Royce didn’t take off for spring break – there was too much for him to do. He remembered going to Florida on spring break years before, back when he was in college and he was getting serious with Maxine, but that had been a long time before and there had been a great deal of water flow under the bridge since then. Those had been pleasant days to remember, but that was then and this was now.

They were making good progress on the new stores – or at least, Jeremy was making good progress, while Royce mostly stayed in the background and worked on Pafco Supermarkets issues. The two of them continued to meet frequently, sometimes a couple of times each day, to coordinate things and sometimes to do some brainstorming.

One of the things that they had yet to settle was the name of what they had called “the hot dog stand.” It was a convenient term to use, but they still felt uncomfortable using it. Now it was getting to be imperative to come up with a real name to use, since Jeremy was anxious to get a graphic designer he knew to work on a logo, signs, and building decorations.

“Really, it doesn’t matter very much,” Royce pointed out as the two of them discussed the issue in his office. “We can pretty well call it the ‘Hot Dog Hut’ for this store since it’s pretty experimental.” The name was on a list of about thirty possibilities, and they had agreed that it was better than others they had considered. “If it doesn’t work out, then it’s no great loss. If it does and we want to open more stores or franchise it, then we’ll have time to come up with a new name and make sure we’re not stepping on someone’s toes.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Jeremy agreed. “Let’s just go with that and call it good enough for now, since we’re to the point where we have to come up with something. That’ll let me get going on the graphics issues so they won’t be a holdup.”

“How are we coming on other issues?”

“About as well as can be expected. The build-outs are coming along nicely, except for the River Street store. It turns out it’s going to take a little more electrical work than we had anticipated, but the builders are on it. It’s about a week behind the others, but there’s still enough slack in the schedule that we’ve got some breathing room.”

Just then the phone on Royce’s desk rang. “I better get this,” he said. “I told Hazel to go ahead and interrupt us if she thought it was important.” Jeremy just shrugged as Royce picked up the phone and identified himself.

“Hi,” he heard on the phone. “Royce, this is Paul Meyerson. Is there any chance you could slide over here sometime today or tomorrow? I’ve got something here you’ll be interested in, but you probably ought to see it here. I’m pretty open for time since things are a little on the slow side right now.”

“How about later on this afternoon? I’ve got a couple of errands to run over in your part of town.”

“That’ll work just fine.”

“Good news?” Jeremy asked as Royce hung up the phone.

“It has the possibility of it. Now, where are we on fixtures?”

It was the middle of the afternoon before Royce could meet with the detective, who was sitting behind his desk working on his computer when Royce walked in. They exchanged greetings and small talk for a while before they got down to business. “You said you had something for me. I take it your daughter came through?”

“She sure did,” Meyerson smiled. “What’s more, she got it even quicker than I expected her to, and it confirms that Keller is a player.” He picked up a remote control, and after a few seconds a wide-screen TV on the wall came to life, showing an empty hotel room with a bed in the middle of the view. “There’s some dead time before anything happens, so let me just fast-forward through it.”

After close to a minute of nothing happening, a man and a woman came scuttling into view, and the detective slowed the view to a normal pace. “That’s Keller, right?” Royce asked. “I’ve never met him.”

“According to Tammy it is, and she knows him well enough to know,” Meyerson commented as the two on the screen almost frantically began taking off each other’s clothes. It did not take them long to be on the bed.

“Wow,” Royce smiled as he saw the nude couple getting down to business. “She’s gorgeous.”

“She ought to be. She’s a hooker, and one of the better ones out there, and one of the more expensive ones, too. It’s just that he didn’t know that she was already bought and paid for.”

“I see. She’s a plant, then.”

“You could say that, but I’ll tell you what, this is a lot better than the usual surveillance video we get. It helps when you have someone really set up.”

They watched the nude couple in action for a minute or so before Royce commented, “That’s not just a surveillance video, it’s a downright porn tape.”

“It would almost qualify for it, considering that it wasn’t taken under studio lighting with a commercial video camera,” Meyerson laughed. “This is about as far as I’ve gotten with it myself. I haven’t bothered to watch it all the way through, but I spot-checked it from here on. It goes on about like this for about an hour and a half. There’s also a view from a second camera, but it’s not quite as good. Is that what you were looking for?”

“I’d have to say that it’s better than I expected.”

