‘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 themselves until Hook Hobie comes along and offers them twenty cents on the dollar for Stone’s debt.’
‘They’d take that? Twenty cents on the dollar?’
Hobie smiled. His scar tissue wrinkled.
‘They’ll take it,’ he said. ‘They’ll bite my other hand off to get it. And they’ll include all the stock they hold, part of the deal.’
‘OK, then what? What about the houses?’
‘Same thing,’ Hobie said. ‘I own the stock, I own the factory out there, I close it down. No jobs, five hundred defaulted mortgages. The Brooklyn bank will get real shaky over that. I’ll buy those mortgages for ten cents on the dollar, foreclose everybody and sling them out. Hire a couple of bulldozers, and I’ve got three thousand acres of prime Long Island real estate, right near the shore. Plus a big mansion up in Pound Ridge. Total cost to me, somewhere around eight-point-one million dollars. The mansion alone is worth two. That leaves me down six-point-one for a package I can market for a hundred million, if I pitch it right.’
The receptionist was staring at him.
‘That’s why I need six weeks,’ Hobie said.
Then the receptionist was shaking his head.
‘It won’t work,’ he said. ‘It’s an old family business. Stone still holds most of the stock himself. It’s not all
traded. His bank’s only got some of it. You’d only be a minority partner. He wouldn’t let you do all that stuff.’
Hobie shook his head in turn.
‘He’ll sell out to me. All of it. The whole nine yards.’
‘He won’t.’
‘He will.’
There was good news and bad news at the public library. Plenty of people called Jacob listed in the phone books for Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, Westchester, the Jersey shore, Connecticut. Reacher gave it an hour’s radius from the city. People an hour away turn instinctively to the city when they need something. Farther out than that, maybe they don’t. He made marks with his pencil in his notebook and counted 129 potential candidates for the anxious Mrs Jacob.