A Breed Apart by Victor Woods

Author:Victor Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Back to the Game

Delilah picked me up, with a chilled bottle of champagne and two glasses waiting. All appeared well, and I was happy to be out. But I knew that those detectives were investigating me closely. I had to tighten up my whole program.

After that ten-day stint in the joint, the first thing I did was make plans to move back into the city because I was under surveillance. Living in the suburbs is great until your cover is blown, but it is too easy in the suburbs for the police to lock in and investigate you. In Chicago, so much goes on, you can just blend in. There were too many other people in the game in Chicago that the police didn’t have time to pay attention to me, as long as I wasn’t obvious or stupid. I wasn’t big enough to attract attention from top-level law enforcement, nor was I the street criminal who attracts the common police.

Marco Calabrase, a young Italian who was in the game, stopped by my apartment while I was preparing to move. He showed me a blank Visa Gold credit card. Marco said he had many more and asked me to check around to see if anybody wanted to buy them. “Leave the card and I’ll check,” I said and returned my attention to moving.

I moved into a beautiful downtown Chicago apartment, in Huron Street Lofts, a block away from the Hard Rock Cafe, four blocks from Michigan Avenue, and across the street from Walter Payton’s America’s Bar. The loft was new and it was sharp. It had wide-open spaces, with no doors other than to enter and to the bathroom. A Euro-style kitchen and exquisitely exposed brick walls set it off. There was a twenty-four-hour doorman. Rent was a cool $1,300.

Once settled, I started thinking about that Visa Gold credit card. Saul Regan was into a little bit of everything. When I called, he expressed interest and wanted to know how many I had. I learned Marco had 4,000 blank Visa Gold cards. He said a friend had stolen them from a security transport at O’Hare airport. I relayed that information to Saul.

Saul called back a few days later, and offered $60,000 for all the cards. I hadn’t figured they were worth that much. Then I did some simple math. Each card had a $10,000 limit, and there were 4,000 of them-$40 million! That number was staggering to me. Of course, I had absolutely no idea how to make a blank card be worth $10,000. However, if Saul was willing to buy the cards for $60,000, knowing how greedy he was, they had to be worth at least $150,000 to him. So I decided to up my asking price.

Saul and I met at Carson’s Ribs in downtown Chicago and I told him that my people wouldn’t settle for anything less than $150,000. Saul hemmed and hawed saying his people were firm at $60,000. I didn’t budge, and he got up to make a telephone call.

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