Carmine DiBello felt giddy and lucky on a rum soaked, warm Caribbean night on the island of St. Maarten. A beautiful woman whom he picked up at the bar clung to his arm as he sloppily shuffled along the resort balcony to his second story room. She was pretty and patronizing. She smelled of perfume and promise.
He fumbled for his key in the humid breeze. She giggled at his clumsiness and pressed her face into his arm.
“You get comfortable on the couch while I go back to my room for a second,” she whispered. “I want to look just right for my big man.” She stroked him provocatively and flashed her best smile.
Carmine smiled dumbly and stepped into the twilight of his room. He left the door ajar for her and opened the sliding glass doors in front of the couch. A soft breeze washed through the room. Waves hissed on the beach. Moonlight reflected on the pool below.
He lurched into the bathroom and pissed sloppily in the semi darkness. He washed his hands and farted, giggling at his own loss of control. He was too buzzed to care.
He threw off his sport coat and plopped on the couch. He realized that his back was to the door. He worried for a moment. But the view off the balcony was too good and he was getting more comfortable by the second. She would be back at any moment he rationalized. The rum dulled his brain. He heard the door shut behind him and smiled.
“What took you so long?” His eyes were half closed in dreamy thoughts of sex. He felt her fingers touch his hair. One hand slid down to his chin. The blood rushed to his loins. He sniffed the air for her heady perfume. But there was no scent of perfume.
He felt an incredibly strong hand grip and lift his chin. His last thought was these aren’t her hands. His neck snapped loudly and he slumped on the couch. His visitor lifted his body by the ankles and dumped him over the balcony railing. Carmine’s head made a distinct thumping sound as it crunched against the concrete pool deck.
The visitor walked back into the kitchen, opened a bottle of rum and poured a glass full. He dropped the glass onto the couch, wiped down the room, and quietly left into the night.
2.

Dave Jenkins sat at his desk in North Las Vegas for the third straight night rubbing his temples. He hoped that his headache would disappear while he figured out the discrepancy he discovered in the monthly billing summary. He had worked at Prism Resorts long enough to know that something in the billing records wasn’t right. Knowledge is power but a little knowledge was dangerous, a lesson that Dave thought that he had learned by now. He had also learned to trust his instincts when it came to business, especially when the numbers just didn’t look right.
Dave questioned his decision to come to work at Prism. He had sold his house in California and moved to Las Vegas to help Steve Eastman, a former business acquaintance whom he trusted implicitly, save the business. Steve was trying to get the company to emerge from a complicated bankruptcy that had been devastating for the shareholders and the timeshare owners alike. There was great risk that the company may not survive and it depended upon the decisions handed down by the bankruptcy trustee, the speed that the company could be reorganized, and the ability to generate a sufficient cash flow that would convince the bankruptcy court to allow the company to survive and emerge from bankruptcy rather than shutting the company down and selling off the assets.
Even if all of the right results fell into place, there were the tasks of centralizing the accounting and refurbishing the resorts. All fifty-six resorts had fallen into various stages of disrepair because of the bankruptcy. To fix all of this, the board, with the approval of the court, had hired a brilliant CEO from England, Dennis Faulks. Dennis’s background was in law and in the management of a chain of resorts in Europe. The board had also recruited Steve Eastman, an accountant with an impressive career in mortgage banking and securitizations, as the company’s chief financial officer. Steve had recruited Dave Jenkins. Now Dave was second-guessing his decision to come on board the struggling company. The politics and the operational roadblocks were daunting.
It was Friday night. Dave knew he should be on his way home instead of sitting at his desk. He massaged his forehead and scanned the papers in his hands. The numbers added up but the payment patterns triggered internal alarms. Something gnawed at his intuition.
Frustrated he scooped up the papers and slipped them into his briefcase. He hoped the answer would come to him in the quiet moments of the weekend. In the six months since he started at Prism Resorts he was still learning the resort business. But he knew payment patterns from his twenty-five years experience in mortgage banking. He knew all about large volumes of cash flowing into bank accounts, delinquency patterns, customer complaint trends, underwriting patterns and loan payment methods. The payment patterns on this portfolio of loans caught his attention.
He guessed that the answer would eventually come. He collected his briefcase and his lunch bag, felt for his car keys and headed for the door. Even as he walked across the parking lot to his car he could feel his phone buzzing urgently in his pocket. He decided that the call would just have to wait in voice mail until he was free. The phone call had distracted him enough that he didn’t notice the white sedan pull out of the parking lot behind him onto Cheyenne and follow him at a distance.