The BOYS

Episode Three

The dogs were gone, digestion begun, the paper and styrofoam tossed out the window by the time the big Lincoln pulled into its reserved space, designated so... RESERVED: Walter Fales, Associate Vice-President, Packaging. It wasn't one of the premium spaces next to the BCM headquarters in Javelinas Office Park, but, after all, there were only eight of those, four held for the private use of William Marcy ("call me Bill") Braxton, prerogatives, after all, of any boss of a multimillion dollar company... even one that produced no useful wealth, but, rather, steered the pensions and savings of hick-town unions, casino Indians and sundry agglomerations of persons into stocks and investments of shaky, but, so-far, profitable provenance. To Matt, just past thirty, Bill Braxton was a genius. Walter, on the other hand, had told Missy that he wouldn't trust his boss to sheetrock their basement - Braxton would probably use something cheap and toxic that'd start crumbling within five years. BCM did sign Walt's monthly draws, though, and he was due for one hell of a payout in Preferred at the end of the year.

BCM reflected the pretensions of its boss, the four-storied building was set up on a low hill, irrigated to a perverse greenness in this late Southern California summer, set above the rest of the denizens of Javelinas... third or fourth dot generation com start-ups in glorified garages, warehouses of Asian and Mexican trademark rip-offs, even a so-called "talent agency" with long-legged, hard-faced beauties coming and going at all hours. Walt's own space was in the row just behind Braxton's - his space faced that of Call Me Bill's personal hitwoman, Laura Costello, Assistant Vice-President for Urban Resources (Matt, a disciple of The Donald, had compared the Black Widow to Omarosa, a person Walt had never seen, but had heard much about).

To the best of his knowledge, Laura had never been married but, otherwise, comparisons to a poisonous arachnid were on the money.

"Bill must be back," pointed Ev as Walt cruised the lot. The company spaces were filled with dark sedans, and there were three others on the sidewalk.

"Renters!" Matt sneered. A couple of years ago... before the plague, the war and the economic shakeup, Bill, turning fifty, had grown a beard and had implants, sold the Mercedes and started driving old, vintage Cadillacs like some fuckin' Elvis... baby blue and yellow Cadillacs, even a red, '53 El Dorado convertible, which made him a sort of man around fuckin' town, in a creepy retrodude way. This coincided with the disappearance of his plain, long-suffering wife (into a sanitarium, Walt's executive secretary, Gloria, maintained) and the arrival of the Black Widow and, also, with the dot-com rollercoaster of Y2K that had made a few fortunes and destroyed many more and the more recent biotech startups engendered by 2020’s plague. The company was, at least, a survivor, a healthy rat of the investment alleys - the BCM building's sturdy, quakeproof basalt was lined with about a half inch of Italian marble, giving headquarters the look of an expensive bathtub, with windows. There was an enormous, sloping atrium, like something out of a science-fiction movie and a smattering of executive offices, small and poorly soundproofed. But, since it was Walter Fales' conviction that time wasted in the home office was inversely proportional to the riches to be reaped on the road, admonishing the suckers: “We do tech!”, he'd never bothered bringing up the matter with Bill.

A million dollar portfolio of Preferred beat out a cozy office any old day.

BCM's best were, pretense and Armani aside, no better than sea-raiders... modern-day Vikings pillaging each other's clients and pocketing commissions with smiles and winks at every churning of the chumps who'd failed to understand that yesterday's Internet flops were being recycled as tomorrow's nanotech sensations. So, after splitting from Ev and Matt among the busy atrium people and riding the escalator (Call Me Bill had called elevators "retro", which was not a term of admiration to the boss) up two flights, without offering anything beyond a pleasant smile and "nice afternoon" to these harried-looking colleagues, he sauntered towards Gloria, who tapped the side of her mouth...

"Messages?" he misunderstood.

Gloria repeated the gesture, then whispered. "Mustard..."

"Oh. Sorry." He wiped with the heel of his fist, but Gloria continued whispering.

