MEET CASEY LINDEN BROOK, MIKE'S HIGH-POWERED BOSS WHO DISPLAYS A PENCHANT FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN AND A TALENT FOR BETRAYAL. IS MIKE THE NEXT TO FEEL CASEY'S WRATH?
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Preface
My friend Casey, like me, did not set
out to be a criminal.
We had graduated from fine law schools
with the best of
intentions, but, like me, he had slipped
into dangerous
habits under the slow pressure of
circumstance.
* *
*
I didn’t feel like meeting with Casey right then. He had too
much energy for my still rather lethargic state of mind. I
even considered insubordination, but Casey, despite our
friendship, was a difficult man to cross. He had told me
once that he cherished his grudges. He said enmity
energized him.
After sulkily roaming the halls for some minutes, I
hobbled, slouching and disgruntled, toward Casey’s corner
office, determined to show him in some subtle but
unmistakable way that I wasn’t happy about being pushed
around. Casey appreciated an occasional streak of
rebellious swagger in his underlings, so long as it didn’t get
out of hand. I found him pacing beside his hand-painted
white Swedish oak desk acquired, like pretty much
everything else in his office, purely for show, his ever-
present phone pressed to his ear.
He motioned for me to sit down before swinging his
lean body toward one of the large octagonal windows
overlooking Pittsburgh’s aging but still charming skyline. I
braced my shoulder against the door in what I considered a
bold yet not outlandish display of personal pique, crossed
my arms over my increasingly pudgy chest and watched
him with some interest. Despite his general distrust of
smart technology, Casey was a master at talking on his cell
phone. It had been the key to his success, as far as I could
tell.
I had long believed that there was nothing
exceptional about Casey Linden Brook’s appearance, even
though I had to concede that his various body parts, when
in motion and working properly together, as they were
now, projected a mildly pleasing effect. He sported a light
scruff of beard along his tanned cheeks that wrapped
irregularly over his chin before sliding unevenly down his
slender neck, according to the fashion of the times. His hair
was sandy, mid-length and sparse, and was parted roughly
half the time on the left side and the other half either down
the middle or not at all. He stood no taller than five-ten,
maybe five-eleven when he wore his Italian leather two-
tone wing tips with the slightly elevated heel and weighed
perhaps one hundred seventy-five pounds fully clothed and
soaking wet.
Casey was firmly and classically proportioned but
not especially muscular, except for his shredded stomach,
which was often detectable beneath his tailored shirts and
microfiber compression underwear, the latter of which he
purchased in bulk over the Internet. He owed his finely
tuned abdominal muscles to a daily morning grappling
match with an inflated “torso ball” he had promptly ordered
after seeing it advertised on a late-night infomercial. He
argued that most clients these days admire energetic young
lawyers with svelte stomachs, and that the torso ball was
the only thing he had ever bought that had been worth the
price, in this case $69.99 plus shipping and handling.
Casey’s voice was softly, at times even sweetly, melodious,
whether by deceit or genetics I could never really tell and
meshed nicely with a highly calibrated sequence of earnest
expressions he could cast upon his youthful face at a
moment’s notice.
That muggy late spring afternoon Casey was
expending his charms to poach a client from another of the
city’s distinguished and over-priced law firms. I knew this
from his predatory grin, which would flash excitedly as he
paused to listen to the drivel from the other end, and by the
violent way his tie, a red silk brand of French design,
would flap against his chest as he jerked his weight
impatiently from one foot to the other. Casey had the knack
of making anything he did seem exciting. I wished I could
say the same.
“They’re all stiffs over there, empty suits,” Casey
explained pleasantly in what had become a routine part of
his canned pitch. He turned to me and winked in a fatherly
way, as though he were some ancient relic of the law
instead of an up-and-coming junior partner and my
immediate superior. “Maybe in a pinch they can draft a
decent power of attorney, but that’s no reason to be paying
them eight hundred dollars an hour. We’ll cut down on
your bills and improve your results in no time. It’s called
legal creativity. We have a lot of creative legal eagles at our
shop,” and he paused to wink at me. “Give us a try. You’ll
see.”
If you want to learn how to rid yourself of incriminating
evidence without risking charges of evidence tampering or obstruction of
justice, find out in Fatal Innocence, just released from the good folks at
Solstice Publishing
If you want to know how an awkward, frumpy guy manages
to hook up with a stunning, sophisticated woman, find out in Fatal Innocence,
just released from the good folks at Solstice
Publishing.
If you want to read about how a couple of adorable
watchdogs manage to save our hero from hired assassins, find out in Fatal
Innocence, just released from the good folks at Solstice Publishing.
Mike Talbert is tasked by his boss with devising a
scheme to deep-six an incriminating draft email from the personal computer of a
prominent politician. Someone with presidential ambitions. And Mike must
perform this treachery without risking charges of evidence tampering or obstruction
of justice. Never one to let ethics or the law get in the way of his
ambitions, Mike comes up with a plan to enlist professional thieves to steal
the computer. The trouble is, the plan works better than Mike or his boss could
have hoped, but complications arise when the women in their lives turn on them
in unexpected ways. Will things ever go right for Mike?
Solstice
Publishing--Fatal Innocence
T.L.
Peters Amazon Author Page
