PART TWO

One thing about L.A---everybody's running from something, usually their past. I didn't know all the details about Alexandra's, but I knew it involved some financial scandal in Chinatown. Typical---she skated through mostly unscathed, but just mention the word and the gets this funny tic in her eye. My past came swimming back up from my subconscious. My first wife had a brother--a stock analyst at Merrill Lynch. "Sky, come on, I can get you on at the firm," he would say to me. "It's a substantial job, with a great future." Substantial, future, yeah right. Back then all I wanted to do was play Coltrane tunes on my sax in smoky clubs half the night and drink Scotch and chase easy women until the sun came up. Is it any wonder she left me? Then it was playing the horn at night and the ponies during the day. Somehow I met Alexandra. It was fireworks for a while. She loved the passion in my music. I loved the way she had with the market---it was a new rush. She got me into winners and losers and I got hooked on the juice. High tech rockets, spectacular flaming crashes, option spreads, whatever. Then she split---it was just too intense. Then sweet Caroline just walked in one day and picked me up out of the gutter. Talked me into opening a detective agency, said she wanted kids. Yeah, I could play the game. Just like that, two beautiful daughters. Redemption---here was my shot. These kids of mine were not going to grow up to look through peepholes, not have to take photos of some sleazebag cheating on his wife. They would be securities analysts, bond traders, market gurus---something the Street would respect. My entire focus, my reason for living, my obsession became putting them through college. I would become fiscally responsible, mature, a long-term investor ignoring the hot stock of the week. And somehow it had been working.

And now the phone call. I knew it would come some day. And I wondered what I would do when that day came. I was fighting it, I swear I was. But my mind was turning over the options. I could dump some of my T-bills, roll over CDs, hell I could live with less shares of GM. Yeah, I could feel the old rush coming. Margin, yeah, I could margin. If this NOIR hit I could put them through 10 years of med school at Stanford. Name a damn library after them. What to do?

She could read my mind. She always could. "Sky, I can't solve any moral dilemmas for you, I'm just giving you a chance to make some money." What a world we live in when the devil now spends her days in front of quote screens wearing a headset phone. I put my head in my hands. "I'm in-- Nightshade, yeah, I like the sound of that. NOIR---that's my kind of stock. Internet applications---can't lose."

Redemption. That's the dream. NOIR was my ticket to ride, my rocket to respectability. A better life for my daughters. College all the way through. It seems like only yesterday I got the margin call---almost all my assets had been re-allocated to NOIR. Alexandra was right about one thing---it was the ultimate killer stock. I still remember the letter I wrote to my second ex-wife after she left.

Caroline,

It really wouldn't be the end of the world if our daughters started at junior college for a couple years, would it? I've got some new investment ideas and when they hit. . .