The Devil to Pay Read online

  I banged the receiver down on the tabletop. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It was a twelve-hundred-dollar cashier’s check and I had been stalling about sending it to the insurance company, thinking I might need to cash it to meet rent and payroll. Café de Oro, “coffee of gold,” had started out well, but over the last couple of months it seemed to have developed a “business virus”—people got sick from something nasty in the counter milk, health department inspectors closed me for cockroaches that suddenly materialized as if they had been waiting for the inspectors to walk in, two employees were mugged in separate incidents, and I had to hire and train new help at a time when business had dropped in half.

  Now the business blew up, taking that poor man with it. Facing disaster from every angle, I had shot myself in the foot by bouncing the renewal check on my insurance and sitting on the reinstatement fee.

  I couldn’t have done worse if I’d sat down and planned a business suicide.

  The letter that had the Colombian lawyer’s information in it gave the man’s name as Francisco de Vega Gomez, with an address in Medellín, Colombia. I groaned again at the thought that my newfound inheritance was located there. “Cocaine cowboys,” the news media called the cartel bosses challenging the Colombian government for power, billionaire criminals with well-equipped private armies.

  After checking my phone book on how to place a call to Colombia, I dialed the number. Several bursts of tones and static later, a Spanish-language recording apologized that the call could not be completed but offered no clue as to why. I spoke pretty good Spanish, a heritage from my mother, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia during the early 1960s, but the linguistic ability didn’t help in talking with a recording.

  It had occurred to me that my benefactor, Senor Castillo, might be someone my mother had met when she was in the Peace Corps. A much more relevant thought buzzing in my head was could he be my father. You don’t leave an inheritance to a stranger.

  My mother had raised me in her role as a single parent. She had revealed little about who my father was.

  For years I would lie awake at night and wonder about my father. I’d fantasize a scene in which I would meet my father and we would instantly bond as he explained where he’d been all my life.…

  Naturally, an inheritance from a Colombian whom I had never met or heard of put Carlos Castillo at the head of the list. But I didn’t have time to mull over the possible connection—I had a sudden, desperate need for money and the one place in the world where I would find it was south of the border, way south.

  Unable to reach a human operator in Colombia even with the help of an American one, I put down the phone and rubbed my face. I couldn’t understand how my life could change so fast and radically. My business was destroyed. I had no insurance. My God, a man is dead.

  I staggered into the bathroom, washed my face, and scrubbed off the soot with a wet facecloth. My reflection in the mirror accurately reflected my mental state: a woman in despair. Besides being red and swollen, my eyes had a strange feral look I realized was shock and panic.

  I stared at myself, wondering how so much of my life went by so fast in such a short time. Just about a year before, I’d left a successful career—burning my bridges as I was apt to do—and launched a business that I was sure would bring me success. At thirty-one, the good life seemed ripe for the picking. No man was in my life, but that was my fault, because I was too busy … and maybe because I’d been-there-done-that with casual sex and relationships and wanted something more meaningful and permanent.

  Sex for the sake of sex wasn’t satisfying, nor was dating guys who expected a blow job instead of a good-night kiss on the first date. I had had it with fallout from the sexual revolution my mother had fought in, and just wanted someone I loved and trusted to snuggle up to at night.

  I had a firm, slender figure, not too muscular, page-boy-length chestnut hair that behaved unruly sometimes, and dark brown eyes. I had tried on a blond wig once to see what I would look like but decided it didn’t agree with my tan shade of skin. And no one would expect to see me at a casting call for a movie, not unless the role was for the girl next door.

  From the looks of my face in the mirror, right now I could be cast as the victim after that creep from the Halloween movies paid a visit.

  I swallowed half a Valium. The woman next door had given me two of them after the health department closed my store for a week. Too bummed out to take a shower, I finished wiping soot off my face and arms and took a cold, damp washcloth to bed with me. Lying atop the blankets, I put the wet cloth over my eyes and forehead.

  Migraines weren’t new to me, but this was the worst I’d ever experienced. My eyes ached and I was sick to my stomach. I couldn’t get an image of that poor man out of my head. Johnny Woo, a skinny guy who wasn’t fresh off the boat but spoke English with a thick Cantonese accent.

  A dour type who never smiled, in all honesty, I hadn’t particularly cared for the man; he didn’t have the personality or language skill for counter work. I hired him out of desperation when he showed up the morning I found out an employee had been hospitalized because of a mugging. But I couldn’t help feeling terrible that he had been killed because of some freaky accident at my business.

  Shoving Johnny Woo’s face to the back of my mind, I thought about the strange twist of fate that would bring an inheritance from South America to me on the same day I suffered a disaster. I’d always felt a connection to Colombia because my mother had returned to the States pregnant at the end of her Peace Corps tour in that country. But that I would get an inheritance out of the blue thirty-one years later was completely dumbfounding. So were the circumstances that brought me to financial ruin.

