by KJ Kalis
“Here’s the problem I’m having…” Sam licked his thin lips. “I expected you to take the loss like a man. Pay your debt. Move on. Enjoy the game. Those are the rules. I don’t see that happening and I’m wondering why.”
Vince felt like a schoolboy getting scolded by the principal. “Did Rhonda tell you I won a bunch of the money back?”
“She did. She also told me you promptly lost it all again. As you know, the problem isn’t generally the balance, it’s the interest.” Sam stuffed his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. “And since you haven’t bothered to pay off any of your debt over the last three weeks, the interest is accruing at a rapid rate. That was the figure I gave you on the phone.”
Vince tried to do the math in his head. How three hundred thousand owed to the table turned into half a million, he wasn’t sure. What he did know is that the people who backed these types of games weren’t run-of-the-mill businessmen. Though Vince wasn’t sure, he thought they were likely involved in organized crime – the Mafia, more specifically. Vince felt like he was stuck in some old gangster movie. The only thing he was missing on Sam was a Fedora. Vince chewed the inside of his lip, “Listen, I’ll get it taken care of as soon as I get back to my condo. I have the money.”
Sam nodded and blinked once, “I know. That’s why it’s so perplexing to me and to the other interested parties why you simply wouldn’t pay your debt off. That way, you can get back to enjoying Rhonda and all the things she has to offer.”
A gentle breeze touched Vince’s face, snapping him out of the anger and defensiveness he was feeling. He knew these were not people to mess with. “I’ll take care of it, Sam. Thanks for reaching out. Okay if I go now?” Vince pointed to his Land Rover. “It’s been a long day. And the sooner I get home, the sooner you get paid.”
Sam nodded and turned, walking with his slouchy gait back over to the sedan. Vince waited for a moment to make sure that Sam and his driver left. He didn’t want to get ambushed just as he was getting back in his Land Rover.
Silence settled over him, the only noise the faint rustling of a few leaves that were left on a tree at the back of the parking lot behind the Lakeview. Walking over to his SUV, Vince unlocked it and had one foot inside of the driver's side when he stopped. He got back out and retrieved a flashlight from the glove compartment. Slamming the door, he walked over to the construction gate, quickly unlocking it and closing it behind him. Using the flashlight to guide him, Vince found the stairwell. The elevators had been shut off months ago. There was no power in the building at all. Vince walked the steps to the fifth floor, hearing the scuffle of what sounded like a rat chirping in the background, escaping the beam of light from his flashlight.
The view from the fifth floor was what convinced Vince to pursue the project in the first place. As he pushed the door open, walking out onto the gutted office space, he could feel the wind blowing in off the lake. The Lakeview was about three blocks from the shoreline, but it was close enough that it would see the brunt of the winter weather in Chicago. Vince walked toward the bank of windows that faced the lakefront. He remembered as a child going down to the beach with his family. It wasn’t the same kind of beach like in Florida or Hawaii. For most of the Great Lakes, the beaches had a tiny bit of sand and a lot of rocks, with an occasional piece of polished lake glass from a broken beer bottle peppered in between, like a jewel. Vince remembered bending over to pick up a piece of green glass, smooth on the edges and then standing up, looking over his shoulder, seeing the skyline of Chicago. For some reason, even though he had been young, that was when he fell in love with the skyline.
Standing in front of the open windows in the Lakeview, he wondered for a moment if he’d done the right thing. Twenty million was a lot of debt for Marlowe to carry. But she was young. She’d probably declare bankruptcy, move somewhere else and find another job in another field. At least that’s what Vince tried to convince himself would happen.
Vince retraced his steps, using the flashlight to get back down to his Land Rover. It was time to go home.
16
As the next day dawned, Emily noticed there was a crack of sunlight coming through the gray skies hovering over Chicago. She stood in the window as she rolled out of bed wondering how long it would last. The case was still haunting her, questions rolling though her mind like the waves on Lake Michigan. There had to be an explanation for Vince’s behavior, other than the fact he was just a jerk. Why would he go to the Lakeview in the pitch black after a trip to the bar? Emily shook her head as she walked down the steps. Mike was already in the kitchen, tapping away on his computer, the smell of the coffee pot swirling in the kitchen. “Good morning,” she said. “You sleep okay?”
“On that lumpy couch of yours? Yeah, it was okay,” he said, not looking up.
Emily felt like this case had barely gotten off the ground before crashing again, like a bird with a broken wing that was trying to fly. “Any news on Vince or Marlowe?” she asked, pouring herself a cup of coffee and taking a sip.
“No, nothing yet. I can’t seem to figure out what he was talking about with that call you mentioned last night. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any ongoing projects at the moment. It looks like he siphoned the money off of the Lakeview project and is sitting on it.”
“Did you find the money?”
“Yep. It’s in a Cayman Islands bank account. Took me a while to trace it, but it’s there. People always think they can send their money to the Caymans and no one will ever find it. That’s not the case.” Mike said, with a sigh. He got up and stretched, his shirt lifting just above the waistband of his pants, exposing white pale skin. “I still can’t figure out who he was yelling at about five hundred thousand last night. Could you have heard him wrong?”
