by Jack Bunker
TRUE GRIFT
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2015 Jack Bunker
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Brash Books LLC
12120 State Line #253
Leawood, Kansas 66209
ISBN 10: 1941298869
ISBN 13: 9781941298862
For the Bar
I also will laugh at your calamity…
Proverbs 1:26
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
After another grueling day of slipping through the grasping fingers of creditors, all J.T. wanted to do was go hit some range balls. It didn’t seem that much to ask. A bucket of balls. Maybe a couple of drinks afterward. Had the chiffon-yellow Lincoln Navigator of Frankie Fresh not glommed J.T.’s usual parking spot, the errant Titleist that flew the eighteenth green never would have reached the windshield of his beloved Mercedes S600. But the web of cracked safety glass sparkling in the setting Riverside County sun told J.T. Edwards that the breaks in his life were taking a different direction.
The lot didn’t have reserved parking, but J.T. had always thought of it as his spot. Technically spots, as he usually parked across two spaces to make sure no one dinged the doors of his Mercedes. Meanwhile, the yellow Navigator still sat empty, idling on the blacktop, a stream of A/C condensation flowing on the ground beneath the engine.
“Are you kidding me?” J.T. roared at the sky. In the center of the windshield, right above the wiper, cracks spun out in all directions in a twelve-inch radius. J.T. saw the offending golf ball nestled in some ice plants a few yards away. He picked it up and heaved it as far as he could into the scruffy hills that surrounded the parking lot.
A couple of spaces away, a slim guy in his early forties, with thinning hair, bad skin, and a cheap polo shirt, sat on the bumper of a bronze Camry, removing his golf shoes and slipping on untied sneakers. “You got a separate windshield deductible on that?”
“Excuse me?” said J.T.
“Your windshield. You’re looking at eight hundred bucks minimum to replace that. Who’s your insurance carrier?”
J.T. kicked at an ice plant. “I don’t know…um, State Farm, why?”
The guy got up from his car and walked over toward J.T. “You’re gonna get hammered, aren’t you?”
The guy looked familiar. J.T. must have seen him around the course before, but he’d never talked to him. “Probably. You a windshield salesman or something?”
“Al Boyle.” The guy stuck out his hand. “I’m a senior claims manager at GSAC. For the time being, anyway.”
J.T. was only too familiar with the Golden State Assurance Company. “You got some rat bastards in that legal department.”
“You must be a PI lawyer,” said Al, nodding toward J.T.’s license plate that read DELICT.
J.T. shook the guy’s hand. “J.T. Edwards.”
He used to call himself John Edwards back when he’d opened his practice, happy to let some dopes on the phone mistake him for the plaintiff’s-lawyer-turned-politician. Until all the scandal and the love child and the angry, dying wife. Then it became a liability and he became J.T. Edwards.
But J.T. didn’t flinch from the epithets “plaintiff’s lawyer” or “personal injury” when his classmates smirked at reunions. He embraced them like he used to embrace the wooden steering wheel of his convertible XK8 as he tooled up the PCH for a balls-out weekend in Santa Barbara. Or the way he embraced a fiber-glass rod when he was fishing for marlin off Cabo. Or the way he embraced a $500 Margaux in his wine cellar…before Stephanie got the house.
All 420 pounds of Francis Xavier McElfresh squeezed through the door of the club’s bar and grill, the 19th Hole, and out to the parking lot. He spotted Al and started waving like he was flagging a beer vendor at a ball game. “Al! Al! How you doing, Al? You get out today?”
Al looked up, his eyes fixed on the dimpled knees that supported Frankie’s bulk. “Hey, Frankie, yeah.” Al lifted a golf shoe from his bumper as if to prove he’d actually gotten out on the course. “You gonna be around? I’ve got something for you.”
Frankie giggled. “Sure, Al, sure.” He pointed to J.T.’s shattered windshield. “Boy, looks like someone really wanted to play through!” Frankie threw his head back and laughed, his pelican gullet bobbing up and down.
J.T. gritted his teeth and squinted. He knew Frankie hadn’t actually hit the ball that wrecked the windshield, but J.T. couldn’t forgive him for his role in the causal chain of events. He made a point of pulling his phone from his pocket as an excuse not to engage in small talk.
Frankie continued on toward his idling Navigator. “Play through!” he laughed to himself again.
Once the threat of conversation was past, J.T. jammed the phone back in his pocket and looked once more at the windshield.
“Listen, I know a guy,” Al said, clearing his throat. “I mean, I’m assuming you don’t want to go with some non-OEM crap on a car like this, right?”
“Almost as much as I don’t want to pay eleven thousand bucks to get it replaced.”
