"Well, I've found that all businesses have the same basic —"
Topper held one finger to the man's lips "Shhh shhh shhh shhh shhhhhhhhhhhut the fuck up." He turned on his heel and paced back down the length of the table as he explained. "We're not the kind of company that celebrates birthdays. We don't have birthdays here. And if we decided that we were the kind of company that needed birthdays, we wouldn't celebrate our own. We would go out and steal other people's birthdays and drink scotch and laugh while we imagined those poor bastards trying to get a driver's license renewed without a birthday. We would drink scotch neat like it was their salty tears, and laugh when we imagined those poor, cake-starved bastards going through the rest of their lives, getting weaker and weaker, grayer and grayer, but never EVER getting old enough to legally drink. And do you know why?"
"I, uh—"
Topper spun around and shot the consultant such a look from the other end of the table that the words he was going to say crawled back into his throat. "For you, that was a rhetorical question. I'm gonna try that again, and this time, dipshit, you don't answer. And do you know why?" Topper held his arms up in the air and waited.
After a minute, Timothy mumbled, "Because we're bad men," with no conviction whatsoever.
"And do you know WHY!" Topper said, even louder.
A few more chimed in, "Because we're bad men."
"AND DO YOU KNOW WHY!" Topper screamed, gesticulating like James Brown with Tourette's syndrome.
'BECAUSE WE'RE BAD MEN!" most of them yelled.
"That's right!" Topper said, as he resumed his swagger. "I should have been a goddamned motivational speaker. That's what I should have been. Now you," he pointed at the consultant. "I'm not gonna ask who, in a moment of ill-advised weakness, saw fit to bring you into the finely tuned machine of my organization. I'm just going to ask you to —"
The consultant made a grave error in judgment and decided to interrupt Topper. "Mr. Haggleblat, I understand you have concerns. I think if we map them out," he revealed a fresh sheet of paper on the pad and waggled a marker hopefully.
"Exactly what kind of consultant are you?"
"I help organizations with process improvement and process management.”
Topper reached inside his suit and pulled out a gigantic revolver. He scratched the side of his head with the front sight. "Uh, come again?"
"Process improvement and—"
Topper pointed the gun at the consultant. "Do you mean efficiency? Are you an efficiency consultant."
He nodded fiercely, "Why, yes, I—"
Topper's first shot missed wide right. Into the silence that followed the deafening report of the pistol, Topper said, "You're no Edwin Windsor."
The consultant stood stock still like a frightened rabbit as the marker fell from his hand. "B-b-b-b-b-b-b-but I don't understand!"
The click of the hammer, as Topper pulled it back, got through to the man and he took off running. Topper blasted a hole in the door right behind his head. Topper holstered the weapon and shouted after the man, "I better not get an invoice for this! You hear me?" Then he assumed the consultant's position at the head of the table. "Okay, you, Timmy, tear that shit off the walls. Now, where were we? Whattsa caper?"
"Well, last week we agreed to form an exploratory committee—" said one of the Adjustors, but he stopped dead when he saw the look in Topper's eye.
"Seriously, Billy, Jimmy, Fred, whatever the hell ya name is? I just holstered this thing. You really want me to bring it out again?" Several of the men smiled at this, and Topper felt like he was finally getting this thing back on track. He kicked through some papers lying on the table. Among them was a picture of the First National Bank of Nevada. "Oh, it's a bank robbery?"
A few weak nods greeted him. Timothy said, "We know it's not much of a scheme, but still."
"Not much of a scheme? C'mon. It's classic! A smash and grab job. Let's have a little enthusiasm, people. It's a bank robbery!"
This time everybody nodded.
"So where are you at?"
"Well, I've got financial projections for the bank informed by business intelligence data going back two years. Combining that with SEC code data and aggregate demand statistics—“
Topper covered his eyes. "Shut up. Shut UP. SHUT UP! What is the matter with you guys? Seriously, how can you live like this? You suck all the fun out of being a villain." He reached over and grabbed a handful of papers from the man who was still mumbling to himself about data. "You don't need all these NUMBERS!" He threw the papers across the conference room. As they settled to the ground, he said, "It's a bank. It has money. That money is yours, but the bank doesn't just realize that yet. It's less about 'robbery', and more about bringing the bank around to our way of thinking."
