“Hello?” I answered our home phone.
“Peter! It's Judy!” my receptionist yelled into the phone. Judy opened the office each day
at 7:00 a.m. “Darryl is dead!”
I slammed the cabinet above the phone portal so hard that Claire called from upstairs
asking what the noise was. Wanting to call Martin right then and completely lay into the asshole,
I tried to figure out how to make this short with Judy.
“Peter, you there?” Judy asked all panic like.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
“They're telling Jonathan that it was a heart attack.”
“Damn it to hell!” I exclaimed. “I'm coming in.”
I hung up the phone and leaned over because my stomach was starting to turn. How many
people were going to die on account of my mistakes? I stood there hunched over in my kitchen
for thirty seconds.
Martin was going to get an ear full, so I ran over to my office to grab my cell phone. I
yelled to Claire and the kids to have a great day, hustled into the garage, and hopped into my car.
Almost driving into the closed garage door, I hit the brakes at the last second.
“Martin, I am out, I am so out it's not funny!” I screamed into the cell phone.
“Peter, what has happened?” Martin asked quickly. “Something has happened, what is
it?”
“Don't insult me, you ass!” I yelled again. “I want to hear you say it.”
Suddenly, I had this feeling that Martin didn't know what the hell I was talking about, so
I decided to take a different tack even before Martin could respond.
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“You don't know, do you?” I asked sinisterly. “Julio did this without consulting the great
Martin!”
“Peter, please tell me what has happened,” said remarkably calmly.
I paused, wanting this jerk to feel left out in the cold, to feel the calculating whims of our
favorite drug lord. Julio killed for fun, that I was now convinced. He really could not have
actually believed that Darryl was a threat to our operation. Julio was smarter than that, so why kill him?
“Julio had Darryl killed last night,” I finally revealed for Martin.
“What!” Martin yelled for the first time in my presence, on the phone or in person.
“That's right, your lunatic employer has outdone himself this time.”
Martin didn't say anything for fifteen seconds and I wondered if he was thrashing himself
or something.
“Peter, I have to call you back.”
As we hung up, I realized that somebody wouldn't have to do much digging to make a
connection between Brad Dellan and Darryl. That I was the connection was something that I
planned to take to my grave. Now it was sitting there out in the open for some detective to start
asking some tough questions.
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Wednesday, November 13th
7:20 a.m.
“Julio, it's Martin, just when were you going to tell me about your change in plans for
Peter's assistant?”
The drug lord sighed into the phone. “Martin, my boy, this was one of those things that
was best delivered without your glorious handiwork, believe it or not”
“I cannot believe you did this,” Martin stated.
Julio replied, “You gave me your advice, I considered it, and it happened that I chose a
different path, that's all.”
Martin got up from his chair and started to pace the room. This was big though he wasn't
sure that Julio realized it. Or he simply didn't care. Martin and Julio had their disagreements but
nothing quite like this. Connecting the dots between Brad Dellan and Peter's assistant wouldn't
be too hard if someone were pointed in the right direction.
“It won't matter if you waited a month or two, someone will clue into the two deaths and
trace it all back to your favorite money laundering center,” Martin declared.
“And if I didn't take care of Darryl Ludsten, I like the odds that he starts sniffing around
based on what Brad Dellan told him,” Julio replied. “And that would hurt worse.”
Julio had already heard my reply to that worry a few days ago, that we had all of the
business lines tapped. Of course, tapping the guy's home line as well as checking his cell phone
every day was all part of the package.
“You know we could easily have tracked all means of Darryl's communication to
anybody, and I also know we cannot control the communication of the first detective to make the
not so hard connection between what happened to the fiancé of a PLH client and a PLH
employee.”
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Julio yelled to somebody in his house. “And I know that you are easily replaceable,
Martin. I have never asked you to do any dirty work, clean up after an icing, count some dirty
drug money…”
Martin had successfully irritated Julio - he suddenly felt foolish, if not outright insane.
“Okay, Okay, have it your way,” Martin interrupted as politely as he could.
“Good boy, now hang up the phone and make me some more money.”
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Damage Control
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Wednesday, November 13th
7:35 a.m.