Page 38 of Rebel

Closing the door behind him, he continued, “For the first couple of years after I was discharged from the military, all my time and resources went into building this home.”

“That must have been a ton of work. It’s really beautiful. It looks like you had an interior designer involved.”

“Maybe I’m wasted as an electrician?” he said with a grin. Gesturing towards his kitchen, he added, “I could talk for daysabout my house, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry tonight. I’m gonna make us some drinks and show you my office. It’s where I’ve been keeping track of the evidence on the break-in.”

“Alright, we’ll get right down to business if that’s what you want.”

“What I want is to be able to leave you in the office every morning without having to worry about some asshole breaking in and harming you.”

“Yeah, I want that too,” I told him.

“I’m grabbing a beer. I have wine, wine coolers, orange juice, or milk.”

“Maybe a wine cooler. It seems a waste to open a whole bottle of wine if it’s just me drinking it.”

He opened his fridge and pulled out our drinks, handing me an ice cold bottle and taking a beer for himself.

I followed him upstairs and into a small office. He had a bulletin board with all sorts of pieces of information pinned to it. Unlike the boards they showed police making on crime shows, his was chaotic and the clues didn’t point in any particular direction.

I sat down in a comfortable armchair as he dropped down on the corner of his desk. Taking a mouthful of my drink I listened as he started to explain. “I started with the clients who were disgruntled enough to come to me to get jobs your employees screwed up fixed. I figured they would be the most likely to be angry at not getting their money refunded by Livingstone Electrical.”

“That was a good call. Shepard refused refunds even when we were at fault.”

“Yeah, and the people I talked to were pissed. I ended up with a short list of nine clients with an axe to grind, and talked to every single one of them personally.” He snatched several sheets of paper off the bulletin board and handed the neatly stapled stack to me, “You can see for yourself what the results of those conversations were.”

I skimmed the list.

“One was an older man by the name of Orville Winthrop. He passed away a month and a half ago and his family had no idea what I was talking about, so I marked him off the list,” Rebel said.

“What about the next two? They have checks next to their names.”

Without even glancing at the list, he responded, “Yes. Ramon Fuentes and Todd Jones. Both of them were quite vocal about the work Sherman did for them. Ramon had an extension built, and Sherman was supposed to install wiring for overhead lights and put an electrical outlet on each wall. Sherman did the install, and I came out a few weeks later and did some troubleshooting, fixing the problem in under an hour. Same with Todd, only he built a new garage and wanted a garage door installed along with overhead lighting and one outlet for his power tools along the back wall. Sherman was good at half-assed installs. I fixed his mistakes in short order as well. They aren’t likely suspects because they both ended up getting me to correct the problem for a nominal charge. Neither of them were particularly irate, just annoyed.”

“Three out of nine leaves six,” I said, stating the obvious.

“The next one is marked out because he’s one of Harvey’s friends and although he got shafted on a security system installation, I fixed it in under two hours and rewired a bathroom light fixture that needed to be replaced due to water damage, for free. He was actually happy when I left.”

We went through all the rest of the clients on his list and most cases were similar to the ones from the top of the list. People were annoyed, but since some time had passed, they’d mostly gotten over it.

“Out of this whole list, I’ve got a file on two of them and will probably go ahead and refund the money they paid you to correct the work our employees did.”

He took a swig of his beer and told me, “You should refund every single one of them on the list. It’s the right thing to do.”

He wasn’t wrong about that. “Before you came along, I didn’t anticipate having the revenue to give refunds, but the business is close to being in the black. I’ll contact them and work out at least partial refunds.”

“So after exhausting that list, I looked through your reviews online and found three more people who were seriously angry but couldn’t afford to hire another electrician to correct the work. I went ahead and volunteered to make it right myself and tried to do a little extra, so they felt satisfied. Their names are on the second page.”

Flipping the page, I realized rather quickly that these jobs probably took longer than the others he’d reworked. “You should fill out an invoice for your work so I can pay you.”

“You didn’t send me on the job. I volunteered. If you move on to the third page, it’s a list Hacker, our IT guy, dug from creating a bot that crawled over several social media platforms looking for any negative chatter about you or your parents. You know, anything significant enough that it might provoke someone into tearing apart your family business. Hacker is thorough and found a couple of things that fall in the category of maybes.”

I quickly flipped to the last page and scanned through all the information.

“You’ll want to flip that page over,” he told me quietly.

One hand flew to my mouth as I saw that my ex had posted a naked image of me in some manosphere group and talked trash about what a terrible lay I was. I’d dated Rudy briefly before I left for Los Angeles, and I’d thought we’d parted on good terms. The things Rudy said about me online were humiliating, I had always thought he was such a nice guy. I felt myself choking up.

My eyes flew up to Rebel. He reached out and plucked a sealed envelope off the bulletin board and handed it to me.

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