Daniel Ganninger - Icarus Investigations 01 - Flapjack (4 page)

-Chapter 7-
 

I still did not
know what my new job truly was or what business plan I would need to implement.  For someone who viewed risk as an extremely predictable, well thought out plan, this all proved disconcerting.  But the sense of excitement was definitely there, and it was tough to quell.  I was moved forward by stories of clandestine meetings and international intrigue.

Our new business would be a
kind of private eye firm, but since neither of us was licensed, we couldn’t call it that.  Instead, we would operate in the same smoky arena of the consultant in which Galveston had been involved before.

Galveston
would get the clients and do the investigations or consulting.  I would handle the business side, the contracts, the expenses, and the bank account, while Galveston would educate me as a junior consultant, slash, investigator.

During our meeting it became evident that while
Galveston knew everything about investigating and sleuthing, he really knew nothing about business.  He was shocked at what we needed to do to potentially make a profit, and the luster of the idea began to wear off.  We had limited funds, but Galveston ensured me we would have clients.  They might not be clients as wonderful as we wanted, but they would be money paying clients nonetheless.

But
I vastly underestimated my role in the business.  Galveston wanted to involve me in investigations immediately.

-Chapter 8-

Our first month of employment together would prove to be uneventful.  No clandestine meetings or international intrigue.  There wasn’t even national intrigue, but I decided to stick with it despite depleting all of Galveston’s savings.

We set up shop in
Galveston’s spacious one bedroom pad, complete with a 70’s era couch, a slow computer, and a refrigerator filled with old mayonnaise, pickles, and milk from the Reagan administration.  It was like two college roommates deciding to go into business together, selling bellybutton lint, because not everyone had some.

We started with simple background checks, employment histories, and driving records.
  It helped keep us solvent and in business, but it wasn’t breaking the bank.

Our first big job was through a contact Dan had at an insurance brokerage firm.
  Galveston had met this man through casual conversation about cars at a local tire store.  He was a lead underwriter at an insurance company and spoke of his frustration about possible insurance fraud.  The underwriter was convinced that one of the claimants they had made payouts to was faking a worker’s compensation injury, and due to a pending lawsuit was costing the insurance company hundreds of thousands of dollars.  No one could prove that this guy was faking, but they were convinced he was.

We’ll call the guy Rick, because that was his name.

“I recommend driving at the guy with our car and then make him leap to safety, proving he was not injured,” I told Dan, regaling him with my best plan.  This course of action did not sit well with him, however.

“
If the guy wasn’t faking and then we popped him with our car, then what?”  Galveston inquired.  I still had a lot to learn about the investigation business.

Galveston
approached the case much more deliberately.  In two days Galveston had enough information to know when this guy blew his nose or flushed his toilet.

We sat in front of Rick’s house for hours, just waiting to take a picture of him doing something out of line for his injuries.  At one point,
Galveston became impatient and ordered me to knock on his door and run away.  A seemingly simple plan, but one I was not willing to do.

“
Why don’t I just kick him in the jaw?  He’d chase me then,” I joked.

“
Don’t question, just do, lesson eighteen,” Dan snapped back.  Obviously he wasn’t thrilled with my idea.

I must mention something about
Galveston’s rules, his “lessons in insanity” as I liked to call them.  They rarely made sense.  He would commonly throw out a random lesson number and follow it with some mundane advice.  The scary part was, to him, these weren’t random numbers.  I had a frightening thought that he actually had these written down somewhere, or they were actually encased in his brain.

I would have wr
itten them down if I would have known that later they would prove useful.  I also didn’t realize that this seemingly simple operation was a test case for future operations.  This was our pregame warm-up.

I
decided to follow the order and gingerly stepped out of the car and made my way around it, crouching and looking both directions.  I made my way across the street, stooped over looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, doing a half step in each direction.

“
What are you doing?  Dodging gunfire?” Dan yelled.  “Just go over there like a normal human being and knock on the door.  That lurching walk doesn’t look out of place at all,” he said sarcastically.

I
immediately stood up and composed myself.  I ran over and knocked on the door of the house, as Galveston had instructed.  I quickly looked both ways down the street and scurried back, jumping headfirst into the passenger seat of the car, hunching down.

“
You looked like a wounded horse,” Dan laughed, making bobbing motions with his head.

“
You’re sitting there yelling at me while I’m doing the grunt work.  You’re telling the whole world that we’re up to something,” I exclaimed and then fell back in the seat, exhausted.

“
Look around.  This is a working class neighborhood with a median age of 103.  You could set off a nuclear bomb here and nobody would notice or care.  Now just sit and wait.”  I sat in the seat looking straight ahead, feeling burned and embarrassed.  I was a greenhorn, but what was this berating going to prove.