  Out of college, I had gone to work for a vineyard in Napa Valley that was out to make a name for itself. With an MBA in marketing, I wanted to work in the food and drink industry, having an ambition in the back of my head of someday running a chain of upscale restaurants. When I found out the winery needed a marketing director, I jumped to get an interview because it had a prestigious reputation despite the fact it was a small operation.

  I ended up working there three years, learning how wine was made and marketed. I liked the job, but everything about wine was too slow for me—it took years to grow, make, and age the stuff. I moved on, in and out of several different business areas, before I discovered I had a talent for analyzing business operations.

  From my last year in grad school through three years at the vineyard, I’d had a relationship with an up-and-coming San Francisco advertising exec. I liked him and thought in terms of marriage and kids, but I realized too late there was something missing in our relationship—he wasn’t as committed as I was.

  When an opportunity came for me to move to Seattle for a high-paying job with a business think tank, I found out that he wasn’t ready for marriage, at least not with me. I told him I’d been offered the Seattle job but would turn it down to stay in the Bay Area with him; he stunned me by saying I should take it. “It’s a good career move,” he said.

  “You fucking bastard,” had been my reply. I don’t usually talk like that, either, but sometimes these things leap off my tongue before I can stop them.

  But he had been right—the offer was more money and opportunity—so it was time to burn my bridges in San Fran and head north.

  The Seattle “think tank” was a firm that solved business problems and objectives of large corporations: increase sales, decrease overhead, expand or contract, open up a new territory, drop an old product line, develop a new one. The analytical process was the same regardless of the problem or objective, using a multi-disciplinary group to research and discuss the situation pretty much like military “think tanks” solved problems for the armed forces.

  With an inquisitive mind, I was a natural for the job. Ambitious and a workaholic, I’d risen from team leader to vice president in charge of operational analysis, the core moneymaking aspect of the company, in two years. Along the way I’
d acquired an engagement ring from a man whom I expected to spend the rest of my life with.

  David was the chief financial officer, the guy who counted the firm’s money. His loving, doting aunt was the widow of one of the founders. David and I hit it off immediately and became lovers after I’d gotten promoted to vice president—I didn’t want anyone to claim I’d made it on anything but hard work. After I’d gotten the big promotion, there was office talk that when the other founder retired, I’d be a shoo-in for the job.

  David popped the question and I said yes. Life looked like it had endless options, all good.

  I shook my aching head, just thinking about it. Just a year ago, I’d had a secure career, a regular paycheck, a condo, and money in the bank—and a fiancé. But I’d been working too hard—and been too blind—to see the land mines.

  Even though I was doing well working for a corporation, and saw myself running the think tank company, I’d always had a secret desire to work for myself. Not running a small business, but launching one that grew into a financial empire. My business models were Mrs. Fields of cookie fame and Martha Stewart of home and garden.

  My mother had been taken away from me in a car accident when I was twenty, but before that she had often talked about the two of us starting a coffee business, a chain of stores specializing in coffee drinks like those in Europe. After she’d worked in the Colombian coffee region during her Peace Corps stint, she came back a coffee addict.

  She passed beyond sorrow, as the Tibetans wisely describe death, about the time the Seattle retail coffee industry was on its way to go national with a chain called Starbucks.

  With my business analysis background, I found it interesting that Starbucks’s path to national prominence had an analogy to the planet’s most successful food chain, McDonald’s. In both cases, a smart businessman who was a stranger to the industry had discovered that somebody was doing something right—and taken the “something right” national.

  McDonald’s success started when Ray Kroc, a Chicago milk-shake machine salesman, went out west to San Bernardino, a parched, dusty town an hour east of L.A., to find out why a single hamburger joint named McDonald’s was using eight of his five-shakes-at-a-time machines. He discovered that the McDonald brothers had a talent for making popular fast food. And Kroc had the talent and ambition to build a retail food empire.

  Starbucks was a small chain with five or six coffee stores in Seattle when it caught the eye of a plastics salesman named Howard Schultz. Schultz wondered why the little company ordered so many drip brewing thermoses from the Swedish manufacturer he represented. Like Ray Kroc’s realization that the McDonald brothers had a winning formula he could pick up and run with, Schultz realized the world was waiting for the right cup of coffee. And the rest is retail history.…

  But the opportunity to get my feet wet in my own business started more like a drowning.

  I think David actually loved me, at least I hope he did, but he was one of those men who were too polygamous to stay faithful. Maybe if I’d been an understanding woman who realized that some men stray and come back, it would have been different. But not only did I lack understanding and compassion for a sonofabitch who cheated on me; he added insult to injury by sticking his dick in the wrong place—in this case, my cute new assistant who had everything I didn’t have: melon boobs, cupid lips, firm tush, all the beauty marks of a modern woman who spends every spare cent on plastic surgery.

  All right, I don’t know that any of it was phony, but it didn’t really matter; it really boiled down to a question of loyalty and common sense—you don’t fuck your boss’s fiancé.

  The worst part was that because I was so busy working to make money for the company, I was the only one who didn’t know the two were getting it on, often right in his office.

  A work friend clued me in on what was going on while we were out Christmas shopping. When I returned to the office and saw the knowing looks the staff exchanged when the little slut headed toward David’s office, love turned to hate. He had not only hurt me as a woman; he’d humiliated me at the office.

