Chapter 1

The brushed steel doors to the executive elevator opened quietly and Allison McMasters walked out at the head of what could only be called an entourage. About the time my wife was promoted to a mid-level executive position in Holcomb Industries, she’d gone to court to change her name from “Chambers” back to her maiden name. She told me it was because one of her focus groups decided “McMasters” had more gravitas than “Chambers” did.

Okay. What was done was done. I didn’t like it one little bit. I did try to be understanding—it was for her professional life—but I never got there. Perhaps if she’d come to me beforehand, discussed it with me, and asked for my opinion, I might have been able to adjust easier. Maybe...

She was the CEO of Phillips Manufacturing, a subsidiary of Holcomb Industries, and she’d held that position for the last two years. There was no one higher on the food chain than she was, save for the President and super-majority stockholder of Holcomb Industries, Mr. Quinton Holcomb III himself. There was a board of directors, but they existed only to rubberstamp Mr. Holcomb’s suggestions—more and more of those came to Mr. Holcomb from the mind of Allison McMasters.

I watched the woman who was only technically my wife as she strode confidently by. A queen in her court couldn’t have been more lordly. A hush fell over the vast space that was her outer office as she passed. A commotion broke out in the far corner—nothing more than some laughter and a little moving around. Queen Allison glanced that way, frowned, and gestured one of her assistant’s to her side. After a murmured, but pointed, conversation, the assistant scurried off toward that corner of the room. The laughter ceased abruptly and the reverent silence resumed.

At forty-six, Allison was still an attractive woman, with her luxuriant brunette hair caught up in a bun at the back of her head. Soft, lustrous brown eyes that used to smile at me, shot darts at most everyone these days. The business pant suit she wore hid a lithe body still slim after two children. She had long, wonderfully shaped legs, and nice breasts. She was often depressed she didn’t have anything more than B-cups, but what she had was beautifully rounded. I knew—I’d held them in my hands often enough.

She was the most beautiful woman in my world and I knew every curve of her body. Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to sample those curves much any more. She was always too exhausted, too busy, too much away, too ... whatever ... these days.

Allison loved all this. She basked in the fawning attention. Her subordinates practically shouldered each other aside so they could get to her and perform some task for her. Everyone focused on her because she had the power to terminate their employment at a whim.

She’d told me the glass ceiling didn’t worry her. She was walking ON the glass ceiling looking down at all the little people below. She’d chortled delightedly when she said it.

I was in the building for several reasons. One, I wanted to take her to lunch if she could find a moment, and, two, I was there to speak to the head of Holcomb Industries Chief of Security, who’d invited me in for a consultation. I was leaning comfortably against the wall chatting with Martin Sanders about how he could better protect the building against terrorist activity, random burglary, industrial espionage, and a host of other issues.

Allison didn’t see me as she swept by; her eyes were fastened on the doorway into her glassed-in office directly in front of her. I knew the walls and doors were made of polarized glass which could be set with a rheostat control from transparent to impenetrably opaque—clear so Allison could keep watch over all the personnel who owed her fealty, and a blank wall when she wanted other eyes off her.

Stopping just short of her office, Allison dismissed most of her minions to other duties. Some were sent on errands in other parts of the cavernous whole floor the business occupied, and several went to the bank of ordinary elevators to head somewhere else. Two of them, a tall, well built man and a slender, redheaded woman accompanied Allison inside her office. The doors closed and the walls turned a milky shade of blank immediately afterward.

I sighed inwardly. It was looking like I wasn’t going to be able to take Allison to lunch; she wouldn’t have time for me again. That was becoming the norm, rather than the exception. She no longer had the time to be a wife to me, or a mother to our two daughters either. I’d come to talk to her about both—a last ditch effort the salvage what had been a great marriage. These days, it wasn’t even what one could call a good working relationship.

It took me another twenty minutes to answer all the questions the Chief of Security had. When he finally excused himself, I headed toward Allison’s office, intending to check in with her personal secretary out front to make sure I wouldn’t be bursting in on a confidential meeting of some sort.

Twenty feet short of Allison’s office doors, I heard a loud scream from my wife’s office. Someone was in big trouble.

I was a cop, the most junior Deputy Chief in the department, but still a policeman at heart. I hadn’t been a patrol officer for many years, but I still carried a big Glock .45 caliber holstered in the small of my back. When I heard the scream, I pulled the weapon out and then I did what all cops, except those in Broward county, do—I ran toward the trouble.

