Just Once - Once Is All You Get

I have never before written a follow-on to someone else's stories. However, after being encouraged by one of my readers to take a stab at adding an ending to Kalimaxos's story, Just Once... If You Don't Mind?

There are other firsts here. This is the first story that I have worked with an editor. I owe many thanks to StrikesandBalls for his superlative work in editing and proofreading my sloppy text. His suggestions and corrections make this a much more readable and enjoyable tale.

StrikesandBalls has been adamant that my story leaves a lot unsaid. To that end, I have promised a second chapter to this tale, cleaning up the unfinished business and bringing some closure to the entire story. But you will just have to wait for that.

... plan on seeing you at the hotel. I'll be waiting for you in the lobby."

When I finished reading it, I noticed Leslie was at the kitchen island filling her glass again.

"Are you OK?" she asked.

"I will be," I replied.

She nodded and came back with the bottle and her filled glass. Sitting next to me this time, she refilled my glass and turned to look at me with those doe-like eyes.

"So, Rick? What do we do?"

&&&&&

Rick looked at the letter again. Suddenly, things seemed to gain a clarity he hadn't enjoyed in days. His mind seemed to clear, decisions started to form and the look in his eyes changed. He looked up at Leslie. She saw the change in his face. She felt a bit of fear as the look in his eyes.

"Leslie, I'll tell you what you are going to do. You are going home and telling Vincent that I appreciate the offer, but no thanks. I won't be bought off by my wife prostituting our friends."

Rick saw a flash of anger in Leslie's eyes.

"You think I am a prostitute?"

"I didn't say that. I said my wife was prostituting our friends for her benefit. You are a gorgeous woman, sexy and desirable. Marcy is, I believe, trying to create a situation wherein she can take away my moral grounds for objecting to her actions. I won't play that game. At least not now."

I finished with the first smile I had put on my face in days. It seemed to mollify Leslie and she stood. I let her lean over and kiss me on the lips.

"Rick, I am sorry. I had no idea what she was doing and how she was doing it. I thought this was all arranged and agreed to. Please don't hold it against me or Vinnie."

"I don't. She played you and Vincent like a Stradivarius. She is trying to game us all. I don't think she has a clue about the kinds of things she is playing with and what the consequences could be."

Leslie listened and I saw her eyes show a tinge of fear again.

"You aren't going to do anything that would get you in trouble, are you?"

I thought about that. Since I didn't have a clear-cut plan yet, I could answer honestly.

"At this time, I don't have any plans to do anything."

She smiled and kissed me again before she scampered out the door and headed home. I got up, headed to my office and got a legal pad and a pencil. When I walked back into the kitchen, I made a pot of strong coffee, sat down at the table, and laid the pad and pencil neatly in front of me. I had also brought a manilla file folder. I gathered the letter that Marcy had sent with Leslie, dated it and made a few notes on the margins. I put it neatly in the folder and closed it.

Earlier, when I had looked at the letter a second time, for some reason, the anger, the frustration, and the depression suddenly shifted. I guess the mental trauma pushed me back to old habits and methods. The anger suddenly became drive. The frustration became resolve. The depression became a desire to react and retaliate.

The coffee was almost done. I was in full blown analytical mode. That's what I do. I take facts, assumptions, and my intuition to form an analysis and then drive my decisions. I needed to know exactly what was happening and who the players were in this farcical nonsense. As Sun Tzu said. 'To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.' I intended to learn all I could about my enemy.

&&&&&

I spent the rest of the night with my computer. Halfway through my research, a thought occurred to me. I remember reading some of the information the hospital had sent home about the program and the trip. They advised the staff to leave their electronic devices at home because they were tempting targets for thieves and likely wouldn't work anyway.

I went to the study where Marcy often worked at home and sure enough, I found her laptop and her cellphone locked in a desk drawer. That would explain why she wasn't answering her phone or her texts. I opened the laptop and in less than five minutes, I had the machine powered up and was working on the passphrase. Five minutes after that, I was past the security and into her computer. It's amazing how habitual most people are. She continued to use our anniversary as her password on every device I found. But that is what makes my job so much easier.

