Chapter 1

I met Mack in a bar -- not a pickup place, but one with pool tables, a juke box and mostly seats at the bar -- the kind of place where men sit and drink. I'd just been laid off and it suited my mood better than most places, although it wouldn't have been my usual thing. I was watching the silent TV display a golf match -- just for something to do -- when Mack walked in and hit the stool two down.

That wasn't an opening for instant conversation; we probably spent two hours parked like that, me pretending to be a beer drinker and him knocking back scotch and soda, before any conversation started. During that interim, he must have taken a half-dozen calls on his cell phone, obviously making executive decisions. When he needed to, he opened a steno pad and scratched figures on it or doodled; he seemed to have problems with math; he would grunt, "Hang on a minute," into the phone, then erase a chunk of what he was doing and redo it, then grunt, "What are the taxes again?" and scratch some more before coming up with a number and barking it into the phone, then closing the call.

Finally, curiosity got the better of me and I ventured, "They won't let you alone, huh?"

Mack eyed me a moment, then grinned; he had one of those craggy faces that could go from neutral to jovial to downright mean in two-tenths of a second. "Well, this IS my office," he related.

I had nothing to lose, so I looked around. "Nice. Should I have had an appointment?"

That tickled him and he let out a guffaw -- probably due to the scotch. "Well, maybe, but I let Mike, here, load the place so he can pay his rent." Mike was the bartender; he nodded, amused, and continued wiping a highball glass.

"Where's your secretary?" I asked, looking around.

"She don't drink," Mack related. "I don't think she thinks, either, from the phone calls I get. All she does is pop chewing gum like a cow chewing a cud."

"Not much help," I opined.

"Well, it's nepotism," Mack grunted. "She's my brother's wife's sister. I think that means we're related. I keep her on the payroll so she can feed her half-wit kids." He chuckled. "Besides, she's got a halfway decent rack. I wouldn't touch her with your dick -- she gets pregnant if you breathe on her twice in succession -- but I can rest my eyes."

I laughed. "You were doing some heavy math, it looked like."

"Shit, I can barely add -- and I CAN'T subtract -- but I'm the math guy. I'm trying to keep shit inside the budget -- close, anyway."

"What's it all about?"

"Renovating a building. Contractors only know 'more' -- more time, more money. I think my current guy uses certain supplier because they're slow as molasses and he can blame delays on them while I pay his boys for sitting on their asses," Mack complained.

"You're in construction?"

"Not really." He chuckled and swished the ice cubes in his glass. "I'm a real estate mogul." He chuckled again.

"I've been thinking about looking into that," I said. "It seems popular."

"Flipping houses?" He eyed me. "Now's the time to buy, but you can go broke holding 'em waiting to sell after you poured your money into 'em." He knocked back a swallow. "I prefer to hold places to rent -- shitty as that is. Just bought a duplex on a short sale -- they took all the copper out, so I'm putting in plastic."

I was awash. "Short sale? Copper?"

He eyed me for a minute. "Don't spend your money until you learn the lingo. A short sale is where you talk the bank into selling you a piece of property they're foreclosing on for less than what's owed. Right now, there's a glut because the greedy assholes lent to anybody they thought they could suck money out of, so they're takin' it in the shorts. Thieves go in the houses while they're vacant and steal all of the copper pipe because it's pricey right now, so you have to replace the plumbing -- with plastic, which is a LOT cheaper."

"Oh, okay," I said, somewhat vacuously. "So what's the big math gig?"

"It's harder to find buyers or renters after a flip," Mack related. "I've got rules of thumb for six months, but with everyone broke, it runs to nine, so it's stubby pencil time."

"Gotcha."

The phone rang again and Mack got out his pad. "That much? Are you sure?" He turned to me. "What the Hell is one and a half times thirteen thousand?"

"Nineteen five," I replied.

"Thanks!" He went back to the phone. "Not a nickel over nineteen five, understand? I don't care if your sister-in-law doesn't eat because her no-good spick husband ain't working -- he ain't sitting on his ass on MY dime! Understand? I've got other contractors, you know!" He listened for a moment. "Look, Julio, I know you have to keep the crew working, but that means you go out and fix your supply problems, not come running to me. Now get on the phone with the yard and tell them to get up off their asses or you'll go elsewhere!" He hung up. "Who the fuck knows where else he's dicked me because I can't add..."

