By the time it was only a little over a week before the planned opening of the Sandy’s Super Subs and the Hot Dog Hut, Walt Benson was getting frustrated.

At least he’d managed to come to a working agreement with Eloise Bennett, the woman who had choked on her sub at River Street Wilson’s. The store had not offered a thing in compensation, not that she had asked for it directly, and she had been willing to let bygones be bygones until Walt had convinced her that there was some money to be made out of a damage suit. He was willing to handle the suit on a contingency fee basis, only taking thirty percent off the top of any damages paid.

They would be asking for a hundred thousand dollars in damages and compensation. Walt had warned her that they were not likely to get anything like that much out of the store’s insurance carrier, but they might get a few thousand dollars. That would bring them out ahead on the deal. He had also warned her that it would be wise to delay filing the suit until the time was right, which would not be far off. Since she had not been previously connected with him, at least before he met her in the hospital, this was a legitimate suit and not directly connected with the shenanigans he was pulling for Royce Palmer.

That was all to the good, and he had hoped something like that would happen as part of the campaign against Wilson’s, although it hadn’t exactly been part of the plan. But Benson had hoped that the incident and the ambulance report might draw the attention of the health department, and he hadn’t been as lucky with that. In fact, after eleven different instances of Wilson’s customers vomiting up their lunch on six different occasions (there had been some secondary vomiting going on) there hadn’t been any interest on the part of the health department, at least not that he could see.

Clearly it was time to bring it to their attention a little more forcefully.

There were several ways to do it; he just had to figure out how to do it the most effectively, and the cheapest way possible. If it could be done so that he wasn’t implicated in the affair, so much the better.

The perfect idea came to him late one afternoon while he was having a beer at “Excuses,” a bar downtown near the newspaper office. He was there on entirely different business, and had stopped off after a meeting at the courthouse, but as luck would have it, Darrin O’Rourke came in, plopped down on the bar stool next to him, and ordered a martini. Sometimes Mohammed has to go to the mountain, he thought, but sometimes it’s the other way around.

Darrin wasn’t exactly what Walt thought of as a friend, more of a contact, but they’d done each other the odd favor over the years. He was a local reporter for the News, and Walt had the impression that he wasn’t a terribly good one, but in this case maybe it didn’t matter much. “Hey, Darrin,” Walt said by way of a greeting. “How’re they hanging?”

“Lower than I want them to,” Darrin shook his head. “I just haven’t been able to turn up anything but really routine stuff for days, and I’m starting to get some static about it from the city desk. Have you heard anything good?”

You can’t ask for an opening much better than that, Walt thought. “Actually, no,” he replied after a moment’s thought. “Hell, it’s even been quiet around me. The only thing I’ve got new is a penny-ante lawsuit I’m handling for a woman who choked on a sub and puked it up at a Wilson Sub store.”

“Shit like that happens all the time,” Darrin shook his head. “You handle a lot of that stuff, don’t you?”

“You have to do what you have to do,” the attorney shrugged. “It’s a lousy living, but it’s a living. The hell of it is that she isn’t the only person who’s blown their guts on a Wilson Sub here the last month or so. A little bird tells me that there have been eleven different times it’s happened at a Wilson place in the last month or two. I mean, you know there’s got to be something goofy going on there but the health department hasn’t done jack squat about it, at least as far as I know.”

“Wilson’s Subs, huh?” Darrin said, sniffing at the lure as nicely as a largemouth bass takes a look at a spinnerbait. “I had a sub at one of their places, oh, a few months ago. It strikes me that it wasn’t the best one I ever had, but I didn’t toss my cookies over it, either.”

“Well, some people have iron guts, and others don’t,” Walt shook his head. “It sure would be nice to know why the health department won’t get off their dead asses on it, though.”

“Yeah, well, they’re a government agency, they work at their own speed. It’s lucky they get anything done at all, let alone do it right.”

“That’s the truth,” Walt conceded, figuring that he’d made his point about as well as he could under the circumstances, but on the off chance he hadn’t, he added, “It might be something for you to look into, though.”

“Yeah, well, maybe,” Darrin shrugged as the bartender sat a martini down in front of him. “It’s not going to drive the Zimmerman murder trial off the front page, but it might be something the city desk would look at. I’ll tell you what, I sure would like to be covering that, but they don’t let me into anything as high-profile as that’s going to be.”