“Anyway, it’s not a GSAC claim, so I can tell you: this guy…good dude, does good work. He’s in Riverside. You take it to him and tell him I sent you. He’ll hook you up.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean he’ll gross up the cost of the windshield to work around your deductible. He’ll use the real glass too.”
J.T. looked at the windshield. “Thanks.” He shook his head. “Hey, I was gonna head inside and get a drink. You want to join me?”
“Sure, why not? Thanks. I need to get something to eat anyway.”
The two men started across the parking lot in silence. J.T. looked back one more time over his shoulder at the cracked windshield. Down the l
ot, Frankie Fresh turned off his SUV, closed the door, and began waddling back toward the clubhouse.
TWO
A window the length of the wall framed the view of the base of the San Jacinto Mountains hard by the parking lot less than a hundred feet away. The golf course was surrounded on three sides by defeated lumps of ochre, scrub-covered rock peppering hillsides that offered no shade but reflected and radiated the desert heat like a convection oven. This was the vista of the Mira Vista Golf Resort.
The original developer had either a sense of humor or a limited grasp of Spanish. Maybe both. When they first put down the signage at the course, the landscaping crew laughed and called the place Mira Chiste. The developer, who’d dreamed of a big resort back before the Crisis, was pained to learn chiste was Spanish for joke, but the damage was done. The nickname stuck.
Across the room, beneath the TV, laughing men finished their beers and began moving for the door. A few more sweating golfers entered as they completed their rounds. Shadows from the clubhouse stretched against the broiling stony backdrop of the dusty hills outside.
“Here you go, Al,” said Wanda, the barmaid, smiling as she set a vodka rocks on the table.
Al nodded his head toward the men’s room where J.T. was washing up. “This guy? This is the PI lawyer you mentioned, right? You know him from outside the club?”
“His firm represented my mom and me when I was in high school and our SUV rolled over. Fractured my pelvis. Wrecked my mom’s back.”
“How’d that go, your case? You win?”
“It was a statewide class action. My mom got her surgical expenses paid, and we got sixteen grand in the settlement. She thought we’d won the lottery. In Mexico she’d have had to pay the car company.”
“So it worked out okay, then.”
“There were four thousand plaintiffs in California. The class settled for like, a hundred and five million. A handful of lawyers split thirty-six million bucks and my mom’s in a wheelchair. Guess it worked out okay for somebody.”
“Still. You could’ve opted out.”
“Yep, that’s true. We could’ve opted out. My mom barely speaks English, and I was seventeen years old. What did we know? Our lawyers said it was a good deal.”
“How’d the opt-outs do?”
“I dunno. I heard a guy with bad dreams from PTSD got a million two. Now he has a B and B in Tahoe.”
J.T. approached from the hallway, stopping to pluck a cocktail napkin from the bar. He wiped his forehead and continued walking toward the table where Al was sipping his vodka.
“So, anyway,” said Wanda, “haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Yeah, work stuff. They’re trying to transfer me.”
“Really?”
“Enh. GSAC’s being bought out by San Antonio Insurance. They want to consolidate and cut loose everyone they can, the bastards.”
J.T. pulled out his chair and sat down. “At least you’re keeping your job.” He took a sip from the sweating glass of scotch Wanda had waiting for him.
“I got seventeen years in with these guys. Those jerk-offs know better than to just kick me to the curb.” Al took a sip of his drink. He drew his lips tight across his teeth. “They want to send me up to Weed to run a regional claims desk. You believe it? Friggin’ Weed, California.”
“Never heard of it,” said Wanda.
“I thought they were messing with me. I didn’t believe it was a real place. But it sure as shit is.”
“It’s nice up there,” said J.T. “Right near Mount Shasta. Quiet. Beautiful country.”
“Snows up there, doesn’t it?” said Al. “Screw Weed. You can have it.”
Wanda excused herself to go wait on a codger waving to her from across the room.
“I’m sure to a lot of people it doesn’t sound like a big deal,” said Al. “But I’m underwater on my house by at least a hundred grand. I couldn’t sell it if I wanted to.”
“Yeah, well, let me know when you’re underwater on two houses by a good two hundred each.”
“Ex?”
“She got the house. I figured no big deal, I’ll hop into one of these monsters they were throwing up and flip it in a year.”
“That year happen to be 2009?” said Al.
“Like every septic tank in California exploded at once.”
Planting his flag in the Inland Empire had been J.T.’s design from the get-go. Riverside and San Bernardino Counties—respectively, the eleventh- and twelfth-most populous in America—meant more than 4.2 million potential plaintiffs. The area of those two counties alone made the Inland Empire, that twenty-seven-thousand-square-mile chunk of nowhere between LA and Las Vegas, bigger than Ireland.
“So what’s your big plan to get out of going up to Weed?” asked J.T.