Ignoring Allison’s secretary, and doing my best to keep my momentum up, I planted a size eleven Wellington boot squarely between the two ornate door handles. The door was designed to give the occupants inside privacy; it wasn’t designed to withstand a physical assault.

The doors slammed open and the inside of the handles smashed against the interior walls to which they were attached. The glass in the doors splintered with the impact. The walls themselves crazed a heartbeat later, then dissolved into tiny pebble-like fragments. A second after my boot propelled the doors inward, the whole interior of my wife’s office was exposed to everyone’s view.

I had my weapon extended in front of me as I glanced all around, seeking the source of the screams. “LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS!” I roared. Hands are what get cops killed—hands can hold guns or knives, or rocket launchers—so police routinely demand to see a subject’s hands as the first order of business.

“LEMME SEE YOUR HANDS!”

I don’t know if my bellowing got their attention first or whether it was the sight of me, clearly ready to open fire with the big Glock. Whatever it was, all three occupants dropped whatever they were holding and their arms shot upward. In my wife’s case, that meant dropping her panties she was holding in her hands as her face blanched pasty white. She stood there, naked from the waist down.

The man I’d taken for one of Allison’s minions had the woman I’d seen earlier bent over Allison’s desk and was ramming into her from the rear. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong. Maybe he’d managed to slam his cock into her ass rather than her cunt, because the scream had been one of intense pain. That’s something that can’t be faked.

There were only the three of them and no weapons were in sight. There wasn’t any threat I could find. The unknown woman shrieked again, this time in shock and fear.

I looked at my half-naked wife. The two members of her staff were having sex and Allison was preparing to join them. It was patently obvious what was going on.

“YOU GODDAM WHORE!” I shouted at my wife. Glaring at her the whole time, I lowered my weapon and thrust it behind me into its holster. I turned around and stalked out, daring anyone to get in my way.

I had a ton of things to do and I walked determinedly out of the building when the elevator deposited me on the ground floor. The little tragedy in the office behind me made it just that much easier to make a lot of decisions that had been a long time coming.

I’d hoped to have a nice lunch with Allison and at least lay the groundwork for a discussion of where we were headed as a couple and a family. I couldn’t remember the last time Allison and I had made love, and it’d been months since we just had sex. At the same time, Megan and Evelyn hadn’t had much mother-daughter time from Allison either. In many respects we were a family of only three—a Dad and two daughters—with a part-time presence whose sole focus in life was her position in the Holcomb hierarchy.

I’d been inching closer to a major career and life decision for a long time now. Professionally, I was a Deputy Chief in the Police Department, senior to every Commander and Captain on the force, and junior to all the other three Deputy Chiefs. Other than gradually getting older and more senior as attrition dealt with the other Deputies, this was as far as I was going. If I wanted to be the Chief of Police, I’d have to start playing hardcore politics, both interdepartmental and in the city government. I just didn’t want to do that. The thought of it bored and disgusted me.

I was effectively at the end of my career, and ... I was content. I’d done what I set out to do so many years ago and I thought I should move off into another direction. What I really wanted to do for the next stage in my life, was resign and start my own business. What I had in mind was a one-stop “store” for routine security, private investigation, executive protection, and whatever else I thought I could gather under one roof.

Back in my office, I pulled the document up that was my resignation letter on my computer, printed and endorsed it, then put it in an envelope for delivery to the personnel branch. I signed out on vacation an hour later, paying no attention to the normal rules and procedures. I was done, finished.

I was moving fast, refusing to think things through. Choices and judgments had already been made—by others and myself.

My next stop was the apartment Allison and I maintained in the city. If one of us needed to work so late that going home was a poor choice, one stayed in the apartment overnight and went home the next evening. To avoid conflict with Allison at home, I’d been staying at the apartment continuously for a little more than three weeks. I didn’t know whether she’d even been going to our home in the Stony River subdivision or not. On second thought, I figured she had been—the girls would have told me if she hadn’t. Allison surely hadn’t missed me though—never said a word.

At any rate, Megan and Evelyn were at the apartment, visiting. School was out this afternoon because of some internal seminar/team-building exercise/whatever was going on. The girls liked the big pool in the apartment complex and they were there to swim and work on their tans. I was surprised when they met me at the door to our apartment, concerned and unhappy.

