To Vegas with love

by J. A. Cipriano

  “No. Thank you,” the bank manager said without mirth. “Remember, the meeting will be in the executive conference room on the fourteenth floor.” He handed me a keycard. “You can use the elevator over there to get there. Just swipe the card on the pad, and it will open.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking it and nodding as he scurried away, probably to foreclose on some poor couple who had lost their jobs.

  “I’m still not over the whole ‘you gave away a lottery ticket’ thing.” Ashley watched me as the door swung closed. “That’s really generous, and most people like you aren’t that way.”

  “People like me?” I shoved the card into my pocket.

  “Yeah, rich playboys.” She had the decency to blush. “Usually you guys are all about one thing, and it’s pretty disgusting.” She ran a hand through her hair, sweeping her red locks behind one pale ear. “You have no idea how many guys will give a donation if I take a donation, if you catch my drift?”

  “Ah.” I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just moved on, walking toward the limo. “So, where do you want to eat? We only have a couple hours, so it can’t be too fancy.” I glanced at my phone. No new messages from Skye, Amy, or Shelley. That meant things weren’t worse. Thankfully, they’d likely be better soon.

  “Um … I actually have an idea.” She gave me a look that told me she was going to try and pull a fast one on me. “Wanna go somewhere that’s a surprise?”

  “Sure,” I said right before activating a voice command. “But know that if this is some elaborate plot to kidnap or murder me, your hair will turn blue.”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?” she said, taking some of her hair in her hand and looking at it. “Are you gonna splash me with paint or something because if you do, I’ll go ten kinds of Carrie on you. It doesn’t even have to be at prom.”

  “No, I was just being weird.” The driver opened the door, and I gestured for her to get in my limo even though I was mostly a stranger. “Just tell the driver where to take us.”

  “Right.” She nodded before leaning close to the driver and whispering something in his ear. The look he gave me afterward, a mixture of horror and concern was, well, concerning.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, looking at me for confirmation.

  “Sure, I have two hours to kill.” I shrugged. “Unless it is to a seedy hotel, so she can cut out my organs and harvest them. I absolutely hate to wake up in a bathtub full of ice.”

  “Not quite that bad, sir.” He smiled and rubbed his chin. “Actually, knowing you as I do now, I think you might quite like it.” He gave me a thoughtful look. “You’re the right type, I think.”

  “Thanks, I think?” I shrugged and climbed into the car after Ashley.

  As he shut the door, sealing us inside, Ashley turned to me. “Your driver really seems to like you.”

  “Meh, his love is bought.” I waved a hand. “I’m paying for both his daughters to go to college and paid off his son’s student loans.” I didn’t add that I also paid him five times what he’d made before to work with me as well as giving him a generous set of benefits.

  “You did that?” Ashley stared at me wide-eyed as the limo pulled out into traffic, which was a bit worse than normal.

  “It seemed the least I could do.” I sighed, leaning back in my chair. “He’s a good driver. Works hard. He deserves to get paid for it.” I smirked. “And he’s a fantastic yodeler.”

  “He yodels?” Ashley glanced at the dark glass separating him from us, and as she did, I saw a variety of thoughts flash through her eyes. “I just realized I’m alone in a limo with you.”

  “Is that a problem?” I asked, putting my hand to the comm unit on the wall beside me. “I can have him lower the glass if it will make you more comfortable.”

  She stared at me for a long time like she was trying to read my mind, but she needn’t have bothered because it was mostly blank. “No.” She shook her head. “I’m just surprised at how nice you are.”

  “Thank you, I think.” I moved across the limo to the bar and began rummaging around in it. “Would you like a drink? I have, well, everything.”

  “Everything?” She quirked an eyebrow. “So, if I wanted some Cristal—”

  “Ugh … have you drank that?” I stuck out my tongue. “I don’t care for it, but it makes okay mimosas.” I waved a hand. “And yes, I have some, somewhere. Is that what you’d like?”