Walt had heard about that case; it was hard not to hear about it since it had been cropping up in the paper and on TV for months. Zimmerman had found his wife and her lover in his bed, and had taken his .357 magnum to both of them. It had been mildly interesting, but not anything that he would ever be involved with as an attorney, and he thought that might be just as well. “Let me tell you a secret. No, you don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t want to sit through that trial. Have you ever had to cover a high-profile murder in this town?”

“No, I haven’t. They occasionally let me do some little stuff, but nothing that big.” He took a sip of his martini; he’d been waiting long enough for it as it was.

“You don’t know how lucky you are. You think high-profile murder case, you think something like a trial on a television show where it’s all wrapped up neatly before the final credits roll. It isn’t like that at all, and this one will be worse than most. In the real world, what little drama there is comes all buried under some of the most boring bullshit you can imagine. In this case, there’s no doubt that he shot the two of them. Hell, he admits it, but there will be hours upon hours of testimony involving ballistics, fingerprints, autopsies, and other forensic evidence, and none of it will be anything that everybody doesn’t already know.”

“Yeah, that could get a little dull,” the reporter answered as he started to take another sip of his martini.

“Hell, that isn’t the half of it. What will get really boring is listening to all sorts of highly acclaimed psychologists and sociologists who will try to convince everyone that they know what they’re talking about when they don’t know shit. You know that because they never agree with each other even if they’re on the same side. Believe me, I’ve been involved with that kind of thing and I know what I’m talking about. It is so damn dull that I don’t know how the attorneys manage to stay awake through it, let alone the jury. Unless you’re some kind of a courtroom junkie, you’ll want to stay as far away from it as you can. I mean, hell, I’m a courtroom junkie but not that bad, and I wouldn’t want to sit through it unless I was being paid a hell of a lot more than a reporter makes.”

“When you put it that way, it starts to make some sense,” Darrin nodded. “Maybe I’m just as happy doing the penny-ante stuff.”

In spite of three martinis consumed over the course of about an hour the night before, Darrin remembered the conversation with his attorney friend at Excuses, so he figured that it would be worthwhile to do at least a little investigation. It might keep the city desk from breathing down his neck for a few minutes.

He started with a call to the health department, and of course they weren’t very helpful. All he got was some secretary who said that she couldn’t release particulars from pending investigations, and wouldn’t admit if there were any investigations of Wilson’s currently under way or not.

But he did get a little more help from a friend who worked at the city ambulance service; he reported that there had been a run from a Wilson’s to a hospital a few weeks before. He couldn’t pass on much more than that; any information about the particulars couldn’t be released.

All that told Darrin was that there was at least a little bit of fire behind the smokescreen, but he’d known that from his conversation with Benson the night before.

There wasn’t much more he could do, but at least there was a little bit more. He sat back and thought about it, and realized that he knew a guy whose girlfriend worked for the health department, and that the guy owed him a couple of favors. A phone call to the guy was promising; while he didn’t know anything about it, he could ask his girlfriend to look into it on an unofficial basis. Darrin knew he wouldn’t be able to cite her as a source, but at least he might be able to tell if there was a story there. It was something.

It would probably be the next night before the guy heard back from his girlfriend, which meant that it would be the first of the week before Darrin would be able to do anything about it. But, if there really was something going on there, it could turn into a story. He needed to get a few of them pretty quickly before the city desk got even more bent out of shape, and this might be better than nothing.

As far as Royce could figure out his plan was coming together nicely. All but one of the pieces were in place now and they were only days away from opening the six stores, which was the biggest one on the list. They were down to the final details now

Late next week there would be a training session for the new employees. While Royce didn’t want to know about the details, he knew that it would be held at the store that was the farthest from an existing Wilson location. Jeremy had set it up and was going to bring his father in to hold the session.

Jeremy’s father had been a help right from the beginning, and had been the source of a number of pearls of wisdom about setting up the shops in every conceivable detail. While Jeremy knew how to build a sub and had built hundreds of them it had been a long time in the past, while his father had built tens of thousands of them, and built them every day. There wasn’t much about the topic he didn’t know.

