The Razor Files
by
Tor Richardson
Copyright 2011 © Tor Richardson
Published by Grey Cat Press
Smashwords Edition
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* * *
The Razor Files
by
Tor Richardson
Prologue
"No, I will not accept your apology. Go away. Leave me alone!"
Paul Mahoney glared down at the tiny man in the red jacket and black slacks who stood behind the silver serving cart outside his hotel room door. The room-service waiter had a white linen towel draped over a bent arm from the crook of his elbow to well beyond his hand, with a look of contrived regret peeking out from behind a greasy goatee.
Wrong room?
Wrong room, indeed!
"Allow me to make amends, Mister... um..."
"Mahoney," Paul snapped. "Not Williams. Mahoney."
"Yes, Mister Mahoney," the man replied. "It was a dreadful mistake, as I tried to explain. In my haste to deliver this fine meal while it was still hot, I mistakenly stepped from the elevator onto the wrong floor—"
"How could you possibly do that?" Paul demanded, interrupting the long-winded excuse. "This entire hotel has only five floors. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. You see? It's not all that hard. Try it."
The man was an idiot. It wasn't as if his task was even as challenging as—say—counting past ten. He should have easily managed the task, even without taking off his shoes.
Paul knew of horses that could do the exact same thing.
"As you say," the waiter replied, bobbing into a half-bow.
Perspiration broke from the man's forehead as Paul once again tried to shut the door, but he gave up and continued to glare angrily through unforgiving eyes after discovering that the cart still blocked the doorway.
Beneath his greasy black hair, the waiter's twitchy gaze flicked to the left. Paul's eyes tracked right, following the man's gaze down the sterile hall—freshly-painted white walls with a phony waist-high wainscoting, a red rug with fine black lines woven throughout to help hide any stains, and a series of cheesy brass light fixtures resembling candle holders affixed beside doors that staggered on alternating sides down the hallway.
At the last door, the elderly woman with the walker who'd stepped from the elevator at the end of the hall continued to worry her keycard in her lock. She'd been at it since moments after the idiot banged on his door. From the looks of things, she'd still be at it long after the man was gone.
"In my country, it is a grave insult not to offer apologies for disturbing a man in his home—"
"Well, we're not in your country," Paul snapped. "We're in California. We do things a little differently around here. When we accidentally bang on someone's door, we leave when we're told. Now, leave me alone!"
Even if a person could step from an elevator onto the wrong floor—a not-too-inconceivable event—that person would still need to search the hallway for the correct room number before banging on any of the doors.
And even if that same person could somehow manage to confuse room five-ten with room three-ten, a simple check of the order ticket would have revealed the mistake.
There'd been absolutely no reason to go banging on Paul's door for a second time after being told of the error—and certainly not just to ask if there might be anyone else in the room who could have ordered the meal!
"My apologies again, but that does not change my situation—"
"Fine," Paul said. "You know what? Apology accepted, if that'll get you out of here. Now... go away and leave me alone. I'm done with you."
"May I offer you a complementary dessert to make amends? I have a wonderful slice of chocolate raspberry cheesecake under glass downstairs."
Paul's mind seized up at the suggestion.
Words failed him for the first time in years.
"Cheesecake?"
Without even realizing it, Paul's eyes rolled up to the ceiling at the suggestion. An entire cheesecake might cost the hotel ten bucks. A slice of that cheesecake might cost ninety cents. If this moron knew how much Paul made per minute, he'd faint dead away... and he'd certainly never insult Paul again by suggesting a piece of pie could compensate him for his time.
"Yes, sir. A most excellent cheesecake."
Paul looked back to the waiter, catching the man's eyes probing into the darkened room—flicking past the television that blared from the top of the low dresser at the foot of the bed and sweeping across the air conditioner below the window.
Stiffening, Paul pulled the door tightly to his side.
"No, I don't want your cheesecake. I've already told you what I want. I want you to go away and leave me the hell alone!"
Shoving on the cart, Paul stepped back and closed the door firmly in the waiter's face. It wasn't a slam, but it was a definite statement, nonetheless.
"Cheesecake," Paul muttered, returning to the bathroom and looking into the mirror. A round-faced businessman wearing black glasses and a three-piece suit stared back.
Leaning forward, Paul touched the cut at the side of his chin—a maddening memento courtesy of a rude waiter banging on a door at the wrong moment and causing a razor to slip. The cut was already beginning to swell. Some faces could handle nicks and cuts, but not his. In an hour, he'd look like he'd been stung by a bee.