Topper paced up and down the long conference room table like a captain on a pirate ship of yore, and continued, "I'm not even going to ask you confused kids what your plan is. I don't wanna be lectured for the next 30 minutes of my life. So I'm just gonna tell you.
"It's a smash and grab job. Which means you've got two phases. Phase 1—Smash. Phase 2—Grab. And it's just that simple. You," he said, pointing dramatically, "Steal a dump truck. You, get some ski masks. You, make sure we've got a shitload of Uzi's." The Adjustors scribbled this list down furiously in their leather padfolios. "Then WHABAMM! You drive the friggin' dump truck through the wall of the friggin' bank. BRAAAAAAP! BRAAAAAAP! Blow off some rounds. Yell something like, 'Everybody down on the ground!' Then you grab the cash, jump in the getaway car and SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE WuhHAAAAAA you're outta there before the WoooooooooOOOOOOOOOooooooooOOOOOOO even knows what hit them."
"What about the dump truck?" asked Timothy.
Topper gave him the kind of a look a vicious reptile gives a defenseless kitten. "Well, of course you need to take the dump truck to a car wash, make sure you vacuum out the interior, use some touch-up paint on any scratches, and be sure to fill it up with gas before you drop it off." Topper waited patiently for Timothy to finish writing his notes. Then he grabbed the padfolio and beat him about the head with it. "NO! NO! NO!" he shrieked. "You leave the dump truck. In fact, just to be safe, light the dump truck on FIRE before you go."
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Stacey Storm, KLAV “Action” News. Ha, that was a laugh. The one thing KLAV didn't have for Stacey was action. It was, without a doubt, the most boring weather market in the nation. It was the kind of a market where meteorologists either warmed and rose, or cooled and crashed into the anonymous lower markets.
The weather never changed here. So it was that successful meteorologists did not linger.
So why would an ambitious career girl like Stacey set her sights on a market like Las Vegas? Why was a meteorologist like her strangely uninterested in the weather? Why had she clawed her way to the middle when she had had better offers from more upwardly mobile markets like Fresno and Portland and more fascinating weather towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard?
Easy. Meteorology wasn't her real career. For her real career, the real ambitions that drove her to get up early in the morning and sortie out late into the night, Las Vegas was wide open. Virgin territory, a blank canvas just waiting for the masterpiece that Stacey Storm believed she could create.
If only her day job would quit screwing with her. Doing the weather was a simple matter in Las Vegas. In fact, the desert was so dull, so predictable, it was little more than pulling the national weather service reports and reading the highs and lows in front of a map. It was hot in August. Not so hot in January. Always colder at night.
It was so dull that the only the only way the News Team could create intrigue or interest was to report temperatures by neighborhood. As if a change of a degree meant anything?
Her boss knew full well how easy her job was. And that's why he tried to stick her with everything else. Worst of all of it, were the local interest interviews.
In the dressing room, she sat patiently while her hair and make-up were minister
ed to. This was television and everything had to be perfect. She poured herself into a pencil-skirted suit. Her pale blond hair, coiffed within an inch of its life, framed her delicate features perfectly. Her eyes were a cruel, pale blue that was accentuated by her taunting, pouting lips. As she looked at herself in the mirror she turned on the wattage just to make sure it still worked. Damn, she almost seduced herself. She didn't know who Narcissus was, but, y'know, Narcissa by any other name.
As she walked to the interview set she could feel the cameraman's eyes on her ass. All well and good. She worked hard to keep it perfect, and it was harder for her than for an ordinary person, so let him take some joy. Let him get good and hooked on the product.
She sat herself beneath the lights of the interview set, re-clipped her mic and flipped through her notes. She was interviewing some eccentric millionaire corporate-type who had just bought the Atmosphere Casino and Tower. Could this be right? His name was Topper? And he had plastered his name in giant red letters across the side of the building. In her mind's eye, she imagined a tall man, fresh from cosmetic surgery, well-muscled with hair implants, compensating for everything in the world.
