Icarus Investigation 01 - Flapjack (v5.0) Read online

  I absorbed all the information. Who was this guy? I wished I was just at home enjoying a stiff drink, watching a bad comedy on TV, and dreading the next day of work. Galveston noticed my consternation and reached for the bill.

  "My treat," he said smiling.

  -Chapter 5-

  Galveston and I said nothing as we walked back to the car. I opened the car door and Galveston piped in over the roof of the car.

  "So what do you think?"

  "What do I think about what?" I asked back.

  "You know, going into business together. I need a partner,"

  "Why me?" I asked him seriously. "Why do you want me as a business partner?"

  "I need someone very strong in the financial aspects of a business, you know, the ability to actually run a business. I don't have any clue about that. I've done some research on you Roger. I know you have a Doctorate in Economics. I know you worked at the International Monetary Fund, and I know you had your own consulting business." I grew quiet at the recital of my past.

  "That was a lot of years ago," I said softly, "and if you know all that, you probably know the rest of the story then," I said incredulously.

  "I think I know enough that your story sounded a lot like mine. You were underappreciated and at the wrong place at the wrong time, that much I do know. I know your business background is strong, you know about international affairs, and you could manage our finances, set up and negotiate contracts, you name it. Plus you need a fresh start, instead of the goofy accounting you're doing now." He stopped and smiled. "Also, I need someone who doesn't have anything else going on."

  "Oh thanks. Does my life have that little meaning?"

  "Right now it does, I mean, come on. I'm offering you low wages, unpredictable prospects, terrible hours, days of uncertainty, and a wish you had never come into contact with me. I mean, who would pass that up?"

  "Well when you put it like that."

  "Yes, and don't forget the travel. Piss poor hotel rooms, little sleep, that just sweetens the pot."

  "How can I possibly say no?"

  "I tell you what, if in one month you aren't satisfied, I'll give you all my savings. That will cover you for a month until you find another half ass job, but who wants that stability. I don't want to leave this parking lot until I have a yes or no. The time is now," Galveston pressed me.

  "You sound like a timeshare salesman."

  I thought about it for a minute. I believed Galveston when he told me he was terrible at the financial aspect of running a business. I knew this already from our work at "la Technologies". He made me feel needed and I could get whatever his idea for a business was off the ground, probably with one hand tied behind my back.

  "I already have our first client lined up," he said smugly and I took another moment to think about his proposal.

  "An investigator," I thought. I had no clue what that entailed, but from his stories I believed he did. The thought of working longer at Tesla sent shivers down my spine. I could always get a job at the local McDonalds if it didn’t work out.

  "Oh, what the hell," I told him quickly. "How tough a business could it be? Alright, you've got one month, no longer. I'll see it through and if I'm not completely satisfied, you'll pay me. Deal?"

  "Done," Galveston said rather gleefully.

  I nodded. I couldn't believe what I had agreed to, an operation with no business plan, no real customers, and no product. But the stories had intrigued me, and Galveston's confidence overrode all my uncertainty. Still I felt like a person who had just been sold an elixir from the traveling medicine man.

  "Alright," Galveston said as he got in the car, rubbing his hands together. "Let's go quit our jobs.

  -Chapter 6-

  Quitting was going to prove even easier done than said.

  "I’ll do the quitting for us. This is your first lesson on my side of the business. Always have an out. I have all the ammunition we'll need, just let me do the talking and you wait here. Give me ten minutes."

  I gathered myself outside, sitting on a brick wall, shaded under a poor excuse for a tree. Exactly ten minutes later, Galveston returned with a manila folder in one hand and a box in the other.

  "What's the story here?" I inquired skeptically.

  "I simply put our conditions and terms of voluntary termination from the company on the table," he said.

  "English please," I replied.

  He paused as if giving some great dumbed down version.

  "We are quitting effective immediately, no questions asked. We wanted a check immediately for our pay. Stan had five minutes to get the said checks, or I was going to post the pictures of his carnal affair with Belinda on the internet, along with a friendly email to his wife explaining where her husband had been during those long late hours of work," Galveston said smugly.

  He pointed to a white envelope in his hand. "I said these would never see the light of day." He handed me the envelope and I nervously ripped it open and peered inside, holding the corners back, expecting sickening and horrendous photos.

  "Oh my God," I exclaimed, turning it upside down and shaking it. Nothing came out.

  "You blackmailed him?" I said loudly, shoving the envelope back at him.

  "Again, the voice. Didn't your mother ever tell you to use your inside voice? You have a lot to learn about discretion." He scolded me like a child, grabbing the envelope from me, crumpling it up.

  "I call it non-factual persuasion. Technically, yes, it is blackmail, but that's not the point. I stitched everything up in a short amount of time. You're not very observant, are you? Those two couldn't keep a secret if their life depended on it," he instructed me.

  "How did you know?"

  "I didn't know 100 percent. Have you ever heard of Occam's Razor? In a nutshell, if there are a number of explanations based on the evidence you have, most likely the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. How many bosses leave the office four or five times each morning to talk to the secretary, when they just as easily could use the intercom? How many bosses lean over their secretary’s desk, touch their arm, and help them with their email? How stupid do you have to be to not figure out email after a two year tutorial?"