"Get something that adds for you," I advised. "Simplest would be a calculator -- but I bet you have all this stuff in your head, right?"

"Damned straight!"

"Okay, then -- it's probably mildly complex, but you just need to plug in new numbers and it all works out, right?" I reached down to my left and hoisted my laptop case onto the bar. "I can whip up something you can just plug numbers into and it will spit out your answers for you..."

"No shit?" Mack grunted. "You some kind of bookkeeper?"

"Computer geek, more likely," I grunted. "We're a little more flexible."

"I hope you don't cost as fucking much," Mack grunted.

"Well, I just started a forced sabbatical, but I'll give you this for free -- how's that?" I replied. "I can look for regular work tomorrow when I don't smell like a beer." I fired up the laptop and for the next forty minutes we collaborated on a spreadsheet for holding costs on a home that was to be purchased, upgraded and refurbished, and turned around for profit in a reasonably short time. Mack's big problems were things like 'vacancy insurance' -- a policy for defraying the cost of vandalism to a vacant house -- that had a six month policy premium. Costs for that were double, not one and a half times his six month window. Additional utilities and property taxes and such drove up his overhead. We'd just finished when he got another call. "They want HOW much? What's the new delivery date if we cough it up?" The house he was talking about was the one we'd used to proof the spreadsheet, so he covered the mouthpiece of his cell. "Four-seventy to deliver in three days. That gets everyone off their ass six days early, but..."

I increased the materials cost and reduced the labor at the daily rate we were using. "That's seventeen days for the crew size you have programmed, and puts you a week and a half ahead of schedule. What if you drop a guy?"

"Do it."

I ran the numbers with one less carpenter. "You save both ways. There might be something else out there, too."

"What's that do to my window?"

"It leaves you four days for emergencies."

"Do it, Julio -- but drop somebody. You'll have more time, so you can use fewer bodies. Is there anybody you haven't called in?" Mack listened. "Don't, then." There were a couple of minutes of wrangling, but Mack hung up grinning. "You just saved me a couple of grand, I figure."

"Eighteen hundred and change," I agreed.

"Can you put that on something I can carry around that isn't so bulky?" Mack asked.

"Probably," I agreed.

Mack eyed me. "The numbers aren't enough -- I need someone who can see the holes like you just did. My bookkeeper knows tax law, but he can't seem to find a way to make me a buck outside of that." He pursed his lips. "Got any folding money?"

"Like, how much?"

"Fifty grand, say."

"If I didn't have to eat for the next few weeks, maybe."

"Eat doughnuts at my place. I'll give you a chunk of the business to run the numbers. You can bring me into the twenty-first century. I need email and shit. Marketing, flyers, spam -- all that crap the competition has that hurts my head. In return, I'll make sure you don't fuck up and you'll be collecting a couple of thousand in rent each month and a cut of whatever I'm doing that you're contributing to. What do you think?"

I rubbed my jaw. "I can probably handle the job description, but I'm not a people person..."

"I've got that. I need a numbers person. Sales jockeys are a dime a dozen."

"Well, okay. I hear horror stories about being a landlord," I muttered.

"It's all in how you pick your tenants and making shit clear up front," Mack chuckled. "I have places I'd rather not go -- and places where the first of the month is recreational."

"Sounds like a deal." I stuck out my hand and we shook on it.

"Keep track of what you're saving me," Mack warned. "Sometimes I get bitchy." We went back to drinking -- but I slacked off even more, since I was now on the payroll and needed to stay sharp. We got a half-dozen more calls and I refined the spreadsheet and set up calculations for a couple of other scenarios and when I staggered home I had his business card and a lot of good will.

The next morning, I hit the address of his REAL office and met Noreen, the secretary with the nice rack. It was, but she wasn't - she was an oxygen thief. Still, she knew I was coming and set me up with a desk and a telephone and we went from there. Automation was nonexistent in Mack's office; when he came in, I had eight different proposals for improvements that were theoretically at least within the limits of his small sales staff. "One at a time!" he grunted, but by afternoon I was buying computers and routers and switches and printers.

I owned automation in that office -- from email to antivirus to the website to marketing to the books -- at least as far as getting the bookkeeper on electronic record keeping. In the first two weeks, I spent twenty thousand dollars -- and Mack was prone to complain, so I kept my numbers with me -- and I'd saved him twice that much.