She jumped when she heard a high-pitched squeaking voice address her from close to the floor.
"Hey, I know you, you're that weather girl." She looked down to see Topper in all his low-altitude glory.
"Who are you?" Stacey asked, with a dismissive note in her voice.
"Whattaya mean, who am I?" Topper said, spreading his arms in a cocky, expansive gesture that seemed to encompass not only the room, but the entire Southwestern United States.
"I mean, what are you doing here?"
"I'm Topper."
"I, uh, well, um. Yes," she said, almost fumbling the recovery. "I'm Stacey Storm, pleased to meet you."
"Ah, toots, the pleasure is all mine." Topper said as he climbed up into a chair. As a man clipped a microphone to his shirt, Topper said, "Now, let's talk about my favorite subject, ME!" With that, the interview commenced.
"I'm chairman and CEO of Omdemnity Insurance. We're the 7th-largest insurance company in the United States. Whatever it is, we'll take the risk off your hands.”
"So why have you chosen to re-locate your corporate headquarters to Las Vegas?"
"Well, Stacey, Las Vegas is a risky place. Which I'm sure you are aware of. Lots of people like to take chances. If you know what I mean. And I think you do," Topper said with a raise of his eyebrows.
"I, uh, no. Our viewers would like to know, why did you choose to locate your offices in a very expensive casino? Why not an office park, or an office building in the city?"
"Stacey, Stacey, Stacey," Topper said, rolling her name around in his mouth as if it was a piece of candy, "For an action guy like me, Las Vegas is the only place to be."
The rest of the interview was equally awkward. Stacey asked serious questions. Topper answered them with more and more absurd clichés. When the interview was done, she got up and walked away without saying anything. Of course, Topper chased after her.
"Meet me tonight. Let me buy you a drink. Let me buy you a diamond."
"I have to go," she said, opening the door to a long plastic hallway. Topper ran after the clacking of her heels as if it was the song made by the opening and closing of the valves in his heart.
"I'm not gonna take no for an answer," said Topper. "C'mon, meet me at my joint. The Cirrus club. Tonight, 10 o'clock."
"Okay, okay, whatever."
And with that okay, Topper felt that his feet might leave the ground. "Do you have any idea how hot you are?" Topper asked.
Up to this point, she was just some hot broad he wanted to bang who worked for the TV station. But when she answered, "Yes," that's when Topper fell in love.
As she passed the news desk, she heard something about a bank robbery in progress on the north end of town. Stacey did not give the rich, obnoxious dwarf another thought as she dashed from the station. She jumped in her convertible and raced out of the parking lot. But less than a mile away, she pulled her car into a large parking garage and parked on the level below the roof. The inanity of the day was over, now it was time for the excitement of her real job to begin.
Topper would have given anything to see Stacey Storm tear off her suit jacket and throw her hair in a cold wind that came up from nowhere. He would have given even more to see her slide out of her impossibly tight pencil skirt and reveal stockings that somehow morphed into thigh-high boots.
The pose she struck as she looked to the north strained anatomy and the obscenity laws of over half the states in the union. In something less than underwear, WeatherGirl took to a sky filled with her own lightning. There were evildoers to be thwarted.
Sure, it was just a bank robbery. It wasn't a giant monster or zombies crawling out from the radioactive testing zone north of Las Vegas. It wasn't a costumed criminal robbing casinos on the strip, but that day would come. It was inevitable. As she filled the sky with her impossibly sexual might, she knew that day would come. As surely as she was able to call storm clouds to her on this dry, windless day, she was summoning the moment of her own greatness.
Her nemesis would come. She would defeat him. And then she would be famous and ready for the big time. She hadn't come to a sleepy news town like this to be on the news. She came here to be the news.
