Blame Charlie
Copyright© 2012 by dotB
Chapter 8
That ideal lasted for almost six months. Then my cousins, Fred and Bert, came to see me and unintentionally managed to throw a huge complication into the lives of everyone on the ranch. Now I don’t think I’ve fully explained my relationship with that pair, but the old saying that ‘You can choose your friends, but not your relatives.’ comes to mind. Both of them were self-centered, avaricious, sneaky, and a touch mean, perfect examples of a slightly sleazy banker and a somewhat shady lawyer. I have always regarded them as avaricious assholes, and I knew that neither of them was happy with the present state of their financial affairs.
To explain their situation, I’ll need to briefly turn back the clock to some months before the Xalibrox had hijacked us from Earth. For some reason, Bert and Fred had decided that they had become too dependent on our local economy, so they diversified their investments and put most of their funds into stocks and bonds that were sold internationally. That idea was sound under normal circumstances because misfortune doesn’t usually spread beyond a limited area, so they dispersed their investments to include companies which had branches worldwide.
Unfortunately, that meant that the majority of their investment funds were left behind when we were shanghaied by the ‘Xalibrox effect,’ so their stock certificates and offshore investments were now worthless. On Terratoo, all they had left were their houses, their vehicles, the cash they had in their bank accounts, and the incomes from their jobs. As far as additional real estate was concerned, all they had was their investment in the ranch and an ancient, rundown motel. They didn’t care for that state of affairs since it was a major setback to their lifestyles, and both sought to improve on their situation in any way possible.
In fact, during the early days of life on Terratoo, before I’d been reawakened, they pulled a typical stunt which came back to bite them where it hurt the most. They attempted to have me declared dead or at least ‘non compos mentis’ in order to assume control of the ranch, planning to sell it to the highest bidder. Unfortunately for them, I had long since written a ‘living will’ which gave control of the management of the ranch to José, Diego, and Maria in the case that I was disabled and unable to function, but not yet deceased. All Bert and Fred really succeeded in doing was to annoy a lot of people - including me, once I was back in the land of the living and heard about their shenanigans.
Of course, that conniving duo only saw that as a minor setback and ignored the hurt feelings they had caused; meanwhile, they carried on actively seeking ways and means of increasing their fortunes. One of those methods was to increase their funds by providing small loans or other forms of backing to enterprising individuals who were seeking to develop or improve on small businesses.
Recently, they’d been approached by a Chinese businessman from a town that had been set up within a couple of hundred miles of where we lived. The gentleman had owned a bicycle manufacturing plant on Earth, but competition from larger firms had put him out of business some years previously. However, on Terratoo, there was no competition in the bicycle field, so he wanted to rebuild, revamp, and restart his factory and needed financing for that attempt. As a result, he’d approached my cousins, and they wanted to invest in his business, but they were still short of funds and certainly didn’t have enough money available to be able to cover his needs. In order to raise the capital they would need to bankroll his project, they approached me, suggesting that I should take out a loan from Fred’s bank and buy out their shares in the ranch.
As I previously mentioned, the fuel depot was beginning to run short of gasoline and diesel fuel. It didn’t seem there would be much chance of refilling those fuel tanks either, since no deposits of crude oil had yet been found on Terratoo. Even if we had discovered crude oil, we had no working refineries and no distribution system of any sort. As a result, the local gas stations had begun to ration the amount of fuel they would sell to any individual, which didn’t go over well with John Q. Public. Bert and Fred were positive that there would be a lot of demand for Mr. Lee’s bicycles, so they wanted to invest in his business in order to be in on the ground floor of what could become a very profitable industry.
Of course, I was tentatively planning to exploit that fuel shortage, but I was betting that neither of my cousins had any idea of my plans. After all, until recently, neither Fred nor Bert had shown all that much interest in the ranch, so they probably didn’t know anything about the natural gas well we’d discovered years before. That was especially true since I paid for the drilling operation out of my private funds, so the expense of drilling the well hadn’t shown up on the ranch’s books. Besides that, after the crap the two of them had pulled on me during our lifetimes, I wasn’t about to enlighten them. As Bert was fond of saying, it was a case of’Carp diem!’which actually translates into’Buyer beware!’.(Okay, I’ll admit I don’t know the Latin words for’Seller beware’ - no matter what the wording is, I was sitting in the catbird seat and they were in the cheap seats - for once.)
During a meeting with them, I hemmed and I hawed, then frowned a lot while they tried their best to convince me to go into debt. Of course, Fred was insistent that he could get me a very favourable loan rate because of that gold I’d invested in the banker’s reserve, but I just sat there shaking my head to that suggestion. Finally, after listening to their arguments for almost an hour, I made up my mind about what I had to do.