At the end of that period, however, things were getting tight; I'd forked over the fifty thousand that first day, purchasing five percent of Mack's company, and I didn't have that much more in the way of resources. The bookkeeper rather jealously informed me that everyone else was an employee, which was a surprise, but that only carried me so far ... So when the end of the month came, I turned to him, beer in hand (we 'worked' half a day every day in that bar or another one up the street -- I was drinking non-alcoholic beer, mostly), and said, "Mack? When do I see some money from this deal? Not to bitch or anything, but this IS my day job and I have rent to pay..."

"Rent? You don't pay no fucking rent! You COLLECT rent! Hang on a minute." He punched the phone and barked. "Noreen! When were you gonna give Pete his apartment keys? Did you set up his drawing account like I told you to? What the fuck you mean you don't know how? Papers? Oh. Shit. Where are they? Shit. When did the lawyer send them? Awright." He hung up and sighed. "Come on, we need to go back to the rat hole." We went out and got in his car -- but he turned to me and said, "You're drinking that non- alcoholic shit, aren't you? You'd better drive..."

It had more or less become a ritual; I got out and took the keys to his Caddy and away we went. At the office, both of the sales guys were out; the two interns were taking calls and interviewing callers with houses to buy or sell and the sales boys were on appointment sweet-talking buyers and sellers to get our piece. The third sales guy was gone; one of my early discoveries was the fact that he was just taking up space. I really felt bad when I pointed that out to Mack -- but he had no problem doing the dirty and putting the guy on the street -- which made me feel even worse. Mack just grunted. "It's a cost of doing business. He'll sell for his next boss or he'll find a new line of work -- we've done him a favor with the wake-up call."

Anyway, we went into his office and Mack dug around on his desk and surfaced some contracts and in a few minutes I was LEGALLY a partner -- and a limited signatory on a drawing account. "Don't abuse it," Mack grunted, then chuckled. "Not that I think you'd know how." Next I was issued a shiny gold AMEX -- with the same injunction -- and we headed out to the bookkeeper's office, where Mack talked to the poor man like he was a three year old. "Got the P & L? Show me." Mack looked it over and grunted, then handed it to me. The number said we were doing okay, I figured. "This includes all that computer crap Pete ordered?" Mack asked. The bookkeeper nodded. "Figure out what five percent is -- minus the tax man's cut -- and open an account for Pete at the bank and deposit it. Put the tax money in the escrow account for the quarterly. Give Pete his checkbook tomorrow. Got me?"

"Yes, Mack."

"Pete sees every fucking thing -- he's a partner. You fix it. He sees YOUR shit in particular, since he does numbers, and I don't. Get me?"

"Yes, Mack."

"Get moving. Hold it. Make sure Pete is on the health plan and all that shit, too. 401k, the works. Can you ballpark what he's gonna get?"

"Yes." The guy -- Fred -- poked his calculator and scratched a number down on paper and handed it to me -- and it was about half again what I'd been doing in salary.

"Jeezus!" I grunted.

Mack chuckled. "We're up five percent AFTER you bought all that shit. That makes you worth it. Next month will probably be more. Some months are shit, but I have a funny feeling that there are gonna be fewer of those. Let's go for a ride."

I followed him out of the bookkeeper's office and to Noreen. Mack barked, "Keys!" and Noreen surfaced a set. Mack snatched them and swept out. I got the feeling that everyone was up in arms because he came back after one p.m. I got to drive again; Mack gave directions. In fifteen minutes we pulled up in front of a condo building. "Come on." Mack waved and I followed him in. He went to the elevator and we rode to the third floor and he turned right and opened a door. "Take a look."

It was three bedrooms with an open kitchen and a hot tub and a balcony overlooking a pool. "Nice!"

"I own the building," Mack grunted. "These are your digs -- get your junk out of your place. Whatever you need to break the lease, take it out of the drawing account, along with the mover's money." He eyed me. "That cool with you?"

"Shit, yeah!"

"Good. Tomorrow, being it's the first, we'll go around and collect some rent on a couple of my pet projects. You'll enjoy it."

We were headed back down the stairs. "Well..."

"Yeah, I know," Mack chuckled. "You're not a people person. Well, it's like I told you -- it's all about who your tenants are. I don't collect rent for all of my places -- just a few. And I do those more for recreation than anything else -- you'll see what I mean."

Twenty minutes later, we were in the bar again.