Chapter 1

Halloween was never one of my favorite holidays as a kid. I didn’t get excited about it because we lived on a farm, with no neighbors close, so I didn’t get to go trick or treating. Not like other kids did, anyway.

Oh, we went to town a couple of times, and my dad would let us off in the fancy part of town, so we could go a few blocks and rake in as much candy as possible, but we never had bags stuffed full like some of the kids talked about in school the next day.

And I was never a believer in ghouls and witches and goblins and all that sort of thing. Of course I suppose nobody is really, except a few wackos, but even the fun of “believing” in that stuff so you could get scared during movies, didn’t do much for me. And then they started making the movies super high tech and all that crap and I just quit going to movies entirely.

I know I sound like a cranky old sourpuss. That’s fine. I made a very good career out of being known as a cranky old sourpuss.

And then I met Valerie... and everything changed.

But I’ll get to that in a minute. First, you need to understand where I was in my life when I met her. I work for Tan-Gen Limited, which is a global business that has its fingers in practically every industry that exists, from toys to genetic medicine. And my position with them is somewhat unique. That’s because I’m somewhat unique. I’ve never found a doctor (psychiatrist or psychologist) who can explain how I do what I do, but if you insert me into a system, and let me watch it for a week or so, I can identify for you the strong and weak points of that system.

Take, for instance, the manufacturing of trash bags. You have two big rolls of plastic that feed sheets into mated halves, which then go through rollers that press the edges together, along with another pressed joint every 18.5 inches. If you introduce a serrated blade that cuts almost through the roll every 18.5 inches, you can make a roll of plastic that will tear into separate bags easily, giving you a trash bag that’s 18.5 inches long.

Sounds simple, right?

It took who knows how many engineers to design and build the machinery that does all this, and it worked flawlessly. The problem was that none of those engineers actually used those trash bags. Maybe they were married, and their wife took care of trash bags. Maybe they had a maid. The point is that they didn’t install that bag into a trash can, or take it out and tie it up to dispose of when it was full.

I, on the other hand, did that on a regular basis. So I noticed that if the trash bag was two inches longer, it would fit the trash can better and you could roll the top of the bag over the rim of the can. People wouldn’t get so frustrated with the bag sliding down into the can. Further, it was easier to tie, especially if you also inserted a draw string into the design.

Yup. I’m the guy who invented the draw string on trash bags. And Tan-Gen’s subsidiary that made trash bags tripled their sales within three months. It was counter-intuitive, because nobody would have thought you’d make more money if you increased the amount of materials in the product and spent more money making it.

But I did.

And I didn’t know squat about trash bags when I walked into the plant.

I’m a troubleshooter. I notice trouble, and imagine ways to solve problems. I have a talent for picking up on how a system works, and how it could be made better. And because my style wasn’t anything like what “efficiency experts” commonly did, I was almost always successful, while all they did was fix things that weren’t necessarily broken. Even my salary got paid differently. They were only too gleeful to give me the terms I asked for when I started work.

“I want three percent of whatever I save or make you,” I said.

“Three percent,” said John Granger, CEO of Tan-Gen Ltd. My dad played golf with him and got me the interview. “That’s not much,” he said. “That’s three cents on the dollar.”

“That’s what I want to be paid,” I said.

“Deal,” he said.

On my first job, I saved them thirty-two million dollars in production costs, and increased business by ten percent. When Mr. Granger figured out that my first paycheck was going to be almost half a million, he about had a heart attack.

But he also realized how much money I would make the company, if I could do that for them again. And again. And again.

So I worked for them twelve years as an actual employee, and earned more money than I could spend if I bought a new car every day until I die. Now I’m a consultant, which means I work for fun. I get to take the jobs I feel like taking, and can say no to the others. That ticks people off, but I’ve been ticking people off for years. Engineers hate me with a white hot passion, because I don’t have a degree in engineering and I make them look stupid. Whoever designed the system I go in and tear through hates me too, because that system was their baby, and they didn’t think anything was wrong with it. But I knew what kind of power I wielded, and I didn’t care what idiots thought, or how much they resisted, saying I didn’t know what I was talking about. I always did. I always got my way. And only once did something I recommended fail to increase either productivity or profits.

So what does this have to do with Halloween? Or Valerie Martin?

Well, I learned a long time ago that people who have money also have parasites flocking around them. So I don’t live like I have money. I live in what looks like a normal house, on Piquant Street in Great Falls, NY, which is a suburb of Niagara Falls, NY. There is also a Richardson Falls and an Evening Falls, which shouldn’t surprise you when you realize all of these coat tail towns were started by land speculators way back when.