"There's been trouble!" And, now, Walter saw through the small glass aperture to his outer waiting room, that a pair of insolent shadows lurked in his office, and they were not the deferential sorts that haunted his few Headquarters hours. No worried clients fumbling with documents in battered briefcases or flipping through Walt's old National Geographics... nor the Uruguayan or Nigerian disfungible schemers, quack inventors chasing the Holy Grail of venture capital... one of the arrogant fucks was sitting on his desk, the other looking out the window and laughing, smoking one of Walter's own cigars, from his own, private stash. And laughing.

"Those men," Gloria pointed, "... they are from the police!"

"Cops?" Walter frowned. "They don't look like cops."

Gloria's voice dropped to a whisper again. "Federales! There is some problem... Mr. Braxton is missing..."

"Missing, you say? This some kinda kidnapping scheme? The fuck..."

The shadows moved out of Walter's line of sight and he heard something crash to the carpet. "There are more of those... those men... upstairs," she pointed upwards, as Walter's own office was directly under the office of Jemison, the Comptroller, whose office was next to Bill Braxton's own lair. "I told them your office was private but they had badges, badges and legal documents... and guns..."

A loud crash... breaking glass from the sound of it... reverberated from the salesman's private office, followed by muffled shouts and curses.

"They're tearing everything apart!" Gloria shuddered. "They are looking... for the papers, they say..."

"We'll see about that!" Walt vowed. "Does Lenny know about this?"

"Mr. Jemison? Not any papers, they say... the papers. They took Mr. Jemison away..."

Gloria thrust her hands up, in front of her breasts, as if to indicate handcuffs.

"Get Sal on the line," Walter ordered, "patch him through to my office..."

"They said no outside calls," Glorie hesitated.

Despite feeling the tang of the kraut and garlic in those two Good Dogs wafting through his teeth, Walter Fales bared his fangs and leaned into the secretary's face. "Do you work for us?" he snarled, "...or for them? Get Sal!"

His hand grasped the doorknob and pushed inwards. The reception area was windowless, but he'd gone to pains to keep it tidy and comfortable with a coffeemaker... and no styrofoam cup for donations, not at BCM, thank you... quality back-dated magazines like Forbes and National Geographic, some nice landscapes on the wall, not prints, but originals he'd purchased from this guy at the beach. The paintings had been ripped down, magazines strewn over the floor, one of the chairs kicked over. He continued to the open door to his private office and watched the Feds rip more files from his cabinets, glance at them and toss them on the floor. They glared back at Walter, but continued wrecking his office.

"If you two little piss-monkeys don't get out of my office now, I won't wait for my attorney... I'll toss you myself."

Actually, only one of the Feds was short. The other was almost as tall as Fales, but it was the short one who reached into his jacket and drew a revolver... a Glock, Walter couldn't help noticing, not an honest, made-in-America Police Special .38 like that he kept in the nightstand to deter burglars. Even the fuckin' cops were selling out the red, white and blue.

The big guy studied Walt like some scientist peering at an insect, shook his head, then looked at his partner like he was some kind of bug, too, and gave a little, faggotty wave, a sort of insinuation to put the gun away and stop acting like some TV clown...

"Are you Walter Fales?"

The stupidity of the question raised the hairs on Walt's neck. "And if I am..."

"Attitude, cheap gangsta attitude," the big man sighed, reaching into his pocket, but for a badge, not a gun. "John Curry, Securities and Exchange. That other guy is Ted Melk, Justice," and then, rather dismissively, "California State Justice."

"You haven't told me what you're doing in my office," Walter said, belligerently, but not making a further move towards the two cops. Only the lunatics were shooting white people, even after George Floyd and all of that, but still…

Curry reached into his jacket and removed... not a gun... but a sheaf of crisp, white papers, laying them on Walter's desk in front of the salesman.

"This is a search warrant, covering all correspondence and documents of Braxton Capital Management in your possession dating back six years."

"Well, I've only worked here four," Walter blustered.

Ted Melk returned the Glock to his shoulder holster, but took a seat on the edge of Walter's desk, challenging him to respond. "We know. Before that, you worked for the local office of Arthur Andersen...

