Highly Confident [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE L.A.'s asleep. But not Michael Milken. Showered and dressed, he pads past the rooms where his children rest, goes downstairs, and presses a button. At the bottom of the dark driveway, the gate electronically opens. A few minutes later, there's a flash of lights, the low hum of the black Mercedes 560. It's 4 a.m. Larry Shamhart is right on time. Shamhart, a pleasant man who resembles Curly of the Three Stooges, never intended to be a driver for anyone. He lives in Glendora, a half-hour drive from Milken's home even on a deserted freeway. But eighteen months ago, he was in a helicopter crash, and when he woke up, with his back and kidneys badly injured, his twenty-year career as a Pasadena police officer was over. When Drexel's chief of security offered him a job as Milken's morning driver last spring, Shamhart didn't admit that he'd never heard of Drexel Burnham Lambert or the man responsible for its recent good fortune. Nor did he say that he considered this a temporary position, a holding action until something better came along. So in his second week, when he overslept, he was so nonchalant about it that he only called Milken because his boss told him to. What happened next was unprecedented in Shamhart's experience—Milken wasn't angry. Just the opposite. He'd driven him- 11