Page 15 of Black Curtain

Dan calculated the distance from the old hole to the new one.

Glancing at the revised blueprint, then back up at the work they’d done, he nodded.

“…Okay, that looks good. Fucking perfect, from what I can tell.”

It had been the job that would never end.

If Dan made it through this checklist, however, it might finally…finally… come to a close. The reality was, it hadn’t been a verylongjob. In fact, that was part of the problem. Their client wanted six months’ worth of work done, including all modifications and changes halfway through, in less than half that time.

Really, it was an obscenely short amount of time.

It should have been an eight-month job really.

The client wanted it crammed into two.

Barelytwo months.

Dan was forced to work his people around the clock, in twenty-four-hour shifts.

They’d gotten noise complaints, working at three a.m., which Dan could hardly argue with. Hell, heagreedwith the neighbors about how ridiculous it was. The worst of those complaints brought the N.Y.P.D. to the mansion’s door, and a demand to cease and desist that night, along with instructions to show up in court by the end of the month.

Dan called the client, of course.

He called him that very night, right after the cops left, thinking he’d leave a message for the cocksucker to pick up in the morning. He’d planned to tell him about the cops, tell him why they had to quit for the next eight or so hours… but he never got the chance.

Instead, the client picked up, instructed them to keep working, and told Danhe’dhandle it. He didn’t just mean the police. He meant all of it.

The cops. The neighbors. The court summons.

The client said he’d take care of it all.

And he must have done something. No notice ever came in the mail for Dan to show up in court. None of the crews ever got a single other noise complaint.

No more cops showed up at the door.

When Dan asked the client what he’d done, the client shrugged it off, and told him not to worry about it. He claimed he’d paid Dan’s noise complaint ticket the very next day.

Dan had no idea how that would be possible, but decided it wasn’t his problem, as long as nothing showed up inhismailbox, especially something saying Dan owed the city a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. If Dan got something like that in the mail, he’d just have to send it to the client, hope the guy would pay up like he promised.

In the meantime, the client told Dan to give the copshisname next time, meaning the name of the client, and have them make out the ticket to him. He told Dan to use the address of the mansion. When Dan told him the cops probably wouldn’t let him do that, that they’d want I.D. or whatever to verify where he lived, the client told him not to worry a second time.

He told Dan to have the police call him directly.

He promised he’d straighten it all out.

In the same conversation, the client also said he highly doubted the cops would show up at the house again, anyway.

None of that was remotely reassuring to Dan.

Yet it turned out the client was right.

The cops didn’t show up a second time.

And, like previously stated, no notices ever came in the mail.

Dan had to bring on more laborers to handle the crazy hours, though, and the even more demanding timelines. If the pay hadn’t been so damned good, Dan would have told this asshole to go fuck himself when he got the first set of blueprints.

Especially after he heard the first set of ridiculous deadlines.

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