“Look, I want to talk to this Chinese businessman of yours before I do anything else. I know I can read people a lot better than either of you can, so I can double-check that he isn’t pulling some sort of elaborate scam on all of us,” I insisted.
“Oh, I’m sure he’s open and above board. He seemed completely honest to me,” Bert argued.
“Bert, I don’t give a damn what you think about his ethics or his honesty. I’m not about to go into debt only to find out that you wasted the money you get from me on a fancy get-rich scheme of some sort. I want to talk to the guy, and I want to do it while the two of us are alone! I don’t want either one of you sending off stray thoughts to confuse me while I’m concentrating on what he’s thinking about.”
“Lee Ming is completely honest and this is a fair deal.” Sawish piped up in my mind, surprising me by ‘visiting’ for the first time in weeks.
“Hush, you. I’m negotiating with a pair of shyster cousins and I need to concentrate so they don’t sucker me into a bad deal. Stick around though, I want to talk to you afterward, especially since I haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“You haven’t improved during my absence, since you are still a bossy human!” she sent, but added an image of her toothy grin and she did fall silent, but I knew that she was still listening.
It took me a while, but I finally got Bert and Fred to agree to ask Mr. Lee to come talk to me in person. I didn’t understand why they were making a big deal out of having him come talk to me. After all, he was already in town and all he had to do was drive out to see me. I really did want to talk to him in person, but not for the reasons I had given my cousins. For one thing, if I did find out he was honest and above board, I was going to tell him about the natural gas well, with two provisions. Number one, that he wouldn’t say anything about that well to Fred or Bert, and number two, to assure him that I wouldn’t even consider selling any natural gas until he had his bicycle factory running well and making a profit. While I was at it, though, I was going to ask him if he might be able to turn out something else that he would probably need money to develop - I was thinking of a motorized scooter running on compressed natural gas. I didn’t know why I felt that way, but I had a hunch that he was underfunding his ambitions, and I definitely didn’t want him to be underfunded because I thought a bicycle factory was a great idea.
After Fred and Bert had left, I had a chance to talk to Sawish and discovered that she had returned to Mamina to pick out a mate. She teased me by saying she’d become jealous of my activities. She had not only met the male she would mate with, but she had also brought back a replacement who she was training to take her place in a year or two. I even had a chance to ‘meet’ Tarwhee and exchange greetings, but little else, since Tarwhee had not yet managed to learn how to send her thoughts clearly in ‘Human’ format.
Sawish and I did take the time to ‘chat a bit’ before she had to move on to reach out to others. She did understand what I was trying to do for Mr. Lee and she applauded that, but thought I was being a bit hard on Fred and Bert.
“You just don’t understand what those two have put me through in the past,” I sighed. “The two of them are a few years older than I am, so while we were growing up, I ended up with the short end of the stick on several deals that they cooked up. I certainly owe them favours, but some of those favours are not so pleasant. They talked me into investing in a few bad deals and then left me high and dry while they bailed out after the boom portion of a boom and bust cycle, each of them blaming the other for not warning me in time. Then just last year they tried to steal the ranch right out from under me._”
“Oh, I didn’t realise that they were that mean-spirited toward others.”
“I don’t think they intentionally cause problems, but they both have a bit of a dark sense of humour and virtually no conscience, so they do find other people’s misery to be amusing. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and their investments on Earth are all gone, they’re finding life to be somewhat less humourous.”
“And you’re out to teach them a lesson?”
“No, I’m not being vindictive. Instead, I want this deal to be completely fair. Even their investment here on the ranch was somewhat unfair to me from the very start, but I haven’t bitched about it because they’ve left me alone. I’ve invested more than my fair share of money here, but I’ve been able to live on the ranch all this time, which is worth every dollar of the extra investment. I don’t even feel bad about not telling them I drilled that gas well, because I paid every darn cent of what that cost and since they didn’t invest anything in it or the rest of the ranch, screw ‘em. Back on Earth, we wouldn’t have gained much from that well anyway, since we didn’t own the mineral rights. As it is now, I’m going to buy the two of them out long before getting any use from a personal investment.”
“Actually, I agree, ” she sent me another grin. “Now, do you have any other important questions to ask before I leave you alone for a while? I really should move on to see how others in my group of special candidates are doing.”
“Actually, I do, ” I smiled at her image. “I’d like you to tell me a bit about Mr. Lee, since you seem to like him so much.”
So she told me quite a bit about Mr. Lee Ming.
The town where Lee Ming and his family resided had been rescued from an area that had actually been miles inland, but the whole peninsula it had sat on had been wiped out by the initial tidal wave. As a result, they had been amongst the early arrivals on Terratoo, being resuscitated not long after our local people had. In fact, there was already a road of sorts built between the two areas, which is how he had been able to visit us.