  The bastard and the slut had to pay.

  Planning revenge was a natural for a woman who specialized in analyzing problems the same way the military analyzed combat situations. I thought of it as just another problem to solve: How do I get even by cutting off David’s dick so no other woman would have to suffer humiliation, and chop off the slut’s knees and sew her mouth shut so she’d never be able to kneel down and give another man a blow job at the office?

  Christmastime fit nicely into the scheme I envisioned. Because we had so many business clients, we threw two Christmas parties before we wrapped up the holidays with a third office party for the staff and their families.

  Realizing that with all the booze and flirting that goes on at Christmas parties it would be inevitable that David and Slut would sneak to his office to knock off a quickie, I bought a video camera with a motion-detection feature that turned the camera on when movement came within its range. I hid it in his office during the first party and got nothing for my troubles except David coming and going. During the second party, I struck pay dirt—David came into the office; Slut came in; he locked the door.

  The video caught it all—he bent her over his desk, pulled her dress up and piled it on top of her back, pulled down her panties—she had not worn panty nose, of course. When her panties were off, he bent down and kissed both cheeks of her tush.

  Dear God … she wiggled and giggled as he bit at them.

  She spun around and unzipped his pants. Calling his penis “my hero” (oh God!), she got onto her knees and swallowed it, sucking it like a lollipop, unclenching her mouth hold to ogle up at him with juices running down the corner of her mouth.

  Short of time, he put her back over the desk, pulled back up the dress, stuck his cock in, and pumped, shooting in less time than it takes to say wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.

  Slut went into ecstasy, moaning and twisting as if she’d just been fucked by Don Juan.

  The little bitch faked her orgasm.

  When I watched the tape later, a drink in one hand, a handkerchief in the other to wipe away tears, I broke out laughing when I realized her moans of ecstasy were as phony as a whore’s. Which she was.

  And then she told him it was the best sex she’d ever had.

  I howled with laughter, spilling wine on my dress and onto the rug, but I didn’t care. She was so phony and he was so damn vain, he bought every false moan and bat of her extralong, store-bought eyelashes.

  God, men who think with their dicks are so stupid.

  The video was priceless. I had only intended to leave it on his desk, along with a copy of my letter of resignation, then ride away into the sunset, sure that he would wither from love lost …

  But after seeing how utterly stupid he was, and what a truly conniving bitch she was, I decided to share this piece of video art with the world.

  When the office Christmas party came around, I had gift-wrapped copies of the video under the tree. I labeled it “Office Party.”

  I only wish I had been a fly on the wall in homes of our coworkers when they played the video to their family and friends.…

  3

  Half a Valium was usually enough to let me drift into sleep, but my mind and body were too wound up. At least the feeling of nausea was gone and the pain had lessened around my eyes.

  I got out of bed and went to the balcony and opened the door, keeping the blanket wrapped around me.

  I loved the view of Puget Sound. The waters were metallic under the gray sky. The Sound was an inlet from the Pacific Ocean indenting into Washington State. Almost one hundred miles long, and navigable by large ships and pleasure boats, the Sound made Seattle a major port miles from the open sea. It was named after a British naval officer named Puget who accompanied the explorer George Vancouver to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1700s.

  From another window I could also see the Space Needle located at the S
eattle Center, the site of the 1962 world’s fair. The Needle stood over six hundred feet high, had been built for the fair, and had a revolving restaurant on top. I’d heard that in a bizarre stunt during the “streaking” phase a naked man once dangled from a small plane as it circled the Needle’s restaurant level. Fifteen minutes of fame by letting it all hang out.

  I wanted to live in the downtown area because of the energy and excitement in the heart of the city. I was within walking distance or a short bus ride of historic landmarks, shopping, restaurants, and the waterfront.

  My favorite place was the Pike Place Market. That’s why I chose it for my store. The market had something for everyone, from junk jewelry to unique pieces of art. Tree-lined First Avenue had an assortment of clothing boutiques, restaurants, and cafés. The first Starbucks coffee store was even located nearby.

  And not too far away was Pioneer Square when I wanted nightlife. The Square even had the city’s most unusual tourist attraction: an underground “city” composed of a five-block area. Subterranean sidewalks and storefronts ended up underground when street levels were raised as much as thirty-five feet following a disastrous fire over a hundred years ago.

  I did a lot of walking, even though I had a VW Bug that had once belonged to my mother. The Bug had transported me through college and now was kept running by a good mechanic that I was lucky to find.

  I liked Seattle, as much as I had liked San Francisco when I lived there. The city is built across hills and ridges and surrounded by beautiful scenery—the jagged Olympic Mountains to the west and the volcanic peaks of the Cascade Range, which includes Mount Rainer, to the east.

  They call Seattle the Emerald City because rain and mists keep the surroundings fresh and green, but the average temperature is not that cold because the city is warmed by the Japan current, shielded by the Olympic Mountains from excessive winter rains, and protected by the Cascades from winter blasts.