“Good. Then there’s no need to watch any more of it unless you really want to,” he replied, stopping the playback; the screen went blank. “What you’ve seen so far would be more than enough evidence of unfaithfulness in just about any divorce action, and it was totally legally obtained. That’s not what you want it for, is it?”

“No, at least I don’t think so. I haven’t thought out just how I want to use it, but knowing I have it will help me think of something.”

“Good enough. I’ll give you a couple of copies of the DVD, and I’ll keep it on file here if you need more of them. Is that all we can do for you?”

“I can’t think of anything else right now, but if I do, you’ll be the first to know. You really did an excellent job on this.”

“Actually, you have my daughter to thank for that, but she’s still down on some beach catching some rays or something. I just sat here, ran the computer and answered the phone.”

Royce pulled out his checkbook. “Sometimes it works that way,” he grinned. “Look, tell me what I owe you, and I’ll add in an extra grand for a bonus for her. This is a lot more than I expected.”

“I’m quite sure she’ll be able to find something to spend the money on,” the detective laughed. “Women are like that, you know.”

A few minutes later and a few thousand dollars poorer Royce walked out of the detective’s office lost in thought. He knew that having the video put a little different spin on things; up until now, everything that he’d learned about Keller had been mostly hearsay, and impossible to prove. That was in the past; he now had solid evidence of his daughter’s fiancé cheating on her.

He got back in his car and headed back toward his office, but his mind was elsewhere. One thing was clear: his daughter was engaged to a cheating louse, and he was sure of it now. But what should he do about it?

He had been very disappointed and frustrated with his daughter for some time, and that business back at Thanksgiving about giving her away at her wedding had just about been the last straw. It proved that she didn’t really care about him or how he felt, or at least that her mother had driven her to feel that way, so it came out at the same point.

Although it was very tempting to do nothing and let her suffer the consequences, he didn’t think he could do that. After all, in spite of everything she was still his daughter, and although she’d drifted away from him or had been taken away from him, he still felt he ought to try to do something to protect her.

As far as he knew, Petra and Barry were still down in Florida – at least that’s what their plan was, according to Tammy. Perhaps he ought to go down to her college, maybe after she was back next week, and show her the video. That way, she would know what she was getting in for, which was a lot more than he had known when he married Maxine. But she might put him off or ignore the warning, and considering the way she seemed to feel about him, she might ignore him out of spite, then go ahead and marry the jerk. If she did, she did, and at least he would know to keep his checkbook closed to her in the future; there was no point in throwing his money down a rat hole.

Perhaps another way to do it would be to go down to the college, track this Barry down, and show him the video, with the warning that he would show it to Petra if he didn’t dump her. It had possibilities, but his first reaction to the idea was that he didn’t like it. Barry might get violent, or consider it to be blackmail – which it was – and he would accomplish nothing.

But those were just first reactions, he knew. There had to be a better solution out there somewhere, a more elegant one. He just had to think of what it was.

He wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to his driving, and all of a sudden he realized that he was near the River Street location that he and Jeremy had been talking about earlier. Although he had tried to stay out of the neighborhood, he didn’t think it would hurt anything if he just drove by the location in order to better fix it in his mind. He couldn’t see anything of what was going on inside, but once again he thought that it was just as good a location as the one Wilson’s Subs had, so that wouldn’t hurt.

The Wilson’s Subs store didn’t look very busy, but it was a time of day when it wouldn’t be expected. Tearing his mind away from the situation with Petra and the Keller kid, he wondered if Milt Wilson had any idea of the steamroller that was heading toward him. It was tempting to get Meyerson to look into the question, but he’d already made up his mind that he wasn’t going to take any risk that might tip him off, not that there was anything Wilson could do about it if he did know. The whole idea was to try to keep him in the dark until the world dropped on his head. That would be more shocking and might lead him to make bad decisions that would hasten the process of ruining him to pay him back for taking Maxine and Petra away from him.

He had long since made up his mind to hold off the action until sometime around the wedding, when Wilson’s attention would be diverted and his cash position poor because of the wedding expenses. Royce wished he knew more about the wedding plans. He didn’t know very much, except for the fact that it would be at St. Marks, and therefore it would be a big wedding with everybody that Maxine had ever met invited to it – with the probable exception of himself, of course. Maxine would not miss a chance to take a swipe at him, which had been what had set this whole thing off in the first place. On top of that, he was dead sure that Maxine would want to make it as big a deal as possible. Even when Petra had been a little girl Maxine had been planning her wedding as a huge and lavish one, and on what evidence there was he doubted she’d changed her mind very much.