So when I’m not off making Tan-Gen millions, I live just like every other schmoe in town. Or look like I live that way. I don’t buy lots of glitzy things that would flaunt the fact that I’m the richest son of a bitch in the county. Instead, I invest my money in ways that will improve my own standard of living.

Like the renovation I did on the house after I bought it. I called in people from outside of the Niagara Falls area, so nobody in town would know they turned my house into a fortress that even SEAL Team Six couldn’t get into. And I bought a 1966 427 Chevelle SS, and had it restored to pristine condition, because I think it’s the most beautiful car ever built. It’s short, squat, and powerful, like I am.

But the main point of all this is that, at 8:45 P.M on October 31st of 2011, I was living in what passed for a normal town, where kids went from door to door on Halloween and begged for candy, making empty threats to trick me if I didn’t treat them. I actually loved it, because I had good treats, the kind that made kids eyes bug out, and I had a blast awarding them.

And that brings us to Valerie Martin. Valerie was dressed as a witch that night, all in black. Her hair is naturally black as coal, and goes all the way down to her ass... witch’s hair if ever I saw it. Plus, there just isn’t any makeup in the world, short of full fledged, professional movie masks, that could make this woman look awful. She had tried to make her eyes look dark, and had added a greenish tint to the face paint she was wearing, but all she looked like was a beautiful woman trying to look like a witch, and only presenting the hint of witchiness.

The two little hobgoblins who she pushed through my gate and up the walk to my house looked the part much better. They appeared to be between six and ten. I’ve never married or had kids, so they all look pretty much the same to me. They were made up to look like zombies. They were wearing torn clothing, and their face paint created an unhealthy pallor pretty well. The boy shambled wonderfully, but the girl, who turned out to be his twin sister, was too scared to act the part. That might have been because I had spent over ten thousand dollars on the skeleton suit I was wearing. It was high tech, and from more than ten feet away, it looked like I actually was a skeleton. It even had sound effects, of shaking bones and chattering teeth. The eye sockets lit up red. It was great.

“If you want a treat, you have to come get it,” I growled into the microphone of the device that distorted my voice and made it sound like it came from a tomb.

The little girl decided she didn’t want a treat. Her brother had more courage.

When he got close enough to discern that I was actually wearing a skeleton suit, and was not, in fact, a skeleton, he took another step forward confidently.

“Whatcha got?” he asked, bravely.

“What do you say?” my voice boomed.

“Trick or treat!” he responded immediately.

“Take your pick,” I said, opening the cooler I had beside my foot. In it were toys, sacks of candy, coupons for a year’s subscription to various children’s magazines, gift cards to various fast food restaurants, and toy stores. I even had a card that said I’d pay for the first year’s medical bills and food for a puppy, if that puppy was adopted from the pound and given to a child for Christmas. I made that one up myself. I hadn’t had any takers on it yet, but that’s only because every kid who wanted it had a parent with him or her.

Now those of you who are discerning may have noticed that when I met Valerie and her children, I put the time in there, along with the date of Halloween for the year referenced. If you don’t live in Niagara Falls or its surroundings, that time and date group might mean nothing to you. But if you watched the news on the first of November, that year, you probably saw our little town’s fifteen minutes of fame. That’s because, roughly fifteen minutes prior to when Valerie Martin sent her twins up my sidewalk, what became known locally as the Tuscarora Riot got kicked off.

Tuscarora is the name of an Indian tribe, and they have a reservation near Niagara Falls. What happened was that a member of that tribe was minding his own business, putting gas in his pickup truck at Sam’s Get and Git convenience store, when a bunch of bikers rode into the parking lot to patronize the liquor store next door to Sam’s. It was closed, because the town selectmen had decided Halloween was enough trouble without a bunch of drunks hooting it up too. The bikers were upset, and decided to take it out on Sam’s customers, whereupon the Tuscarora Indian, who also happened to be a three tour veteran of Iraq, taught their leader some manners. Then, since there were two dozen more of them, he hopped in his truck and took off. He was brave (no pun intended), not stupid.

They called what happened next the Tuscarora Riot, which isn’t fair, because there was only one Indian, and two dozen or more bikers. But people have been fucking over Indians for hundreds of years, so we shouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, there was this mad chase, which caused a bunch of accidents, and people started chasing the bikers, some of whom crashed and had to run for it. Pretty soon there was a crowd of mostly people in their teens who had no idea what started the whole thing, but were having a wonderful time raising hell and tearing stuff up.

