Tripwire

time. Could be he’d be in and out within an hour. And he could use more information than hotels had to offer. He needed phone books for all five boroughs and the suburbs. Hotels wouldn’t have all of those. And he didn’t need to pay the kind of rates hotels like to charge for phone calls. Digging swimming pools had not made him rich.
    So he was heading for the public library. Forty-second Street and Fifth. The biggest in the world? He couldn’t remember. Maybe, maybe not. But certainly big enough to have all the phone books he needed, and big, wide tables and comfortable chairs. Four miles from Roosevelt Square, an hour’s brisk walk, interrupted only by traffic on the cross streets and a quick diversion into an office-supply store to buy a notebook and a pencil.
    THE NEXT GUY into Hobie’s inner office was the receptionist. He stepped inside and locked the door behind him. Walked over and sat down on the end of the sofa nearest the desk. Looked at Hobie, long and hard, and silently.
    “What?” Hobie asked him, although he knew what.
    “You should get out,” the receptionist said. “It’s risky now.”
    Hobie made no reply. Just held his hook in his left hand and traced its wicked metal curve with his remaining fingers.
    “You planned,” the receptionist said. “You promised. No point planning and promising if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.”
    Hobie shrugged. Said nothing.
    “We heard from Hawaii, right?” the receptionist said. “You planned to run as soon as we heard from Hawaii.”
    “Costello never went to Hawaii,” Hobie said. “We checked.”
    “So that just makes it worse. Somebody else went to Hawaii. Somebody we don’t know.”
    “Routine,” Hobie said. “Had to be. Think about it. No reason for anybody to go to Hawaii until we’ve heard from the other end. It’s a sequence, you know that. We hear from the other end, we hear from Hawaii, step one, step two, and then it’s time to go. Not before.”
    “You promised,” the guy said again.
    “Too early,” Hobie said. “It’s not logical. Think about it. You see somebody buy a gun and a box of bullets, they point the gun at you, are you scared?”
    “Sure I am.”
    “I’m not,” Hobie said. “Because they didn’t load it. Step one is buy the gun and the bullets, step two is load it. Until we hear from the other end, Hawaii is an empty gun.”
    The receptionist laid his head back and stared up at the ceiling.
    “Why are you doing this?”
    Hobie rolled open his drawer and pulled out the Stone dossier. Took out the signed agreement. Tilted the paper until the dim light from the window caught the bright blue ink of his twin signatures.
    “Six weeks,” he said. “Maybe less. That’s all I need.”
    The receptionist craned his head up again and squinted over.
    “Need for what?”
    “The biggest score of my life,” Hobie said.
    He squared the paper on the desk and trapped it under his hook.
    “Stone just handed me his whole company. Three generations of sweat and toil, and the stupid asshole just handed me the whole thing on a plate.”
    “No, he handed you shit on a plate. You’re out one-point-one million dollars in exchange for some worthless paper.”
    Hobie smiled.
    “Relax, let me do the thinking, OK? I’m the one who’s good at it, right?”
    “OK, so how?” the guy asked.
    “You know what he owns? Big factory out on Long Island and a big mansion up in Pound Ridge. Five hundred houses all clustered around the factory. Must be three thousand acres all told, prime Long Island real estate, near the shore, crying out for development.”
    “The houses aren’t his,” the guy objected.
    Hobie nodded. “No, they’re mostly mortgaged to some little bank in Brooklyn.”
    “OK, so how?” the guy asked again.
    “Just think about it,” Hobie said. “Suppose I put this stock in the market?”
    “You’ll get shit for it,” the guy said back. “It’s totally worthless.”
    “Exactly, it’s totally worthless. But his bankers don’t really know that yet. He’s lied to them. He’s kept his problems away from them. Why else would he come to me? So his bankers will have it rammed under their noses exactly how worthless their security is. A valuation, straight from the Exchange. They’ll be told: This stock is worth exactly less than shit. Then what?”
    “They panic,” the guy said.
    “Correct,” Hobie said. “They panic. They’re exposed, with worthless security. They shit