That opened the door to another possibility of how to use the video in his briefcase. He’d have to think about it, though . . .

Although Barry was blissfully unaware of his starring video role, he had his doubts about the future as he lay back in a lounge chair with a can of beer in his hand as he watched Petra get another dose of sun in her really tiny thong bikini.

While her nearly naked body gave him something to think about, his mind was still on the encounter he’d had with that really gorgeous gal a couple of days before. He’d never even gotten her name, but she’d given him the ride of his life. He’d never had anything that good; hell, he’d never even dreamed that it could be that good. For it to happen out of nowhere, with no warning or preparation was even more dazzling, since it proved that interesting things could still happen.

What really irritated him was that by comparison to that gal, Petra was, well, average. She was good in bed and fun to be with, but she didn’t hold a candle to that walking goddess who had invited him to have the greatest experience he could imagine. He’d often expected that there had to be someone better than Petra out there, and now he knew it.

It would have been fun to go another round or two with that gal, but strangely enough he hadn’t seen her since. It was almost as if she had been a dream, a figment of his imagination, except that he knew that she hadn’t been. Somehow, though, she seemed to signify that he was a fool to be settling for what he now knew was second best.

The more he thought about it, the more reluctant he got about actually getting married, although he knew he was pretty close to being in too deep to turn around now.

Maybe he didn’t mind that much. After all, Petra was pretty, no doubt about it – but not that pretty. She was good in bed, and fun to be in bed with – but again, not that good. She was pleasant to be around, and easy-going and easy enough to evade that he ought to be able to have a little more fun if an opportunity like he’d had with that gal happened to come around again.

He knew he was pretty well committed to marrying her, even though his enthusiasm was limited. Petra’s mother had been making a huge deal out of the wedding; the only reason she hadn’t been calling them every ten minutes down here was that Petra had told her that she was going to leave her cell phone off. Frankly, he had already had enough of her and her wedding plans, but at least in three months it would be over with and in the past. It would be good to have it there so he and Petra could get on with things.

On the other hand, if her mother was going to make as much a pain in the ass of herself after the wedding as she had before, it was a good argument against getting married at all. Although not much had been said – at least in his hearing – he was just about as sure as he could be that as soon as everyone came up for air after the wedding her mother would be starting to rant about grandchildren. That could be as much of a pain in the ass as this wedding thing, and if the marriage didn’t work out, then having children would be a huge complication.

But then, he had to consider Petra’s father, whom he had never met. Petra hadn’t even said a great deal about him, but it was clear that he had some money, which was more than could be said for her mother and stepfather. Her father had given her quite a bit of it for college and her car and it seemed likely there was more where that came from and he might be able to do something about it. He couldn’t quite believe that her father would just come out and buy a house for them, but it was not beyond the realm of possibility. As his roomie Mike had pointed out, a split-up could mean that he took a lot more out of the marriage than he took in with him.

He wished that there could be some way he could stop to consider his options. Everything seemed too balanced, with plenty of arguments for and against. Petra was nice, but was she worth giving up his freedom for?

Milt Wilson always preferred making subs and interacting with customers to sitting back in the office of the Haviland Avenue store working on the biweekly payroll. It was a small and cluttered room, but then he didn’t need much of a headquarters or headquarters staff since Wilson’s Subs was a pretty small operation. Granted, it needed a number of employees to keep the stores open, and all but a handful were part-time to keep the cost of having to pay benefits from eating him alive, so that meant that doing the payroll involved a lot of checks.

In fact, right now it involved a few too many checks as far as he was concerned, but there was no point in laying anyone off right now. Sales had been down, but it was seasonal and he’d known it would happen. In another month or so there would be ball leagues getting under way, and there were a lot of people who would grab some subs on the way to their kid’s games so as to not have to make dinner. When that rolled around, he’d want all the staff he had and might even have to hire a few temps.

