by Melissa Good
Dar’s yell spurred her to come around the counter and head for the door, poking her head out. “What’s up?”
Dar had Mocha under one arm and she was slogging through the sand heading back up to the cabin. “He was fighting with a damn land crab!”
Kerry stifled a laugh as Dar arrived at the porch. “Did he get hurt?”
“No, but the damn thing bit me when I tried to save it from him.” Dar gave her an aggrieved look and displayed a lurid red mark across the knuckle of her index finger. “Ow!”
“Woow,” Mocha let out a puppy yodel.
Kerry bit the inside of her lip to keep from laughing again. She leaned over and gave the spot a kiss. “Aw, my brave Dardar. You saved the puppy.”
Dar came inside and put Mocha down. “Stupid crab.” She went over to the sink and ran cold water over her finger. “It was guarding its hole,” she said. “Mocha was trying to play with it.”
Kerry eased around her and got the cups, adding some honey to them and mixing the liquid. “Well, he’s a puppy,” she said. “He’s never seen a crab before. Or a beach, or most of anything else. Can you imagine what it must be like to be so new and not know what anything is?”
Mocha recovered from his crab battle and pattered over to the water dish, licking at it with somewhat erratic enthusiasm.
“No, actually I can’t.” Dar dried her hand off.
Kerry took her cup and went over to the couch. She sat down and stretched her legs out across the tile floor. “What do you think about an electric fireplace for the corner there?”
Dar took a seat next to her and sipped at her cup. “Sure. So long as we puppy proof it. We don’t want to come back in to find our dog with no eyebrows.”
“Point taken. I was listening to an infomercial the other morning and I saw these little fireplaces that are supposed to be handmade by Amish people.”
Dar turned and looked at her. “You don’t for one second actually believe that, do you?”
“No. I don’t. But it gave me the idea of getting an actual one for here,” Kerry said. “And hey, I completely forgot this, but I meant to tell you about it. I was walking around the back of the office building and I found a break in the bushes.”
Dar remained silent, sipping her milk.
“It looked like something big was going in and out of there behind the hedges where that other property line is. I think maybe something or someone went through there.”
“Behind the hedges?”
Kerry nodded.
“You think it was the homeless guys?”
Kerry shrugged. “I don’t know. It just looked weird.”
“Okay, let’s have Marcus check it out next week. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to have people living in his bushes.” Dar eyed her. “So that’s why you put those leftovers from the cart on that iron table in front.” She saw the blush rise on Kerry’s face. “You sneaky little bugger.”
“Well, it was better than leaving them for the bugs inside,” Kerry muttered. “The cleaning people had already been through.”
Dar chuckled and draped her arm over Kerry’s shoulders. “It’s fine. It’d just end up in the garbage, and besides, I had them put all the server crates out in the back with the pallets, too.”
“That’s enough wood to make a Huck Finn raft.” Kerry watched the stars outside twinkle. “You know, we’re sitting here in this nice cabin and pretty much anything in the world we need taken care of, not to mention having each other, and...”
She paused, and shook her head.
“We’re lucky people,” Dar finished for her. “You and I.”
“We are.”
Mocha put his paws up on the couch and looked at them expectantly.
“And you’re a lucky puppy.” Kerry put her cup down and picked him up, putting him in her lap and scratching his ears. “He’s so darn cute.”
Chino jumped up on the couch on the other side of Dar and put her head down on her leg, letting out a long sigh.
“So what do you think about the little punk, Chi?” Dar asked, stroking her head. “You jealous of all the attention we’re giving him?”
Chino’s eyebrows twitched and she peered up at Dar soulfully.
“Don’t worry.” Dar smoothed the fur over her soft ears. “You’re still our favorite girl.” She smiled when Chino’s tail thumped on the surface of the couch. “I’m sure you’re gonna enjoy him a lot more when he gets a little older and stops chewing on you.”
Mocha looked up from chewing Kerry’s fingers.