So much for his plans to pop out to Los Angeles for a night on the town.
Paul Mahoney would be staying indoors tonight.
Alone.
...all thanks to some idiot waiter who couldn't count past five.
Switching off the light, Paul walked back into the bedroom, shrugging out of his suit coat and draping it across the back of the chair at the corner writing desk. He'd hastily put it on before answering the door. He needn't have bothered. The waiter likely hadn't even recognized the courtesy.
In the end, breeding always showed.
Snagging the television remote from the nightstand, he relaxed onto the bed, tucking his left arm behind the pillow at his head. Resolving to forget about the waiter, he set his glasses on his chest and resumed the only leisure activity he'd managed to maintain during ten years of traveling the country as a freelance auditor: channel surfing.
Paul stared at the television set, paying little attention to the blurred commercials that broke across the screen to the tempo of his finger tapping on the remote. When Paul surfed, he didn't pay attention to what was on the screen. Instead, he rode the waves of shifting colors to soothe his tired eyes and plunged into the pounding cadence of the music to drive the day's troubling thoughts from his mind.
This was a time to relax.
This was a time to shift gears and shed Paul-the-Auditor in favor of Paul-the-Person, but it was hard to shut out the too-many spreadsheets and the too-tiny numbers that tumbled through his head. There was a disturbing story taking shape at the failing insurance company he was investigating, and Paul-the-Auditor didn't like what that story seemed to say.
A blast of cool air swept across Paul's cheeks.
The air conditioner growled, straining from a sharp gust of wind that blew against the exhaust vent outside. Beyond the closed curtains, the Santa Anna winds were having a field day, racing in from the blistering desert to roar through arid canyons filled with dried grass and scrub brush. There'd be another wildfire before too long. It was only a matter of time. Southern California only had three seasons—green, brown, and black.
Sometimes, black came early.
With the return of the fires would come more insurance claims. With the return of insurance claims would come more too-tiny numbers on more too-many spreadsheets, bringing more odd-looking financial reports and many more questions.
...and the need for more answers from hired financial guns, like Paul.
Troubling or not, Paul Mahoney would find those answers.
He always did, and he always would.
The growl subsided and Paul's finger paused.
He'd stumbled across a game show, the one that offered free money to anyone who understood financial probabilities and expected cash flows.
Retrieving his glasses, he saw a male contestant, tall with a thick tangle of dark hair, nervous eyes and a strained smile. He faced three unopened cases: one worth five thousand dollars; another worth ten thousand; and the last worth a cool half-million.
The kid was over his head; he didn't have a clue.
Paul smiled at how quickly his own overworked brain tossed aside the troubling audit questions and dived into the new economic puzzle. An expected value of one-hundred-and-seventy thousand dollars popped into his head, give or take a few thousand dollars.
Paul's finger itched to continue its surfing but he held back, curious to see what kind of discount rate the television show's producer would offer the nervous kid. Would the bumpkin understand the deal he'd be offered, or would it be just another toss of the dice to him?
The Master of Ceremonies put down the phone and turned to face the contestant. The MC was a famous actor. Paul couldn't remember his name. He looked good, though—better than he had in any of his movies: fit and trim, with a snappy suit and a confident smile.
Good for him.
Paul liked it when people that he felt he knew got ahead.
The actor spoke with the quiet, measured cadence that promised the secrets of the universe—but only if one listened very closely.
"One. Hundred. Twenty. Thousand. Dollars."
A thirty percent discount?
Paul's mind reeled from the audacity of the offer.
...and he screamed a moment later when the kid agreed.
"Moron!" Paul shouted, barely resisting the urge to fling the remote at the screen. Some people were simply too stupid to live, but there was still a smidgen of justice left in the universe. After the actor played his game of opening the cases to reveal the truth, the kid was forced to realize that he'd been sitting on the winning case all along.
It might not have been a lesson in discount rates and expected values, but at least the moron was forced to admit that he'd screwed up—even if he would never fully understand all the different ways in which he had.
A sharp pounding came from the door.
Paul jumped.
"Room service, Mister Mahoney!"
Speaking of morons...
"Leave me alone!"
"I have that cheesecake for you, sir."
Paul growled, climbing off the bed and stomping across the room. He glanced briefly at his jacket, but decided against putting it on. Normally, he'd never answer the door without one, but this man had tried his patience once too often to deserve even that much civility.
"What was it about the phrase, 'leave me the hell alone,' that you didn't understand?" he demanded, snagging the knob and yanking the door open.