  "But to want Belinda? Even for Stan, that's pretty low," I replied in disgust.

  "Don't ask me why or how, please don't make me even conceive the two of them doing anything but slopping hogs after work. I don't know, but the signs were there. The little glances, the little laughs, plus I saw both of their cars parked at the motel down the street," he laughed. "I kind of put it together." He handed me a piece of paper from the box sitting on the wall. "Cash it in good conscience. You have received lesson two in simple observation and part of lesson three in gentle persuasion." I reached for the paper slowly, still in a state of shock and now fully unemployed.

  "I would hate to see your non-gentle persuasion," I said as we walked back to his car. I realized I had exited a terrible situation and entered into a terrifying unknown.

  -Chapter 7-

  I still did not know what my new job truly was or what business plan I would need to implement. For someone who viewed risk as an extremely predictable, well thought out plan, this all proved disconcerting. But the sense of excitement was definitely there, and it was tough to quell. I was moved forward by stories of clandestine meetings and international intrigue.

  Our new business would be a kind of private eye firm, but since neither of us was licensed, we couldn't call it that. Instead, we would operate in the same smoky arena of the consultant in which Galveston had been involved before.

  Galveston would get the clients and do the investigations or consulting. I would handle the business side, the contracts, the expenses, and the bank account, while Galveston would educate me as a junior consultant, slash, investigator.

  During our meeting it became evident that while Galveston knew everything about investigating and sleuthing, he really knew nothing about business. He was shocked at what we needed to do to potenti
ally make a profit, and the luster of the idea began to wear off. We had limited funds, but Galveston ensured me we would have clients. They might not be clients as wonderful as we wanted, but they would be money paying clients nonetheless.

  But I vastly underestimated my role in the business. Galveston wanted to involve me in investigations immediately.

  -Chapter 8-

  Our first month of employment together would prove to be uneventful. No clandestine meetings or international intrigue. There wasn't even national intrigue, but I decided to stick with it despite depleting all of Galveston's savings.

  We set up shop in Galveston's spacious one bedroom pad, complete with a 70's era couch, a slow computer, and a refrigerator filled with old mayonnaise, pickles, and milk from the Reagan administration. It was like two college roommates deciding to go into business together, selling bellybutton lint, because not everyone had some.

  We started with simple background checks, employment histories, and driving records. It helped keep us solvent and in business, but it wasn't breaking the bank.

  Our first big job was through a contact Dan had at an insurance brokerage firm. Galveston had met this man through casual conversation about cars at a local tire store. He was a lead underwriter at an insurance company and spoke of his frustration about possible insurance fraud. The underwriter was convinced that one of the claimants they had made payouts to was faking a worker's compensation injury, and due to a pending lawsuit was costing the insurance company hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one could prove that this guy was faking, but they were convinced he was.

  We'll call the guy Rick, because that was his name.

  "I recommend driving at the guy with our car and then make him leap to safety, proving he was not injured," I told Dan, regaling him with my best plan. This course of action did not sit well with him, however.

  "If the guy wasn't faking and then we popped him with our car, then what?" Galveston inquired. I still had a lot to learn about the investigation business.

  Galveston approached the case much more deliberately. In two days Galveston had enough information to know when this guy blew his nose or flushed his toilet.

  We sat in front of Rick’s house for hours, just waiting to take a picture of him doing something out of line for his injuries. At one point, Galveston became impatient and ordered me to knock on his door and run away. A seemingly simple plan, but one I was not willing to do.

  "Why don’t I just kick him in the jaw? He’d chase me then," I joked.

  "Don't question, just do, lesson eighteen," Dan snapped back. Obviously he wasn’t thrilled with my idea.

  I must mention something about Galveston's rules, his "lessons in insanity" as I liked to call them. They rarely made sense. He would commonly throw out a random lesson number and follow it with some mundane advice. The scary part was, to him, these weren't random numbers. I had a frightening thought that he actually had these written down somewhere, or they were actually encased in his brain.

  I would have written them down if I would have known that later they would prove useful. I also didn't realize that this seemingly simple operation was a test case for future operations. This was our pregame warm-up.

  I decided to follow the order and gingerly stepped out of the car and made my way around it, crouching and looking both directions. I made my way across the street, stooped over looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, doing a half step in each direction.

  "What are you doing? Dodging gunfire?" Dan yelled. "Just go over there like a normal human being and knock on the door. That lurching walk doesn't look out of place at all," he said sarcastically.

  I immediately stood up and composed myself. I ran over and knocked on the door of the house, as Galveston had instructed. I quickly looked both ways down the street and scurried back, jumping headfirst into the passenger seat of the car, hunching down.

  "You looked like a wounded horse," Dan laughed, making bobbing motions with his head.

  "You're sitting there yelling at me while I'm doing the grunt work. You’re telling the whole world that we’re up to something," I exclaimed and then fell back in the seat, exhausted.