“And you, too.” Dar leaned over and gave her a kiss on the lips.
“Mm. Feel like I’m floating in a big vat of marshmallow goo.” Kerry sighed. “Between those two pairs of Labrador eyes, and you kissing me, I almost expect to hear the theme from the Love Boat starting up any minute.” She looked up to find one round, blue eye peering at her, the other obscured by Dar’s hair. “Yes?”
“Is that a good or a bad thing?”
“Being completely surrounded by love? What do you think?”
Dar smiled. “So.” She tickled Kerry’s ear. “Valentine’s Day.”
“Mm?”
“Pack a bag for three days.”
“Really.” Kerry nibbled Dar’s shoulder. “What do I pack?”
“Beads.”
Kerry’s eyebrows hiked. “Beads?”
“We have reservations in New Orleans for the last weekend of Mardi Gras. That okay with you?” Dar noted the look of delight on Kerry’s face with satisfaction. “Good surprise?”
“Hell yes!” Kerry bounced up and down in her seat, making Mocha yelp and bat at her with his paws. “Oh my god, Dar! I’ve always wanted to go!” Her eyes lit up. “You are awesome!” She put the puppy down and threw her arms around Dar. “Eeeeee!”
Dar drained her cup and put it down, very pleased with the reaction to her plan. “Now.” She turned and cupped Kerry’s cheek, leaning over to kiss her. “Where were we?”
“In the bedroom.” Kerry tugged her upright and gave her a nudge. “Go go go.”
Chapter Two
MARK STUCK HIS head into Kerry’s office. “We got phones,” he said. “And let me tell ya, Mayte’s rocking it as a PM.” He entered carrying a desk phone and put it down on her desk. “She’s got those guys controlled.”
Kerry put her pen down and shifted her attention to her new phone. “Oh. Nice.” She waited as Mark ran the cable down and plugged it into the second network jack under her desk. The phone lit up and started through its boot up process. “I’m glad Mayte’s doing well.”
“So, it’s got a built in phone book.” Mark perched on the desk and pressed the buttons. “And we’re all in it. They got this module we can use to link it to email. So you can see who’s online or not.”
“Do we want to do that?” Kerry asked.
“We can play with it. Sure would be slicker than me using Pinger to see if you guys were here.”
Kerry chuckled. “That’s true. Okay, put it in. What the hell. If Dar doesn’t like it she’ll just hack into it and re-write it or something.”
“Yup.” Mark got off the desk. “So that’s it. I’m running all the phones out on the carts. I got two guys maybe starting tomorrow so I can get back to some planning stuff again.” He waved. “Later!”
“Thanks.” Kerry amused herself for a few minutes punching the phone’s buttons and looking up names. She hit the entry for Dar and heard the phone in the next office start to ring.
“Yes?” Dar’s voice rumbled through the speaker. “Playing with your new toy, Kerrison?”
“Can I record you saying that and use it as my ringtone?” Kerry asked. “I’m getting into these ringtones.”
Dar started laughing, audible both through the phone and through the open doorway. She hung up the line and a moment later appeared at Kerry’s side, dropping onto the window bench that had become one of her favorite spots. “Like the phones,” she said.
“Me too,” Kerry said. “Did you get
your travel all sorted out?”
“I did. Maria set up a deal where we get first class upgrades in return for ten hours of consulting time a week with a travel agent consortium she knew of.”
“Hon, I wouldn’t book you anything but first class anyway, even if I had to bake and sell cupcakes on Brickell every week to support that,” Kerry said in a mild tone.
Dar smiled. “I know. But Maria did a great job with the negotiation, so as much as I love your cupcakes, we won’t need them.” She winked. “I’m off to my first programming team meeting. Wish me luck.” She got up and cracked her knuckles, then wandered out.
“You need no luck, Paladar Katherine.” Kerry chuckled to herself as she sorted out the listings of service offerings she was developing. “All you need are those brain cells and the baby blues. Everything else falls in place around you like metal filings around a magnet.”
