Mandy was still asleep on the couch and not looking very comfortable when John came out of the bedroom in the morning dressed for work. “The coffee should be ready in a minute, John,” he heard Sally call. “Breakfast in another three or four minutes.”

“Thank you, Sally,” he said. “I’d planned on just hitting a drive-through like always.”

“No point in doing that,” she smiled as he went into the kitchen. “I know you’re going to have a tough day and you’re dreading it. I at least want to send you off with a good attitude.”

“I appreciate it,” he told her. “It’s been a while since that happened.” None of his wives, including Mandy, had been very good about getting up in the morning; once in a while they’d manage it, but to have them make breakfast on a work day was a rare occurrence. Having Sally make his breakfast was a rare luxury. “I could get used to this.”

“Look, I know Mandy, Teresa, and I have got to work on the school business,” she said, “but it doesn’t have to be done today if there’s something else I could do, even if it’s nothing more than running some papers someplace.”

“I don’t know how the day is going to go, but that might happen. I might have to call on Mandy rather than you, since she’s got a car and knows where stuff is around here. But getting this school thing working before some social services agency whiner gets a whiff of Teresa not being in school is more important than some of that other shit. I can put off dealing with insurance agencies or whatever for a day or two if I need to. Insurance can be complicated but I doubt it’s anything like as much of a pain in the ass as some damn social services do-gooder.”

“Oh, shit, I know that all too well,” she agreed. “I’ve mostly been able to keep them off my ass but there have been times . . . well, let’s just say I agree with you. I want to keep them off my ass even worse than you do.”

“Then I don’t need to lecture you about it,” he said as he sat down to the bacon, scrambled eggs, home fries, and toast she set in front of him. It looked a hell of a lot better than a breakfast sandwich from a drive-through.

John had made plans to get up and get moving a little early so he could get to the office and at least get a glance at the Tomtucknee Regional bid before the storm broke, but the breakfast slowed him up, along with natural reluctance to face facts. It was much more pleasant, after all, to sit at the table and have a second cup of coffee with Sally before he got moving.

He was still running a little ahead of schedule when he got in the van and started for the office, mentally running over some of the things he had to do today, many of them which had little or nothing to do directly with Suncoast Medical Supply. I really need to make a list, he thought; something has to get going on getting some compensation for Sally’s accident. Several times over the last part of last week he’d made up his mind to get a lawyer and get him going on that, but always something had come up to get in the way. That shouldn’t be forgotten about. Probably his insurance company could handle the details of the accident Saturday night, although the probably sort-of-stolen nature of the other car and incompetence of the driver would complicate things. Something needed to be done about the front door of the office pretty quickly, but he needed to check in with his agent before he went looking for someone to deal with that. And so on, and so on.

Mental note: make a list, fool. Otherwise you’re going to miss something, sure as hell.

The office was quiet when he got there, since it was still well before he could expect Annamaria to arrive. He unlocked the back door, but decided to leave the front door locked until official opening time, or at least till Annamaria got there. He took the time to look at the front door; it looked worse in daylight than it had in the dark on Saturday night. Going to have to get rolling on that today, he thought.

He went on into his office and turned on the computer. While he waited for it to boot up, he pulled out a scratch pad and tried to note down some of the action items he’d been thinking about while driving in. It turned into a longer list than he’d thought.

First things first: the Tomtucknee Regional bid; that had waited far too long. In the odd minutes he’d had to think about it, he’d been able to think of a couple service agreement amendments that might make the bid look a little more promising. There wasn’t much he could do on price – that had been clear from the beginning – but he could shave off a few bucks and that might help on a close bid. That would have to do, he thought. It wasn’t that damn complicated, it was simply that he just hadn’t had the opportunity to work on it. He typed up some notes about how he wanted it done, and put them in an e-mail to Annamaria so she could pull together a formal bid proposal. There, that was that pressing issue out of the way, he thought.

I might as well get some other work done early, he thought. As soon as a couple of offices opened he was going to be heating up the phones, and he probably wasn’t going to be able to get much else done for a while.

The e-mail queue was probably the next thing to get a look at; there could be all sorts of brush fires lying there. Predictably, a lot of stuff in the inbox was pure spam and trash; the senders and subject lines told him most of what he wanted to know in order to delete over half of it, bing, bing, bing. That made the job a lot easier.

