I stared at my screen again, more adamantly this time. With purpose.
It looked like she was sleeping. Fitfully. Her head lolled to the side. Her chest rising faster and faster. Like she was in the midst of some nightmare or the other. Hmm…well, I guess she kinda was. Though, the beginning of that nightmare hadn’t quite started yet.
Open your eyes, baby doll, I thought.
“Maddox? Seriously, dude. We're going to be there in ten minutes, don't you think we should go over the plan? A little?”
“I said give me a god damn minute.”
Martin looked as if he was going to protest, then thought better of it. He'd known me for quite a long time, which meant he knew just well when to push and when to back down. He waved me off, shook his head, and went to pour another martini, not spacing them out as he usually would.
Phoney Maria's eyelids fluttered open, and she turned her head to the other side. Then the other. Back at the ceiling, and at the camera. Perfect.
I captured her image – just her face – because phoney Maria's picture was going to be on its way to my secretary.
Subject line: Do You Know This Person?
Phyllis wouldn't ask any questions. Nor would she tell lies. She was our head gal for longer than I could remember. To be kept around for that long it meant she was sharp as a tack and loyal to a fault from the get-go and remained that way throughout the years. She was also everyone's favorite pencil pusher. And she never forgot a face.
I pulled my fingers apart, expanding the view of my lovely little office guest. Her lips were moving, and I think she was swearing at me. Yep, judging by the way her face twisted as she spoke, she was definitely swearing at me.
She cursed, she thrashed, then threw her head back on the pillow, arched her back, and I watched in reverent desire as the muscles in her neck and shoulders strained as she fought against my...custom design.
I tapped the lens, and captured her nearly full frontal nudity in all its toned, Spanish glory. She was captivating. Toned, and deliciously exotic. Yeah. Exotic.
“No, wait. Fuck this,” Martin slammed the bottle of gin in its holder. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”
“So what if I am? I can multi-task.”
“This is my rodeo, too, did you forget that? And Drixoll's nothing to fuck with.”
“You swear too much.” I put the phone in my breast pocket. My erection was knocking on my zipper again, and I didn't want to give it any unintended encouragement by brushing up against it. “We're giving Drixoll a pat on the head, perhaps their ass, then sending them on their way.”
“You're being too casual about this, Maddox.”
“That's kinda the idea.”
Martin got that look, once more. The one I knew so well, the one that said he didn't know who the hell was sitting across from him. We'd been playing good executive/bad executive for the better part of a decade, and once in a while, my disorder gave him reason to pause. We made a great team, though. And I think he liked the danger factor involved - never knowing what I was going to do, or when I was going to do it.
Unpredictability is a fantastic character trait. It all boils down to strategy, keeping one step ahead of everybody else. Knowing what your opponent is going to do before they do it. Because life is a chess game. And I excelled at chess.
Which is why I found phoney Maria so troubling. No one ever took me by surprise. I always knew someone's ulterior motive, the methods behind their madness. I was always four steps ahead, so why I didn't see a mad Hispanic coming for me with a gun stuck in a bucket of bleach didn't process correctly.
And I didn't want to wait until later to interrogate her, either.
But, what comes before pleasure is business. My business gave me all kinds of roads to pleasure.
If I wanted to maintain those highways, I had to tend to this latest pothole that came in the form of the Drixoll Corporation – a pharmaceutical company that manufactured some of the latest and greatest medicinal remedies for all kinds of ailments both real and imagined. From diarrhea to clinical depression, skin rashes to Attention Deficit Disorder, they had the chemical anecdote for everything. They even had a best-selling concoction to help with constipation brought on by taking too many prescription drugs. While I dug the irony, I did not dig Drixoll.
My distaste stemmed from a purely personal standpoint. I didn't like any of the Big Pharmas. Martin knew it, our primary shareholders knew it, so when I agreed to meet with their corporate honcho, more than a few eyebrows furrowed.
I had my reasons.
Drixoll didn't just want a piece of our pie. They wanted to be part of the filling, so to speak. To merge under the Petersen & Stiller umbrella would be a fiscal dream come true for any company. Anyone with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal knew an alliance-in-good-standing with Petersen & Stiller would put the most return on an investment.
Among other attributes, we were one of the few brokerages to come out of the great recession unscathed, and to this day came up first in any Google search of Most Successful Wealth Management companies. We were the alphas of the corporate pack even before Google, if you can imagine such a time. No wonder Drixoll wanted in.
“Just swear that your fucking phone is off, Maddox. You need to keep your hands out of your pants.”
“You need to stop telling me what to do, Martin. That’s never gone over well.”
“Nobody tells you what to do. But Drixoll's too important for you to be… distracted, shall we say?”
I shoved both my hands into my slacks, and smiled.
I liked Martin. He wasn't the merciless fuck that