“Pardon?” Maria poked her head in. “Were you speaking to someone, Kerrisita?”
“Just myself.” Kerry scribbled a note. “Great job on the travel account, Maria.” She glanced up and smiled at the older woman, who danced in place and snapped her fingers. “That’s exactly the kind of thing we need.”
“You are very welcome,” Maria said. “I am having such the good time here, Kerrisita, you have no idea.” She continued her little dance out the door, salsaing away in her UGG boots and leaving Kerry with a big grin on her face.
“Now that’s cool,” she said, resting her hands on the desk.
Her new phone buzzed. “Huh. Already?” Kerry glanced at the device and pressed the answer button. “This is Kerry.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the receptionist downstairs said. “I have a visitor for you? He says he has an appointment, a Mr. Bott?”
Kerry checked her calendar. “Yes, please walk him up, Angelina, thanks.” She released the button with a feeling of satisfaction, then reached for her cup of tea and sipped it, sitting quietly until she heard the sounds of approaching footsteps outside.
A soft knock came at her door. “C’mon in.”
“Hello, Miss Kerry?” A doe eyed, dark haired girl opened the door cautiously. “Someone is here to see you.”
“Thanks, Zoe,” Kerry said, giving their new junior admin a smile. Maria’s family friend had turned out to be a gentle, slight girl, as shy as Maria had said she was, with a look of perpetual astonishment on her face.
She had a slight speech impediment and she limped a little. Kerry noticed several reasons for her to be a little on the wallflower side. But she was sweet and very willing to learn. So far she’d done all right.
A man entered behind her and crossed the floor, extending his hand to Kerry as she stood to greet him. “Hello there.”
“Mr. Bott? Thanks for coming over.” Kerry indicated one of her visitor chairs, and she seated herself as he did. She studied him briefly. He was a little above average height, with curly brown hair and hazel eyes, and a tapered, athletic frame. “I appreciate it.”
“No problem at all,” he said. “Your message said you were looking for some security services. That right? How can I help you? My company doesn’t do the traditional security guard kind of thing if that’s what you’re in the market for.”
“I know,” Kerry said. “I wasn’t really looking for security guards.” She got up and went to the door, closing it before she came back to her desk. “After all, it’s not that big a building and we don’t transact in cash.”
He nodded, but remained silent.
“What we do is provide IT services.” Kerry sat back down. “To some very average clients, like Dade Paper, and some not so average ones like the Federal Government.”
“Ah.” He nodded again.
“So I need some help in developing a security plan that will keep our intellectual property secure,” Kerry said. “I need someone to strategize with us about how to put in place data security also.”
Now Bott smiled. “Well good. Then I see you did your homework before you called me.” His eyes twinkled a little. “Because that is what we do. So let me do my sales spiel and lay out what our services are and then we can decide if we can do business with each other.”
Kerry nodded and leaned on her elbows. “Pitch me. Just one thing—don’t put any software into the sales job. My partner won’t allow any third party in here.”
He paused and regarded her. “You write all your own?” He seemed surprised. “That’s unusual, even for a tech company.”
“That’s unusual, especially for a tech company,” Kerry said. “But that’s how it is.”
Bott shifted and hiked one knee up, resting his arm on it. “Fair enough. So let’s start at the beginning with physical security.”
“Let’s.”
DAR WAITED UNTIL the chatter died down and then regarded her little pack of programmers.
Mixed bag. Mostly young, though one of the most recent hires was an old timer, a grizzled gray software architect with a long history of project work. Mostly a little restless and outspoken, none of them so far afraid to voice an opinion.
All of that pleased Dar. She suspected the attitude was likely going to rub her the wrong way at times, and she also suspected she would need to earn her stripes with this new group, but she much preferred that to a bunch of earnest yes men.
Or women, as it were, since two of the coders were.