I didn't bother to install any kind of spyware. There was no need. I had everything I would ever need for a divorce case. The point was moot. Searching her history, I began downloading all of her message histories, emails, the contents of all of her data files, photos, and her browser histories. I did discover a link to some cloud storage and captured it. I could work on cracking that later.

Once I had the contents of her laptop, her phone was next. I repeated the process, putting everything into a secure cloud server. Once I was done, I returned the two devices to their proper place.

I sat down in my recliner and leaned back. I intended to sit and think this through, logically and analytically. Unfortunately, my mind had other ideas and it was almost 7 am when I woke up. I made a pot of coffee, looked at my notes and stretched. I was quickly falling back into a routine that I thought I had expunged from my system. I was back in combat mode.

After a hot shower and a change of clothes, I fixed some breakfast, poured more coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to prioritize my actions. The first was to find out more about Dr. Trey. I didn't want to spend the time myself doing that kind of basic research as I had other things to keep me busy. But I had people who were good at that sort of thing. I started to make a call but stopped mid dial and looked at my cell phone. I realized I was as guilty as some of my targets. I tossed the cell phone on the table like it was a hand grenade.

I grabbed my everyday pocket carry and my keys. I didn't think Marcy and her lover would be keeping tabs on me from Colombia. However, I didn't want anyone else to be able to see my footprints in the digital sand. I was pretty sure that what I had planned was not going to be strictly legal, even if it was warranted and justified in my own mind.

A quick tour around town brought me home with a new laptop, a new burner phone with several hundred minutes prepaid, and a nice little RF receiver quite useful for ferreting out anything in the area that was emitting any kind of radio signal; think bugs, video cameras, etc. My first task as soon as I got home was to sweep the house for those very kinds of devices.

To my surprise, the house was clean. I guess my loving wife was so secure in my trust that she didn't think it necessary to keep tabs on me to find out what I was going to do. Her blissful innocence was appreciated. It would make my plan much easier to implement. I was at war.

&&&&&

I put one of our analysts to the task of building me a complete dossier on Dr. Trey with the instructions to put it together ASAP. I also talked to my boss and brought him up to speed on the whole situation. He was going to find out anyway and I thought it best to bring him into the picture as early as possible. I retained my security clearances when I retired from the military and those were important to me in my current job. He understood, having gone through two divorces while he was on active duty himself. He admonished me not to go nuclear, being quite the collateral damage from that kind of response. I assured him that I was planning a tactical response rather than a strategic option. He sent me on my way with carte blanche to use the company assets as I needed them.

That afternoon, I was at my attorney's office. He was not a divorce attorney, but I figured as one of the best civil attorneys in the state, he had a line on the best divorce attorney available. He understood as another vet with personal experience. In less than 20 minutes, he had given me a complete list of things to do to protect my assets and a list of the ten top divorce attorneys in town. I used a phone in his office to make the first call and had an appointment the next day with one Angela Foster. She was number one on my attorney list.

I spent the rest of the day taking care of some of the bullet points on my new list of tasks. By late afternoon, I had done everything with one or two exceptions. Suffice it to say that I had laid a veritable minefield in our personal financial and professional life.

I returned home after stopping to grab some Chinese takeout. I sat in the kitchen, looking at my lists and my notes, munching on spring rolls, and sipping a cold beer. I wouldn't have the report on Dr. Trey for several days, so I decided to spend some time working through the information I had gleaned from Marcy's laptop and phone. I found out she was a bigger idiot than I thought.

Based on the emails and messages I had from her phone and laptop, this little expedition to Colombia was just the latest in a long history of hospital-sponsored junkets and that it was a well-known, if unacknowledged fact, that the participants were known to carry on extracurricular activities among themselves. While not overtly condoned, it was clear from the emails among Marcy, the head of HR, the VP that was in charge of the junkets, and the Hospital CEO all knew what was going on.

That put a whole new complexion on this situation. It was clear that this was a planned exercise but that the hospital administration was complicit in the situation. I printed out enough of the emails and texts and put them in the folder.