As expected, the waiter stood on the other side.
This time, however, his green eyes held no apologies—insincere or otherwise. Cold and unsmiling, they stared out with an unexpected detachment as the linen-draped arm swung up. A hollow black disk peeked out from beneath the towel's leading edge.
Before Paul could say another word, a pencil of flame lanced out from that disk. A muffled thwack rang in his ears, like the smacking of a ruler on a wrist. A slam like a hammer blow rocked Paul's chest.
...and pain!
A second shot followed the first.
Paul staggered back, a tingling warmth spreading across his arms and legs; a whine filling his ears, high and insistent and drowning out both the sound of the television and the rattling air conditioner.
Chin dropping, Paul looked to the two little holes in his chest and the blood pouring down the front of his spotless white shirt.
This time there was no mistaking the contemptuous sneer as the waiter reached out and yanked the door out of Paul's hand, pulling it firmly shut. It wasn't a slam, but it was a definite statement, nonetheless.
On the television, another country bumpkin stepped into the limelight. The air conditioner rumbled again, renewing its insistent warning of the impending firestorm. Neither the wind nor the television noticed as Paul's legs buckled and he dropped to his knees.
A darkness crept in from the edge of his vision, a dark tunnel.
With the light fading, Paul Mahoney—former freelance auditor—slumped silently against the closed hotel room door.
Chapter One
None of us were particularly thrilled when the boss went on the warpath. It was one of her favorite pastimes, though. She did it so often, in fact, that it was no longer really a proper path. It had become more of a broad roadway, instead—stamped flat and polished by the constant slapping of her angry feet. But the warpath was the only route that Leisha Sanders ever took to reach our cubicles, anymore. That was both good and a bad—good because we knew what to expect every time she left her super cube near the window on the other side of the office, but bad because we couldn't avoid our fate—even when we could all clearly see it coming.
Anticipation was sometimes a bitch; but then, so was she.
Everyone shared in her wrath, even if she had her favorites—those chosen few who she enjoyed making squirm more often than the others.
Even among her favorites, though, she had a favorite.
...and, joy of joys, that favorite happened to be me.
So, it was with no surprise that I glanced up from my tiny cubicle on that fateful Friday morning to see the boss stomping down the warpath, plowing unerringly through the dark maze of clerical cubby-holes, filing cabinets, and interlocking partitions with her eyes firmly fixed on me. I'd done nothing wrong—not that I could remember—but her internal clock must have reminded her that she hadn't yet yelled at me all morning.
It was ten o'clock.
The yelling session was long overdue.
Leisha was a big woman, but not in the politically-correct sense of the word that they used out here in sunny California. She was big in the sense of the word that we used back in Joplin. She was tall, with strong arms and wide shoulders. I was no slouch, but she had a square frame with solid muscles that could give me a run for my money at wrestling or boxing.
I'd grown up on a Missouri farm to earn my muscles.
What was her excuse?
Leisha had the most annoying brown eyes that could catch fire in an instant. She also had curly, brown hair that would have looked trendy on a poodle, but I doubted that anyone ever said so... not to her face, at least. She had a strong jaw and the heavy eyebrows that some men found attractive in a woman. Other men, but not me... which was fortunate, since she was my boss, and since she was also a royal, flaming pain in the ass.
I had no desire to get mixed up with her kind of woman.
Never again.
Glancing down at my desk, I looked for contraband... taking quick stock of the scattered piles of papers, pens, and sticky-notes that covered the surface. Trouble was already on the way, but there was no sense inviting more of it than was absolutely necessary to the party.
Spotting my CD player beneath a folder, I casually opened the top drawer so she wouldn't notice any sudden arm movements and then slowly swept it inside, along with a forbidden pack of chewing gum. Spearmint flavored—such a rebel.
"What am I paying you for, Mister Crane?" Leisha asked as she neared my cubicle. A thump rattled the cubicle wall and I looked up, a warm smile on my face. Leisha's thick forearms rested on the top of the wall, a single sheet of paper clutched tightly in her fist.
"To process invoices, ma'am," I said in one of my most congenial tones, adding a warm touch of southern hospitality for good measure. She was one to hear insults where none existed and, as I'd already said, there was no sense inviting any more trouble to the party.
She shook the paper.
Her knuckles whitened.
"And?" she demanded.
