Chapter 2

"I see you have lost 18 pounds. How are you feeling?" Jake asked.

"Hell of a diet you have there, Doc," I croaked.

"Well, the voice is a little better, and you are getting even feistier, if that is possible."

"I'm sick of soft eggs, Jell-O pudding, and all kinds of soup. I still like ice cream though." Even the small amount of talking I had done since entering Jake's clinic severely strained my voice.

"I'm sure you have been experimenting with other foods. You don't strike me as the type to follow orders all that well."

"Fresh bread, with peanut butter and jelly is about as solid a food as I've managed to get down. Even then, I have to remove the crust"

"Give it time, Max, your esophagus needs to heal. Once the inflammation and swelling go away, it will be as good as new."

"I don't want to hear any jokes about a new profession giving blowjobs," I said, with a smile. It always made doctors feel better if the patient could smile. I have no idea what that said about modern medicine, but it was true.

"Max, I know you had some emotional trauma as well as physical trauma, have you been seeing anyone?"

"Hell no, I'm in no condition to date yet. I sound like a frog and I'm not sure I could manage a blowjob just yet, although semen is probably on the soft food list."

"I meant like a therapist," Jake replied, without any indication that he had a sense of humor at all.

"Break out that bottle of Jack Daniels you keep in your desk, and I'll talk to you. It would probably do as much good."

Jake buried his head in my file for a few more minutes, then began to read off facts as if I didn't know them. "5ft 5inches, 127pounds, that's just about perfect for your body mass."

"Then why do I still have the belly dancer's pot?" I asked.

"Max, you are over forty, that small belly comes with the territory. You are lucky that there isn't forty more pounds in your rear."

"I know, I used to eat all the wrong things and drink beer. God, those were the days," I said wistfully.

"That's about as bad as it gets. Switch to black coffee and rice cakes to keep your weight down."

"I don't think I can do rice cakes right now," I replied, in my raspy voice.

"Yeah, but it won't be long."

"When is the voice going to get back to normal?"

"Your voice should get some better soon."

"Some better? You mean I'm never going to sing opera again."

"I didn't know you sang opera?" he said, thoughtfully.

"I don't, but I always hoped I would someday."

"Well, I'm glad to see you kept your sense of humor." He looked at the stack of papers again, then added; "Tell you what, Max, go by Krispy Kreme and get one donut on the way home. You can even get one of those fancy coffees with a lot of milk. Let the coffee cool down before you drink it. Eat it all slowly and in small bites. See how that goes down."

"So do I have to go see that eye, ear, nose, and throat quack again."

"Come on, Max, Dr. Edwards did a hell of a job repairing your esophagus."

"Yeah, all I had to do was let him continue the throat fucking I got from Pedro."

"A small tube with a couple of drops of super glue is not the same as what that asshole did to you."

"Yeah, but I still didn't like the flashlight he stuck down my throat."

"At least, it wasn't a lantern," Jake said, finally smiling. "Get out of here and make an appointment for a month from now. If the voice doesn't get better, go back and see Edwards."

I had been out of the hospital two weeks and back to work for a week. I felt like crap on the soft food diet. I wanted red meat, but they wouldn't let me shove it down my throat yet. It wasn't like I wanted to swallow an Italian sausage without chewing. I just wanted a McDonald's hamburger. I had no reserve energy at all. It was a good thing I was a process server, not an athlete.

I was ready to open the door on the minivan when my cell phone started playing that stupid song it always played for incoming calls. The song was so annoying that I just had to answer the phone quickly to shut it up. "At your service, Stone," I got it out without sounding too much like a cancer survivor.

"Max, it's Franklin Wilson's office calling, could you stop by the office this afternoon."

"Shirley, why are you being so formal? Of course, I'll swing by."

"They are recording our calls for some reason."

"Probably to be sure you aren't using the office phone for you phone sex business."

"I only use the cell phone for that," she said, with a hardy laugh.

"Can you give me a hint what Frankie wants with me."

"Some papers to serve, I think."

"Okay Shirley, I'm leaving the doctor's office. I can come by in about twenty minutes, is that okay?"

"Boss won't be here, but I expect that I can give you the information. If it isn't alright, I'll call you back,"

"Fair enough, I'm off to have a Krispy Kreme donut."

