by Thomas Locke
Juan asked, “How much are we talking?”
“The value of your remaining shares could easily be five million dollars. Maybe more. Much more.”
Father and son exchanged another long look, then Juan asked, “What’s the downside?”
“For you, minimal risk. I will put a rider in each contract that if the feds take any legal action against the new holding group, you have the right to buy back my shares for eighty cents on the dollar.”
The silence was heavy, stifling. At least to Lena. Finally Enrique asked, “What do you think, Pop?”
“She’s given it to us straight. I like that.”
“Me too.”
Juan asked her, “You dealing with Preston Downs over at Pueblo State Bank?”
“My attorney is with him now. And the president of the ATM group.”
He reached for the phone. “Why don’t you give us a minute, let us check things out.”
“Of course.” She rose from the chair.
Enrique walked with her through the outer office. “I guess it’s the conference that’s got you pushing so hard.”
“Excuse me, what?”
“They got some special name for the group, Colorado Marijuana Retailer’s Association or something. They’re having their first meeting.”
She could not help herself. She actually shivered. “When?”
“Starts tomorrow. The papers have made a big noise about it. You didn’t know?”
“Not until now.” She disliked how she couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice. “Assuming you and your father agree to this proposed deal, could I ask your help with something?”
He shrugged. “Depends. What?”
“Come with me.”
4
Brett Riffkind entered the hospice care facility and almost collided with a couple on their way out. They were so broken up they probably did not see him or hear his apology. Even after a year of working in such facilities, such encounters still left him shaken.
Like with many hospices, the director’s office opened into the front foyer, so all activities and visitors could be monitored. He knocked on the open door. “I’m Brett—”
“I know who you are, Dr. Riffkind. And you are four hours late.”
“I apologize, Dr. . . .”
“Mrs. Birch.” She was narrow and fuming and accustomed to ruling her domain with unquestioned authority. “Your patient has been enduring extreme discomfort.”
“First of all, she is not my patient. She can’t be. Since I’m not a medical doctor.”
“Then what on earth are you doing here?”
“I came at the request of your patient.” As the hospice director knew all too well. And over her strident objections. Which was the real reason for her irritation. “Again, my apologies. My flight was canceled and I had to rebook.”
“You told me all that over the phone. And it does not change a thing.”
“Right. So if you’ll excuse me . . .” Brett turned away.
“Just hold on there, mister!” When Brett kept walking, she came rushing around her desk. “I haven’t said you could go anywhere.”
Brett ignored the stares from everyone in the narrow waiting alcove and kept walking. “You’re going to tell me the patient is too far gone to endure four hours off her meds. Which she has insisted on despite your objections. Just as she has demanded I be granted access. Ditto on the disapproval. But this procedure has nothing to do with your wishes. Your lawyer has already told you that.” He knew the room number because the patient’s sister had told him. “How am I doing so far?”
“What you’re proposing is most certainly not a procedure.”
“The patient disagrees.” Brett knocked on the door. “As does her family. And those are the only voices that matter. Your lawyer has told you this too.”
The hospice director was still standing there when the patient’s sister opened the door, which meant the director heard the woman in the bed say, “That lady is such a pain. Bad joke.”
Brett regretted the exchange even before the door was closed. And said as much. “I watched a patient die this morning. It always gets to me.”
The patient’s sister asked, “You stay around for the end?”
“If they ask me to.”
“Even when you don’t like it?”
“Some of my subjects are not fortunate enough to have a sister there for them.”
The patient watched the exchange with eyes that glittered with intelligence and defiance. Brett liked her already. Which only made his job harder. His hands trembled slightly as he opened his laptop and began the process of coding in. He put the tremors down to a long day.
It was the sister who stated the obvious. “Maybe we need to make peace with Mrs. Birch.”
The patient spoke in the tight gasps of a woman intent on holding back the pain. “Not worth it.”
“I can’t be here all the time. What happens when I leave?”
“I don’t like her. Nobody does.”
Brett unwound the lead and plugged it into the special headphones. “How’s the pain?”
“Not so bad. When I’m still. Breathing hurts. Maybe I should stop. Joke.”
Over the eleven months he’d been working this gig, Brett had developed certain traits. They formed his own personal firewall. One of them was that he always referred to these people as his subjects. Or the patients. He willed himself to forget the names of all the family members. He never returned the embraces that often came after the procedure. But occasionally there were patients like this, who shamed him with their strength.
“I didn’t introduce myself properly. I’m Brett Riffkind.”
“Em.”
The sister said, “And I’m Sandra.”
“It’s nice to meet you both. Your sister is right, Em. And there’s one other issue to consider. Mrs. Birch will make it especially hard if anyone else here wants my services.”
Sandra gave Em a chance to respond, then asked, “You always do this for free?”
“Expenses only. And that’s another thing. Because the director is opposed to what’s happening here, I can’t stay in the overnight medical quarters or take my meals here.”
Em said, “We can afford it.”
“He’s not talking about us, Sis.”
“Oh. Right.” A few panting breaths. “I really don’t like her.”
“It’s your call,” Brett said.
“Oh, go ahead.”