  "Look around. This is a working class neighborhood with a median age of 103. You could set off a nuclear bomb here and nobody would notice or care. Now just sit and wait." I sat in the seat looking straight ahead, feeling burned and embarrassed. I was a greenhorn, but what was this berating going to prove.

  "I just want to see what he’ll do. We could wait here all day, but this is quicker and has a little more pizzazz," Galveston threw his arms up and gave me the jazz hands.

  Nobody came to the door after ten minutes of waiting and Galveston was becoming even more impatient.

  "Okay, do it again,"

  "Are you serious? I’m not running over there again," I pleaded.

  "Sure you are, and this time, yell that you’re from the Department of Water and Power."

  I tried to explain my case, but Galveston would have nothing of it until I reluctantly agree. As I ran across the road, I crouched low, swinging my arms wildly as if avoiding bees doing my best wounded horse on acid routine. I raced over to the door, knocked hard and yelled, "Water and Power Company!" I then nervously turned the other direction, found the nearest pair of bushes, and jumped behind them, panting

  I noticed that Galveston had crept around the car and was growing impatient. Before I realized what he was doing, I heard a crash of glass. Galveston had broken a pane of glass on the front of Rick’s porch with a rock. He jumped out of sight behind the back of the car.

  "Oh, there’s our boy, here he comes, faster than I expected," I heard Galveston say loudly.

  Rick came darting out the front door, down the steps, and hopped across the grass, looking for the culprit. He moved rather elegantly, like a cow dragging a bucket it got a hoof stuck in. He definitely wasn’t a man in extreme pain. I sunk down in the dirt behind the bush as far as possible, hoping Rick wouldn’t see me.

  Rick huffed and puffed outside his house for five minutes, turning, bending, squatting, all the things he shouldn’t have been able to do. Rick finally gave up and returned inside, obviously perturbed he didn’t get to punch someone in the face.

  "Run back over here, will ya?" Galveston yelled to me in a whisper from behind our car.

  "Okay, hold your horses," I yelped back at him. I moved from behind the house and raced across the street.

  "I think I see him coming," Galveston said, pointing at the door of the house.

  I felt a rush of adrenaline and crouched low, like that would help conceal my position.

  "Oh sorry," Galveston yelled, "I guess it was a mirage."

  I stood up, peeved, with my hands on my hips and began to walk back.

  "Okay, now you do need to hurry, I really do see him coming," Galveston yelled again seriously.

  I once again went into a strange run, looking both ways as I crossed the street, and flew into the passenger side door, breathing hard.

  "Where is he?" I gasped.

  "Oh. Sorry about that. I’ve got to get my eyes checked. It was just a bird, a really large, fat white bird," he laughed.

  "Haven’t you heard of the boy that cried wolf? The wolf ate him," I scolded.

  "I’m sorry, it was just too easy. I apologize. I actually really needed to see how fast you were, or was it how gullible?" He laughed again and rubbed his chin in fake thought. "That was even better than I thought," Galveston quipped as he put away the video recorder. He noticed the consternation on my face. "What are you worried about?"

  "I’m worried that we could get arrested. This isn’t what I signed up for."

  I'm not sure which laws we had broken during this little operation, I’m sure there were many. I couldn’t remember if it was against the law to impersonate a water and power man; I sure hoped not.

  "Don’t sweat it. That was a good time," Galveston said slowly, nodding his head.

  I would get him back at some point, but rig
ht now I was glad it was mostly over. I had a sinking feeling we would be ramping it up a bit from this point on. The pre-game warm-up was over, now it was on to the big game. If only I had known what we were getting ourselves into.

  -Chapter 9-

  We returned to Galveston’s humble abode, the headquarters of Icarus Investigatory Services, or as we called it, Icarus, or more simply "Ick!". Galveston and I had come up with the name after a study of Greek mythology. Our business name was an ode to the mythological boy who flew too close to the sun with wings of wax. The wings melted, he tumbled to the earth, and went splat on the ground. Galveston told me this is probably how we will feel every day, flying too close to the sun.

  The insurance company awarded us with a check in the mail along with a bonus I had stipulated in the contract for bringing the case in under our scheduled time. We had potentially saved the insurance company hundreds of thousands of dollars. They would have settled quickly due to the abysmal safety record of the construction company Rick worked for and a need for it just to go away. For our two days of work we received eight thousand dollars, and it was plenty of money to split fifty-fifty. I now officially liked my new job.

  I was in, all in. The excitement now was palpable and I had a new sense of purpose. I was bringing order to an otherwise chaotic world. Alright, that was a bit dramatic, but there definitely was an amount of fun and interest in my new endeavor that I found, well, gratifying.

  During the rest of March and into May we picked up other cases, examined records, did interviews, and gathered contracts. I was starting to get the hang of things, even the lingo that was spewed out, all under the watchful eye and tutelage of Dan Galveston.

  We had become a well-tuned unit, like Laurel and Hardy mixed with Starsky and Hutch. We received more and more job opportunities. Some were successful, some not, and many times the company that hired us was wrong. Key contract negotiations allowed us to rack up sizable payments and stay, barely, in the black.