And a group of about fifty or sixty of those juvenile delinquents came around the corner of Elm and Piquant streets, at 8:45 PM. They were throwing rocks and bottles and running up onto porches to smash pumpkins and kicking down fences and just generally acting like assholes as they surged toward my house.

And toward Valerie Martin, who was standing on the sidewalk.

Now, believe it or not, a mob is actually a system of sorts. It has a body, and it has movement. There are generally leaders, and there is something that motivates the mob. So you can sometimes hypothesize what a mob is going to do.

Basically, I analyzed the system that was approaching my house, and recognized some control measures that might lend themselves to affecting the outcome of the situation.

I delayed putting those control measures into place long enough to snatch up the little zombie standing in front of me and put him inside my front door.

“You need to bring your daughter into the house now,” I roared. I didn’t mean to roar, but the voice thingy was still plugged in and working fine. The average mother would have simply screamed, snatched up her remaining child, and run for it to report the madman who had kidnapped her son. But Valerie wasn’t the average mother. Plus I pointed one skeletal arm and hand at the mob, and her head turned and saw ‘horde of savage beasts’ bearing down on her. She was a smart girl. She ran, scooped up the little girl zombie and followed me into the house, where at least there was only one beast.

There is a feature built into the wall beside each of the entrances to my house that came in handy that night. All it took was putting one of six fingers I had programmed into the fingerprint scanner on a little dipped out area built into the wall, and a spring-loaded door popped open, revealing a mini arsenal inside. I grabbed the shotgun with the drum magazine and took it back outside.

The mob was still two houses down, destroying Mrs. Abernathy’s carefully tended flowerbeds and garden gnomes.

I fired six rounds into the air. I was in fear of my life. That’s what I told the police later, anyway. They were hotter to see my permit than to ask why I fired the thing.

Funny how gunfire will take the starch out of the spines of a bunch of worthless juvenile delinquents.

“You will disperse,” I growled into the microphone. “You will not run. Anyone I see running will be shot. You will walk calmly - on the sidewalks - and go somewhere else. This street is closed for the evening.”

Of course the fact that a skeleton was waving the shotgun around in the air didn’t hurt anything. And, of course, nobody walked, or stayed on the sidewalk.

But they took off screaming back in the direction they had come from which, presumably, was already trashed.

The riot went on for another three or four hours that night, but not on our street.

And that’s how I met Valerie Martin and her twins, Chip and Samantha.

Valerie was not a happy camper when first we met. Not right away, anyway. She had the same aversion to guns that most New Yorkers have. That’s because, as far as most New Yorkers are concerned, the only people who have guns are criminals. And nobody likes criminals. So nobody likes guns. I know it doesn’t make sense. You could say that eyes are bad, since criminals have eyes. And hands and fingers too. May as well ban all eyes, hands and fingers. I’m sure crime would go down. At least that’s probably what New York politicians would think.

In any case, while Valerie did not like guns, she liked what had happened to her house even less. She lived three blocks away, on Newton Street, and when she called her neighbor to see how things were over there, her neighbor was in tears, saying that half the block was on fire.

Including Valerie’s house.

So that’s why Valerie and her children stayed at my house, instead of going home. And it was good she did, too, because New York Police don’t think anybody should have a permit to own a short-barreled shotgun, especially a semi-automatic one with a pistol grip and a drum magazine. Even if you’re in fear of your life. They think you should call 911 and ask them to come solve your problem.

I asked mister nice policeman how many people from Piquant Street had called 911 that night. I didn’t give him time to answer. “You didn’t show up,” I said, instead. “We sort of had to fend for ourselves.”

“We certainly did!” agreed Valerie, passionately.

Anyway, there wasn’t much they could do. I have the best attorneys on the face of the planet, and the one I called doesn’t live in Niagara Falls, so he didn’t have problems of his own. He said, “Stay on the line, Duke. This won’t take a minute.” He needled me by calling me John Wayne’s nickname, because he said I had the same mindset as Mr. Wayne sometimes. I stayed on the line. It actually took fifteen minutes, but they were dithering, trying to figure out what to do. Pretty soon somebody came to get mister nice policeman and whispered in his ear. He looked disgusted, but whoever had called him off had enough pull that it outweighed his burning desire to seize my shotgun and drag me off in hand irons for defending our neighborhood.

I turned around, and that was when I found out that Valerie Martin had nowhere to go.