  “No,” she said while watching me closely. “I get pretty dumb when I drink, and I need to show you this.” She smacked her folder with one hand. “Water will be fine.”

  “Okay.” I fished out two bottles of water and offered her one. “Always good to be hydrated.”

  “Right.” She nodded before flushing. “Are you making a joke? Because of my project.”

  “I wish I were that clever,” I said as I opened my bottle and drained half of it in a single gulp. Man, I was thirsty. “I’m only mildly clever, to be honest.”

  “And so humble.” She nodded to me before setting her unopen bottle in the cup holder beside her. Then she opened her folder. “It’s not terribly complicated.” She tapped what looked like a city map with dark lines drawn all over it. “Basically, this section of piping is bad, and so, when we send good water through it, it becomes contaminated.” Her finger shifted to a blue x. “Because of that, it goes to this treatment plant for re-processing.” She looked at me. “The annual cost of the plant is about twenty million dollars a year, but replacing the pipe is only about two million.”

  “That seems like a no-brainer …” I rubbed my chin. “So, your project is to fix the pipes?”

  “Sort of,” she said with a sigh. “If we fix the pipes, then we can save about 18 million in the first year. The payback is in months, if not weeks. And, if we repurpose this plant to take over all the stuff from the neighboring counties, they won’t actually need to build another treatment plant. That would save another hundred million …”

  “I don’t understand why you went to the bank with this,” I said, shaking my head. “Aren’t those city pipes?”

  She blew her hair out of her face with an exasperated breath. “No. The pipes are technically owned by some investment company, and they are leased to the city.” She sighed. “They recently put them up for sale, so I figured I could get a loan to buy them, and then with the lease payments, pay it off in a few years.” She shrugged. “It leases now for about half a million dollars a year.”

  “Wait, hold up.” I made a time-out gesture with my hands. “Those pipes are for sale?”

  “Yes, but no one wants to buy them because they’re all fucked up.” She flushed. “Sorry for my language. I approached a few people about it, but no one wants to spend two million to recoup their investment in five years. The timeframe is just too long.”

  “And there’s the people at the plant who would be out of jobs, potentially.” I tapped my chin.

  “Well, they would just switch focus. Really, it’s the guys building the new plant who would be out.” Ashley looked at her notebook. “Admittedly, I don’t know how to fix that since the treatment plant would bring in jobs …”

  “Yeah, but they’re dumb jobs. Like, okay, if we actually fixed the pipes for two million, we could spend that one hundred million on something else, something might have more economic impact.” I sighed and rubbed my temples. “Okay, executive decision time. Who owns the pipes?”

  “Modi Asset Management.” Ashely flipped to another page in her notebook and showed it to me.

  “Hmm … well, this should be interesting.” I glanced at it for a second before grabbing my phone and snapping a picture. Then I sent it to Skye, Amy, and Shelley with the message, “Buy this.”

  My phone started ringing. It was Shelly. And as I looked at it, I got a call from Amy.

  I answered and patched the two together.

  “What the fuck, Roger? Water pipes?” Amy said, and even though I was obviously on speaker phone, I could hear her confusion through t
he phone. “We don’t have time for that right now.”

  “I haven’t done any research on it either,” Skye added, and I quickly realized why I was on speaker phone because they were both talking to me over the same line.

  “And we could use that money on more upgrades for the Medallion,” Shelley said. “You don’t give me nearly enough budget as it is.”

  “Just get me the paperwork, and I’ll take care of it. It’s a good project, and we can spare the money,” I said with a shrug. “And it’s owned by Modi Asset Management. It’s a great scam.” I proceeded to tell them what Ashley told me.

  “Right, I’ll confirm all that and get back to you in a bit,” Skye said, and I could already hear the clack of her mechanical keyboard. It was one of those weird ergonomic ones, but it had Topre switches so that it sounded like she was beating a war drum one letter at a time.

  “Thanks, Skye. What are your thoughts, Amy?” I asked, and my CFO groaned audibly.