Timothy stood on the sidewalk wearing a hard hat and glancing nervously at his clipboard. Beside him, the back of a dump truck protruded from the brick wall of the First Memorial Savings Bank of North Las Vegas. Several of the Adjustors had made fun of him for wearing a hard hat to a bank robbery, but Timothy felt like it gave him a proper foreman-like air. After all, he was in charge of this operation.
They could laugh all they wanted; by his checklist, the robbery was going very well. With the insertion of the dump truck into the wall, the "Smash" phase had been completed and now they were well into the "Grab" portion of the operation. Inside, the team of Adjustors was emptying the vault and safe deposit boxes.
For the umpteenth time, Timothy checked to make sure there was gas in the jerry can next to him on the sidewalk. Timothy was meticulous. He wasn't much of a fan of Topper's methods. He preferred the patient, inexorable ways of Edwin Windsor. But even he had to admit, Topper's plan seemed to be working.
As he checked his watch, the getaway vehicles arrived precisely on schedule. Topper had insisted that they be custom vans with mag wheels, teardrop windows and extravagant custom paint jobs. He had explained that nondescript white vans were just too suspicious-looking to be used.
As Timothy checked off "Getaway Vehicles Arrive" on his clipboard, a cloud drifted across the brilliant desert sun. Timothy flipped to the weather forecast, several pages deep on his clipboard. Underneath his hard hat, his brow furrowed. This wasn't supposed to happen. The KLAV Storm Center weather forecast predicted clear weather for the next 14 days. As a sudden cold wind ruffled his papers, Timothy cursed meteorologists for the inaccurate creatures that they were.
The radio in his ear crackled to life. A voice said, "Ready for extraction."
Timothy raised his hand to his head and talked into his wrist, "You are a go for extraction.” With that he checked off the final box under the "Grab" section of the plan. As he lifted his pen from the paper he heard the ominous rumble of thunder. What the…?
He looked up and saw that the dome of the sky was now completely filled with black clouds.
The Adjustors, laden with their ill-gotten gains, did all they could to run across the street to the vans. But it had been such a good haul, the best they could manage was something that looked every bit as dumb as Power Walking.
Timothy reached for the can of gasoline next to him. He was going to torch the dump truck as he had been instructed, but before he could even pick up the can, the sky fell.
The rain didn't come in drops or sheets but in tanker loads. Within the tremendous quantities of water that poured forth from the heavens were softball-sized hunks of hail. T
hey smashed into the getaway vans and pummeled the Adjustors flat in the middle of the street.
Most of them were instantly knocked unconscious by brutal impacts to the head. By virtue of his hard-hat, Timothy remained conscious, but his feet, legs and arms took a beating. Screaming in pain and fear, he took shelter under the back of the dump truck.
From his refuge, Timothy watched the horrifying scene. Water flooded the street. Hail pummeled the defenseless bodies of his colleagues. The phrase “Wrath of God" hardly seemed enough to describe what he saw.
As quickly as the rain had come, it was gone. The sun broke through the clouds and illuminated a figure descending from the heavens. Was it an angel? No, thought Timothy, she was far too sexy to be an angel. Her boots touched down on the pavement lightly and she surveyed the damage. After a moment she nodded her head and said to herself, "Good enough."
Timothy whimpered in fear. WeatherGirl spun to face him. As she marched across the pavement towards him, he tried to shrink even further under the dump truck.
"Get out from under there," said Stacey. Timothy did what he was told. He stood shivering on the sidewalk as Stacey stared him down.
"That's a terrible disguise," she said, pointing to his hard hat.
"It's n-n-not a disguise."
"That's even worse."
"nnn-nnnad gement," Timothy mumbled, afraid that if he looked at her perfect breasts he would be struck by lightning. It was, given the circumstances, a pretty reasonable fear.
"What did you say?" asked Stacey.
"Inadequate risk management," Timothy managed, fumbling to make a note on his clipboard.
"No," said Stacey. "Your mistake was robbing a bank in my town. Hope you don’t mind that I didn’t fight all of you, but," she held up her perfectly manicured fingernails, "I just had them done. You understand, right?"
Timothy shook his head because he didn't understand any of what had just happened.
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