"God, get the new triple dark chocolate, it is to die for," Shirley suggested.

I had the triple dark chocolate filled donut, with a chocolate frosty. Might as well OD on chocolate, I thought. It was wonderful, as I knew it would be. I never met a donut I didn't like. As for chocolate, there should be no need to explain how chocolate affects women.

"Here you go," Shirley said, as she handed me the thick Manila envelope.

"It's a good thing I don't charge by the pound," I suggested.

"This one isn't a court order. It's some kind of corporate filing, something to do with product liability."

"You are kidding, they don't make anything around here." It was common knowledge that all manufacturing was done in third world countries, or in China or Russia.

"That's what I thought as well, but we did a product liability research on some kind of new battery technology." Shirley stopped while I watched her mind working. "I did not tell you that. This is all hush, hush."

"Who me, I have no idea what it is I'm lugging around today." I smiled as I accepted my check for fifty dollars. It wasn't much, but it was my fee for the local delivery of documents for lawyers.

I drove with the envelope on the passenger seat of the van. The GPS unit kept me on track even though I would have known the way even without the directions. It could have just said, deliver to the old recapping plant on Battleground Avenue. There were so few industrial buildings left in Astor that everyone knew exactly where each was located. Not so much from there use at that time, but from back in the day when we still made things there.

After all the twists and turns, that's where I found myself. When I knocked on the office door, a buzzer sounded after which the door opened to my push. I found myself in a waiting room with enough room for about four people. After a minute or two, a tall thin man entered.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

"I hope so, I'm looking for the owner or manger of Simple Energy." I said evenly.

"I'm Jed Hyatt, I'm the plant manager. I'm also a partner."

"I have some documents from Franklin Wilson's office, can you sign for them?"

"Let me get Edward," he suggested. Jed disappeared into what seemed to be the small office section of the building. A few minutes later, a second man came through the inside door.

"I'll take that," he said, reaching for the envelope.

Instead I handed him my dollar store clipboard. "Sign on the line with the X please." I was very insistent. Once he signed, I handed over the stack of papers. "So what are you guys going to make here?" I asked.

"It's not ready to discuss yet," he said flatly. Obviously he had his mind made up, so I just nodded, then turned back to the van. Once outside, I got just a little curious, so I took a couple of pictures of the building and the trucks parked around it. I half expected Edward to rush out and try to take my camera. Instead nothing happened. Maybe I had been hoping that he would. Since it was anti-climatic, I just left.

Taking the shots of the startup factory bothered me. I just couldn't figure out what I was thinking. I gained nothing from it, and I had risked a confrontation that could have led to a damaged relationship with a client. It was a no-win situation. All I could figure was that I was just plain bored. I was obviously just out looking for some shit to get into. I promised myself that I would think more before acting. I knew, even as I made it, that it was a hollow promise.

On the drive back to the office, I realized that I truly was bored. I also realized that being bored was worse, for me at least, than being terrified. I needed to find something interesting to do. In a town the size of Aster, or even the larger Tryon next door, there just weren't that many things a middle-aged woman could get into.

Nothing came into the office for me to be involved with that afternoon, so I watched TV shows on my computer. It was a habit I picked up while avoiding some rather nasty characters from south of the border. Since that was behind me, I watched at my desk in Ed's office, but it was still a good way to pass the time.

"At your service, Stone," I said into the cell phone.

"Max, what the hell were you doing out there?" Franklin Wilson asked.

"I delivered your papers and got a signature the same as always," I replied. I was waiting for the other shoe, since I expected the call was about the photos I shot. It seemed to have been some kind of hush, hush project.

"My clients are a little paranoid and when you went out and began shooting pictures of their plant, they we got really nervous."

"I don't know what got into me. I guess it was something to do with a new industry coming to town. I was curious I guess."

"What you did wasn't illegal or unethical even. I guess it was just ill advised."

"Well. I'll try to think a little longer next time before I do anything more than deliver the papers." It was like the fancy dress I carried around in my van, just part of the show now and then. Being contrite was the same, just part of the show. Franklin probably knew it wasn't real.

