Bad Billionaire (Bad Billionaires 1) - Page 36
Bastien laughed. “Not even close, my friend.”
He knows, I thought.
It would get out sooner or later, how much money I’d come into. I’d figured as much. But Bastien knew. Right now. The question was, how much did he know?
“Talk,” I said to him. “I’m busy.”
“Yes, you are,” Bastien said. “Managing all your money from that big house in Diablo. You got lucky, huh?”
I shrugged.
“I know all about it,” Bastien said. “How you had a dear old granddad who kicked it while you were in. How you got the whole thing. How you don’t need any of us anymore. How you told your good friend Gray you were done.” He nodded. “Well, that’s interesting. Because I disagree. I don’t think you’re done at all.”
“I’m not driving for you, Bastien,” I said.
“I’m not talking about driving,” he shot back. Gray was still utterly silent, as was Amy. Bastien only looked at me. “You’ve graduated into the big leagues with all that money, Wilder. And I owe you one for that time you did. So I’m giving you the opportunity to move into the big leagues with me.”
“I don’t want to be in any league with you.”
“Hear me out first.” He lifted a hand from groping Amy and held up a finger. “I have a deal happening soon. The biggest deal San Francisco has seen since the heyday of the eighties. The biggest deal I’ve ever done. This deal, Wilder, is going to change the landscape here. And you can be a part of it. You think you’re rich now? You can be rich past anything you’ve ever imagined.”
I watched him carefully. I’d dealt with snakes like Craig Bastien nearly all my life, and I knew how to read them. One, he was definitely not talking about a few TV’s crammed with Oxy—that part wasn’t blowing smoke. Two, he knew about the house and maybe some of the money. He didn’t know he was actually talking to a billionaire, a man who could buy and sell him—with all of his drug money—ten times over.
Because, like everyone else, he couldn’t compute Devon Wilder, ex-con, with a billion bucks. And right now, I didn’t want him to. Score one for me.
My best bet, right now, was to play along. “Go on,” I said.
“Aha.” Bastien grinned at me. “Everyone always caves at the money. While you were inside, I’ve been growing my business. Expanding, you know? It’s taken time, and a lot of skill on my part, but I’ve finally put this deal together. The biggest single shipment of heroin our harbor has ever seen. And it arrives in four days. This is going to put every single one of my competitors out of business and establish me in this city. In this state. It’s going to make me.”
“Sounds like you don’t need me,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” he replied. “I do. You’re the grandson of Graham Wilder, the former movie mogul. A respectable guy. You’re his heir. You live in Diablo. With you as an investor, the whole operation looks legit.”
I laughed. “You’re in dreamland,” I said. “I’m a con who just finished a stretch.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’re gentry now. The only thing I’ve been missing in this operation is a cover that makes it look good to the cops. And that’s you.”
Was he fucking nuts? I didn’t look good to the cops.
Except, when they’d come to my house, they’d been polite and respectful. And then they’d left.
My money did that.
It was thin. I didn’t have any kind of relationship with the cops. But I thought about my neighborhood—Kenneth with his stupid dog, the IT guy, the producer, the old-school Playboy centerfold. You could hide a drug deal in Diablo, easy. On an everyday basis, unless they were called, the cops left those people alone.
“So what?” I asked Bastien. “We do it through my house?”
“The whole operation will be quiet,” he said. “We need to store the product before we distribute it. Somewhere the cops won’t look.”
“You want to store the city’s biggest-ever shipment of heroin in my house?” This guy was off his rocker.
“There will be people to handle everything,” he assured me, as if this wasn’t insane. “We’ll use vans that have cleaning company logos, gardening company logos, for cover. Rich people always have staff coming and going, am I right?”
I stared at him. My jaw had gone hard and my fingernails were quietly digging into my palms. “Is that it?”
He grinned again. “Not quite. There’s the small matter that I need to front a certain amount of cash to get a big job like this done, and I’m short. That’s where you come in.”
Right. This was the heart of it. This was why I’d been brought here, shown this little display, Craig Bastien lording it over Gray with Amy in his lap. He was trying to impress me. Because he needed money.
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