Brett walked back down the hall. As soon as he rounded the corner and entered the reception area, Mrs. Birch burned him with her gaze. He knocked on the open door anyway. “Em and her sister would like you to join us.”
The invitation was clearly the last thing Mrs. Birch had expected. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
Brett turned back. “It’s the only way you’ll ever understand.”
“This procedure was developed by Dr. Gabriella Speciale, an Italian scientist who spent years recording the brain-wave patterns of people meditating and at prayer. She isolated the primary shifts in mental states and identified the dominant brain-wave cycles.” Brett directed his words to the patient. But Em and her sister already knew all this. The information was on hundreds of websites and blogs. Thousands. All over the globe. No one could have anticipated the outpouring that had resulted from his eleven months on the road. Especially not Brett. “Earlier studies had already determined that if you place a pure tonal sound in one ear and a slightly different tone in the other, the subject does not hear two different sounds. Instead, the brain forms a vibratory pattern. The rapidity of this vibration is determined by the difference between the two tones.”
From her chair by the window, the hospice director radiated disapproval. Brett had no idea whether her tension would interrupt the patient’s ability to ascend. But the way Em watched him with an almost ferocious intensity, he doubted it.
“The sequence starts with a pattern that invites the body into a state of complete relaxation. You remain completely
in control of the entire process throughout. If you feel the least bit uncomfortable, you may simply return to full physical consciousness.”
Em listened to him through the headphones. Brett used the type that completely enveloped the ear. Their bulkiness only highlighted the patient’s wasted state. She asked, “You’re sure I will ascend?”
“In our normal clinical trials, the standard rate of ascent on the first go is about thirty percent. Another thirty percent report a period of intense relaxation and nothing else.”
“And the rest?”
“They bug out and run screaming from the room.”
Em smiled for the first time. Her entire face flashed with the humor she had managed to hold on to, despite everything. The sight twisted Brett’s heart.
Em said, “I’d like that. To go running. Anywhere.”
Sandra asked, “What about with these procedures?”
Brett motioned to the Bible on the bedstead. “For subjects with strong faith who are not heavily medicated, the ascent rate is almost one hundred percent.”
“I wouldn’t call my faith strong,” Em said. “More like a last gasp. Bad joke.”
Her sister sat where she could share smiles with Em. “You’re terrible.”
“I know.” Em’s sharp gaze found the director. “I need to do this.”
Mrs. Birch sighed but did not speak. She seemed fascinated despite her own best efforts to the contrary.
Sandra asked, “Have you ever lost someone when they’ve been, you know . . .”
“Ascending. No. Not yet, anyway.”
Em flashed him another smile. “There’s always a first time, right?”
Brett knew it was going to be very hard to say good-bye to this one. “I hope not. Ready?”
Em shut her eyes. “Let’s do it.”
5
Lena maxed out her credit cards by acquiring the smallest booth available and the last spot on the conference agenda. It meant they would be speaking first, which she assumed had been avoided by others here to address the group. She had no experience with peddlers of this stuff, legal or otherwise. But she doubted many of them would be fresh-eyed and alert at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning.
She said as much to Don Metzer as they surveyed the exhibition hall. The attorney had arrived at seven thirty that morning with their three new partners. They had taped a handwritten placard at the back of their empty booth and begged three folding chairs and a rickety table from a passing janitor. Now they stood at the railing of the rear balcony, which also served as the foyer to the main conference hall. Below them stretched aisle after aisle of the most bizarre convention on earth.
Don surveyed the scene with a faint smile and said, “Actually, speaking so early could be to our benefit. Our audience might be smaller, but we’ve got a better chance of catching them while they’re still . . .”
She found his smile contagious. “Unstoned.”
From her other side, Enrique chuckled. “Man, this is seriously twisted.”
More than six hundred vendors were giving their booths a last-minute buff-up. Over the hall’s sound system, Blondie sang a lament to life’s wasted hours. Directly below Lena stretched an aisle of hand-blown bongs and tie-dyed shirts. The row to her left was reserved for confectionaries, where every counter was piled with chocolates and buns and brownies. Then came two aisles of machinery—self-watering pots, vacuum-sealing machines, carbon dioxide extraction systems, flicker grow lights. Farther back was row after row after row of the product itself. The fragrance wafting up to the balcony was pungent.
The ATM leasing company’s president was a square-jawed aging jock named Gary Langdon. He ran the family business in a solid if unimaginative style. Enrique asked him, “You okay with all this, man?”
“Money is money,” Gary replied. “The state my balance sheet is in right now, I’d lease bananas to the Denver Zoo’s monkey house if it got me through next quarter.”
A voice from behind them asked, “One of you dudes named Fennan?”
Lena swung around. “That would be me.”
The red-bearded Viking cast a merry gaze over the banker’s and lawyer’s ties. The guy wore a vintage Grateful Dead T-shirt and a tag that declared him to be a staffer. “We need you on the podium.”
