with Mary he eases back into his chair and begins trading again as if nothing happened.
I mouth the words “thank you” to her, grateful that she defused the situation. She smiles up at me sweetly as she sits back down, pointing at Max through the cubicle wall and shaking her head as if to say, “Don’t worry about him. That’s just the way he is.”
She’s taken an early liking to me, helping me learn my way around last week and asking me to lunch later on today—the real reason she couldn’t accept Slammer’s invitation. She’s nice, but her watchful eyes and the lines around the corners of her mouth suggest that her life hasn’t always been easy. She has a hunted look about her, constantly raising her head up and looking around as if she’s expecting to see someone or something pursuing her.
