"Sedona?" Turbo asked politely.
"Oh." I paused to take a much needed breath. "You're not being held hostage somewhere or anything, are you?" It wasn't easy to bring my focus back to the problems at Strandfrost.
"No, I'm fine," he reassured me. Then he was silent for a while. With Turbo that could mean he was thinking, but since he had called, he probably had all his cards neatly shuffled and ready for dealing. Therefore, the pause meant something else.
"What did you find out?" I asked.
"Did you like technician work?"
Uh-oh. "Why?"
With false brightness he said, "Actually, it might be a good idea if you took the job Huntington offered."
"Turbo."
He continued as though he hadn't heard me. "It would be a nice change of pace, something new, get you back into the swing of things, you know, regain that technical edge."
"Turbo."
He continued babbling. "Turbo!" I yelled. "What did you find out?"
More silence. "I went in to see John, the new VP."
"And?"
"Seems that Gary is insinuating that you're likely responsible for the current set of problems. He claims that when he was working at Strandfrost, you caused all kinds of ruckus, kept the schedules up in the air, and didn't get on well with the other managers."
I closed my eyes. "They are going to fire me, aren't they? They are going to believe that slimy little weasel Gary over an innocent troop."
I could hear Turbo swallow. "I, uh…"
"Turbo," another thought occurred to me, "You didn't get yourself fired did you?"
No answer for a long moment. Finally, he replied. "I guess it wouldn't hurt if you asked Huntington if they have two openings, just in case."
"They can't get the work done at Strandfrost without you! The schedules are too tight."
He let loose a long breath. "I don't think they'll fire me. John said something about forgiving my outburst. And they won't fire you. They'll just ask you to look around like they did Gary."
That certainly didn't leave me with much to say did it? The phone made noises at me for another few minutes while Turbo babbled platitudes and nonsense. I could hear Turbo's wife, Irene, in the background asking whether he wanted corn or potatoes with his supper.
Finally breaking the daze, I said, "I gotta go Turbo. I'll see you tomorrow." Maybe. It depended on whether or not management gave me any time before they made their "suggestions." My life was going to hell in a hand basket, and the devils didn't even leave a handle on the basket for me.
Looking out the window, I laughed. No, the devil in my life left me a Lexus instead of a hand basket. The problem was that I had no idea where to drive it or what to do with it.
Without any better ideas, I left the car sitting in the driveway and went to bed.
Chapter 6
Tuesday morning my life did not improve. Not only did the Lexus remain parked in my driveway, there was still no sign of Huntington. I wasn't ready to call my brother and ask how to get the trunk open.
I drove myself to work, contemplating my other problems. There was probably no good way to get fired, but if I had my choice I would go down fighting. Unfortunately, from what Turbo had said, the decision was made, and I wouldn't be given a chance.
I slinked my way into the office at seven-thirty so that I could carry down the few personal items I kept there without being seen. At eight, reading through my emails, I found one mailed late the night before from Ross Canton, the marketing and program manager. After looking at his latest proposed schedule, my heart sank. Even without Turbo's warning I would have guessed something bad was going to happen. Ross was quite creative and liberal with commitments to our customers, but not even on his worst day would he normally have tried to sell this schedule. Management was counting on me protesting so they would have a good reason to fire me.
I saw no point in torturing the others with my presence any longer than necessary. I tried Huntington's pager. I was truly relieved when he actually called me back.
"Glad to see you are still alive," I said.
"I called Anthony's and had them reverse the charges on your card and put dinner on mine."
"Oh, how sweet of you," I chirped. "I was sooo disappointed that you couldn't stay long enough to give me a ride home, but I see you made up for it by parking your car in my driveway. I must say you have an interesting way of wooing a girl."
I could hear him sigh. "I assume you called to tell me you wouldn't accept the job if it was the last one in town?"
Hmm, now I was in a pickle. It would be nicer if he would beg, but I had a house payment to make.
Before I could reply, he grumbled, "Did you have to chase after me with a cleaver? What were you going to do with that thing anyway? You know Scalia has been a friend of mine for years, and now he thinks I have endangered my life by dating a woman that came after me with a kitchen ax."
I bristled. "Oh, like the gentlemen that followed you through the kitchen were your buddies and law abiding citizens! Didn't your friend Scalia ask about them?"
"He mentioned that he thought they had guns, but at least I wasn't on a date with them!"
"Yeah, getting left with the bill at a restaurant makes me look really attractive. Being seen with you is certainly a statement of how good a girl can do."
"Look, if I pay you on the side, like last time, will you take the job already? You won't be able to drive the Mercedes, because it doesn't go with the pay Acetel will be giving you, but you still have your Honda, right? And I know you have jeans, despite all the money you spent on other clothes. You can keep your new lifestyle, but you'll have to bank it for a while."
"And then what? I continue working at this place, trying to eek out a living and hope I like it?"
He paused again, not a good sign. "It's quite possible I wouldn't be able to get you your job back at Strandfrost afterwards. How about an advance to mitigate the risk? Say a couple grand. That will give you time to look for something afterwards in case this doesn't turn out to be your dream job."