Emily shook her head. “I know what I heard. And I have a theory.”
“Care to share?”
“Not yet. I need to make a call.” Emily walked down the hallway to her office, her stomach clenching. This was a call she wanted to make in private outside of Mike’s ears.
From her list of contacts, she found a number and then dialed it, waiting for it to ring. An automated voice answered saying that the person at the other end of the line was not available and to leave a message. “Anthony, this is Emily. I have a problem I was wondering if you could look into? I was wondering if any of your contacts knew anything about a real estate developer named Vince Olivas. He’s managed to skim about twenty million off of the Lakeview construction project and hide it in the Cayman Islands. Give me a call back or stop by. You know how to find me.”
Emily slumped down in the chair. Calling her former father-in-law wasn’t a card she played very often. Anthony was always quite private about his connections and his businesses. After Luca died, Emily expected the five thousand dollars a month that showed up in her mailbox in cash to dry up. She had thought for years that it came from Anthony, and the fact that his son was no longer alive meant he was no longer obligated, but it didn’t stop. The money kept coming, every single month, a plain white envelope with a stack of cash in it.
After Luca’s death, Anthony had called one night, late. It was a brief conversation, one in which Anthony had expressed regret at the way that Luca had treated Emily and said that if she ever needed anything to give him a call. She was still family.
That’s what Emily was counting on now...
Opening the door to her office, the creak of the door bouncing off of the walls, Emily padded back to the kitchen where Mike was working. “Okay,” she said, pulling a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. “I called Anthony. I think he might be able to help us figure out what’s going on with Vince.” Emily checked the time on her cell phone, “Listen, are you going to be there for a while? I’m going to go work out. Maybe we can dig through some more financial information when I get back.”
Mike nodded but didn’t say anything and didn’t look up.
A couple of minutes later, after putting on a tank top and a
pair of leggings, Emily slung her workout bag over her shoulder and headed out the door. “See you guys in a bit,” she said, glancing back at Mike who was staring at his computer. Miner watched her. It always broke her heart just a little bit when she left him behind. He was such a good dog, but there would be time to play with him later. What she needed now was the clarity of a good workout. The clarity that she hoped would get her moving forward on the case.
17
Marlowe woke up with a headache. It was the kind that made her vision blurry and the room spin. If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve thought she’d been drinking, but she hadn’t been. The day before had been a confusing mess of meeting with Emily at the Lakeview project and trying to explain to her what had happened. In talking to Emily, Marlowe realized she wasn’t nearly as on top of the details as she thought she was. She’d spent a good part of the previous night going through the paperwork, wondering if what Emily said about Vince managing to get him off the partnership agreement and the loan was true.
At about two o’clock in the morning, she found the paperwork, buried in a box at the back of the stack in the small storage unit she had rented while she was staying on Kelsey’s couch. She had closed the overhead door to the storage unit, the single bulb casting a dim light across what was left of her belongings and the corrugated metal walls of the unit.
Sitting on a chair that belonged to her dining room set, Marlowe found the information she was looking for shoved into a folder of invoices. As she read the paperwork in front of her, her hands started to shake. How had she missed what Vince was doing? Had they talked about taking him off the loan and the partnership and she somehow forgot? She bit her lip as tears ran down her face. A wave of loss and grief and embarrassment rolled over her like a wave crashing on the shore during a storm. She had been duped.
Using her phone, she quickly accessed the Lakeview loan’s credit line account online. Not that she was expecting to see that anything had changed. She had looked at it at least once a day every day for the last few months. But this time, she was looking for something different. As she thumbed through the pages, it took her three clicks to find what she was looking for — the responsible parties for the loan. There was only one name, Marlowe Burgess, Lincoln Park Construction.
No one else was responsible.
Marlowe felt like a vice closed around her chest. She was suffocating. Struggling to breathe, Marlowe left the paperwork where it was, flipped the light off and locked up the storage unit, spending the next several hours driving, almost to the Indiana border and back. For a brief moment, she realized she could just leave town. Sure, bad credit might follow her, but maybe there was a way for her to change her name, try a new city, start all over again. She didn’t know. She was just a simple girl that wanted to build a building, not some hardened criminal that knew how to change her identity.
By four o’clock in the morning, she unlocked the door to Kelsey’s apartment as quietly as possible, not even flipping on the light. Still in her clothes, she slumped down on the couch, pulling a blanket over her body.
Once again, she fell asleep in tears.
A few hours later, Marlowe sat on the edge of the couch, the crush of the information from the night before still weighing on her. She went into the kitchen. Kelsey must have left for work without Marlowe waking up. Checking her phone, Marlowe saw it was nearly ten o’clock in the morning. There were no texts from Angelica’s sister, Emily. No new information. She sighed. Maybe there was nothing that Emily could do to help. Maybe there was nothing anyone could do for her.
The day stretched out in front of her, and she had no idea what to do.
18
Emily came home two hours later, sweaty and tired from her workout. Clarence had put her through her paces again, combining her boxing and self-defense work with conditioning that unfortunately included too many sprints. She could feel the soreness start to gather in her hips and back already. Walking in the back door, she expected to see Mike and Miner there, but they weren’t. An eerie silence filled the house. “Mike?” she called, knowing that if Miner was in the house by himself, he’d come running to the door.