I went home after work. I had been staying with my friend Jen and her husband, so I was extremely glad to be going to my own home after work. I stopped by one of those super grocery stores on the way home for a pre-made pasta salad. They make it fresh, so it wasn't too awful. The store's take out window was on my way home. If I called ahead from the office, even the pizza, which I could no longer eat, would have been waiting by the time I got to the store. The pasta salad was a walk in item, so I parked.

Later that night, I debated going to the Cop Out for a drink, but decided that I wasn't ready for that crowd just yet. So instead, I watched television on the television for a change. I had a satellite subscription TV service. It was the smallest plan and was useless. I threatened to cancel every time I wrote the check.

I got bored with TV about ten. I got bored with TV even earlier most nights. So being bored, I began to research Simple Energy and the men who owned it. I found that a lot had changed in the state since I was in high school.

For one thing, the state ran a think tank at the State Capitol Center. The State Capitol Center was an industrial park developed to nurture new ideas. It was a place with low rents and lower taxes for startup companies. Simple Energy had been one of those. Jed Hyatt and Edward Doser were engineering students at the State's University, specializing in such things. They had an idea and spent their last two years consumed with it.

The state had made their educations possible, so when graduation came, they accepted even more grant money to work on the state's project. The problem came when the idea behind Simple Energy came to fruition. The state wanted to turn it over to someone like GE to manufacture, but Ed and Jed wanted to be the new Bill Gates. Ed and Jed moved to Aster and began assembling their plant.

Now a lot of this was reading between the lines, but I'm pretty good at reading between the lines. The part that was even more supposition was exactly what Simple Energy was and how it was made. Since the state owned a chunk of the process, some of it was in the patent office records. Some of it was to be found in the trade rags, if you knew where to look. I was also pretty good at media research.

Simple Energy was a radically new way to store electrical energy. The storage battery, as we know it, does not store energy, it manufactures it using a chemical process. Charging a battery reverses the effects of creating electricity so that the materials can make more electricity. Okay, that's the storage batteries for dummies explanation.

The scientific rags stated flatly that the Simple Energy process was something radically new. Not the device really, but all the things that made the device work. They were radically new because they were simple to manufacture and almost never wore out. Best of all, they did not require cheap labor to create or assemble.

In the words of the simplest explanation, the simple energy device is nothing more than a giant storage capacitor. Think of it like the tank on your car, only this tank you fill with cheap electricity. There is a gate at the opening of the capacitor which can be opened in degrees. A throttle if you will. If you have an electronic device the gate is set to allow a steady stream of amps to pass through so that the device is always at the same operating level.

However if the device is on an electric motor, the gate can be varied to allow for different levels of power and speed. The storage device is the motor controller so that component of your machine is unnecessary. All that is fine and isn't really all that new. What was really new was that the storage device was made completely of paper. The unit was made from thousands of paper plates sandwiched together.

The plates were printed on a simple printing press. The genius was in the ink formula and the construction of the finished stack of plates. One man could run all the machines to make the plates from his climate controlled office. Add a dozen more to haul the chemicals around and mix them and you had the complete work force to make millions and millions of dollars worth of Simple Energy Super Capacitors. After I pieced all the pieces in place, I knew why they were so anal about the pictures I shot.

There had not been a lot of financing required for Ted's and Ed's great adventure; but what had been needed was supplied by family members of the two boy geniuses. It was a tight, beautiful, business plan, everyone said. The state's share of the business was on a buy back since it was a secured loan, not a real ownership share.

Aster had been chosen for several reasons, not the least of which was that Edward's family had connections to the town. His grandparents still lived in Aster's farm community. His grandfather still sold vegetables at the farmer's market on Wednesday. During the winter, his wife sold fresh bread, so they could always be found in the parking lot of the community center on Wednesday mornings. I expected that it had become their social event of the week, or at least one of them.

When Edward had the chance to sell out to the Chinese, he decided to build his own plant instead. So Aster had a chance to become the new Mecca for portable electronics. That was at least the hope of the locals. If the power source worked as predicted, then all kinds of plants would pop up near it, or so the popular thinking went. I suppose with all that at stake, there was reason for the geeks to be concerned.

