Bad Boy of Wall Street: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance (16 page)

Still, I had to admit that his methods got results. While I usually stuck with my little fluff pieces, bringing in only a smattering of views and comments, Teddy's deeply critical and exposing articles, often several pages long, brought tens of thousands of hits to our site. When he released new articles, they routinely shot to the "trending" list on various social media sites, generating even more buzz. Often, the comments sections of his articles were filled with raging arguments and vitriolic attacks, but he definitely knew how to reach a wide audience.

Now, I needed his help.

"Hey, Teddy," I said, sliding onto the bar stool next to him. "Um, thanks for coming to meet me here, tonight."

He glanced over at me, not offering to buy me a drink, not even really saying hello. "So what's so urgent that you need my help?" he asked.

Ah. Jumping right to the point. "I need your help getting my hands on a computer," I began.

Teddy frowned at me, but before I could say more, the bartender stopped by my stool, reaching up and tugging on that ridiculous looking top hat of his. "Drink, miss?" he asked.

"White wine, please," I told him, and waited for him to move away and fetch it.

"Where's this computer?" Teddy asked.

"Well, that's kind of the trouble." The bartender brought my wine over to me, and I thanked him. "It belongs to a guy named Chad Cartmann. Ever heard of him?"

I didn't miss Teddy's eye roll, since he made no attempt to hide it. "Everyone and their mother has heard of Chad Cartmann, especially now as he fights desperately to keep his whole sketchy little trading outfit from being dragged through the wringer. But why in the world would you want anything on the guy's laptop?"

Great. This was going to be fun, explaining to Teddy why I wanted to get my hands on that laptop in case it had the program. Not.

Briefly, doing my best to at least sound somewhat impartial, I laid out my story of the events that I believed had really happened. Even though I left out any mention of how I desperately still wanted to jump Rob's bones and drag him off to bed for a few hours, I still saw Teddy's expression darken and his frown grow wider.

"This seems way too involved for a story," he said, once I'd presented my case as best I could.

That was the response that I'd feared. "But think about uncovering the truth, here!" I insisted. "If this turns out to all be a cover up, we could be the story that uncovers fraud at the top of one of these Wall Street trading houses! That's a huge scoop for us, and for Grit magazine!"

Do you catch what I was doing here? I used "us" instead of "me". I wasn't yet fully on board with the idea of sharing the byline (and the profits) with Teddy, but I knew that I wouldn't get any further without his help.

Teddy still wore a frown, but it didn't seem quite as focused on me as before. "I suppose it could be possible," he mused quietly. "We'd need to get ahold of the computer for a few minutes, of course, make a clone of it so that we could return the original."

I nodded along, wondering what in the world it meant to clone a computer. "There's one little snag with that, though," I said, once Teddy's musings had lapsed off into silence.

He glanced over at me. "What?"

"Well, Chad Cartmann apparently brings this computer with him everywhere. He doesn't leave it at home, or at the office. He takes it with him all the time. At least, that's what Rob says." How could we get our hands on the computer if Chad never let it out of his sight?

This little fly in the ointment, however, didn't seem to bother Teddy as much as I'd expected. "We'll just have to find a way to get our hands on it for a few minutes without him knowing," Teddy answered. "But this means that we need to know his patterns and movements."

How would we do that? I didn't want to seem like a total newcomer to this whole investigative journalism thing, but Teddy must have sensed the question in my head, or seen the confusion in my eyes.

"Surveillance," he said shortly, and then tossed back the rest of the amber liquid in his glass as my eyes widened.

Man, this really was the hardcore journalism stuff! I pictured the two of us sitting in the back of a van together, the vehicle crammed with tons of high-tech equipment, listening devices and microphones and all sorts of other spy gadgetry. Maybe I'd be the one driving the van, wearing a trench coat and a pair of dark glasses so that I wouldn't be recognized, tailing after Chad's car and keeping him in range so that Teddy, in the back of the van, could do his thing...

"Hey. April. You there?"

I snapped back to the present moment, as Teddy snapped his fingers at me. "Yeah, I'm here," I answered. "So, surveillance! Are we going to need code names? Rent the van under a fake name, maybe? Do you know a guy who's got all sorts of high tech equipment that he'll lend to us because you saved his life once?"

Teddy just stared at me like I had grown a second head. "No, to all of it," he said slowly after a long minute. "We're just going to follow Cartmann around and write down his schedule, looking for any points when he might be most easily separated from the computer. No code names, no high tech anything."

I pouted. "Fine. I accept your help. When do we start?"

"I can get Cartmann's address online, but we'll want to be at his place before he gets going in the morning, so we don't lose him," Teddy said. "I'll text you the location. Meet me there at around four. That should be early enough."

"PM?" I asked hopefully.

Teddy just shook his head at me. "I'm definitely making a mistake," he muttered to himself as he got up from his seat at the counter and left the bar.

Four AM? That was barely six hours away! Even if I got home right this moment, I'd still be tired and yawning when I showed up. I was going to need a lot of coffee to make it through this.

"Making progress!" I texted to Rob before draining the last of my glass of wine.

His response came back almost immediately. "Be safe. Don't make me have to come down there and save you."

I smiled. He couldn't hide how much he cared, even in a text message.

Chapter Nineteen

*

Surveillance, I discovered at an hour the next morning so early that it didn't even feel like it was real, was even more awful than I'd imagined.

I found Teddy sitting behind the wheel of a dull, black Cadillac parked across the street from a very expensive looking high-rise apartment building. "What are you doing?" he hissed at me, as soon as I slid into the passenger seat beside him.