From what Sawish was able to tell me, Lee Ming was not only honest but also honourable, and she advised me to trust him implicitly. Then, before I could ask her any further questions which might delay her departure, she quietly said ‘Goodbye’ and vanished.
She was probably smart to do that, since what she had told me made me curious about several other details, but I knew I’d be able to ask her about those at a later date. In fact, I could always ask ‘my’ Eritol information guy, but his/its dry datum just didn’t seem as satisfying to me as Sawish’s informative explanations. I resolved to force myself to have patience; I could wait, at least for now, but I had other things to do anyway.
In the first place, if Mr. Lee Ming was coming to visit me, I needed to know just how my finances stood. Then I would know just how much I could afford to spend while buying out Bert and Fred. Thank goodness the powers that be and the computer gurus at the local university had managed to get an abbreviated version of the Internet in operation in our local area. We no longer had NSA, or Google and Yahoo sticking their noses in our business or advertising everything under the sun, but I could still check my bank balances while sitting comfortably in my office.
At the same time, I investigated the present values of land and was astonished that the value of farmland had fallen so greatly in the last while. Of course, since we were sitting on the edge of a huge, undeveloped continent with millions of square miles of arable land, relatively undeveloped farmland like the ranch would naturally be quite low in price. Actually, the herd of horses we had on the ranch was worth more than the land was.
It was early the next day when a tiny little compact car came rolling up the driveway to stop near the house, and out of it stepped a middle-aged Oriental gentleman. I liked Lee Ming from the moment I met him, and we hit it off immediately. He said he’d approached my cousins and not me because I had a reputation of being something of a recluse. Of course, I explained why that was, telling him of my dislike for silly ceremonials and things of that sort, admitting that I’d let that opinion be known to anyone who asked.
“You would not make a good Chinese merchant then,” he laughed. “You would be better as a Buddhist monk, hiding away in your isolated refuge and contemplating nature.”
“Some monk I’d be, since I have several dozen mistresses, and almost all of them are pregnant right now,” I laughed.
“Ah yes, that brings up another point. I understand you can read my thoughts and are planning to check me out to see if I plan to deceive you and your family members.”
“Actually, I don’t need to do that, so I won’t bother, but then you had excellent references from a source I trust implicitly. Instead, I insisted on seeing you in person because I have some information that might well be important to your future, but I have to ask you to keep what I tell you from Fred and Bert, at least for now. You have to understand that they invested in the land which makes up the ranch, not in the improvements that I have made to it, and one of those improvements may be quite valuable in the very near future.”
“Ahh, you mean your beautiful horses? I have a young daughter who would love to come here to see them, if not ride upon them. Whatever your secret is, though, I shall be mute toward your family members.”
“Bring your daughter out, and I’ll let her ride horses to her heart’s content, just as long as she can ride well and isn’t mean to the horses,” I shrugged. “But, my investment in horses, which I breed and raise to sell to others, isn’t what I was talking about. You see, in two or three years, I may be able to provide fuel for cars, which will have some effect on the sales of your bicycles.”
“Ah ha, yes, you are right! That will affect my factory in both supply and demand,” Ming nodded and frowned slightly. “You see, I will be using the metal from abandoned cars and the rubber from old car tires to build my bicycles. The Eritol engineers have been kind enough to show me how to recycle both the steel from the bodies of old cars to make the frames and the rubber from old tires to make the tires and tubes of my bicycles.”
“Well, I can pretty well guarantee that any supply of fuel won’t be available for a year or two, which should give you time to get on your feet. I may be able to extend that period a little, but this country is going to need trucks and tractors before long, so I can’t promise to hold back much longer than that,” I grinned and winked then. “Now, a smart businessman would prepare for that eventuality and be ready to build motorcycles and scooters once the fuel became available. Then too, a smart investor with some spare funds might be willing to fund the research necessary for the businessman to be able to afford to expand his product line to meet that demand.”
That brought an instant smile to his face, and he reached out his right hand toward me.
“Somehow, I believe that the two of us might learn to be that intelligent, do you not agree?” he grinned and winked at that idea as we shook hands.
“Yeah, if I had to, I could probably free up a total of about four hundred thousand dollars worth of gold at today’s gold prices, but I really don’t want to part with that amount of gold. If possible, I would like to retain most of that gold for the time being. Unfortunately, my two cousins’ shares in the ranch are worth less than two hundred thousand at present-day prices. Land values have fallen tremendously in the past two years, simply because of all the unused land available on this planet.”