One of the first things that drew his attention was an e-mail from the office in Las Vegas. Specifically, the subject line was: “Re: Do you have any idea what that means?” John frowned for a moment, and realized that it was in reference to the memo in pure Japlish that he’d gotten Friday morning; from the date stamp it looked like the e-mail hadn’t been answered until he’d been out of the office Friday evening. In other words, it was another pain in the ass caused by the time differential. Maybe it would clarify the original e-mail, though.

“We’re not sure what this guy actually meant,” the e-mail read. “But from what we can make out, it looks like he’s talking about removing sections B-13 and C-5 from the standard service agreement.”

That didn’t exactly clarify things a lot for John, until he could pull up a copy of the standard service agreement. Somehow, it wasn’t any surprise that the two sections were precisely the areas he’d just mangled for the Tomtucknee Regional bid. Well, shit.

Now, wait just a goddamn minute, he thought. It’s only a proposed change to the agreement, after all, and whoever it was in Las Vegas didn’t seem to be altogether clear if that was what the Japlish memo was talking about, anyway. It might not go into effect for a while. Maybe it’s possible to slip it in under the wire, so I better not say anything about it to anyone in Las Vegas for a while. The damn Tomtucknee Regional bid was a big deal, after all. What I gave them was really the best deal I can offer, and if Voss can beat it, I’ll be damn surprised. But still, I don’t want to let those bastards steal a deal this big.

In any case, there wasn’t much else he could do about it right then. He turned to the rest of the e-mails, and discovered that most of them were routine. Sid still wasn’t making any sense about the service agreement question he had over in Arkansas, but that was no surprise; that probably was going to turn into a phone call. He added a note to his list to make the call in a couple hours; time differential was an issue there, too.

“Wow,” he heard Annamaria’s voice. “What happened to the front door?”

“Warren’s wife had a tire iron and wanted to have a word with him,” he replied. “That was Saturday night, and they hauled her off to the cooler. I haven’t heard anything since, but as she took a swing at a cop there’s a chance they might keep her for a while.”

“I take it Warren left.”

“Yeah, he blew this pop stand like you wouldn’t believe,” he replied. “At least that was what he told me the plan was on Saturday night. Look, Annamaria, we’ve got a ton of stuff come down, especially Saturday, and I’m probably going to have to lean on you to deal with some of it. I really want to thank you for turning me on to Raul and Carlos. They managed to solve some big problems, and Teresa was real happy about both the computer and having Carlos around.”

“No problem, both of them were glad to have the work, and Carlos said that Teresa was kind of fun. What do you plan to do about the front door?”

“I’m just waiting until the insurance agency opens, and then I’m going to give them a call. We probably can’t have it fixed until they send someone over to take a look at it. That’s probably going to involve getting a copy of the police report, so we need to get hot on that.”

“I’ll give them a call,” she offered. “What’s the deal with both your Toyota and Jaguar sitting out back?”

“The Jag crapped out on me Saturday morning when I was bringing it out here so I’d have garage space at home. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but I had a hell of a time getting it here thanks to those bastards from Greenleaf. The Toyota, well, Saturday night some Alzheimer’s patient made an escape and decided she had to get to her club meeting in Passaic, New Jersey. She thought I was holding her up so she rammed me.”

“That stuff happens,” she agreed.

“I had it towed here, too,” he said. I guess I’ll be driving the van for the next few days. I’ll need to get to the insurance company about that, too. That’s not office stuff, so I guess I’d better be the one to make that call.”

“All right, but let me know if you need any help with it. Look, John, about the Jaguar?”

“I’m not in any real rush about it. It can sit here and rot as easily as it can at home. I’m not looking to pay those robbers at the foreign car place half my life savings to fix something stupid on it though.”

“That was my thinking. Look, maybe I could have Julio come over and look at it. He’s pretty good with cars, and it might be something simple.”

“It probably is. The stuff that goes wrong with that car tends to be pretty simple. It’s just that it costs an arm and a leg for those bastards to fix it. Julio sounds like a good idea, but tell him not to rush. There are more important things to deal with.”

“He’d probably do it for nothing so long as he can tool around in it a bit, with me as his seat cover.”

“Sounds like a plan to me, but if it breaks down while he’s driving it, he’s responsible for the tow – and tell him not to call those bastards from Greenleaf. I ought to get smart and sell the damn thing, anyway.”

“Yes, but then you’d have to find something else to complain about.”

“I have more than enough to complain about, thank you,” he said, leaning back in his chair. Thank God for Annamaria! That was two of the problems he was facing this morning that he was able to slide off on her, at least for the moment. That would ease the sting a little. Maybe this day wasn’t going to be as bad as he’d feared it could.