There was no way I would have taken the job had I not known that I was about to get fired. "Make it five thousand. You didn't tell me I would be risking my life and limbs last time."
"You won't be this time! You're just going to work, mingle and listen to gossip."
He made it sound so simple. I didn't say anything.
"Okay, five it is."
"And you'll cover the difference between the new salary and what I'm making now," I added. "I'll send you my resume, and you can pitch it to your cohorts, assuming you've got someone on the inside."
"Uh…yeah."
"What does that mean?"
"A guy, Jacques, is going to call you later today."
I was furious. "You assumed I was going to say yes?"
Before I could blister him, he interrupted. "No, I was hoping Jacques could sell you on the job. Tell you what a great opportunity it would be. I can't exactly do that."
"Not well, anyway! You couldn't even manage dinner." A sudden, more important thought came to me. "He'll call me at home?" When one is about to be fired, one can't count on being at work later to take a call.
"Whatever works best," Huntington said, pretending to be magnanimous. "I gave him both numbers. Oh, and I picked up the Lexus a little while ago, so you don't have to keep trying to locate the keys. I'll stop by tonight so we can do a little planning."
I grunted and followed his normal habit of hanging up without saying goodbye. Rats. I had forgotten to ask why his car was in my driveway in the first place. Too late now. Ross was standing in my doorway as if he had all day to wait for me to get off the phone. Instead of shouting a quick request and moving on to the next deal, he stood there fidgeting.
I waved a copy of the new schedule. "Wow, three new projects on top of the four I already have. Good thing I hired some new people. We'll just have to squeeze all the work in, right?"
Ross opened his mouth and then shut it. He s
tarted forward and then retreated. He was the kind of guy who should have run for public office, always hanging out with the right people, saying the right things and dancing the dance. Except today. He seemed to be short a step or two.
I continued smoothly. "I wasn't quite sure what you were looking for on the last project on the list, and I know how you like to have your ducks in a row by staff." Our management staff meetings started at nine. John and company knew that I'd have plenty of time to see the "new" schedule and work myself into a fit over it.
Ross took a deep breath and then blurted out, "Patrick said he couldn't handle the Mamba project either. He's giving it back to you." He loosened his tie, and in the process accidentally undid it too far. Between that and the constant motion of running his hand though his thick brown hair, he ended up looking like a drunk in a bar.
"No problem." I smiled a last grimace and sent my resignation to the little inkjet printer on my desk. Resigning probably beat getting fired. Ross stammered a few more times as we walked to the staff meeting.
At the door to John's office, Ross looked even more desperate, his eyes bulging, but not meeting mine. "Uh Sedona, listen…"
I stopped. He stared down at his shoes, and then instead of saying anything, he bolted ahead of me into the staff room.
I walked in and there smiled Gary. He looked smug, but not as happy as Dan Thorton, Strandfrost's finance manager. Dan was a womanizer and a lecherous creature. He was still angry because I had exposed his baldness in an incident involving his toupee.
"Gary, good to see you again," I said solemnly. Like moving a favorite bookcase and finding a giant brown recluse waiting.
It wasn't possible for me to hand in my resignation with him gloating. I couldn't do it. "I hope you'll fill me in on what's new with you when I get back from vacation." I stuttered a little as I made up the lie.
John, the vice president, looked over at me. "Vacation?"
I nodded and gulped. I had almost three weeks of time off because I had been so busy helping Huntington, I hadn't used any of my vacation for the year. I sure hated to let these guys mow me over before getting the time off. "Yes, starting next Monday for the next three weeks, remember? The week before Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving week and the week after." Since it was pretty obvious I wasn't going to be around to take any time off at Christmas, may as well take all my accrued vacation now.
John blinked rapidly and glanced around the room. Everyone frowned except Ross, who was now staring at me with what might have been admiration. John would look petty if he fired me today, right before my big vacation. None of them would find it strange that they couldn't recall me asking for it in the first place, because they never listened to a word I uttered. They wouldn't remember if I had announced I was growing marijuana and delivering it to Santa Claus in time for Christmas.
We all sat down around the conference table. I felt like a bag lady from the homeless row downtown, an unwanted social problem. John straightened his tie and started babbling. When Ross presented the schedule, it got really quiet. I smiled so hard my cheeks hurt. "I went over it with Ross earlier. Should work out great." And they would have to wait three weeks while I was out before they could decide who was really going to do the work. It was evil. It was mean.
My smile got wider and a lot more sincere. John couldn't very well fire me right before earned vacation, and they couldn't put the fake schedule behind them and move on to real business with me still there.
I smiled all the way through the muddled meeting. John finally gave up trying to pretend he had anything else to say, and cut us loose. On the way down the hall, I laughed. What a terrible person I was.
Chapter 7
Huntington showed up at my place just after I got home. I let him in, set his nice leather coat on the back of the couch, and regretted again that I hadn't managed a butter-soft jacket out of the last deal. "Did you bring my bonus check?"