“Even less than that much is more than they were expecting to be able to convince you to borrow, and I was prepared to make a start with that lesser amount. If you are willing to buy from them for something which matches their stated amount, I will honour my agreement with them. Then if you wish to invest more, I would consider your idea of developing a scooter or small motorcycle as a positive goal; perhaps we might even build a tiny car. For three separate payments of one-hundred-thousand dollars, I am willing to sell your group a total of forty-nine percent of the company shares.” He displayed some relief, but that seemed to border on disbelief.
“Done, but keep my investment quiet for now because I want our agreement to be separate from theirs. I want you to retain full control of your company since my cousins are involved. You see, I don’t trust them an awful lot, but I do trust you!” I held out my hand again. “That means I’ll make a deal with my cousins and a separate one with you, but you’ll still end up with a total of three-hundred-thou. However, if you need more than that, let’s say for the purpose of research and development of motorised vehicles, we can discuss that separately.”
“You have made me a very happy man,” he smiled as he shook my hand again. “I am fascinated that you have such a large amount of gold available, since it is such a rare mineral on this world.”
“The gold came to Terratoo along with me,” I chuckled. “You see, I’ve always felt that gold was a good investment. Even when I was young, I put every dollar I could into the gold market. Then, once Krugerrands became legally available, I converted my stocks into the actual metal. In later years, I invested every dollar of the stud fees from my horses into gold and socked it away. Eventually, my investment added up to a tidy sum. I keep a certain amount here at the ranch, but the majority of the gold I didn’t invest in the Banker’s Reserve Fund is in my safety deposit box at the Credit Union. As a result, I can arrange to give you the funds for my share in either a cashier’s check or a bank transfer for the full amount. If you really need to have gold, I might be able to pay a quarter of the amount in gold and the rest as a check.”
“My goodness gracious, and I was told you were a hard man to deal with,” he laughed. “Now I was wondering, might I use your telephone? I would like to call my family at our motel room and perhaps come back later today to bring my daughter and my wife to your ranch so they could both see your horses.”
“Fine, but you’d better plan on staying for a while then, because if your daughter likes horses, she’s going to want to ride one or two of them, and that will take some time.” Then I had a second thought. “In fact, would you mind telling me which motel you’re staying at?”
“No, we’re at the ‘Grand Motel,’ right on the main road into town.”
“Are you getting a discount?”
“No, but should I be getting a discount?”
“Well, that motel is owned by my cousins, Fred and Bert. Since you’re negotiating a business deal with the owners of the motel, I think you should be staying there free, but since you aren’t ... why don’t you book out of the motel and stay here instead? I have several bedrooms that aren’t being used, and I imagine this deal is going to take some time to complete. At least if you stay here, you won’t be paying them a bundle in motel fees while I’m trying to negotiate a deal with them for their share of the ranch,” I grinned. “I’d prefer that, since I want my cousins to gain as little extra as possible out of you on this deal, and I think they’re trying to set you up to rip you off.”
“You would have my family live here as guests?” he stared at me in surprise.
“Why not? After all, we’re going into a partnership of sorts, so this will give us a chance to get to know one another,” I shrugged.
So Lee Ming, his wife, Lee Shan, and his daughter, Lee Chen, came to visit for a few days, which did increase the work around the house, but Angie didn’t miss a beat or raise a fuss. In fact, she befriended the newcomers in moments, absorbing them into the house and into our activities almost as if they were relatives who had come for a short visit. Actually, she was much friendlier with those three than she was with Bert and Fred, who were also frequent visitors over the next few weeks.
Before we could make any purchase though, Bert, Fred, and I had to come to an evaluation of what I owed them for their investment. I was adamant that I was only willing to pay them for the value of the land, not for any improvements I had made to that property. I had an assessment done, and so did my cousins. Then I hauled out every bill for improvements I’d made to the property, and my independent lawyer proceeded to cut their assessor’s valuation to shreds. If Bert and Fred hadn’t contributed toward the expense, then I insisted the cost of that improvement and the value it had added to the evaluation of the ranch had to be deleted from the assessment.
“Damn it, Dave, why are you being such a hard ass about peanuts?” Fred demanded.
“Fred, I’m not being unfair, but I am asking to be treated decently and demanding justice this time. Once you and Bert bought a share in the property, you walked away. Then, if I asked for help, you usually laughed at me and told me it was my problem. The one time I did manage to convince you to give me any help, you demanded repayment early and interest at a damned high rate, so I learned not to even ask you. I’m not built like you though. I’m helping you out by buying out exactly what you invested your money in, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give you one penny more than your fair share. Since you refused to assist in paying for any of my investments, I refuse to allow you to steal any of the benefits from those improvements.”
“But you’re not being fair,” Fred whined.
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