A little to his surprise the call to his insurance agent about the Toyota went off easily. He didn’t have to talk to his agent, Herb Campbell at all; Campbell’s secretary was able to handle things and it sounded like she’d been doing it for years. John reported the accident to her, told her where the car was, and she said they’d send someone over to look at it later in the day. If he could have the police report on the crash by the time the adjuster got there, it would make things go more smoothly.

For perhaps ten minutes things looked pretty promising. Things began crawling back into shape; perhaps the next thing to do would be to find some ambulance-chasing lawyer to work on Sally’s problem from last week. That had gone on long enough. The thing of it was that he wasn’t sure just how bad he wanted to depend on ads in a phone book to find the right ambulance chaser. It would be good to have a recommendation from someone, but he had to sit back and think about who he could ask.

For no good reason he thought of Toby Green, the guy who ran the place where he’d rented the hospital bed and wheelchair for Teresa. If memory served him, Toby had been involved with a bad accident a couple years before and it had wound up going to court. He might have an idea or two.

It was only the work of a couple moments to get Toby on the phone; as he waited, John tried to think of some kind of sports bullshit he could lay on Toby before they got down to business. The best he could come up with was to ask, “Hey, Toby. Are the Tigers looking any better?”

“They probably could beat your average Little League team on a good day,” Toby snorted. “Realistically, they’ve got a bunch of guys there who really ought to be playing Double A ball. Maybe even Single A. They’ve got a couple guys who might not be too bad with some decent support, but there’s no way in hell they’re going to get it. So what’s on your mind today?”

“I’m still dealing with that accident last week, you know, the one that caused me to see you about getting the bed and wheelchair for the girl who was hurt. I’m thinking we need a lawyer to get on the trucking company’s ass big time, but I don’t know who to call. I thought you might be able to help me out.”

“Well, the guy I had was Linton Sanford, up in Bradenton,” he replied. “Pretty decent guy, and got me out of the case a little ahead. He probably would do you about as well as anyone.”

“Good enough,” John replied. “It could be I have a little other business for him, too.”

“Oh, he’ll charge you for it, but all lawyers do. He’s a pretty good guy to have on your side, and he’s on your side so long as you’re paying him. I can think of worse.”

“I actually don’t think this is going to be all that complicated. I just think I need to have a lawyer show his fangs, but I could be wrong on that.”

“Trust me on this, John. It’s any lawyer’s job to take something simple and make it complicated. It if was simple they wouldn’t make any money off of it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” John said. “Thanks a bunch, Toby. Any chance for the Devil Rays this year?”

“They’ve never won half their games and last year was the worst ever. In other words, nothing’s changed. How’s that kid getting along?”

“She’s doing better, but she’s going to be laid up for a while. We’re trying to make it easy on her, but she’s a kid and doesn’t like being laid up.”

“Can’t say as I blame her. If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.”

“You’ve already been a big help. Thanks, Toby!”

John hung up the phone and pulled out the phone book to look for Sanford’s number, but before he could manage it he heard Annamaria’s voice: “John, call for you on line two. I hate to say this but it sounds like trouble.”

“Oh, great,” he said. “I knew it was too good to last.” He punched the button of line two and said, “John Engler.”

“Mr. Engler,” the voice on the other end of the line said sternly. “This is Linton Sanford. I’m an attorney up in Bradenton, and I want to know what you plan on doing about that accident you caused Saturday night.”

Oh, shit, John thought. That’s the guy I wanted to talk to about Sally’s problem. “I was in an accident Saturday night,” he admitted, “but there’s no way in hell I could have caused it. I was sitting stopped in a left turn lane with my blinker on when I was rammed from behind.”

“That’s not the way my client tells it,” Sanford replied. “That’s nothing at all like it.”

“Mr. Sanford,” John replied reasonably. “I have two questions. One, have you actually looked at the accident report, and two, who is your client?”

“My client is Charles Mayerling, the owner of the car you destroyed,” Sanford replied, malevolence in his voice. “He was told by the woman driving it that you rammed into her.”

“She could have told him a lot of things,” John shook his head. “I know she told the officer that she thought she was in Hackensack, New Jersey, and on her way to a club meeting in Passaic.”

“Be that as it may, he wants to see justice done. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to tell you to call my insurance company and deal with them. That’s why I have insurance, after all. You can get the name and number of my insurance company off the police report, and it might be a good idea if you read the rest of the report before you call them.”

“Mr. Engler, that’s not good enough. This needs to be dealt with. You destroyed that man’s car, and now you’re going to pay for it. We intend to file suit on this issue.”