I'd clearly done something wrong. It wasn't surprising, since I was still fairly new, but she never saw it that way. She'd been the accounting supervisor for ten years and didn't remember how steep the learning curve could be with all the funny insurance terms, the bizarre procedures, and the strange processing rules. I cut her some slack, though. If I was stuck in this profession—like she was—I'd probably be cranky, too. For me, this wasn't a career. It was just a paycheck.
"To input the invoices into the system, ma'am," I added, working hard to scrub all traces of what she called my hick accent from my voice. We'd had that conversation a fair number of times, too.
"And?" she asked, her mouth thin and eyes smoldering.
"To create journal entries—"
"Exactly," she barked, slapping her free hand down on the top of the partition and then sweeping around the short wall and through the narrow opening into my cubicle. She wore her tight black skirt again, along with the thread-bare light brown blouse that fit too tightly at the waist and too loosely up top, revealing far more each time she bent over than would be considered decent back home. Slamming the paper onto my desk, she bent down to tap the journal entry that she'd carried in her fist.
"Would you care to tell me what this is?" she demanded.
My eyes followed her movement for a moment as she bent down, but then zipped away as I recognized what was about to happen. They made it to the paper in record time, but not before catching a flash of an open shirt and a hint of red silk beneath.
I shuddered as the image of this she-man in a red bra burned my brain.
Plunging my eyes into the neutrality of the unoffending journal entry, I blinked rapidly to scour away the nasty afterimage. "It looks like a paid loss invoice," I told her, my eyes beginning to water.
"And?" she asked, standing up and crossing her arms. She wasn't going to tell me why she was mad. I'd need to figure it out on my own.
Picking up the paper, I wiped my eyes and flipped over to the invoice clipped behind the journal entry to refresh my memory. It was one of the easier reinsurance transactions that I'd booked during the week, ten thousand dollars payable to a sister company, Soloton General Casualty Company, for some business we'd assumed from them. The supporting materials had seemed to check out, so I'd booked it.
I looked at the eight line items on the journal entry, reaching for my cheat sheet and carefully checking both the account numbers and the directions of the cash flows against my examples.
I'd booked the paid losses up by ten thousand dollars and bumped the accounts payable up by ten thousand dollars, as I should have. I'd taken the reserve account down by ten thousand dollars—which I'd forgotten to do the last time—and also taken down the change in reserve account. This time, it looked like I'd even remembered that our company, the Soloton General Insurance Company, had syndicates sharing in our losses, so I'd mirrored the entries on the ceded books to let the collections people go to work.
One invoice; eight ledger entries.
A person could get lost in all those numbers.
It seemed perfectly goofy, but that was the way I was told insurance was reported. People called actuaries had already guessed at the amount of losses any given policy would suffer. They'd already booked those losses in advance. We were merely recording that the losses had finally happened, and that we were sending reimbursement checks out the door.
"I give up, ma'am," I told her.
Bending down again, her finger stabbed a line near the bottom of the page... a line where I should have recorded the sum of the individual entries from the sections above.
The line was blank.
Reaching over, I wrote forty thousand on both the debit side and credit side of the line–
"Mister Crane!"
"Sorry, ma'am, I forgot."
Powering up my adding machine, I tapped out ten thousand dollars on the key pad and hit the addition key four times. The machine ka-chunked and verified that the sum of the four entries on the debit side of the page was, in fact, forty thousand dollars. I repeated the process for the credit column and turned off my machine. Four times ten was forty, even without a calculator. That was the way we learned it on the farm, but they did some things differently out here in California.
Maybe that applied to basic mathematics, as well.
"I expect you to pay more attention to detail in the future, Mister Crane," she said.
Then she was gone, stomping back off up the warpath into the weak sunlight filtering through the gloomy hallway from the distant windows.
* * *
"I expect you to pay more attention to detail in the future, Mister Crane."
Bob Johnson mimicked Leisha's voice from the cubicle across the aisle.
Bob was a bit of a jerk, sometimes more so than others.
...like now.
"Go soak your head," I growled.
Hunched over at his chair, Bob grinned through the opening of his cube, staying well below the top of the partition in case Leisha should happen to glance back on her way to her super cube—a cubicle twice as large as ours and reserved exclusively for supervisors. Bob's dark hair was uncombed, as usual, and his black glasses were crooked on his nose. The button-down shirt he wore was the same shade of pea green as the aging carpet beneath the rollers of his squeaky chair. Bob always wore button-downs so he'd have a pocket for the pocket protector that sat proudly at his chest. Before I came to California, I'd thought pocket protectors to be extinct, but Bob never went anywhere without one.