“
I just want to see what he’ll do.  We could wait here all day, but this is quicker and has a little more pizzazz,” Galveston threw his arms up and gave me the jazz hands.

Nobody came to the door after ten minutes of waiting and
Galveston was becoming even more impatient.

“
Okay, do it again,”

“
Are you serious?  I’m not running over there again,” I pleaded.

“
Sure you are, and this time, yell that you’re from the Department of Water and Power.”

I tried to explain my case, but
Galveston would have nothing of it until I reluctantly agree.  As I ran across the road, I crouched low, swinging my arms wildly as if avoiding bees doing my best wounded horse on acid routine.  I raced over to the door, knocked hard and yelled, “Water and Power Company!”  I then nervously turned the other direction, found the nearest pair of bushes, and jumped behind them, panting

I noticed that
Galveston had crept around the car and was growing impatient.  Before I realized what he was doing, I heard a crash of glass.  Galveston had broken a pane of glass on the front of Rick’s porch with a rock.  He jumped out of sight behind the back of the car.

“
Oh, there’s our boy, here he comes, faster than I expected,” I heard Galveston say loudly.

Rick came darting out the front door, down the steps, and hopped across the grass, looking for the culprit.  He moved rather elegantly, like a cow dragging a bucket it got a hoof stuck in
.  He definitely wasn’t a man in extreme pain.  I sunk down in the dirt behind the bush as far as possible, hoping Rick wouldn’t see me.

Rick huffed and puffed outside his house for five minutes, turning, bending, squatting, all the things he shouldn’t have been able to do.  Rick finally gave up and returned inside, obviously perturbed he didn’t get to punch someone in the face.

“Run back over here, will ya?”  Galveston yelled to me in a whisper from behind our car.

“
Okay, hold your horses,” I yelped back at him.  I moved from behind the house and raced across the street.

“
I think I see him coming,” Galveston said, pointing at the door of the house.

I felt a rush of adrenaline and crouched low, like that would help conceal my position.

“Oh sorry,” Galveston yelled, “I guess it was a mirage.”

I stood up, peeved, with my hands on my hips and began to walk back.

“Okay, now you do need to hurry, I really do see him coming,” Galveston yelled again seriously.

I once again went into
a strange run, looking both ways as I crossed the street, and flew into the passenger side door, breathing hard.

“
Where is he?” I gasped.

“
Oh. Sorry about that.  I’ve got to get my eyes checked.  It was just a bird, a really large, fat white bird,” he laughed.

“
Haven’t you heard of the boy that cried wolf?  The wolf ate him,” I scolded.

“
I’m sorry, it was just too easy.  I apologize.  I actually really needed to see how fast you were, or was it how gullible?”  He laughed again and rubbed his chin in fake thought.  “That was even better than I thought,” Galveston quipped as he put away the video recorder.  He noticed the consternation on my face. “What are you worried about?”

“
I’m worried that we could get arrested.  This isn’t what I signed up for.”

I’m not sure
which laws we had broken during this little operation, I’m sure there were many.  I couldn’t remember if it was against the law to impersonate a water and power man; I sure hoped not. 

“
Don’t sweat it.  That was a good time,” Galveston said slowly, nodding his head. 

I would get him back at some point, but right now I was glad it was mostly over.  I had a sinking feeling we would be ramping it up a bit f
rom this point on.  The pre-game warm-up was over, now it was on to the big game.  If only I had known what we were getting ourselves into.

-Chapter 9-

We returned to Galveston’s humble abode, the headquarters of Icarus Investigatory Services, or as we called it, Icarus, or more simply “Ick!”.  Galveston and I had come up with the name after a study of Greek mythology.  Our business name was an ode to the mythological boy who flew too close to the sun with wings of wax.  The wings melted, he tumbled to the earth, and went splat on the ground.  Galveston told me this is probably how we will feel every day, flying too close to the sun.

The insurance company award
ed us with a check in the mail along with a bonus I had stipulated in the contract for bringing the case in under our scheduled time.  We had potentially saved the insurance company hundreds of thousands of dollars.  They would have settled quickly due to the abysmal safety record of the construction company Rick worked for and a need for it just to go away.  For our two days of work we received eight thousand dollars, and it was plenty of money to split fifty-fifty.  I now officially liked my new job.

I was in, all in.
  The excitement now was palpable and I had a new sense of purpose.  I was bringing order to an otherwise chaotic world.  Alright, that was a bit dramatic, but there definitely was an amount of fun and interest in my new endeavor that I found, well, gratifying.