“I’m sure the insurance company will be glad to talk to you,” John said. “And they may want to file suit against Mr. Mayerling over the whiplash injury he caused by letting someone incompetent drive his car and ram it into the back of someone else’s car. There’s no way in hell I’m going to take the blame for something I didn’t cause, and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it. Now, call my insurance company. I’m not the one you need to talk to.”

“You don’t have to talk to me like that. We intend to file suit.”

“Talk to my insurance company. They might want to talk to you. I don’t. See you in court.” He slammed the phone down.

“Christ,” he said loudly, the anger he’d been feeling much of last week coming to the surface again. “Of all the asshole stuff that’s happened to me recently, that one has to take the prize.”

Annamaria came into the office. “Trouble?” she asked.

“Narrow-minded blithering idiot,” John sneered. “It’s assholes like him who give lawyers a bad name. I was just getting set to call him up and ask him to take a look at Sally’s case against the trucking company. She needs to have some mean, stupid junkyard dog like that, but it’s sure as hell not going to be him, now.”

“Maybe I’d better ask around a little,” she said soberly. “I mean, John, I teased you last week about getting a lawyer out of an ad on the back of a phone book, but this sounds like it might be serious.”

“Thanks, Annamaria. You’re a life saver again. I suppose I’d better get my ass down to the cop shop and get a copy of the report before someone changes it.”

“John, don’t drive too fast and don’t drive angry.”

“I’ll try not to,” he said, recognizing the reason in her voice. “Hold the fort, and don’t be surprised if something else really stupid crawls out of the woodwork in the next few minutes.”

John went out, got in the van, and headed downtown to the police station, trying to keep it under the limit but wondering what the hell was going to happen next. A couple things had gone right this morning but it was clear that the jinx was still on him. Fortunately, it didn’t take him long to get a copy of the police report, and, as expected, it was an honest reflection of what had happened: he’d been stopped at the light when he was rammed from behind. The old woman driving the car had been written up for Operating With Ability Impaired, which seemed like an understatement to him. With any kind of luck, the police report ought to take care of most of the problem with the attorney, but John had the feeling that it could be dragged out for months.

Another goddamn problem he didn’t need. Was this shit ever going to end?

As he came out of the cop shop he stopped for a moment to think about what to do next. Though there were still fires to piss on at the office, maybe a little closer coordination with his insurance agent would be a good idea. His insurance agent’s office was only a couple miles away; so he might as well do it while he was close, he thought, heading for the van. As he was getting in, his cell phone rang, and he had to fumble in his pocket to get it. “Yeah,” he replied.

“John, it’s Mandy,” he heard. “We’ve got a problem with registering Teresa in school.”

“What is it?” he sighed, as if he didn’t have enough problems this morning.

“They have to get Teresa’s records from her old school,” Mandy said. “Sally doesn’t want to let her old school know where she is now, since she’s afraid her old boyfriend will use it to track her down here. Sally is very upset about it.”

“That’s who? Hector? The guy who wanted a piece of Teresa? I can’t blame her for being upset. Come on, Mandy, you’re social services bureaucrat enough, bullshit them.”

“I’ve tried,” she said. “It’s hard to bullshit someone who doesn’t have the brains God gave a goose.”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll have to solve this one somehow. For now, take Teresa home. When you get home, get on the computer and start looking for home schooling programs, preferably something that isn’t run by some rightwing maniac church with enough axes to grind to kill a flock of chickens.”

“That’s probably a simpler answer than getting some school to do a homebound program.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, but we need to get moving on this. Now that the cat is out of the bag about her being here, you can be goddamn sure that some bleeding heart wannabe is going to be causing trouble, so we’d better get her signed up quick, like today if possible. I’m going to be looking for a reasonable attorney, not like one asshole I could name. I’m going to have a shitload of work for him by the time this is all over with.”

“John, this is going to cost money.”

“Everything costs money. I’ll pay for it if I have to, but there’s no reason Sally and Teresa should have to live in fear of Hector. I don’t know how credible a threat he is at this distance but there’s no point in finding out.”

“Sally says that maybe it would be better if she and Teresa just left.”

“Ask her how she’s going to manage that with no money, no car, no place to go, and Teresa in a wheelchair. She’s better off here for now. We’re just going to have to fight this one through. If Hector hasn’t shown up by the time Teresa gets out of that wheelchair, he probably isn’t going to show up ever.”

“All right, John. I’ll try to make that clear to her.”

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