Free The Bad Beat by Tod Goldberg

unusual?”
    “Here? No. But on his home policy, yeah.”
    “You cover his house, too?”
    “Yeah, didn’t I mention that?”
    “No,” Sam said. “Anything else you’re holding out on me? Or should I just call the IRS right now and have them start your audit while we chat?”
    Mention the IRS to anyone, even the guy in charge of the IRS, and immediately people get that look on their face like someone just unscrewed something in their bowels.
    “He had an unusual amount of televisions in his house,” Handel said.
    “What’s unusual?”
    “Ten.”
    That was unusual and it dovetailed into what the detective had said about Grayson possibly, at least at one point, running his own book. It didn’t make him any easier to find, but it gave Sam a few ideas about what his next step might be after he and Michael met with Big Lumpy.
    “All right, Handel,” Sam said. “I’m going to do some checking into things on my end, both on Mr. Grayson and on you. I like what I see, I lose your Social Security number. I have concerns, you’ll be hearing from someone. You understand?”
    Handel looked grave, so Sam gave him a wink . . . which was probably hard for Handel to see since Sam still had on his sunglasses, but karmically Sam felt closer to even.

5
    Taking on a disguise is not about changing the way you look. It’s about changing the way you think. Someone who has never met you before and doesn’t have access to DNA technology is going to have a difficult time identifying you as anyone other than who you say you are, so when you take on a new identity, you have to make sure you know all the possible angles of inquiry. If, for instance, you say you’re from the South, you should have more than a passing knowledge of grits, college football and sweet tea and you should probably still have a strong opinion about the Civil War . . . or the War of Northern Aggression, as it were.
    You also need to be aware of the knowledge base of the person you’re hoping to deceive. If he’s also a spy, your cover needs to be more than rock solid—you need a fake mother, a fake sister, a fake wife and two fake dogs, one dead, one still alive. Fiona was going to get as close to Drubich’s local operation as possible using whatever cover she deemed best. Being an attractive woman often requires only that a very short skirt be utilized in the building of a backstory, so she had it easier than I did, though I assumed dealing with someone named Big Lumpy wouldn’t require much in the way of world building, either.
    Or at least I assumed that until Sam got to my loft that next morning.
    First, he filled me in on everything that he’d learned about Brent’s father—most of which was a surprise to Brent, particularly the $2.5 million he stood to earn upon his father’s death—and the more upsetting news that the Russians hadn’t just casually destroyed his office but had actually brought a rocket launcher with them. Not exactly the kind of thing you pack as an afterthought.
    “Brent,” I said, “did these guys give you any indication that they’d be coming to see you with weapons of mass destruction?”
    “No,” he said. He was curled up on the floor in front of one of his laptops downloading all of the information I’d asked for from him: the voice mail and e-mail from Drubich’s people, Brent’s correspondence, a trail of every dollar he’d spent (I had a feeling this would be difficult, but I wanted to make sure he wasn’t omitting anything that might cause all of us trouble down the line) and the text of all of his Web pages. “They just said either they’d get what they paid for or they’d kill me.”
    “And so you thought Sugar could fix that?” I said.
    “Sugar and Sam,” he said. “But I didn’t think they were serious. I mean, you know, we’re businessmen.”
    “Really?” I said.
    “Well, sort of.”
    “Neither you nor the Russians are businessmen. You’re both fakes. You just happened to piss off a