"Can't," he replied, sitting up and spinning his chair around to face his desk. "Brain this big won't fit in the sink."
"A head that big, you mean."
He laughed at the stale joke, the same as he always did. It was part of the banter he seemed to expect of me. Depending on his mood, Bob could be one of the sharpest businessmen I'd ever met, or a six-year-old child.
Today, it was the infant.
"Why do we keep coming to this place?" he asked as he began running a long series of numbers on his adding machine. One of our more tedious tasks was adding up reams of tiny numbers from loss reports—bordereau—and checking the total against the invoice before paying it. Supposedly, each number on a bordereau represented a loss payment, although nobody ever told me how to verity that. There were up to fifty lines per page and they were sometimes several inches thick. Bordereau was a French word. I didn't know exactly how it translated, but judging from how bored I got whenever I processed one, I was sure the French had picked the right word.
"It's a good company," I told him. "It pays the bills."
"Unlike that last company of yours?" he asked, plowing through the numbers on his adding machine. "Chicks and guns. I tell you, that had to be off the hook. Did you stick your tongue in her ear? I tell you... why doesn't anything cool like that ever happen to me?"
"I should never have said a thing," I told him, shaking my head. "Get back to work, Bob. You're going to get me in trouble."
Bob chuckled, but did as I asked.
During my first week at Soloton General, I'd made the mistake of telling Bob about the title company where I'd worked before. It had happened on Friday. From what I was later told, the insurance commissioner always seized bankrupt companies on Fridays because it gave him the entire weekend to poke around in the office and think up something to tell the press on Monday morning. Anyway, none of us had any idea that anything was wrong... not until the California Highway Patrolmen walked through the front door, followed by a man with a briefcase and the sour look on his face.
But the patrolmen had been women, instead.
I didn't know that part until later, when one of them stopped by to drop something off with the commissioner's people. She'd been a bitsy little thing in a yellow polo shirt with a dazzling smile—someone I could easily have asked to dinner. But on that Friday morning, wearing black state-of-the-art body armor with her hair tucked up beneath a riot helmet, and with that hand cannon dangling down in its hip holster to well below her knee, I didn't have a clue what gender she might be... nor did I care.
I'd made the mistake of telling Bob that her transformation had been the most shocking thing about that entire ordeal.
He'd found that revelation most amusing.
After that, I learned never to tell guy-things to an infant.
"Hey, here's an idea," Bob said, stopping his marathon run on the ten-key and spinning in his squeaky chair to look at me. "Why don't we head up to Malibu for lunch? A little fresh air and ocean sunshine might do a slacker like you some good, especially after the pounding you just took."
"As I recall, you don't like the sand."
"I never said anything about sand. I was talking about fresh air and sunshine, not silica down my shorts. I know this little place up the PCH on the other side of Malibu that makes the world's best fish-n-chips. What do you say, Axel?"
"I can't," I told him. "Alice dumped me and kicked me out. I'm going to be a little short of cash for a while."
I was surprised at how well I kept the bitterness from my voice.
Alice Newbie had been the reason I'd come to California. I'd met her at college and followed her out here after graduation. I should have known that once she was back in familiar settings, she'd get tired of hanging out with a Missouri farm boy. She preferred bleached teeth and the smell of tanning oil to a crooked grin and the sweat of an honest day's work.
"What?" Bob hissed, struggling to keep his voice down. "No way, dude. Where are you staying? What about all your stuff?"
"Stuff?" I snorted. "She said everything in her apartment was hers and told me to get off her porch before she called the cops."
"And you let her? You just left? Dude, you're a wimp. She wanted you to fight back. She wanted you to put those guns of yours to good use," he said, flexing his arms and striking a comic muscleman pose.
"Not after threatening me with cops. I watch the news. I know how that goes. Best to leave in one piece than hang around and be beaten or tazed, and then arrested for resisting... maybe even shot. It's not worth it, even if it means starting over, or maybe going home."
Bob shook his head. "Your dad wouldn't let you hear the end of it."
"Yeah, well. On the bright side, nothing else can possibly go wrong."
"Where are you staying?" Bob asked again.
"I found a place outside Agoura. It does weekly rates. It's more than I wanted to pay, but I didn't have much choice. Not on such short notice. Anyway, I'm going easy on the cash until I get it sorted out."
Before he could reply, heavy footsteps approached from down the aisle. They weren't the sharp staccato of Leisha's heels. They were deeper, solid, more measured...
Boots.
Looking up, my breath caught in my chest.
"You've got to be kidding me," I whispered.