"Yeah, I... hey!" Walter put up his hands "I had nothin' to do with that Enron shit or anything else. And I got nothin' to do with... what the fuck is it you're lookin' for, anyway?"

"Mr. Fales," said the tired-looking Curry, "do you know the present whereabouts of William Marcy Braxton?"

"Bill? Dunno... he runs the company, he don't have to report to me! That's one of the privileges you get, bein' the boss. His girl says he went off on a business trip, love it or leave it. That's what we do, you know, business?"

Ted Melk rewarded him with an arrogant little smirk. "Monkey business... that's more like it. Or, piss-monkey business?"

"Either of you goons going to tell me what this is about?" Walter lowered his hands. "Tax crap?"

"It's in my Federal warrant." Curry nodded towards the document on the desk. The cover page had one of those little legal boxes wherein the People of the United States had charged BCM, William Marcy Braxton, Leonard C. Jemison, Laura Fern Costello, a couple of Bill's other top tier parking lot flunkies and Does One through Five Hundred. A lot of Does, Walter thought, sort of hoping, even, that he'd at least made the top twenty... maybe even the top ten...

"IRS is conducting its own separate investigation," said the Fed, "they'll be by to see you when they get their act together. We're looking into the misappropriation of investor funds, insider trading, stock manipulating..."

"Typical Chinese fire drill," Melk remarked, drily, "a dozen Federal agencies running around on their own investigations. John hasn't even brought up Homeland Security. Your tax dollars at work."

"Well, I'm certainly shaking in my shoes, having been working for terrorists all along. I mean, if we were just ripping off customers, would I have closed... just this morning, mind you... on Simcoe Municipal Utilities, and with a gang of wild Indians? We're so fuckin' rotten we're outperforming the Dow three to five percent over the last three years... that's common... BCM preferred eight, maybe nine percent, and everything I own that ain't my house or on my back is in Braxton Preferred, and I'm crying, right. So, who's complaining?"

The telephone rang, and Walter snatched it away from Curry, who had been reaching out lazily to pick it up. His phone. He gave the big Fed a murderous glance that set Curry back a little, then Gloria said, "Mr. Fales? I have Sal Duquesne on the line..."

"Put him through." He squinted at the cops, pointing at the black receiver on his retro-phone. "This, as if you haven't figured it out, is my attorney... you guys want to beat it before I call security in the basement to set the dogs out after you? They got some nasty, mother-fuckin' dogs... Sal!... got a pair of jackboot thugs, government morons here, askin' questions about Bill. No, not IRS... one of them's from the SEC, somethin' else that crawled down from Sacramento..."

And then Walt could almost smell Sal Duquesne's fear through the horn. "Don't give them anything that ain't in a court order," the attorney advised in a warm, unctuous baritone. "Are you under arrest?"

"Am I under arrest?" Fales asked the heat.

"That depends," Curry replied, rocking on his heels. "Let's just say that you are a person of interest, at the moment. May I?" He snapped his finger, pointing to the phone and, after a moment's hesitation, Walt handed it over.

"Am I speaking to the attorney for Mr. Fales?" Curry paused. "Uh huh? You do, that's helpful. We're not at liberty to discuss details at the moment, but yes... no... not at this time. Yes... depending on the progress of State and Federal investigatory processes, my superiors will want to speak to Mr. Fales at length... in a week, maybe ten days." He paused. "I'm afraid so... yes, taped and padlocked by the end of the day... yes..."

He handed the phone back to Walter with a smirk. “Happy Nine – Eleven.”

"Walt," Sal Duquesne counseled, most of the smooth having drained out of his voice the way grease disappeared into one of those expensive paper towels when Estrellita lay bacon strips on it for Sunday morning breakfast, "you got nothing to say. Nothin'! Understand?"

"I... sure, Sal," he answered.

"I'll make a slot open for you Friday mornin'... tennish. That okay with you?"

"Can't Sal. I got appointments, way up Inyo County, I'm gonna have to drive up on Thursday night and stay over. Fuckin' job, you know..."

"Walt," said the attorney, "hate to break it to you like this, but... you don't have a job anymore..."

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