“Daddy, what happened to Mom?” Megan demanded before I even put down the box of personal belongings I’d brought from an office that was no longer mine.

“Oh ... something I’d rather not talk about right now, please girls,” I countered. Megan was fifteen, going on twenty-three, and Evelyn wasn’t far behind her at fourteen, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell them what I’d encountered at Allison’s office.

“She said you WILL call her when you got home!,” Evelyn told me, mimicking the autocratic tone her mother used more and more often these days. “I think that’s called an ‘order’,” Megan remarked.

I sighed and sat on one of the barstools at the breakfast bar between kitchen and dining room. I looked at the girls pensively, wondering how much to say. Because they were both very emotionally mature for their ages, I decided to give them the plain unvarnished truth. It was going to come out anyway, eventually.

“I went to your mother’s office today—caught her half-naked in there with a guy and another girl having sex,” I said baldly. “Well ... the guy and the other girl were having sex ... your mother wasn’t—yet,” I clarified.

The girls threw each other an appalled glance, then each picked one of my shoulders and began to sob on it, hugging me tightly. I wrapped my arms around them and held on to them as I’d been doing all their lives.

“Are we gonna live with you?” Evelyn asked, skipping to the bottom line.

“Depends on what you want,” I answered after taking a couple of seconds to catch up. “As old as you girls are, family court will generally let you pick which parent you want to stay with.” None of us mentioned the “D” word. I suppose we were all assuming from the beginning a divorce was going to happen. I know I was.

“... ‘Kay,” Megan replied. “We wanta stay with you,” she said. Evelyn nodded in agreement.

“Can we move in today?” Evelyn asked. “We can go pack right now,” she added. They weren’t wasting any time.

“Well ... I think we’ll do that in a couple a’ days,” I returned. “I need to get some things done this afternoon, and you two have enough clothes here to last for a while, right?” They nodded.

“Okay, I’m going to run some errands and then go over to the house to get some things out of my file cabinet and stuff. I’ll pick up some pizza on the way back. You girls find something to amuse yourselves ‘til then?”

They nodded and kissed my cheeks. They really were incredible smart and capable young women. I was proud of them both.

I stopped back by the personnel office to sign some additional paperwork and get them to cash out my pension plan immediately. Then I made my way to the bank to sit down with a young manager who helped me turn CD’s, some bearer bonds from our safety deposit box, and other assorted assets into cash. I knew all our assets would go under review by the family court when I, or Allison, filed for divorce. A proper division would be made retroactively, but I wanted control of that money now—I took a hit, what with all the penalties for early withdrawal and stuff like that, but that’s life.

Without any particular strain, I wound up with a little more than three-hundred thousand, in cash. I’d asked for usable bills and got my wish; all those $20 dollar bills made quite a nice little pile that I stowed in a largish duffle bag and parked in the back of my Land Rover.

Satisfied I was set for a while, I dropped by the home Allison and I shared to pick up as much of my clothing and personal belongings as I could. I had some new, unassembled boxes in the storage room in the basement and I was going to fill as many of them as I could before the Bitch of Holcomb Industries got home.

I almost made it. I’d finished stacking boxes by the front door and was in the bedroom and I was about to grab a quick shower to wash off the sweat when Allison announced she was home. She started in on me while I was still out of sight and before she slammed the front door shut.

“GODDAMN YOU, RUSS. WHAT THE HELL DID YOU THINK YOU WERE DOING BREAKING INTO MY OFFICE LIKE THAT, YOU SORRY BASTARD?” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

I didn’t say a word from the bedroom. She was attacking to put me on the defensive, but that was a game I wasn’t going to play. In my mind, I was already gone. This morning, on top of all the disrespect and coldness of the past few years, was all I needed to pronounce marriage officially dead.

None of her maneuvering was going to have any effect on me. You have to care in order to be manipulated. I was past all that; I didn’t care at all. I felt kind of liberated actually, now that I’d made the decision to leave all the ugliness behind.

“WHERE—?” she yelled. She finally saw me in the bedroom where I was in the last stages of stripping my clothes off to get into the shower.

“Why didn’t you answer me?” she asked indignantly, in a slightly moderated voice.

“ ... Didn’t feel like I needed to,” I replied coolly. “I figured you’d find me sooner or later ... damn it!” I sat down on the side of the big brass bed to take off my boxers.