“I can’t really call it a big plan yet. More like a dream.”
“You jumping ship?”
“What I want to do is get my own ship.”
“You want to open your own insurance agency? In this market? That does sound like a dream.”
Al sipped his vodka and grimaced again. “Who said anything about an agency? What I’m talking about is consulting. I’ve done some homework on this. Plenty of opportunities, I think. Just a matter of making the right connections.”
J.T. crunched the ice from his empty glass and sipped a little scotch from his new one. “How so?”
“Okay, well, let’s say you’re a lawyer and you got a claim. Not a rock-solid, drunk-city-bus-driver-ran-over-a-pregnant-neurologist, but a slip and fall. Maybe you know what the reserve is, you shape your offer one way; you know whether it’s a no-consent policy, you make a different offer. You see where I’m going?”
J.T. nodded slowly and sipped his drink.
“Now, let’s say you got access to a database that gives you every single settlement over the past ten years, with all the facts available—internal notes, the works. You think that’s worth something?”
J.T. realized there was no sense telling him plenty of services already provided legitimate insurance settlement data. Sure, it would be nice to have GSAC’s internal notes, but the poor bastard was going to hear crickets from the plaintiffs’ bar.
“So you’re talking about obtaining GSAC’s files. Stealing their proprietary information.”
“Nobody said anything about stealing.”
“You didn’t take it?”
“I didn’t say that either. I just said nobody said anything about stealing.”
“Sounds like you got all the moves figured out.”
“Not all of them. Before I can set up my operation, I need to get a little grubstake first.”
A gaggle of sweaty golfers drinking in the far corner broke into a collective guffaw. Seeing Frankie Fresh leaning over the table, slapping backs, his face flushing purple, reminded J.T. of his shattered windshield.
“Yeah, we could all use a little cash injection at that, couldn’t we?” said J.T.
If it wasn’t for George Bush and that stupid tort reform. It had really put him in an ideological bind. The Republicans were taking away his livelihood; the Democrats were taxing it away. If somebody didn’t hurry up and invent another Agent Orange, the ass of J.T. Edwards was going to be fitted for a Chapter 7 sling.
“Shit, you’re a lawyer,” said Al. “What’ve you got to worry about?”
J.T. crunched some more ice and looked off into the distance. This guy couldn’t begin to imagine J.T.’s nut. A strip mall in Norco he bought a few years ago sitting half empty and hemorrhaging money. Economy goes to hell and those shit-kickers just go to Little League games instead of restaurants. Ten grand a month alimony. A grand a month on the Mercedes out in the parking lot. Office rent on half a floor of the Inland Empire tower in Riverside. Still got to come up with campaign contributions for every judge from Calexico to Barstow. Claims hanging fire, some of them, for years now. Goddamn insurance companies doing their war-of-attrition bullshit.
“Believe me, pal, you ain’t th
e only one could use a boost.”
Another shout went up from the corner. The TV was replaying the Red Sox batter getting hit in the elbow by a pitch. The replay flashed over and over. In one shot, the camera zoomed in on the displaced flesh at impact; on another, the rictus on the batter’s face.
Al waved at Wanda. “This one’s mine,” he said to J.T.
J.T. rolled a piece of ice around in his mouth. “So where are you getting this grubstake? You go to a bank?”
“Please. Those bastards are getting money interest-free from the Fed and you think they’re lending any of it? Shit. They’re just stuffing it into their mattresses, waiting for the next bubble. You go in with a legitimate business plan, they don’t give you the time of day.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure legitimate is the mot juste there.”
“You know what I meant. Anyway,” Al said, hunching forward over the table. “I do have an idea about a clean little transaction….”
THREE
The chatter from the corner grew louder as the TV showed the benches clearing after the Red Sox hitter charged the mound. The Angels’ pitcher wrestled the batter to the ground within a frenzied scrum of uniformed players and coaches appearing agitated.
J.T. leaned back from the table. “So this transaction….”
“Watertight. Catch is…” Al looked around and lowered his voice. “I need somebody on the other side. Somebody dependable. Trustworthy.”
“Need somebody for what?”
Wanda brought the steaks to the table. “Here you go, boys. You need anything, you let me know.”
Al’s eyes darted across the table to J.T. and up at Wanda. “I could use another,” he said, shaking his glass.
“Same here,” said J.T.
“Back in a jiff,” Wanda said. She turned sideways to step among the maze of tables on her way back behind the bar.
“I told you I was a senior claims manager. Means I have two-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement authority. On my own.”
“Is that right?” J.T. shifted in his seat.
“I got a roster of policyholders in a geographic area, I draw certain cases. Let’s say, hypothetically, someone were to bring a claim for a soft-tissue injury. You with me so far?”