Chapter 2

            Mike Carmini fingered the sharp edge of the silvery knife in his top desk drawer.  Honed to a vicious edge, the knife teased his thumb as he passed it over the steel.  He raised his liquid brown eyes to me.  “Fuck yourself,” he said.

            “Now, Mike, that’s no way to talk to a lady,” I said.  He knew I could see the knife, because he was holding his hand deliberately at an angle where it would be just, ever so slightly visible to me.  But I wasn’t intimidated.  I have the reflexes of a cat, and a black belt to back them up.  He knew neither of these things.  All he saw was an attractive, yes, I am sure, woman of a certain age, with long, thick auburn hair carefully kept auburn by repeated applications of the finest of Clairol products, creamy skin, almond eyes, and a lithe, taut figure that belies my mature years.  He did not know that this figure was kept lithe by strenuous daily dojo workouts, sparring with men far more agile, strong, and younger than Mike Carmini.  On the other hand, Mike had a knife.

            “Put the shiv down, big guy,” I said with a smile.  “I’m here to tell you the reality of your situation, and I’m not going to be put off by a little armament display.”

            “Armament display?  Is that even a word?”

            “Don’t fence with me, Mike. Let’s talk turkey.” I looked past the ugly bobble-hipped hula dolls that gathered dust on his office desk, to the two-way mirror behind him that looked out over the gaming floor.  “You needed money.  You’ve got an entire bingo casino at your fingertips, there’s money flying all over the place here, and yet, you needed money.  How’d that happen?”

            “You know how that happened, Lisa.”

            He thinks my name is Lisa.  In my generation, half of the girls in my class were named Linda, and the rest were evenly divided among Lisa, Susan, and Sherry.  No one was ever named Tiffany.  That was a store, or a lamp.  That’s how you could tell girls born in the 50s from girls born in the first half of the 60s.  In the sixties, they were all named Tiffany.

            Brittney, Courtney, and Kendall came much, much later.

            My name isn’t Lisa, but I told him it was, and it’s been Lisa ever since.  It works, in my line of business, to have a nice, easy name, one that doesn’t scare the crap out of people.  And besides, his name isn’t really Mike, either.  It’s Michaelangelo.  But he’s only a third rate con artist.  No one is ever going to ask him to paint a Sistine Chapel, or run the con equivalent.

            “Sure, Mike.  I know how that happened.  A man can’t skim forever."  And with auditors breathing down his neck, he had had to raise some cash pretty fast.  So, enter Lisa’s Loans.  But that’s not what I meant.  “What I want to know is how you let this happen.  This, being the fact that you can’t make your payment.  So, give me your best sob story, and let’s see if I fall for it.”

            Mike fixed me with his puppy dog eyes.  “It’s like this.”  Every lie starts with either It’s like this, or Quite frankly.  “Quite frankly,” he continued.  I had to force myself not to roll my eyes.  The next thing you knew, he was going to lean forward with his palms up, entreating me.  “You gotta believe me, Lisa,” he said, leaning forward, palms up, entreating.  Three for three.  “I did try to get the cash together.  It’s just, well, my source seems to have disappeared.”

            “Source?  Who you got this problem out-sourced to?”  At one time, I didn’t know that you could out-source debt.  That was before 2008, when our Federal Government taught me how. 

            “I had this friend, she was supposed to help me increase profitability around here.  And she did, too.  In fact, we were doing a lot better, and I was going to have fifty grand for you this afternoon…”

            “It was supposed to be a hundred,” I said curtly.  I don’t like when people monkey with my numbers.  It’s insulting.

            “I know, Lisa, I know.  But we couldn’t turn things around that fast.  I mean, the Feds, you know, they’re looking at everything, ever since we got in all that dumbass trouble a couple of years ago.  Now I’ve got a good shark, and he keeps us clean, but if we’re clean, it’s hard to make any real good money.  So, anyway, this friend, she was showing me how I could really improve profitability, without upsetting the government, and now she’s gone, somewhere. And now I'm screwed."

“Yes, Mike, you really are.”  He was.  I know truth in my bones.  “So, when did your friend disappear?”

            “About forty-five minutes ago.”

            “What?? She’s probably just gone shopping or something.  You can’t disappear in forty-five minutes!”

            “The money’s gone too.  She wouldn’t need all of it for shopping.”  He was right.  I hate when that happens.

            “Okay.  Maybe she’s taken the money.  Was it in actual cash?”

            “Of course.  How else would we hide it from the Feds?  I mean, what do I look like, some kind of computer genius hacker kid from Palo Alto?”  No, he looked like an Italian American from Mount Kisco, but I wasn’t going to say that.  “And I got a bigger problem than just you.”

            “I resent that.  I am your biggest problem, Mike.  You owe me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  One hundred thousand of it was due today, and you don’t have it.  You weren’t even going to have it, before some cock and bull story about how your runaway friend here took the cash.  I am your biggest problem, Mike.”

            He stared at the hula girls, and then, covertly, went back to fingering his knife.  “No you’re not.”  He kept his eyes down.  “It’s a lot worse than I can tell you.  But trust me, you are not my biggest problem.”  He took the knife out.  I felt a little shiver.  Then, in a flash of insight, I realized it was himself he intended to stab. I jumped up on the desk, dropped down on his arm.  The knife clattered to the floor, but Mike’s scream was more than surprise.  I heard the sickening crack, as his arm snapped in two under my leg.  He was still screaming as I tucked into a crunch, hit the floor, and rolled into a sitting position. 

            I looked at Mike’s ashen face.  He stopped screaming as he went into shock.  I grabbed his phone, dialed 911, and shouted at the operator to send an ambulance.

            Then, with a quick glance at Mike, now writhing and rolling in pain, I wiped the phone clean, and slipped out the door of his office, down the darkened corridors of the rear of the casino, and out the service door.  I had almost made it to the freeway when I heard the sirens behind me.  I dutifully pulled over as an ambulance and a police car roared by. 

            I pressed the accelerator down to ease into the heavy, fast moving traffic, and blended smoothly into the center lane.  The sundried hills looked like sleeping lions as I sped by. Let Mike think a broken arm was the cost of missing a payment to Lisa’s Loans.