I did all the research to satisfy my curiosity. Yes, I would have bought stock in the company had there been any available. I own stock in several local area companies. I'm no big investor, but I like to own a little stock in the businesses I do business with.

For a few months, I pretty much forgot about the two geeks living across town. My main interest was in trying to get my voice back to normal, not to mention return to my normal diet. Even after the months passed, I still sounded like Glynis Johns on a bad microphone. Okay, for those of you who are younger than me even, Glynis was an actress who had a very raspy voice. On her it was sexy; on me it was Kermit the frog with a frog in his throat. I couldn't do the bass voice necessary to make that croaking sound sexy.

By that time, I was eating almost anything I wanted though. I just tried not to want anything with sharp edges. I could have done well chewed things like hamburger after the first couple of weeks. It was things that had sharp edges like hard breads and the like that scared the hell out of me.

When I got word from the ENT man that my voice would only get a little better, I resigned myself to never singing opera, but I might be able to do gospel. Since I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it, I didn't really mind the singing thing. It was the volume, or lack thereof, that pissed me off. My voice was practically a whisper and everyone thought that it must hurt me to have a conversation. It did indeed cause me pain, but it was emotional pain, not physical.

I was still pretty upset about the lack of a good screaming voice, when I got the call from Frank Wilson. Usually it is Shirley, his assistant, who calls. That morning, Frank himself was on the line. "Max, I'm calling about the owners of Smart Energy again."

"Good God, Frank, I haven't been back out there since and I haven't done anything with the images I shot out there. What the hell is their problem now?"

"I explained about who you where and that they had nothing to worry about, so that is not the issue here. After I told them about you, they did some research themselves. Seems there is a lot of information about you on the net."

"Franklin, there is a lot of information about everyone on the net."

"Yeah, well anyway, they want to hire you to do a security checkup."

"A what?"

"I know it's pretty stupid but they want to know how vulnerable they are."

"Frankly, have them call Wackenhut, or somebody. I don't know anything at all about building security."

"Okay, Max, but would you have lunch with them."

"You are kidding?'

"Max, it's a free meal and I'll have them pay you for a delivery, so it won't be a loss."

"When and where?" I asked, with a sigh.

"I'll get back with you," he replied, then hung up.

It was almost noon when Franklin Wilson called again. "Come on down to the Banker's Club. We will be there waiting."

"What the hell are two punk kids and you doing at the Banker's Club?" I asked. "I thought you had to have been a millionaire before the First World War to be a member of that club."

"No, Max, you just have to be worth more than 99% of the other people in town."

"So, which one of you is worth that much?"

"Not me, their membership is based on the value of their contribution to the community. In other words, the existing members plan to get a lot richer, when all the other industries move into the industrial park. That is the park they are going to build for the Simple Energy spinoffs."

"Ah well, I suppose I need to dress for the event?"

"Well, you will never get in wearing jeans, or with your boobs hanging out." Franklin informed me.

"Can't we just meet at McDonalds?" I asked.

"Come on, Max, it's your chance to have lunch at the Banker's,"

"Big fuckin' deal," I replied. Okay secretly, I admitted to myself that it was indeed a big deal. The dress and shoes I had in the car were not those of a Banker, but they might be those of a banker's hooker. Since I was not going to spend a month's income on a power suit, it was the Banker's hooker for me.

I was more than a little uncomfortable in the skimpy dress and high heels. I hoped no one noticed, but of course they did. At least it felt as though everyone was staring at me, and not staring in a good way. I had been careful to be at least twenty minutes late so that I wouldn't have to wait for the others.

"There you are, we were beginning to worry," Franklin said. "Ted and Ed, you remember, Max?" They both stood then nodded that they indeed did.

The waiter seated me, then left me at the table. Since there were silverware, a plate, and a glass of ice tea, I assumed the three of them had placed at least part of our dinner order.

There was some small talk first; it was supposed to set me at ease. It was also meant to impress me with the fact that they had done their homework. They let me know that they felt I was someone they could trust. They seemed to trust me even though at 5'6" and 125 pounds, I was not an imposing figure. Some of those 20 pounds I had lost were in muscle mass. In other words, I might be down to my proper body weight, but I was about twenty pounds below my fighting weight. Even so they seemed to trust me.