“Okay, folks,” Dar said. “Let’s get this going and keep it short.”
The gang amiably settled down and focused on her.
Dar cleared her throat. “First off, welcome to the company. At this point, most often you’d be given a little rundown on the history and all that, but we don’t have any history. The company started up a few weeks ago, so we have to kinda make it up as we go along.”
She paused and everyone looked at her in silent attention. “Any questions about that?”
Mostly head shaking.
“Okay,” Dar said, “our first project is going to be in two parts. One, a universal database, and two, an enterprise service bus that will feed into it from a variety of different systems.” She paused. “The project is enterprise grade and has to handle a very high rate of throughput.”
The programmers all exchanged glances. Most of them had started just that morning and were still getting settled into their cubes. One of the females held her hand up. “Which database are we using for that?”
“We’re writing it from scratch,” Dar responded with a faint smile. “But I have a base code for it.”
Another one raised his hand. “And the ESB? Are we writing that from scratch, too?”
Dar nodded.
“Wow,” he said. “Can I ask why?”
“Sure,” Dar said. “Because the customers who come to us are looking for something that’s very specific and designed for them. Not a product that’s off-the-shelf components stitched together. And the other reason is some of our customers want one hundred percent assurance that every line of code is known.”
“Like...for security?” the woman asked.
“Something like that, yes,” Dar said. “Sometimes the contracts we sign require confidentiality. Sometimes you do it to make it a differentiator between us and our competitors.”
“So another company can’t come in and tell your client—hey we can do that, too, only cheaper,” the older man spoke up. “Custom. I like that.”
Dar grinned at him.
“Company I was at last, they did it the other way,” he said. “Put together some off-the-shelf stuff, then sold it with a support package cheap enough to convince the customers they’d be saving a lot of money.” He shook his head. “Didn’t work out. Fifty percent of us got laid off after eight months.”
Stan, was his name. Dar recalled. Stan Ruffelhouse, who had worked for one of ILS’s competitors and probably had some small idea of who she was.
“Company was all about sales. What’s the next sale? How can we sell more?” Stan said. “Never about keeping the customers, just getting new ones.”
“Sales is like that,” Dar said. “It’s part of the culture.”
“Here, too?” the woman spoke up. “You need sales, right?”
Dar paused and considered a moment before she answered. “Right now, Celeste, we don’t have a sales department. To be honest, I never got along with sales in my prior job. But you do need to put your products out there if you expect your company to grow. So we will have one, but I’ll have to figure out how to do that.”
“If you...I mean, we, don’t have a sales department how’d we get a project?” Stan asked.
“Long story,” Dar said. “But that’s why we don’t have a sales department yet. I’ve got enough projects lined up to keep us busy until that all gets sorted out.”
The door bumped open and Chino wriggled into the room, trotting over to Dar and nosing her knee.
“Hey, Chino. You coming in to hear my lecture, too?”
The Lab wagged her tail, going over to the corner and settling down into a ball there.
“That’s a nice dog,” Celeste said. “It’s cool you bring her here. Can we bring animals, too?”
Dar leaned on the back of her chair. “I love animals,” she said. “But if your animals are going to take up more time to watch after, or chase after, or keep from fighting than your work does, we’ve got a problem.”
Celeste smiled and lifted her hands. “Point,” she acknowledged. “I was thinking more like a small fish tank.”
“Fish are fine. I have some in my office,” Dar said, taking her seat again. “Since that came up, let’s talk about work hours.” She leaned her elbows on the table and tapped the wood lightly. “I expect people to be productive.” She let her eyes track to each new face. “So you’ll all have delivery dates and product schedules.”
They nodded in understanding.
“Generally speaking, the doors’ll be open from seven or eight a.m. to seven or eight p.m.,” Dar said. “So figure out how you can get your work done in the hours we’re open. Everyone understand me?” she asked. “Not everyone’s a morning person. As we continue to build the company the hours will change and get later, depending on support groups.”