He smiled. "I auto-deposited it. I still have your account number from the last case. Now that I've hired you again, you're officially back on the payroll."
Since the day I met Huntington, he had been presumptuous. "Ah yes, that brings us right to the point. You are here to fill me in on what you are looking for. You might also want to explain why those thugs were after you at the restaurant the other day."
Huntington stuffed his hands into his khaki pockets and rolled back on forth on his feet. He looked frustrated enough to actually kick something. "I had no idea anyone with that kind of muscle was concerned about me working on this case, but obviously someone followed me and found us sitting in the restaurant. Mark has been…hanging around Acetel. He normally drives the Lexus. Someone must have seen him."
I folded my arms and tapped my foot. If Huntington didn't know why the men had been following him or who they were, that meant they were still in the picture. This was not good news. "You have more details, I assume."
He sat down on my well-worn tweed couch while I positioned myself behind the bar counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. I started the rice cooker while he talked.
"Ben Martinez is a freelance accountant who does a lot of contract work. He mentioned how well other companies in this business are doing--yet Acetel recently was forced to layoff people to get expenses in line with revenues. Ben was one of the layoffs. He recommended the board hire me to make sure things were on the up and up. The books added up, mind you, it's just that Ben doesn't understand why Acetel isn't more profitable." Huntington moved his leather jacket from the back of the couch and leaned back. I thought about offering to hang it, but chances were poor that he would accidentally forget it, so I let it stay on the armrest.
"This is the company's second layoff. The first occurred before the company went public. The CEO, A.J. Chambers, agreed to the first one mainly because his advisors wanted to quietly clean house prior to the company going public. It only affected about twenty people.
"A.J. is an engineer at heart. When he started Acetel, he wanted to tie small-company designs to larger ones and service them. For a while, the company was nicely profitable."
"So what happened?" The work sounded a lot like what Strandfrost did--except we didn't service the equipment after the sale, we only certified that the equipment worked in certain environments and provided performance statistics.
"Expenses and overhead grew too fast. Bottom line was that Acetel's customer account payments weren't keeping pace with hiring and expenses. A second layoff was needed. From all appearances, the hiring that went on right after the first layoff was extreme and the biggest part of the problem. Strangely, the hiring was supposedly done because accounts existed that needed people working them."
Firing people madly and then hiring them back right away didn't sound at all unusual to me. After all, Strandfrost had just hired Gary back even though there had been very good reasons to walk him out the door. Even more common than Gary's situation, every company had a greedy manager or two that built a personal empire by hiring an echelon of troops, needed or not. "So...the company is madly out of control? They hire, they fire? And one of the casualties, this Ben guy, took offense at that?"
Huntington snorted. "He's suspicious, not offended." He got up to pace. My house wasn't big enough for a dining room. Instead there was a dining nook just off the kitchen and living room, which afforded almost enough pacing room. "We aren't sure where the problem lies. The numbers add up from the audit, but Ben mentioned that when he worked there, managers were very slow to turn over requested records. Given employees' apparent productivity on cases, A.J. believes that someone might be getting work done at Acetel--but instead of Acetel getting paid, one or more individuals are pocketing the money for the work done."
"How can that happen?"
"At this point, we suspect that the customers might even be in on it. For a reduced charge, some customers could be making payments under the table to a contact inside Acetel. It could be as simple as the service contract requiring A and B, but someone
does A, B and C. The payment for C goes right into side pockets, leaving Acetel out of the loop and taking away from its bottom line."
He went back to his jacket and extracted some folded sheets of paper from the inside pocket. Since I was busy cutting broccoli, he laid the papers on the bar. "Another possibility is that certain individuals might be doing work for companies that don't have an official service contract at all. I brought you a list of all the legitimate customers. If you hear customer names that aren't on this list, that means there is no service contract and payment for the job is being diverted away from Acetel."
I fluffed rice and threw thin pieces of beef into a wok. I added some soy sauce and the broccoli. "This isn't Chinese. Don't think it is Chinese. It is beef, and it happens to have broccoli in it." I had never figured out how to make the thick, rich sauces that Happy Family served. Mine was a poor substitute if mistaken for possible Chinese.
While the meat sizzled, I got out plates and sodas. "All this info still doesn't tell me why those two guys came looking for you. It sounds to me like there's been a leak concerning your involvement, and whoever is running this scheme knows all about you."
He tapped his fingers on the table. "Mark had the Lexus for a while. We were sharing it because he needed it in order to blend inside certain neighborhoods. I needed it for mixing with the board set. Mark spotted a black Lincoln following him when he delivered the car to me at a board meeting. They were still on my tail when I left. By the time I took you out to dinner, I had lost them, but apparently they drove around long enough to spot the car at the restaurant."
I froze in the motion of dumping steak over rice. "You mean someone has been following you around for a while? And you parked that thing in my driveway?"
Huntington frowned. "No one followed me here so you're safe."
I passed him a plate while I contemplated his theory. "If Beefy and Buns found you at the restaurant, what prevents them from driving around and finding it here?" I answered my own question. "Nothing."
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