DRIVER'S LICENSE
No business at this hour, so Jack had Ernie all to himself.
"Hey, Jack," Ernie said from the rear of the tiny store. He stood maybe five-five, weighed a hundred pounds after a five-pound meal, had a droopy, hangdog face with perpetually sad eyes, and spoke at a hundred-and-twenty miles an hour. "How y'doin', how y'doin'. Do the thing with the door there, will ya?"
Jack locked it and flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED. On the way to the rear, next to the bootleg videos, he passed a display pole festooned with high-end handbags—Kate Spade, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada—none of them the real deal. Not with twenty-dollar price tags. Everything Ernie carried was a knockoff of one sort or another.
"Into women's accessories now?" Jack said as he reached the display case that served as the rear counter.
"What? Oh, yeah. Outta towners come in and buy three, four at a time. Can't hardly keep 'em in stock." He pulled a manila envelope from behind the counter. "Wait'll you see this, Jacko. Wait'll you see!"
He dumped the contents onto the scratched glass: a driver's license with Jack's photo and two credit cards—a Visa gold and a platinum AmEx.
"That's it?"
Jack couldn't see what all the excitement was about. Ernie furnished him with this sort of thing all the time.
"Checkitout, checkitout." He was literally vibrating with excitement. "Check the license."
Jack leaned over for a closer look, then picked it up. His picture, but the name was Jason Amurri, and the language was…
"French?"
"It's Swiss," Ernie said, "and it's perfect. And the credit cards are both exact duplicates of his, right down to the expiration date and the verification number. Just don't use 'em or you'll blow everything."
"And just who is Jason Amurri?"
Ernie grinned. "Lives in Vevey. That's on the Swiss Riviera—you know, Montreux, Lake Geneva, those kinda places. Celine Dion and Phil Collins and people like that got homes around there."
"Okay. He lives in a ritzy area in a foreign country. That's a good start. Give me the details."
"You're gonna be impressed."
Jack had set strict criteria for this set of ID. He hoped Ernie had come through.
"I'll decide that after you tell me."
Ernie told him.
And Jack was impressed.
"Nice work," he said, forking over Ernie's stiff fee. "You deserve every penny."
"I do." If he rubbed his hands together any faster his palms would catch fire. "I do, I do."
"Looks like I'm going to have to get a room at the Plaza," Jack said.
"Nah. Every nobody who thinks they're somebody stays at the Plaza. I mean, they got rooms for a couple hundred and change. You need better than that. You want someplace where the money that knows goes. The Ritz Carlton… now there's a hotel."
"If you say so."
Maybe Mrs. Rossi hadn't been so overly generous with her advance. This was turning out to be one expensive fix.