That set her off again.

“YOU SORRY S.O.B. YOU KNOW HOW MUCH SHIT YOU CAUSED? MY DAMN OFFICE IS WRECKED; IT’LL TAKE A GODDAMN MONTH TO FIX IT.

“ ... AND IT’S GOING TO TAKE ME A DAMN YEAR TO FIX EVERYTHING WITH THE BOARD AND MR. HOLCOMB.”

“Tough shit,” I replied mildly. Her eyes grew as big as saucers. “What does Mr. Holcomb think about you being a slut in his office building?” I asked interestedly, cutting off another screech or two. I’d seen she was inhaling in preparation to do the bullhorn thing again.

“SCREW YOU!” Allison shot back. “You had no right, dammit. Just what did you think you were going to do, huh, Russ. You gonna make me sorry for bein’ a bad little girl?” She laughed derisively. “Is that what you thought you were gonna do, Russ? Big Bad Cop chargin’ in to make his naughty wife behave, huh?”

“I thought someone was in trouble,” I answered quietly. “I didn’t know it was just you and your fuck-buddies gettin’ it on,” I added. “When I saw it was nothing but you whoring yourself out, I left.”

“It was just going to be a little sex, Russ,” She said, more or less, calmly. “I’m responsible for EVERYTHING that happens in that building. I think I’m entitled to blow off a little steam every now and then; it’s one of the fringe benefits of being a successful senior executive, dammit ... and I think Dad is right. It’s a thing he needed just to unwind. Mom knew about his ... friends ... and she understood how things are. You’re just going to have to get with the program!”

I looked at her without speaking, too astounded to reply. I had no idea she’d even want to discuss such a thing with her father. I sure hadn’t been part of the decision process.

“You don’t have any idea what I have to deal with every damn day,” she added defensively. “You just don’t know how much everyone depends on me to get it right every damn time something comes up!”

“Any of those ‘somethings’ shoot at you?” I inquired. Her lips tightened. She didn’t like being contradicted.

Two years earlier, when I was still a Commander heading up, among other things, the detective bureau, my uniformed driver and I stumbled onto a liquor store robbery and we shot it out with two bozos. During the gunfight, a round from one of them drew a red streak across the outside of my left shoulder before I was able to put him down. My partner took care of the other one, but took a bullet in the belly and spent six months in hospital and rehab.

Afterward, I’d wanted to take Allison and the girls on a family trip out West to see the Grand Canyon. I’d even used the phrase “blow off some steam,” but she’d pooh poohed the idea.

“Fuck you!” my dear wife advised me. Looked to me like she remembered what I was thinking of and didn’t like being put in a bad light.

“Good God, no!” I retorted. “I wouldn’t touch your cunt with a ten-foot pole.” With my boxers off, I stood up and was about to stroll into the bathroom.

Allison really didn’t like my comment. Her face was a mask of fury. Apparently, what I’d said wasn’t respectful enough.

Allison moved forward aggressively, ramping up her CEO intimidation mode. “You listen to me, dammit,” she began, “you are going to write a letter of apology to me, my staff, and to Mr. Holcomb telling everyone how sorry you are you overreacted at something you thought you heard and something you thought you saw. You’re going to offer to pay for fixing everything—don’t even think I’m going to give you money to do that—and you’re going to say you’ll never come in the Holcomb Building ever again, DO YOU HEAR ME?”

“My God,” I said softly, astounded by her arrogance. I looked around the room helplessly. “Help me, Obi Wan! She’s been seduced by the dark side!” I called out dramatically. “Help me, Obi Wan ... help me!”

I was disgusted. I’d have spit on the floor if it hadn’t been such an expensive carpet. I stepped around my deranged wife, en route to the bathroom and a nice hot shower.

Her lips twisting manically, Allison cut me off, and stepped into my path to block me. Her right hand came whistling around to deliver a hard slap to the left side of my face. Clearly, I ‘d been a little too flippant to the CEO of the universe.

It wasn’t any great problem avoiding the blow. I was already moving to her right to get around her and walk into the bathroom, so all I had to do was lean away. I swatted at her elbow from behind as it went by and that, together with the impetus her own swing produced, helped propel her almost all the way around. Still on the way to the bath, I stepped behind her at the same time she was whirling back to get at me again, so she wound up facing me again. She was spitting mad and raised her hand to try another slap.