"Um, surveilling?" I responded, not sure what he was talking about. Was he annoyed that I had brought an extra-large cup of coffee?

Teddy, however, gestured out his window at my little Miata, parked in a spot a few spaces down that I'd managed to snag - which I considered to be an incredibly fortunate stroke of good luck. "Get rid of that!"

"What, my car?" I responded, feeling hurt. Sure, it wasn't as corporate looking as the Cadillac, but why did it have to go away?

"We can't let Cartmann see anything out of the ordinary," Teddy hissed. "We need to track his normal routine, not his routine if we throw distractions in front of him."

"My car is a distraction?"

"Move it somewhere else," Teddy insisted firmly, so I got out of his car, leaving my coffee behind, and grumpily stomped across the dark and empty street to go find a more inconspicuous parking spot for my little two-seater.

Despite doing as he obeyed, Teddy didn't look any happier when I returned. He next directed his ire towards my coffee.

"Do you really think that bringing that was a good idea?" he asked.

I looked down at it, taking a second to breathe in its wonderfully fragrant steam rising up from the little hole in the top of the to-go cup. "Trust me, I wouldn't have made it here without it," I said.

"What's going to happen after you've drunk it all?" he pointed out. "All that liquid's gotta go somewhere."

I hesitated. I actually hadn't considered that issue. "Bathroom break?"

"Because these buildings will let you just duck inside and use theirs, I'm sure," he answered, his words dripping with sarcasm.

I shrugged, not having an answer, and took a sip of coffee to calm my frazzled nerves. I settled down into the passenger seat, tried and failed to fight the urge to yawn, and dug my phone out of my purse.

"Surveillance sucks," I texted to Rob.

I didn't expect him to be awake before five in the morning, but little dots appeared on his side of the texting screen. "I've heard that it gets very boring. Try to stay awake."

"I am trying," I responded, "but my coworker thinks that coffee is a bad idea. 'What goes in must come out,' he says."

A smiley face - aww. More dots. "He's not wrong. If it helps, I know that Chad is an early riser?"

I relayed this information to Teddy (minus the smiley face), who just grunted. My coworker had settled down into a slump in his seat, his eyes locked on the front of the apartment building across from us, and wasn't moving. If it wasn't for his open eyes, I would have guessed that he was asleep. He looked like he wasn't planning on moving for hours.

"How early?" I texted Rob.

"He was in the office most mornings just barely after six. He used to love watching the newbies struggle to show up before their boss. Claimed that after lunch, all he could think about was hitting the strip clubs."

"Wow," I typed out. "Sounds like a hell of a guy."

"Don't even think about seducing him for a story," Rob sent back. "I'm the only one you should be pulling that move with!"

I snorted into my coffee, hastily turning the sound into a cough so that Teddy wouldn't get suspicious.

The next hour or so drifted by, and we continued sitting there as the streets slowly began to fill with cars, people starting to appear on the sidewalks. I pulled up a picture of Chad Cartmann on my phone and kept looking down at the pretentious looking face, trying to commit his features to memory so that I'd recognize him when he appeared.

Staring out the window at all the people wandering by was almost hypnotic. I kept fighting against my sagging eyelids. Even with caffeine on my side to help keep me awake, my lashes kept dropping lower, my vision fading out. Surely, we didn't both need to be awake in order to keep up surveillance on the building...

"There he is," Teddy growled, and I nearly spilled my coffee on myself as I jerked upright.

"What? Where?"

Again, my companion didn't bother to hide his eye roll, but he flicked his gaze across the street. I rubbed my eyes and looked out the windshield, and sure enough, there he was! I spotted Chad striding along on the sidewalk, looking like he'd been stamped out of a mold that made Wall Street executives. His suit was so crisply creased that it looked like it could impale people. He kept his head high and his eyes aimed straight ahead, not looking around at anyone he passed.

"Target sighted, in pursuit!" I texted to Rob.

"Go get 'em, tiger!" he answered, as Teddy slipped the key into the ignition and started up the Caddy's engine.

Chad, we soon discovered, wasn't headed far from his apartment. He strolled into a post-modern coffee shop a few blocks down the way from his high-rise building, the kind of place decorated to look like the inside of an abandoned warehouse and where lattes could easily cost ten dollars or more, made with fancy designs by super-hipster baristas.

Teddy parked the car, and we climbed out and also headed to the coffee shop. "Now, don't approach him, and don't stare at him," Teddy warned me as we walked along the sidewalk. "We don't want to give him any impression that we're there for anything related to him. We're just going in to get our morning coffee, and to sit and enjoy it. You won't even be facing towards him once we sit down."

This seemed like awful advice to me. How were we supposed to surveil Chad if we didn't even look at him? But Teddy was the expert, and he also looked angry enough to bite straight through a coffee mug if I protested. I wisely elected to hold my tongue.

Inside the coffee shop, I ran my eyes over the chalkboard that served as the place's menu board, aghast at the prices. Eventually, I ordered a "cafe au lait," simply because it looked reasonably cheap and I figured that I could pronounce it. Still, the thing cost nine dollars! For a cup of coffee!

Teddy and I stood around as we waited for the baristas to make our coffees, and I did my best to not look over at Chad. In that fancy suit of his, he wasn't hard to spot - and he'd somehow gotten a table entirely to himself, in its own little segregated area. There was even a red rope that separated his area off from the rest of the coffee shop's interior! He'd probably earned it by spending thousands of dollars on drinks here - which would only take a few visits, I grumpily guessed.

And he had his laptop out!

It took every bit of my self-control to keep from just rushing over to him and snatching the computer off the table in front of him. That had to be the computer that had his hacking program on it, letting him break into the computers of the other traders at his own firm!