“Bingo. You’re catching on. Better hurry. I didn’t tell you, but Howie-Boy is due back any minute.”
“Muller’s due back? You got to be shitting me.”
“Don’t ever shit my friends.” Stuart pulled a tissue from a box on a side-table and wiped his brow. Peter’s eyes widened as his friend then dropped the Kleenex onto the tabletop. Peter grabbed the damp discard— evidence of their intrusion—and shoved it into his pant pocket. “Three more tickets to write,” Stuart continued. “Better get them stamped, Old Paint.”
With his hands shaking, Peter entered the date and time for the last three trades. The buy times became the sell times, the sells became the buys.
When he finished, Stuart popped to his feet, looking halfway sober. “See over there?” he asked, gathering up the tickets. He raised his eyebrows at a far wall.
“Over where?” Peter asked.
“There.” This time Stuart pointed. “That panel retracts. I once had to make a delivery for Melon-Head. There’s a safe full of cash. Lots and lots of big bills. I’d love to get my hands on some. That’d be cool, but no use dreaming. Let’s blow this Popsicle stand before my cousin comes back and finds out I’ve shared a few of the family secrets.” Stuart sounded jovial.
“I do not want to know details,” Peter said, as a thick pain hit him in the gut. “Ever.” That what they had done stunk in the extreme wasn’t lost on him.
“It ain’t about nothing. I just screwed up on some ticket writing’s all.”
Peter shoved Stuart, who seemed in no hurry to get out of Muller’s office. Once the door finally shut behind them, Stuart put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll take this as a down payment on all I’ve done for you. I’ve got a surprise.”
“No thanks. This is surprise enough for one day.”
Unfazed, Stuart said, “Once I finish rewriting these tickets, I’m taking you out to meet a couple of old friends.”
“Who?”
“Not who, but what.”
“You’re making no sense.”
“Those spread-legged spinners from Gordon, Ashe are back in town, and Aimie St. Claire has cleared out the entire weekend for you—told her husband she had a convention to go to.”
Just then, Howard Muller entered the trading room. His head bounced above the turrets as he strode towards where they stood, ten feet outside his office. A couple moments earlier and no fan would have been big enough to handle all the shit flying their way.
Peter shook his head just as Muller shouted, “Numbnuts. Get those trades and reconciliations to my office.”
“Better hop, dude. I’ll bring the girls by your place later.”
“Don’t,” Peter said. “I won’t be there.” The image of ferocious animal sex with Aimie St. Claire made his heart race, but it also caused his stomach to turn. “I repeat, Stu. Don’t.”
“We’ll see.”
Peter went back to work, finishing his own paperwork. “If I’d known what he was up to,” he told himself, “I wouldn’t have helped.”
A few hours later, Peter sat in front of one empty and one full cocktail glass. He would stay out all night if that’s what it took to avoid another interlude with the married woman, Aimie St. Claire.
Billy Graham once said that the best way not to give in to temptation was to avoid being in the same room, alone, with a woman.
Old Billy gave sage advice, Peter decided, continuing to sip in solitude.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SPORTS BAR HAD TELEVISIONS HANGING FROM EVERY ANGLE. A wall-to-wall mirror framed the shelves of liquor bottles, giving the appearance that the space— about the size of a high school basketball arena—was even larger. Six bartenders roamed behind a fifty-foot alley, serving as a watering hole for one-hundred thirsty bodies, all of whom mingled, sat, yelled, and cursed to the sounds of the main football game playing on a six-foot screen mounted in the center of the room.
Peter pretended to watch a different game playing on a thirty-inch, ten feet away. He sipped a double Jack with a splash of water, tasting nothing, still waiting for the numbing effects to take hold. Potato skins, filled with petrified cheese and undercooked bacon, sat uneaten in the center of his round table. From his corner location, Peter shifted his attention to the singles scene: at least three men for every woman, everybody working to get drunk, happy that the workweek had ended and the weekend party had begun. The waitresses all wore short, green, strapless dresses slung low in front, and exposing crimped breasts. Best of all, Peter thought, the place had a decibel level sufficiently high to make thinking optional, or impossible.
Peter checked his watch: 7:30. This promised to be a long night. Peter envisioned Stuart and the two Gordon, Ashettes hovering, waiting to descend on him when he arrived home. Stuart even had a key to Peter’s condo. They might be sitting in his living room, drinking his wine, watching his new television, while Aimie St. Claire stroked Henry’s fur. Maybe they had moved to his bedroom, doing God knows what.
With peripheral vision, he vaguely noticed a woman coming from the restroom to his left. Although something struck him as familiar, he didn’t turn until she stopped at his table. “Mr. Neil?” she said.
It hit him immediately. This was the girl who flirted with him that first day at Stenman Partners, who led him from the shrink’s office to the trading room door, and who said, “Call if you need anything.”
“My, God!” she now said with an excited voice. “What luck, finding you here. You never called.” She gave him a look that left no room for anyone or anything else.
“No, I, uh, I forgot your extension,” he lied, forcing a corner of his mouth to turn up.
“Twenty-two, but no longer my age. I’m twenty-three now. Maybe I need to change my extension to twenty- three.”
“Yeah. Good idea.” Peter partially ignored her, paying closer attention instead to a small man in a brown suit, moving in his direction, and staring at him through horn-rimmed glasses. When the man got within twenty feet, he stopped, went into an at-ease stance, and waited.
“Maybe you and I could have a drink,” the girl said. “I don’t know if you caught on, but I hoped you might ask me out. I hear you’re doing real good on the trading floor.”
Peter had ceased listening. The bone-thin man looked practically vaudevillian, except for his eyes—they were lasers, intense and unyielding, magnified behind thick lenses. Peter decided he had better find out what this guy thought he needed.
“Sorry, uh . . . I forgot your name.” Peter kept an eye on the brown suit while he spoke.
“Katrina. You can call me Kat. Purrrr . . .” She raised her hands and hung her nails like a cat. She then ran her tongue over her upper lip.
“Kat. That’s cute. Listen, I’d love to buy you a drink and all, but that guy standing behind you? He’s meeting me.”
“Bad luck. If I don’t hear from you, Mr. Neil, I might just call.”
Peter didn’t watch her leave. Instead, he looked to the mysterious man.
With his hands folded on the table, Peter said, “Your turn, Bub. Whatever you’re up to, I hope it has nothing to do with wanting to seduce me.”
“Who was that?” Dawson asked, referring to Katrina.
Peter wore a blank expression. “Let’s start with who are you, and what do you want?”
The small man chose not to sit. With his back to the rest of the bar, he leaned in, his voice sounding urgent. “I work for the Enforcement Division at the SEC. Name’s Dawson.”
“You have some I. D.?”
“First,” said Dawson, subtly using his head to indicate Katrina, “does she work at either Leeman, Johnston,
