Page 106 of Tainted Love

What a prick.

On the surface, he seems like a decent guy but you start peeling back the layers and you discover a few particularly creepy traditions passed down to him from when his father ran the Chicago location, including one annual party that’s so skeevy even I won’t touch it.

Mr. Ian Botsford and his wealthy, social elite buddies like to lure young ladies (the more jail-baity, the better) into his hotel to be auctioned off to the highest bidder for the night. I mean, I’m not exactly the picture of healthy morality, but come on…

Gross.

If the mainstream media found out about this little moral abomination, the good branch of the Botsford family will surely suffer the consequences for Ian’s creepiness. Luckily, guardian angel Boxcar discovered it before the press did and I’m more than willing to keep this information quiet.

For a price.

I’ve spent the last several weeks traveling to various Botsford Plaza Hotels around the country, inserting a special, completely undetectable, line of code into their payroll systems. Nothing too crazy, just a worm that eats up one percent of every dollar that passes through. Each Botsford Plaza moves — on average — one million dollars each month through their payroll accounts. So far, I’ve uploaded this worm to twenty-five hotels throughout North America. One percent of one million dollars times twenty-five. Let me do the math for you.

Two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

And I don’t even have to leave my desk.

In the morning, Ian will receive an untraceable letter from a courier explaining what I’ve done and why. It’ll be up to him to figure out how to keep his CEO cousin happy but in the grand scheme of things, this will be little more than a parking ticket for him. Not really my problem. I’ll be in Fiji doing Jell-O shots off an islander’s voluptuous tits by then.

Sure as hell beats the hell out of Boston.

I sit back in my desk chair and stare at the clock on the wall. Three minutes until midnight. The payroll department finalizes its transactions at 12:01 east coast time every payday. They never miss it. It’s the very definition of clockwork and quite possibly the most impressive thing about the staff at Botsford Plaza Hotels. They know their shit. From management to maids, those places are run tight as virgin priestesses.

12:00. Almost there…

I crack my knuckles and sit up, looking through my own reflection staring back at me in my desktop computer monitor. It’s been a few days since I’ve shaved and even longer since I’ve hit the gym, but I’ve been busy, dammit. What’s your excuse?

I slide my glasses off and wipe the fingerprints clean before clacking the keyboard, preparing to activate the rather hungry worm slipping its way through twenty-five separate payroll systems. All I have to do is tell it to start chomping and my bank account fills up like magic.

12:01.

It’s showtime, Synergy.

I move to activate the worm and my security system alerts loudly from my phone.

Well, shit.

I spin around in my chair and roll over to my second desk to check the monitors. Someone is outside of my apartment door — make that two someones — and they aren’t here to sell me Girl Scout cookies, that’s for sure. Unless the ladies changed their uniforms to include spec-ops black.

One is male, mid-twenties with ash brown hair in desperate need of a trim — not that I’m one to talk about that. The other is female. She’s petite but muscular with hair that looks like a beaten-up red crayon. She stands in front of the security panel with a screwdriver in her hand, thinking she can probably brute force her way through my system. She can’t, but it’s cute she’s trying.

I enable voice decryption and flick on the microphone. “Um… Excuse me, madam,” I say. She instantly pauses and stares straight ahead into the camera. “I don’t mean to alarm you two, but the police have been notified and they’re on their way to this location.”

She smiles at the camera. “No, they aren’t.”

Say cheese.

I open my facial recognition software and it goes to work, scanning every point and dimple of her little face. Now, I just have to keep her talking while it checks her against every law enforcement and identification database in the world.

“Open the door, Mr. Carson,” she says. “We just want to talk.”

“Oh, I’d love to chat with you, sweetheart,” I say. “Ditch the shadow and we’ll go have a drink. My treat.”

She glances back and rolls her eyes at the guy as he chuckles softly. “Mr. Carson, we’re looking for a friend of yours.”

I glance back at the facial recognition software. Sixty percent finished and not one damn match? That’s odd.

“I don’t have any friends,” I say.

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