“Give us three minutes.” When he moved off, she turned to the third of her new partners, the oddest duck of them all. Preston Downs the Fourth, president of the Pueblo State Bank, was dressed in a three-pieced black suit, a needle-thin black tie, and a white shirt so starched the collar shone blue in the fluorescents. He was aged in his early sixties and looked ten years older, with a shiny bald head and cheeks so lean they formed caverns. Preston Downs the Fourth looked like a mortician sizing up his own casket.
Lena asked him, “How would you feel about being our spokesperson?”
“Are you certain that’s wise?” His voice matched his physique, a low and somber drone.
“You best listen to the man,” Enrique agreed. “These cats see him walk to the mike, they’ll probably figure they’re headed to the OD Corral.”
To her surprise, Don Metzer said, “No, no, this is good. We’re not after fitting in. We are offering a banking service. Stable, safe, secure.”
When no one else objected, Lena said, “Okay. We’re on.”
“My name is Preston Downs. My family was one of Pueblo’s original settlers. We ran a dry-goods business through the gunslinging era. We fed the cattle drovers and we buried the ones who didn’t make it out. Our fortunes rose and fell with the town that we’d helped build up from nothing. And right now, the fortunes of my family and my town are both pretty close to rock bottom.”
Lena surveyed the audience. They formed a remarkable collection of sizes and shapes and facial hair and tattoos and piercings. Her group possessed the only two ties. Lena figured she was the lone woman wearing makeup.
Preston Downs continued, “My great-great-grandfather established the Pueblo State Bank in the first month of the last century. Before then, our farmers and ranchers and merchants had to truck their money to Denver, or bury it in their backyards. Opening a bank didn’t make much sense at the time—the town wasn’t big enough to afford one. But we did it because our friends and neighbors needed what a bank could offer. Safety.”
The man spoke with the slow cadence of a plainsman. He stood impossibly erect for a man of his years, and he addressed this audience with the same gravity as he would an audience of financiers. His manner and his speech came from a bygone era. Within three minutes of his starting, the conference hall was not just quiet. These people were engaged.
“I opposed the legalization business. But the people of Colorado have spoken. And I respect the democratic process. Even when I disagree with the result. That’s what makes our country—”
He stopped because he had to. The conference hall had risen to its feet. They whistled and they applauded.
Don reached over and squeezed Lena’s hand.
When the hall went quiet, Preston continued, “What is a crime now is how our government fails to guarantee the safety of our citizens doing what the state has declared a lawful enterprise. This situation is outrageous—” He had to stop a second time. And for him, that was enough. When the hall quieted once more, he said, “I’ve spoken my piece. I’m turning it over to the woman responsible for us being here.”
Lena approached the mike, introduced herself, took the biggest breath of her entire life, and launched straight in.
She walked the retailers through her plan. Step one: new armored ATMs were to be installed in each retailer that signed on. The ATMs were granted “bank status” because the machine’s supplier was now part of a bank’s holding company. This meant the machines could be equipped to accept deposits as well as handle credit card withdrawals.
Step two: twice-daily pickups would be scheduled using the Chavezes’ series of armored vans, a company that had been handling secure transport for over forty years.
Step
three: accounts were opened by the Pueblo State Bank, which listed them as “special deposits.”
What Lena left out of her presentation was the most worrying aspect of her plan. Don and the bank president both knew it for certain, but had granted her breathing space by finding no need to mention the obvious.
It all came down to a race against the clock.
Throughout these high-pressure days, three questions had raked talons across her brain. Was she correct in assuming this grey area was just that, and not genuinely illegal? Was the attorney general actually working on a ruling? If it was delayed for any reason, which would come first—the new ruling or a felony warrant?
Directed straight at her. Lena Fennan. President and CEO of the new holding company.
Lena completed her overview in eight minutes. She then turned to where the others stood and introduced them as her partners. She finished her remarks with, “We are still in the process of incorporating. We don’t have contracts ready for any new clients to sign. We don’t even have a cost structure. So right now, if you’re interested, you have two choices. You can wait until all the legal hoops have been jumped through and we can write you up a contract on letterhead. Or you can accept us on our word. In that case, we’ll do a handshake deal and our armored vans will be by to make their first pickup . . .” Lena turned to the Chavez father and son.
Juan called out, “We can start this afternoon.”
Enrique added, “And go as long as it takes. Everybody will be seen to before we go to bed.”
Lena turned back. “Your cash will be delivered to the Pueblo State Bank. Preston?”
He lifted his voice loud enough to carry over the silent crowd. “I and my staff will stay on duty all night if required.”
Lena caught the bearded Viking’s cutoff signal and said, “I guess that’s it. If you’re interested, you can find us at the emptiest booth on the exhibition floor.”
They were mobbed.
6
Lena’s and Don’s only break from signing up new clients that entire Saturday was to hold an emergency conference call with the three partners at Don’s firm who formed the management committee. The committee was required to green-light any new client. In Lena’s case, this was especially important since the firm’s largest single client was the bank. But Don played the senior attorneys like the pro he was. He named the firms Lena had acquired, then gave their revenue and the cost of the proposed acquisitions. His tone suggested it was barely worth the partners’ attention, particularly on a Saturday afternoon. Which was echoed by the lawyers who utterly disliked how Don had disturbed their weekend.