No one came.
Emily dropped her bag to the floor and started walking room by room. When she got to the family room, she pulled the curtain aside, realizing that Mike’s car wasn’t parked anywhere she could see. Maybe he had just taken Miner for a walk, she thought. Going back into the kitchen, she checked her phone. There was no text from Mike, no indication of where he and Miner had gone. Something about it seemed strange, but Emily decided she was just being paranoid. This business with Marlowe has me off my game, she thought, heading up the steps to take a shower.
Half an hour later, when Emily came down from getting cleaned up, she expected to find Mike and Miner back in the house. They weren’t. She sent him a text, “Where are you? Do you have Miner with you?” A pit formed in her stomach.
Emily stood at the back door. The fact that she didn’t know where Mike and Miner were sent a surge of terror through her body that she wasn’t expecting. What had happened to them?
19
Just outside of the city, Mike finally started to breathe again. The minute that Emily had left for boxing, he knew what he needed to do. He grabbed his backpack, some food for Miner and put them in his car. Back inside, he put a leash on Emily’s dog and grabbed a drink from the refrigerator. Miner didn’t suspect anything and followed Mike right outside, climbing into the backseat. Mike was his caretaker when Emily was out of town anyway, so it was nothing new for the pup to go for a ride in the car with Mike.
As Mike pulled off the freeway, he realized maybe he shouldn’t have taken Miner with him. He’d been betrayed, but Miner was Emily’s dog. But how could he leave Miner with someone like Emily, someone who would turn on other people just like that?
Mike thought back to a night after he had known Emily for about a year. They’d been eating Indian food from a takeout place around the corner, sitting outside on a particularly warm fall evening. That was the night Emily told him about Anthony Tizzano.
“That’s your father-in-law?” Mike said, almost choking on his chicken.
“Ex,” Emily said, taking a sip of her beer. “Luca is my ex-husband.”
Mike had only heard about underground mob bosses like Anthony Tizzano from some of his gaming buddies. Some of his friends had gotten involved in online gambling and had suffered the consequences when they were unable to pay their debt. These were not good people. Some people believed in the nobility of the Mafia. Mike was not one of them. People like Anthony Tizzano were ruthless and without scruples. At least Mike was trying to help people, even if that did mean some hacking and snooping in information he probably shouldn’t look at, but he was trying to help. People like Anthony were not. Emily didn’t seem to see that.
Mike rolled down the window a little to get some fresh air. He checked the rearview mirror seeing that Miner was sitting up, a smile on his face. The dog loved to go in the car. He loved to be with people. A trip would be good for him, for both of them.
For the last couple of years, Mike had been taking a good chunk of the money he earned and putting it into a little property he bought about an hour outside of Chicago. What most people didn’t know about the city was although it was one of the largest in the United States, a quick drive would take you into the boonies in just over an hour. Mike rustled around in his backpack, pulling out a protein bar. As he chewed it, he ran through the list of what was at the cabin already — canned food, access to water, electronics protected by a Faraday cage. Pretty much everything he’d need to go off the grid.
The cabin had come to him in one frantic weekend while he was playing video games online. He was having a side conversation with a buddy of his who was playing from Arizona and lived out in the desert. “Chicago is a pretty big city. Do you have a bug out plan if things go south?” his friend asked over the VOIP connection they shared. VOIP was an untraceable Internet-based
phone service. Mike used it for pretty much every phone call he made. You never knew who might be listening.
The comment hit him like a ton of bricks. Mike knew that there might be a situation where he might have to escape the city, whether because of civil unrest, power outages, food shortages, martial law, not to mention terrorism or a biological weapon. Thinking about it made him nauseous. Emily always told him he got too caught up in the doom and gloom, but he thought of himself as a realist. His friends generally felt the same. Replying to his buddy, he said, “I don’t, but I should.” A second later, a website popped up on the screen.
“Check this out when you get a minute,” was all his friend said.
The next morning, Mike got on the website, forgetting it was there after their game. Luckily, he had taken a screenshot with his phone before it disappeared. Typing the address back into his computer, Mike saw there were properties listed that were out of the city and off the grid. Two hours later, Mike was in the car, driving out west to go visit an old hunting cabin. Later that night, he made an anonymous transfer into an anonymous bank account and a deed was generated to the property, assigned to a ghost LLC that would be nearly impossible for anyone to track.
Mike liked it that way.
Raised by a sometimes-present alcoholic mom who finally lost custody of Mike when he was twelve, Mike was always suspicious of people. Knowing he had the cabin made him feel a little bit more secure. Sure, he’d be by himself, but at least he had a place to get away.
He needed to get away now.
As he finished the protein bar, the sickly sweet taste coating his mouth, he gave the last bite to Miner, who had perched his front feet on the console, waiting for Mike to finish. Miner took the last piece of protein bar gently out of Mike’s fingers. The only thing Mike felt was a little tug. For how energetic and busy the cattle dog was, Miner was also very gentle. Underneath his barking, his soul was sweet and loyal.