I cleared away the debris from dinner, opened another beer, and turned on the TV. Imagine my surprise when I was greeted on the 10PM news with a lead story about the great humanitarian efforts in Colombia by the team from the local hospital. There on the news was the great Dr. Trey, pontificating about the great work they were doing. I watched with growing rancor that quickly turned to nausea. I had to leap out of the recliner on a dead sprint to the downstairs bath to relieve myself of the beer and Chinese food in my stomach. Returning to the recliner, I switched off the TV and the lights. I spent the rest of the night stretched out in the recliner. I guess I slept at some point. It became clear that this was going to be a long 6 weeks.

&&&&&

A couple of days later, I arrived at work and there was a thick manilla folder on my desk. I recognized one of my analysts, Samantha Pasquel, handwriting on the front. All it said was Cardoza, Trey Michael, MD. I carefully opened the large envelope and pulled the sheaf of papers onto my desk. I began at the first page and quickly scanned through the documents, gleaning the highlights quickly.

I wasn't too surprised at what I found. Dr. Trey Cardoza was a serial adulterer. Since his rise as one of the premier surgeons in his field, he had bounced from hospital to hospital. It wasn't exactly the career path one would expect of a preeminent surgeon, especially if you believed his own press.

Sam had found a consistent pattern of chaos and destruction: three broken marriages in a New York hospital, a plethora of lawsuits and a divorce involving the wife of the Chairman of the Hospital Board. I was amazed that this guy could even get a job, much less keep his license. I put all the documents back into the envelope, looped the string around the button, and locked it in my fireproof filing cabinet.

I wandered out of my office, filled my coffee cup and eased down the hall. I stuck my head into Sam's office. She glanced up and smiled at me.

"Get my package?"

"I did. Can you add Dr. Trey's financials to the package?"

"I thought you might want that. I'll have everything I need this afternoon. Bank computer security is a lot tighter these days."

I nodded and headed back to my office.

&&&&&

With the information I had from Marcy's laptop and cell phone there was no need to spend the time or money to get any additional information. Hiring a PI in Colombia was next to impossible anyway. I decided to concentrate on preparing for the final day of reckoning that was coming in less than four weeks. I had my team of security analysts, hackers, and my bulldog attorney hard at work.

Everything was beginning to fall into place. I had done the usual separation of marital assets as my attorney advised. The one change I made was to send everything to an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands and to a bank in Switzerland. Most of the funds in this account came from me selling my share of our business back to my partner. I was now nothing more than a salaried employee and at a much lower salary.

&&&&&

Deciding I could no longer stay in our house, I prepaid 3 months of mortgage payments and then moved out. While I was packing a load of my things into my car, Vincent came around the corner of the garage. I stopped and looked at him. I didn't offer to shake his hand.

"Moving?"

"Yep."

"You gonna sell this place?"

"Nope. I letting Marcy have it. If she can make the mortgage payments fine. Or, she can sell it. Since I remortgaged it and took all the equity out of it, she won't get much out of it."

"That's pretty harsh."

I stopped what I was doing and looked at Vincent.

"Unlike some people, my wedding vows meant something to me. Even after I knew what was going on, I still believed in what I had promised her. When this divorce is done, then I will consider the alternatives."

Vincent's face seemed to turn cold.

"Leslie and I have an understanding."

"I know. I understand that you don't have an issue with your wife fucking other men and she doesn't have a problem with you fucking other women. How is that working out for you? How many men has she had in her bed besides you? How many do you know about? How about the others? The same goes for you.

The fact that you and Leslie both were complicit in helping Marcy concoct this harebrained scheme behind my back hasn't done anything to make you more credible or more trustworthy in my eyes. Both of you should have known that I would never agree to using Leslie to salve my wounded self-respect."

"But you had already cheated. Marcy told us."