Now, imagine a beautiful young woman, who is shapely and could model for any of the hair or makeup commercials without even using the products first. And don’t think beautiful women aren’t aware they’re beautiful. Or at least that other people think they’re beautiful. They may not believe it deep down, but that’s because they see the outside flaws that most other people never notice, and they know the inside flaws that they don’t think anybody else has (but which we all do, of course). But a woman like that is hit on so frequently, by so many men, married or not, that she’s aware that she has something a lot of men are after.

In this case, she had twins to prove that as well.

And then imagine that all the men in her life prior to meeting a raving skeleton who not only waved a gun around, but actually fired it a bunch of times, were jerks who only wanted to mount her soft, white body long enough to piston their prick in her until they reached sweet release.

I suppose they wanted more than that. Like bragging rights, to have her on their arm as they showed off what incredible masculinity they must possess, to be able to claim this trophy. But mostly they wanted to see her naked and fuck her. They didn’t really care about her or love her. And this was because every one of them couldn’t believe, even for a minute, that a woman this fine would choose to stay with a loser like him. Just like beautiful women know they’re beautiful, jerks know they are jerks. They like to say they’re just obeying Mother Nature’s prime directive of spreading their seed as far and wide as possible, but they’re really just assholes, and they usually know that.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that any woman with half a brain will soon arrive at the conclusion that since all the men she’s met in her life were jerks... then all men are jerks. She knows that’s not true, of course. She’s met lots of wonderful men, mostly husbands of her friends. Or guys who are gay. But all the available men are jerks.

Especially the one who got her pregnant with twins and only then admitted he already had a wife and family.

Granted, I was older... old enough, in fact, to be her father. But she’d been hit on dozens of times by men old enough to be her father, so I didn’t get any slack. Not in the beginning. And then there was the raving, gun shooting lunatic aspect of things.

Turned out I just happened to do two things that mitigated a lot of her inborn hostility towards me.

“Are you okay?” I asked, after the mob turned and fled. That was the first thing. Later on she’d say it was the fact that I snatched up Chip and protected him, and then took her and Samantha in. But anybody would have done that.

“I’m sorry,” I said, which was the second thing that got me points that night. She didn’t know what I was sorry for. Actually, what I was talking about was scaring Samantha, who was still sniffling. But I had done many things (in her estimation) that called for an apology, and from her perspective, I had offered one.

She liked that. I was polite. And she liked polite.

Then there was the awkward, semi tense period while we waited for it to be safe for her to leave. Small talk in that situation is very difficult, because neither of you believes the relationship is going to last longer than a few more minutes.

I’d argue that the only reason the cops showed up at my house was because of the gunfire. The rioters didn’t happen to be carrying firearms. They did recover some ten or twelve hand guns either taken from bikers or believed to have been abandoned by them, but those guys were smart enough not to use them in New York. Or maybe they weren’t in fear of their lives, like I was. In any case, while only three percent of the 911 calls that night actually resulted in the police showing up, I was in the three percent. I’m pretty sure if I hadn’t popped off a few rounds, nobody would have come to “render aid.” In fact, while the cops were at my house trying to disarm me, the riot was still going on four or five blocks away. But the riot was fluid, ebbing and flowing. It would have taken an actual plan to contain that, and the Great Falls PD did not have a plan to quell a riot. I, on the other hand, was static, in one place. And I had a gun! That, they had a plan for.

The point is that that awkward social situation between Valerie and me got interrupted by the police, who took long enough that Valerie had time to investigate and find out she had no place to go, because everything she owned in the world was going up in flames and there was nothing she could do about it.

So when the police finally left, I was then confronted with a weeping woman with two ten-year-olds who were trying to tell her that everything was going to be okay. That’s what she always told them when they cried, so that’s what they told her when she cried.

When I found out what happened, I said, “You can stay here, of course. I have plenty of room. Call your husband and tell him to come here too. You can all stay with me until you figure something else out.”

That was the third thing I did right that night, and I didn’t even know it.

There was no husband, of course. I knew there were assholes in the world already, so this was simply more evidence of proof. And I knew, or had worked with, dozens of men who were like the one who victimized Valerie. These were men who thought whatever they wanted was what should happen, simply because they wanted it. And if they need to lie to get what they want, that’s fine because they deserve to have whatever it is they want. And if you wanted a woman like Valerie, then you needed to tell her what she wanted to hear, such as that you were sadly alone because of the untimely demise of your wife, or that you were a confirmed bachelor because you’d never, until you met Valerie, met the woman you sensed was your life mate.

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Bewitched

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