  “If you wanna piss them off, it’s a great scam, but we need to find out who is building that new plant. We may be picking a different fight.” She was silent for a minute. “But I agree, we should fix it.”

  “I will agree if you fund my expansion project,” Shelley said, and while I could tell she was mostly joking, I knew she was also serious.

  “I’ll look at it when we have our meeting tomorrow. I was never opposed to it, we just needed to work out where the funding was coming from—

  “You have a magic pen, Roger,” Shelley said a bit too forcefully into the phone. “Turn on Godmode for ten minutes and let’s get it done.”

  “I will.” I nodded. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but with all the attacks on us, I was willing to grease the wheels a bit with the pen. After all, paying for stuff with pen powers was a lot easier than navigating the legal system with it. “Assuming you have all the paperwork and whatnot.”

  “I do.” The way Shelley said it, made me think she’d probably had it for a while. “I’ve prepared it through all the D level projects.”

  “Great, let’s look at it tomorrow. I don’t have a problem as long as all I have to do is sign things.” I laughed.

  When I hung up a couple minutes later, Ashley was looking at me strangely, and for a second, I’d wondered if she had caught the bit about the magic pen.

  “What are D level projects?” she said which was surprising to me because I would have definitely asked about the pen.

  “Oh.” I looked at the ceiling. “Basically, it’s silly MBA speak. You have four kinds of projects broken down by grades. Easy to do, and good, are A projects. Hard and okay are D projects. B and C are in the middle, hard but good, and easy but okay.”

  “Ah,” she said, thinking. “And what is my project?”

  “Normally, a B or a C. But in my case? Probably an A.”

  7

  “Well, this wasn’t quite what I expected,” I said as I stood beside my limo staring at the Heavenly Arms Soup Kitchen. “Did you make a reservation?” I gestured at the line. “Or are we waiting?”

  “We’re helping, actually,” Ashley said, taking my hand and leading me toward the door. “You know, serving the masses.”

  “Interesting. So, we’re cutting the line, then?” I replied, taking a glance back at my driver, Brant, and giving him a thumbs-up. He nodded.

  “I’ll be here,” he said right before Ashley pulled me past the line.

  “No, we’re going in the back way.” Ashley took me to a side entrance and rapped on the door a couple times. “That way we can sneak in without paying.”

  “Oh, so it’s like the movie theatre when I snuck into R-rated movies as a kid,” I replied as the door opened to reveal a woman with skin like dark chocolate and eyes that sparkled with life and energy. As she caught sight of Ashley, she pulled off her hairnet and shoved it into the pocket of her stained white apron.

  “Ashley, as I live and breathe!” she cried, wrapping Ashley in a hug that would make Aunt Jemima proud. “Are you back from helping the helpless in LA?”

  “Yeah, that project got canceled after year five.” She frowned. “We did what we could though.”

  “I should say so.” The woman looked to me, and I barely had time to smile before she wrapped me in a huge hug that smashed me into her pillow-sized breasts. “And who is your friend?”

  “This is Roger,” Ashley said as the woman released me. “He says he wants to help people.”

  “Well, Roger, it is a pleasure for sure.” Her eyes roamed over me before she cupped one hand to her mouth conspiratorially and leaned toward Ashley. “And cute too.”

  Ashley laughed before gesturing to the woman. “I’d like you to meet Jane Dough.”

  “Jane Dough?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “That sounds suspiciously like a fake name.”

  “It is, dearie, but it’s been mine so long I can’t even remember what it used to be.” She crossed her arms over her massive breasts. “That’s the name I took after I started really helping people.”

  “Jane used to be a lawyer,” Ashley added helpfully. “A big one, in New York.”

  “Well, you know what they say about lawyers …” I trailed off as Jane smirked.

  “What do they say about lawyers?” she dared.

  “Well, that you can compare them to leeches, but that the comparison upsets leeches.” I shrugged.

  Jane laughed. One of those fully-bellied things that made me feel better than I had all day, and given my early morning activities, that really said something.