Training for the Hot Dog Hut was a little different. While there are plenty of variations in setting up a sub, there are far less to building a hot dog, which is really pretty simple. Jeremy’s father wasn’t a lot of help with this one, but the concessions manager from the local ball park had forgotten more than most people knew about hot dogs, and had trained hundreds of workers over the years. He was willing to come in and get things going, and even oversee things for a few days since the local minor league baseball team was going to be on the road.

The problem here was speed, and speed only came with practice. But an experienced worker could set up a hot dog with any number of toppings and have it wrapped and out the door in seconds. They didn’t expect to have lines out to the street in the first few days of operation, but in a week or two he figured they would be almost up to snuff.

Royce did not know – and did not dare ask – if Milt was aware of what was about to hit him, but it was coming and would be coming hard. At a minimum he would be losing a big chunk of his business at a time he could least afford to; that much was certain. The Hot Dog Hut would also take a big cut out of his business at what they all figured was his biggest and busiest store, and that would hurt too. Royce had planned his assault on the premise that Milt wouldn’t have the financial reserves to weather the storm, while he could spend what he needed to keep things that way. Aggressive promotion and “introductory offer” pricing that could almost be called “predatory” would have a lot of effect, and Royce could keep that up as long as he needed to.

There was one part of his plan that wasn’t quite in place yet, and it was a latecomer. He would have to take part in this one himself, but it was clear that it was going to be a hard hit if not necessarily a game-winner.

The problem was that Royce hadn’t been sure how he wanted to handle this one; there were several ways, and he had taken his time thinking about it. He had considered a more conservative approach up until the time he realized that he had been left out of Petra’s graduation. That got him more upset than he would have believed at the time, but it ate at him and festered at him until it finally convinced him that the best approach would be to take no prisoners.

One of the things that had bothered him about the whole project was that it had been aimed more at Milt than it was at Maxine, who would only suffer the secondary effects of Milt’s money getting cut off. This one was aimed at her, and from what little he’d heard from here and there, it would be devastating. It would hurt and embarrass Petra, too, but he figured that after turning her back on her father she deserved what she was going to get.

By now, he had most of the plan worked out; he was just missing a couple of pieces. At one point he’d thought of bringing Maria’s father and brother in for this one, but had decided to leave them out of it, mostly because he didn’t want her upset about what he was going to do. It would probably upset her anyway, and it if did, it did; while he liked the woman and somehow wished that things could go further, it was still far from a done deal yet. She’d managed to point out to him that there could be happiness out there for him sometime in the future, at least sometime after he’d gotten his long-awaited revenge.

There were several store employees who might have qualified for his plans, but he’d decided to leave them out of it, too; it would be better if his participation could be left out of sight, at least for a while.

He was running out of ideas and thinking about a different approach entirely when it crossed his mind that Paul Meyerson might be able to help him. While he didn’t know much about what Meyerson did or how he went about doing it, it seemed likely that he would have some ideas of how to get the people he needed.

Still, he dithered over actually doing something until he worked up the determination to call the detective. When he answered his phone, Royce identified himself, and asked, “Hey, are you busy right now? I can call back.”

“Not busy right now, but be glad it’s not next week. I’m going to have to testify in that Zimmerman trial, and that’s going to be a mess.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, the reason Zimmerman caught his wife and her lover in bed was that we had identified that they were fooling around,” the detective replied. “I mean, we had the goods on them, so all he would have had to do would have been to go to a good attorney and he would have been free of her. But no, he had to show his balls.”

“Been there, done that, but without the gun, at least. It didn’t do me much good, though. I have to say that I understand where he’s coming from.”

“Yeah, maybe so, but he could have been a lot smarter, like you apparently were. Now he’s been sitting in the city slammer for over a year awaiting trial. The story is that he had been willing to cop a plea of manslaughter, which he still could have avoided if he’d had his head on straight. But no, this is an election year and the prosecuting attorney is sniffing some votes if he can nail him on a murder one rap. So much for fair and speedy justice. At least I’m only going to be there for a day or two, but those poor bastards on the jury are going to have to sit through at least a week of testimony and who knows how long they’ll have to deliberate? That is not fun, I’ll tell you that. So what can I do for you today?”