"You're right. I did. In Afghanistan, three other soldiers and I were blown out of our Humvee by an IED. Two of them died instantly. The other one, Diedre Keil and I ended up in a half-destroyed mud hut with small arms fire keeping us inside. We had just been nearly killed. Only the suppressing fire from a couple of Blackhawk helicopters was preventing the insurgents from getting to us. We kissed, she gave me a blow job and I returned the favor. Just as I was finishing, one of the helicopters managed to set down a few yards from our position. We gathered ourselves up and made a sprint for the helicopter. The entire episode lasted all of 15 minutes. That was it. A sorry incident but under the circumstances, I don't think you or anyone else would really call it an affair.

Marcy had been fucking that scumbag doctor for at least 6 months on a regular basis. If this was a revenge thing, I am pretty sure she has tilted the scales in her favor in a big way. She may claim the encounter as the reason, but it doesn't make sense. No, she made a conscious decision, lied about it to me, lied about it to you and Leslie, lied about it to her own children. The only people she didn't lie to were the rest of those scumbag doctors and nurses she is with.

I am sorry that you and Leslie got caught up in this, but you are no better than Marcy in my eyes. If you weren't seriously morally compromised, you would have understood what this was going to do to me and our family. That puts you square in the center of the guilty circle. Now, I have to finish packing."

I turned away and went inside to get another box of my things. When I came out, Vincent was gone. I never saw him or Leslie again.

I moved to a much smaller condo nearer our offices. My intention was to give Marcy that monstrosity of a house. She had wanted it in the first place, now she could have it. Her BMW, which was parked at the airport, was on a lease through my company. When I sold out to my partners, I advised them to cancel the lease on both vehicles. I purchased a 15-year-old, 4-wheel-drive pickup. It was a real beater and much more my style. I never liked driving that Infiniti anyway. The leasing company picked up both cars with a tow truck.

I left a couple of thousand dollars in the joint bank account and her debit card working. I figured that would carry her through until she got back. Maybe Cardoza would take care of her entertainment expenses. He was keeping her entertained anyway.

With my own affairs in good order, I turned my attention to Dr. Trey. I was a little torn when I learned that the sleaze had a wife and three little boys. I was about to nuke their world and I felt bad about that. I pondered how to approach this as delicately as possible. Then I had a thought: why not make Mrs. Dr. Trey an unknowing co-conspirator and get her a little payback. I figured she was going to need it.

&&&&&

Several days later, Sam came into my office. She closed the door, which was unusual, and sat down across the desk. Sam was attractive but not one of those drop dead, make the guys go gaga, beautiful women. I don't hire people based on looks. I hire people who can think, and Sam could do that. She looked at me and I could see a slow burn behind her eyes.

"This Cardoza is a total sleaze ball."

"Why don't you tell me what you really think?"

That broke the tension a little. She grinned and tossed another handful of papers onto my desk.

"Not only does he cheat on his wife, but he also cheats on his taxes. He is siphoning money off this charitable outfit. That money isn't going into any bank account we can find. He has to be pumping the cash into an offshore account somewhere."

"Can we find it?"

"Hard. Unless you can get into his computer."

"Ugh. You don't ask much, do you?"

She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders.

We sat and brainstormed for a minute. After several ideas were rapidly tossed in the trashcan I had a thought. It made me chuckle.

"You know, sometimes, the best route for an attack is a flanking maneuver."

Sam looked at me puzzled.

"How likely is it that a wife with two kids is unaware of what this asshat is doing?"

"Unless she is a total nitwit, I would say she is well aware. Why hasn't she done anything?"

"What is the most compelling instinct in a woman with children?"

"Protect the children."

"I'm betting that she has decided the best thing she can do for her children is to protect the status quo. She is going to take care of her kids first and she thinks if she rocks the boat, it's going to affect her kids' welfare."

"That makes sense. What are you planning."

"I think if she saw a way to leverage her husband and come out on top, she might be willing to help a little."

Sam looked at me suspiciously.

"Is this going to land you in jail?"

"Hell no. Think about it this way: if he has money offshore, more than likely no one in the US knows about it. If he is hiding the money for some reason, he can't very well make a scene if something happens to it, can he."

Sam's eyes closed to almost slits.