  “That would be unfair to leeches.” She seemed to remember where she was then because she stood back and gestured toward the entrance where people were still waiting for the doors to open. “Come on inside. Lots of hungry people in need of soup and bread. We can catch up later.”

  I followed the pair of them inside and soon found myself standing on the line with Ashley. I’d met six others of varying ages, but we were the only two out in front at the moment because the others were either still setting up or were the backend crew.

  “Can you serve the soup, Roger?” Jane asked, moving beside me and setting a huge cauldron of bubbling red liquid down on the space in front of me.

  “Um … sure,” I said as she took a bowl from the stack in front of me and put it down between us.

  “Thank you.” She took a scoop out of the pot and put it in the bowl. “Just do that much, okay?”

  “Just one scoop?” I asked as she handed me the ladle.

  “Yes, just one scoop. Once that’s out, we don’t have anymore.” She gave me an ‘it is what it is’ look. “So, we want to make sure we get as many fed as possible. And sometimes the Lord shines on us, and we get through the lines and can give seconds to some.”

  “You know, one scoop of soup doesn’t seem like enough …” I nodded down the line. “Soup, half a piece of bread, and I don’t even know what that is.” I gestured toward what looked sort of like potato salad. “That just doesn’t seem very good. There’s no protein.”

  “Protein is expensive, and we get ninety-nine percent of our food through donations.” Jane put a hand on my shoulder. “This will have to do.”

  “I suppose,” I said as she nodded.

  “I get it.” She sighed. “I suspect you do too. But you didn’t before.” Jane shot a sideways glance at Ashley. “I suppose that’s why your friend brought you to me.”

  “Hey, you wanted to help people, Roger. Now is your chance?” Ashley gave me a grin from her spot beside the weird potato salad. “And it’ll be fun.”

  “Oh, that I believe,” I said as Jane nodded to the pair of us.

  “Well, I have some stuff to clean up in the back. Just remember, one scoop.” With that, she turned and headed to the back as another guy, a fellow named Ralph who was built like a brick shit house and had flaming red hair came and put a pile of quartered bagels down in between us while he cradled another cauldron of soup under his arm.

  “You two need help with this or can I man the othe
r station?” He pointed about ten feet down where a second soup station was being set up.

  “We’ll be okay,” Ashley said before turning her eyes to me. “Right, Roger?”

  “Of course,” I said, nodding as I looked it over. Then I decided I had magic and I should use it. “Hey, can you guys let me know if you think you’re going to run out of soup?”

  “Sure,” Ralph said as he lumbered over and put down the cauldron next to a tall blonde woman and a shorter guy I think was named Felix.

  “That’s a weird request,” Ashley said, eyeing me carefully.

  “Oh, I just want to know how much soup this place needs for when I make my donation afterward—”

  “That’s not why I brought you here,” Ashley said as I reached into my pocket, so I could pretend to pull out my pad and pen. After all, making them appear from my sleeves might draw unneeded attention. Taking a moment, I jotted down a few notes to make the soup, well, extra hearty. I also altered the potato salad. At least it was now potato salad.

  “I didn’t think it was.” I shoved my pad and pen into my pockets before allowing the pen and pad to move back into my sleeves. “I want to do it.”

  “Right …” Ashley was giving me that weird look again. “You amaze me, Roger Stevens.”

  “Well, prepare to be more amazed,” I said as the doors opened, and the first people came toward us. “Because I’m about to show you my elite soup serving skills.”

  8

  “I can’t believe we never ran out of soup, potato salad, or bread,” Ashely said, surveying the room full of people busily eating. “We usually run out way before everyone.”

  “Hey, maybe we were just blessed,” I said, smirking. I had half a mind to show her the notes I’d made on my pad which, essentially, had turned water into, well, soup. Then I divided the bread.

  “We certainly are,” Ashley said, taking my hand and giving it a squeeze. “Helping people is its own reward, I know, but the sight of this does make me smile.” She swept a hand at the crowd. “These people have nothing, and even the little they do have is often taken. This, well, it matters.”