“I’ve got kind of an odd question for you. Have you ever watched any old gangster movies? You know, Capone and his buddies getting set to wipe out Dion O’Bannion?”

“I just about lived on those damn things when I was a kid. It may be part of how I got into this stupid business in the first place.”

“You know how when the big kahuna mobster wants to breathe on somebody, so he marches into the guy’s office with a couple of big thugs by his side, and lets him know, very gently and politely, where the bread is buttered?”

“Yeah, so?”

“I need the thugs. A couple of them, big, ugly, with the look that they’d just as soon kick the living hell out of someone as look at them. They don’t have to do anything or say anything, just look mean.”

“Royce, I don’t know about you sometimes.”

“All I’m trying to manage is to get someone named . . .”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t think I want to know.”

“All right, just someone,” Royce laughed. “I want him to listen to me for a few minutes and consider what I have to say seriously without giving him the chance to run off. Nothing more, no rough stuff, and if he does try to run off they don’t even have to stop him. All they have to do is look like they’re willing to do it. I’m willing to pay real well for this, Paul.”

“Well, that might be something that could be done. I’ve had to pull stunts like that once or twice.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. I figured you would be one to step outside the realm of being conventional now and then if it was worth it.”

“Well, maybe once or twice,” the detective replied sheepishly. Royce knew there was a wolf under that sheep’s voice; he’d proved it with the kind of daughter he’d raised. “How long are you going to need them for?”

“Not long, maybe an hour or two Friday evening. I don’t know exactly when I’m going to be able to pin this guy down, but I have a rough idea. I’ll pay well, especially if they can be depended on to keep their mouths shut for a few days at a minimum. After that it probably won’t matter.”

“All right, I suppose I can help you on this. Are you going to need to meet with these guys beforehand?”

“I don’t see any reason to, so long as they look like I want them to look, which is to say thugs. Like I said, they don’t have to say anything, so there won’t be a lot of need for them to rehearse. I can just meet them somewhere, explain what’s going to happen, and we can go do it.”

“That sounds reasonable. Are you going to need anyone else?”

“Some help in pinning this guy down would be helpful. I have an idea of where to pick him up and could probably get the details, but once again it would be useful if I wasn’t caught trying to find out what I need to know. After that, it’s just going to involve tailing him until we can find a place where I can talk to him.”

“That’s more down my alley. You’re willing to pay for that, of course?”

“Yes, I will. What’s more, I’m willing to pay well. The schedule isn’t real tight, but it’s important that this does actually happen.”

The month since her college graduation had not been a happy time for Petra.

If there had been some way she could have avoided coming home until the last days before the wedding, she would have been glad to do it, but she couldn’t think of a thing. There wasn’t much choice but to go home and put up with her mother obsessing about the wedding, and there was rarely any relief from it.

She still felt more than a little guilty about the way her father had been excluded from the graduation ceremonies, and all but excluded from the wedding – in fact, he would have been excluded if she hadn’t put her foot down months before, going behind her mother’s back to do it. Her mother rarely let her forget about it, either.

What with everything going on, and her mother eternally finding more things for her to do, she wasn’t having much time to herself. Barry drove up a couple of times; that was good, even though they didn’t get much chance to be alone together with her mother watching her like the proverbial hawk, as if she were some young teenager with a precious virginity to protect. He got frustrated with it quickly, and took the first opportunity he could to go back home and wait out the days until the wedding. She couldn’t blame him in the slightest and wished that he had taken her with him.

She felt that it was important that she get together with her father for at least a few minutes, to apologize to him if nothing else, and to thank him for all the help he had been with her getting through college. He had to have been hurt by it, but he might be willing to forgive the slights a little if he realized that most of them had come from her mother, not from her.

She didn’t often have the chance, especially in the evenings when it seemed likely that he ought to be home. It was getting close to the wedding now, and this evening might be her last opportunity to see him before it happened. She had been forced to come up with an excuse that she was going out with some girl friends just for a break; it was actually the truth, but they had agreed to meet an hour later than she had told her mother. It had worked in high school when she needed it, and it worked now.

But once again she knocked on her father’s door for what seemed minutes, but as far as she could tell he was not home.

Well, that was the last chance, she thought sadly as she got in her car and drove away. I hope he doesn’t hate me for what Mom made me do.

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