Rosencrantz. What kind of guy named Stanley Rosencrantz would possibly think this was a way to conduct business? Stanley Rosencrantz should have been sitting behind a desk somewhere, permanently, his ass growing exponentially larger each day. His firm was called White Rose Partners. How friendly.

'Nice card,' I said.

'We can get you one, too,' he said. Now he was just babbling. 'Whatever you want.'

'I'll have an account set up tomorrow for the wire. You'll have the money ready.'

'Tomorrow is a little early,' he said.

'If you are who you think you are,' I said, 'you can have this done in forty minutes. I'm giving you until tomorrow as a courtesy, since you're going to need to take your friends to the hospital, figure out a way to lie to everyone you know, maybe get a script for some Xanax to get yourself asleep tonight, kiss your wife goodbye in case it turns out that I kill you anyway.'

'Tomorrow, Stan. Tomorrow.'

'Tomorrow,' he said.

I stepped to one side, offering Stan a path around me. 'Then by all means,' I said, 'get to work. And a word about your friends. You might want to avoid a regular hospital. I'm not sure you want to be talking to the police, Stan. Maybe go across to Little Haiti. Find a nice clinic, throw around some money, hope no one forgets to sterilize their surgical implements. Hate to have your friends die of an infection, after all they've been through.'

Stan nodded, but didn't move. He was going to need to talk to someone about post-traumatic shock, but I figured I'd let him figure that out. 'Do you have a card?' Stan asked finally, 'some way for me to call you?'

'Did Dixon have a card, Stan?'

'Well, yes,' he said.

Eddie Champagne really was an idiot.

'That's why I'm not Dixon Woods,' I said. 'When you think you need to contact me, I'll have already contacted you.' That sounded ominous enough. I let it sink in. 'Now, Stan? Get the fuck out of my house.'

11

If you live in Miami and need to make millions and millions of dollars in a short period of time, but have no discernible skills that would allow you to either play quarterback for the Dolphins, first base for the Marlins or, with Shaq out of the picture, center for the Heat, you have three choices:

1. You can deal drugs. This is a good choice. Miami has a large transient population of Hollywood and New York types who like to ingest as much cocaine as possible over the course of a weekend and won't haggle over price. Miami also has a disproportionately large refugee population, which, while used to huffing glue, has become an equitable buyer of crack, meth and marijuana, as well, which is nice since it's hard to move glue these days. Selling drugs can be dangerous, of course, so if you're concerned about your life or liberty, you could just keep your business confined to the sixteen thousand members of the University of Miami's student body, at least a quarter of whom like to take some recreational drugs. And then there's the retirees who can't afford the really good Oxycontin or Vicodin on their fixed incomes, so if you had a contact or two in the retirement villages, you could probably make a nice living without ever being threatened at all. You need a million dollars? Get yourself some cocaine or heroin and move to Miami, set up shop, get to work. If you can't make your nut, you're using your own supply.

2. You can marry in. This is a better choice. Even though Miami-Dade County has a median income lower than the rest of the nation, it also has millionaires by the legion. You just need to know where to find them. Fisher Island, of course. Snapper Creek and Hammock Lakes in Coral Gables. Biscayne Park. Cocoplum. The entire stretch of the Keys. If you're a man, this might be slightly more difficult, though not impossible. If you're a woman, if you haven't been seriously deformed in an industrial accident, if your name is Star, or if it used to be, you could live a millionaire's life without any outlay of your own, apart from the cost of your belly-button ring and hair dye.

3. You can go into real estate. This is the best choice. The reason? Because people will give you money for nothing. People will give you money on the idea of land. The presumption of inflation. The chance that they'll be able to turn their own millions of dollars into millions of dollars more. The chance that when you promise them a huge, absurd return on investment-say, 20 or 30 percent-that you are just the finest real estate investment program in the history of real estate.

Of course, it helps if people think a former Green Beret is running the company, investing his own money in the venture, because an ex-Green Beret must be an honorable man. During this time of war, surely an ex-Green Beret wouldn't be defrauding people out of millions of dollars in fraudulent properties and mortgages.

But then, Eddie Champagne wasn't exactly an ex-Green Beret. Dixon Woods was. Eddie Champagne, not even a raspberry beret. But the people behind White Rose Partners didn't know that. They just knew he had money and reputation and stories. And he had connections to more money. And when things got dicey, when it looked like there might be a problem, well, he had a human ATM in Cricket O'Connor.

What they were running out of was time.

Or at least that's what Sam's source at the IRS told him. After Stan managed to drag his two partners back out to their boat, we got Cricket back to my mother's and let Sam work the phones to find out what he could on White Rose Partners and what more he might find on Eddie Champagne.

One of Sam's sources at the IRS was an investigator named Lenore. Like his source at the FBI, Kyle, Sam had never actually met Lenore face-to-face. But when an ex-girlfriend got into a bit of jam and was facing a potentially hazardous audit-one that would probably show her husband just how much money she'd spent out with Sam-Sam called in a few interagency chits and ended up on the phone with Lenore, who simply hit the delete key a couple of times, and Sam's girlfriend's problems disappeared.

Over the years, he'd found that Lenore was one of the more dependable people out there, if only because she never seemed to fall for any of his charms, which Sam found both admirable and baffling. He thought of sending her a photo of himself from his younger, more muscular days, but decided, ultimately, that if she worked for the IRS, she probably knew his financial portfolio pretty well and was sure that, charm-wise, that was a black mark.

Still, he always tried to put a dash of sugar into their conversations. He called her under the aegis of just checking into an investment opportunity, making sure all was legit. A perfectly reasonable thing for someone to do, Sam thought, if one had the connections. But as soon as he brought up the White Rose Partners, he could actually hear her training take over. 'I'm going to need to call you back, Samuel,' she said abruptly.

She always called him Samuel. She was the only person alive who called him Samuel. But this time it didn't sound remotely affectionate, like it usually did. Fifteen minutes later, she called him from a secure conference line, which required him to enter his social security number to gain access. That was the thing about talking to people at the IRS: A real paucity of secrets existed.

'Why do you want to know about White Rose, Samuel?' Lenore said when they were finally hooked back up.

'I've got a buddy, name of Eddie Champagne, who told me they were a great investment group,' Sam said. He heard her clicking away in the background, and for a long time she didn't respond. It always bothered Sam that people in government had such poor phone skills, that they couldn't pretend to have chitchat while they sourced your every word. It was harder to do back when everyone was still working on typewriters, Sam wagered, though he was sure he would have been annoyed by the sound of the dinging return and papers being shuffled, too.

'Samuel, you know you're not investing anything. You need to see about getting more in your 401 (k), you want my opinion,' Lenore said finally.

'I was just going to give them a few thousand dollars,' Sam said, not that he had a few thousand dollars. 'My girlfriend, she's looking to put some seed into…' Sam didn't know what he was saying. He figured if he just let the words drift, Lenore would pick them up. She did.

'Let me put it to you this way,' she said. 'You give them money, you'll never see it again and, most likely, you'll be a plaintiff in about two months.'

Lenore explained that White Rose was under investigation for mortgage fraud, but the problem was that no one had rolled on them yet. They were still making investors money, or at least enough to keep them hoping it was all legit. Right now, she said, it was the banks who were flagging them.

It was a classic scheme: White Rose used straw buyers to purchase land at full or slightly above full price;

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