Heller and Shannon: Plans aborted. Plans born.

Doctor and Professor Faith Turner, M.D. sat down heavily in Dr. Theodore Fuimaono guest chair. “Level with me. How bad is it?”

“Total loss of enervation below both knees and below Lon’s left elbow. There appears to be some nerve function to the pinkie and ring finger on his right hand” Dr Fuimaono said.

“Bruised nerves?” Doctor Turner asked.

“Cut” Fuimaono replied “but the situation isn’t hopeless. There have been some amazing advances in stem-cell…”

“Cut the crap, Teddy. That is my department. Those “amazing advances” are in very young animals with no response after secondary sexual characteristics manifest.”

Doctor Turner was not at her best. She had flown into San Francisco and never turned on her phone and left orders at the front desk to not disturb her. For such a small woman she could be extremely intimidating.

She had no sooner awakened and turned on her phone when it blew up. She got back onto an eastbound jet, dehydrated and jet-lagged and flown back to Detroit Metro.

She had looked at the imaging and the reports. Now she wanted to talk to the humans.

Teddy was nearly as large of a man as Lon was. He looked down at Faith. “Patients need hope, especially when they have been as completely broken as Lon is. You don’t have to believe it. But he does.

“By the way, the Hospital Admin has you on Family Medical Leave. Anything you want, you ask and it is yours. We are family. We stick together” Fuimaono said.

“Thanks. But work is my therapy. I may be asking for more hours because, for now, I don’t have a home to go back to” Faith said. “The insurance company said they will put me up in any hotel in town.”

Twenty minutes later, she walked into Lon’s room. Hearing the door open-and-close, Lon moved his eyes to see had come in. As soon as he could make out that it was Faith, tears welled up in his eyes and he started weeping soundlessly.

“There, there, Babe. Its going to be all right” Faith crooned. “We have the world’s best doctors working on you and I promise that I will be with you every step of the way.”

The tears flooded down the side of Lon’s face.

He had been SO CLOSE to moving to the cabin in the Caribbean that Faith knew nothing about. It was on the island where he had been currying the favor of the local law-enforcement officials. They had been amply rewarded for being deaf and blind.

He had been moving assets and funneling them through accounts where he could take his skim from a distance.

He had been SO CLOSE. SO CLOSE! $21 million dollars for the property down the drain. No naive, vacationing beach-bunnies from Europe. No drugs. No parties. All gone.

And he was going to be bound to this...lizard with the coke-bottle glasses and the grating voice.

He listened to her drone on and on about stem-cell this and porcine that. SHIT. SHIT. SHIT. SHIT. The tears continued to flow…. 

***

Danny DelVechio was paid a stupid-large amount of money because he was very, very good at what he did. He choreographed the food at the largest casino in Michigan. He did it 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

He had an other-worldly ability to sense when a problem was developing and nipping it in the bud. This was one of those times.

"Hows comes I don't smell no bacon" he bellowed as he bulled his way through the main kitchen.

Danny delegated to a team of chefs. Nobody in Michigan delivered so many meals or kept so many square-yards of buffet table stocked. Gamblers who have food readily at hand never have to leave the table, their thrall and adrenaline-high is never interrupted.

Danny pulled up to the modified pizza-oven that cooked rashers of bacon by the hundred-weight on a continuous assembly line. His cook was already screaming at the hapless lads whose jobs it was to feed the assembly line.

There. Was. No. Bacon.

Danny had all of his suppliers on speed-dial. In a thrice, he was screaming into his phone "How come you didn't ship no fucking bacon!" into his phone.

The supplier on the other end screamed back "How come your fucking check bounced. I got bills. I get cut off when I can't pay them. No BACON. No SHRIMP. No PRIME RIB until you pay the bill!"

What the hell? That had never happened before. Danny called his expediter. "We gotta get bacon and shrimp or our ass is grass. Get on it. And then find out why the checks to our meat supplier bounced" Danny directed his "fixer".

Danny, and Danny's boss had no way of knowing that this was an advance tremor of the earthquake that was about to hit them. By 4:30, word would spread like wildfire that the paychecks had not dropped for the maids, cooks, truck-drivers and dealers associated with the casino and its suppliers. Second-shift started calling in. No pay. No workers.

Danny's casino would not be an isolated event.

***

Normally, Ken Aarons would not have driven all of the way from Novi to the Cracker Barrel restaurant on the west side of Lansing but one of his former clients, Clayton xxxxx had called him and personally vouched for the seriousness of the situation.

The couple seemed like a mismatch. The young woman, Shannon, did most of the talking. She was a titian-haired woman with Rubanesque proportions. The young man was quiet and went by the initials of L.R.

They wanted to talk business right from the get-go and Ken said there would be time to do that after eating. One does not talk serious legal business in a public restaurant.

He learned that they were both employed and had lucked into a windfall. They seemed smart and were just a bit on the paranoid side. For instance, neither had brought their cellphones which was unusual for people their age.

Just talking in broad generalities, Shannon said she thought they needed two weeks of his time and asked about his hourly rate. She didn’t blink an eye when he said $400 an hour.

Shannon responded “So a $30,000 retainer would be cover about two weeks?”

“Closer to nine working days, but yes, close” Aarons said.

Shannon had already priced out lawyers and $400 an hours in the middle of what established lawyers with good track records were charging.

“I hope you take crypto” Shannon said as she pulled a thumb-drive out of her purse.

Aarons looked over the top of his glasses. Shannon was obviously somebody who didn’t believe in wasting time on pleasantries.

“Let’s settle up the bill and then we can talk business in my van” Aarons said.

Which is how the three of them found themselves sitting in Aarons’ seven year-old minivan with the A/C running. “How do I know this crypto is any good?” Aarons asked.

“Which bank do you use?” Shannon asked.

Aarons told her “Chase Bank”.

Shannon said, “There is a branch three miles east of here. We walk into together and you deposit it. I can walk you through it.”

Impressive. Very, very impressive.

After hearing Shannon’s plan, Aarons said “You know you can get messengers much cheaper than what I have to charge.” He wasn’t planning on turning down the business but he wanted to see how they reacted.

“This is a test to see how quickly you can get the work done. We have more work for you if you perform adequately” Shannon said. L.R. nodded in silent agreement.

They went to the Chase branch on M-43 and Shannon walked him through turning the account information on the thumb-drive into a deposit.

Back in the van, Shannon gave him almost seventy, meticulously labeled thumb-drives and a list with names and addresses.

Aarons balked a little bit. “You will be paying me a hell of a lot to drive around”

Shannon said “One of the reasons we picked you is because you are in the Detroit area. Nearly all of the charities receiving these donations are down there.”

Scanning the list, Aarons saw that was true.

“You might as well drop off the donation to the Michigan American Legion while you are in Lansing” Shannon suggested. They were another two miles east of the Chase branch.

Aarons drove the couple back to their vehicle and then drove the the American Legion. The financial guy was a nervous looking man with a pronounced widow’s peak and was disinclined to humor Aarons but Ken could be very persuasive when he put his mind to it.

Both men were surprised when the amount of funds in the account unlocked by the thumb-drive yielded $3.5 million dollars, enough for $10k for every AmL post in Michigan.

Looking at his watch, Aarons saw he had enough time to hit the Interfaith Homeless charity in Jackson before it closed. He asked his new best-friend with the widow’s peak if he could call ahead to the Jackson charity to “grease-the-skids”. Aarons was suddenly motivated to squeeze as much Shannon and L.R. work into his already-full schedule as possible.