However, that was then; right now it meant that the cash flow was getting a little tight. By itself it wasn’t much to worry about, but every time he turned around it seemed like Maxine needed more money for Petra’s wedding. It had long since gotten out of hand and showed no signs of improvement anytime soon. Today it had been $2500 in earnest money for the caterer, and he was going to have to fork over more before that was over with.

He had once suggested that he just provide a pot load of different sub platters for the banquet, but Maxine had shot that down almost before he opened his mouth. It would have made a lot of sense, and while it would cost him some money, he could have done it in-house and saved himself a bundle. But no, things had to be done right, which is to say the way Maxine wanted it, which was the most expensive way possible.

This whole wedding thing was proving to be a pain in the neck, and an expensive pain at that. The wedding was still three months off, and Maxine had already managed to spend most of their savings on it. Just the other day he’d bit the bullet and decided to take out a second mortgage on the house just so he’d have the cash to deal with the wedding. It really would put him in the hole, but at least once the wedding was over with he might be able to pay off at least some of it if sales were good over the course of the summer.

The thing that really yanked his chain was that he had to come up with the money for the whole thing, and Petra wasn’t even his daughter! Well, that wasn’t totally true; Maxine usually referred to Petra as being his daughter, even though he knew she had been born ten years before he’d ever met Maxine. Maxine had made several attempts to have him formally adopt Petra so she could take his name, but Petra had resisted that idea right from the beginning. It had been about the only place where she had been able to resist her mother, though, and that had come about when Petra announced that if she had to take the Wilson name she’d have it changed back to Palmer just as soon as she turned eighteen. It was still something Maxine would have liked to accomplish, but it seemed unlikely.

He wished it were possible that Royce Palmer would help out with the wedding expenses. After all, Petra really was his blood daughter, no matter how much Maxine seemed to wish otherwise. But he knew better than to raise the issue with Maxine, who would have been just as happy if Royce hadn’t been invited to the wedding at all. She’d tried to block it, but somehow Petra had slipped a fast one past her mother and there was nothing that could be done about it. Milt thought that that was a pretty rude thing for Maxine to do, but that was the way things were.

Milt was sure that Maxine still resented the way Royce had treated her when he found the two of them in bed in their old home over a decade ago. Objectively, Milt could see where Royce had every reason in the world to be mad about it, and was just grateful that Royce hadn’t been carrying a gun at the time or he might have used it. Still, it had been pretty awkward there for a while, and Maxine had to move in with him, even though it wasn’t what he really wanted her to do – she had no other place to stay, and he had been single. He had been very surprised when the family court gave Maxine custody of Petra, so that meant that all of a sudden he had a daughter he neither wanted nor expected.

Petra had actually been a pretty good kid, even though they’d never really warmed to each other. In the early years she had clearly missed her daddy a lot, and Maxine had gone out of her way to indulge Petra to make up for it, drawing him in with it. Keeping her busy with after-school activities and other such things had been intended to divert Petra’s attention and keep her happy. Milt had slowly come to understand that it had been Maxine’s way of keeping Petra away from Royce as much as possible to try to make her forget about him. He wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do, but in the long run it seemed to have worked – at least they didn’t hear that much complaining about it from Petra any more, although it hadn’t entirely gone away.

Things had eased up a lot when Petra went off to college. That plus her job as a summer camp counselor meant that he’d only had to put up with a limited amount of trouble about it for the last four years, at least until this wedding business had come along. This Keller kid seemed all right, although there seemed to be some kind of a smirk on his face like he wasn’t taking everything as seriously as he could have. But Petra wanted to marry him, and Maxine wanted to go the whole nine yards on the wedding, so there it was. Maybe all the hassle would be pretty much over with after the wedding; at least he hoped so.

It would be nice to have his mind off of the wedding and back to business. There were several things he could do to build things up, but right now he didn’t have the time or the money to deal with them, but that would change once the wedding was paid off. It was something he needed to do; he wasn’t particularly worried about the espresso shop or whatever it was going in next to the Peavine Street store – it really wouldn’t be competing for the same business – but that didn’t mean there wasn’t other competition out there.

One of his customers at the Peavine Street store had commented that something was going on in a store a block up the street, and that he thought he’d seen restaurant equipment being unloaded there, but that might or might not mean anything. As far as that went, something was going on up the street from here, but he had no idea what that could be.

He wasn’t particularly worried; he had a solid clientele, and things were always changing out there anyway.

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