During the rest of March and into
May we picked up other cases, examined records, did interviews, and gathered contracts.  I was starting to get the hang of things, even the lingo that was spewed out, all under the watchful eye and tutelage of Dan Galveston.

We had become a well
-tuned unit, like Laurel and Hardy mixed with Starsky and Hutch.  We received more and more job opportunities.  Some were successful, some not, and many times the company that hired us was wrong.  Key contract negotiations allowed us to rack up sizable payments and stay, barely, in the black.

We proved ourselves
to be better than other investigators by bringing our cases in under time.  Regardless of how long it took we would only get paid one sum.  No made up hours or crazy bills for a thirty dollar ham sandwich, or four hours of billing for paperwork.  We convinced or clients that they were saving money with us over other investigators.  We didn’t have a real office, no other employees, and only a cheap fax machine, so our overhead was nonexistent.  This allowed us to get our price below what anyone else was offering. 

By
June things were going well.  Word of mouth spread and we put our feelers out for bigger fish to fry.  We developed more scrupulous and unscrupulous measures, choosing to take a more creative approach to things.  We would pose as everything from janitors to handymen to exterminators, with Galveston’s mouth leading the way.

Galveston
said believing you are who you say you are helped ease the pain of, technically, committing breaking and entering, or fraud.  We had an almost cavalier approach to our exploits and on our next job, the biggest yet, we would have to pull out all the stops. 

-Chapter 10-

On a small Mexican airfield across the border from Arizona, activity was increasing at a dirt airfield simply know as Elias North, about 30 miles south of Yuma, Arizona. 

It was
a dusty, dirty, and sparse place.  Yucca plants and cacti dotted the landscape and a rough dirt road careened its way around rocks and through shallow ravines toward the field.  Sitting under the blazing June summer sun were two off-road Jeeps parked under the limbs of a paltry mesquite tree.  Five men were scattered about, dressed in army green fatigues with rifles slung at their sides.  One man, known as Colonel Espinosa, fiddled with a satellite phone.

“
Vamanos muchachos,” he barked at the rest of the men.  The men immediately jumped in their vehicles and bumped their way to the end of the dusty dirt runway, which was rutted and soft, the product of poor upkeep and care.

The Colonel
stood up in the Jeep and turned his gaze to the north.  On the horizon, low over the terrain, a dot appeared and grew larger, the sound becoming louder as it approached. 

The outline of a
twin engine Rockwell 690B Turbo Commander appeared and began its approach to the runway with its wings wavering in the wind.  It was a light transport aircraft, capable of carrying heavy loads for its size, but on this day it was only carrying one piece of important cargo.  It touched down, sending up a billowing cloud of dust that floated down the runway and settled over the waiting men. 

The plane’s door popped open and out stepped a neatly dressed man in a long sleeve shirt and pants with dark sunglasses
, it was Sergeant Walker.  He reached to his seat and pulled out a silver briefcase, larger than what a businessman would carry.

Walker
began to walk toward the Colonel, but stopped midway, set the case down, and held out his hand.  With his fingers he flashed a one, four, one and three.  The Colonel punched the numbers into his satellite phone and put the phone to his ear, listened for a few seconds, and then put the phone down and waved to Sergeant Walker.  Walker set the briefcase on the ground, turned, and got back in the plane.

The aircraft
bounced back down the runway, past the on-looking men, and lifted off, spraying dust over them again.  The sound was deafening as it climbed away from the dirt field, staying low to the terrain.  The case stood alone at the side of the runway and Colonel Espinosa did not move, nor did his men.  They just kept their eyes trained on the silver case while peering at the surrounding terrain.  The plane faded from site as he brought the phone back up to his ear.

“
The case, it arrived,” he said in English into the phone.

“
Good, you’ll have your payment when I have confirmation of delivery.  Your bonus will be at your hacienda awaiting your arrival,” said the monotone voice on the other end.

“
Excellent,” the Colonel answered.

He motioned for his men to return to their Jeeps while he walked towards the
far end of the runway.  One of the vehicles pulled beside him and a soldier handed him a black duffel bag.  The Colonel pulled out a radio, spoke into it in Spanish, and walked to pick up the silver case. 

After a few minutes another plane appeared into view and landed just as the first.
  Colonel Espinosa walked to a Beechcraft King Air as the door to the aircraft popped open.  He made his way inside carrying the duffel bag and the silver case and disappeared up the steps as the departing Jeeps left the dirt runway.

T
he pilot skillfully maneuvered to the opposite end of the runway and turned around, applied full power, and slowly lifted the plane into the hot air, fading into the blue, cloudless sky.  It would be a long journey for the Colonel to his final destination before he could return to his home in Mexico.