Alicia's Long Weekend

The Wages of Sin

    It was just this recently that she'd gotten to where she could delegate covering the long weekends to someone else, simply because she'd had to invent what the company did around the various people she found or had tossed her way.

    Finally, she had someone she could hand off the red phone to for three days. Up to this point, she'd been sleeping with it.

    Maxine was reasonably considerate, but the months she'd had it, it had had rung twice in the night.

    Once had been a truly urgent issue with a malfunctioning building control unit, the other had been an urgent request for two quarts of red tool dip and a gallon of uncolored latex mold compound at 2:30AM.

    She'd been met at the apartment door by Maxi Max in a robe and a tall, strange woman wearing nothing but tattoos.

   Maxi had grinned, given her a thumbs up and handed her a bottle of astonishingly good wine in return for the bag of supplies.

    Sarah and Maxine were far less demanding than the other clients – but Sara held the red phone and her job depended on performance.

    The other clients – well, she could actually fire them. She had fired one – or rather informed them that after a final service, their patronage needed to be directed elsewhere.

    She'd had to remind them twice that any lawsuit would result in intimate details becoming public before they realized the position they were in.

    But while Sarah was the red phone client – everyone else was treated the same way, at her insistence. And they were billed accordingly.

    Expedited Services, LLC, was on call 24/7 with a shared database of phone numbers of people willing to be awakened at odd hours and a supply room filled with a selection of frequently needed items – everything from plumbing supplies to rare wine.

    Two of her people were qualified chefs. Three of them had enough computer skills to respond to most technical issues. If it was within normal business hours, they had hundreds of phone numbers; some in ordinary databases, some on secure laptops that were kept in a very special safe that would wipe them if security was breached.

    Those numbers were for the benefit of particularly special clients, so it would be very unlikely for such an intrusion to be official.

    Sometimes she wondered if any of the people she was working for could open a can of beer by themselves, but often they came up with fascinating challenges and money was rarely an issue.

    There was an idiot tax built right into the fee structure. Red Phone clients were no exception – Maxine had been very clear on that when she hadn't been invoiced properly for the mysterious midnight plastic run.

    Bribes had to be invoiced at 200%. There was a "wake up fee" for services that required waking someone up. Even for her.

    Alicia found that running out the door while chugging an energy shot was far less taxing if it added a thousand dollars to her already substantial monthly salary.

    It was intense, it was fascinating, no two days were alike.

    She was making stupid amounts of money by her rice and ramen standards, she had invested most of it in a charming little bungalow with a semi-detached garage that didn't look like it had a basement.

    But it did. She'd gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that the basement looked like it was only big enough for the heating and cooling plant, hot water heater and sump pump.

    There had clearly been a larger house here at one time; perhaps a fire had destroyed it and insurance would only cover a smaller home.  

    It was an amazing thing to find in the region – very few homes in Western Washington State have cellars at all because of the high water-table, but the house was on a hill and the soil was able to drain.

    The unusual feature had added rather a lot to the asking price, even though the bungalow was in need of... well, everything.

    But that was ok. She had a whole list of contractors she needed to become familiar with – contractors she wasn't about to set loose on clients before she'd given them a challenge or six.

    The cellar was made of brick with beautifully arched ceilings. Her first project had been finding matching brick at an architectural salvage firm. Her second project had been commissioning a custom concealed door built with those bricks.

    She had been ruthless with all the contractors. She wasn't willing to give them a great deal of work until she'd witnessed how they handled a non-showroom challenge under the sorts of conditions that she expected many of her clients to demand – working with no electronics or cameras, shrouded work-site and under impossible time constraints.

    She did her best to impersonate an unreasonable client – and to her absolute surprise, Sarah approved of her approach and was willing to write off half of the expenses, so long as the materials budget wasn't unreasonable.

    There were no complaints from the contractors she kept, merely surcharges. Those that argued, those that asked personal questions, those that snooped – she struck them off her list.  She learned a very great deal about managing contractors and asserting herself.

    When she walked downstairs and was absolutely unable to even find the door she knew had to be there, much less even guess how it could be opened, she paid them a budgeted but un-promised bonus on the spot – and had dumped business on them immediately.  Maxine alone had three projects for them – and two other concierge tenants had asked about newly fashionable "hidden features."

    Features like the door she was standing in front of now. She went to a crudely made shelf made of old salvaged boards. It was impossible to tell that it had been assembled only weeks ago. It was filled with equally antique clutter – the sort of thing that accumulates over time. Eventually, it ends up in the toxic waste area of a dump, where it's not difficult to get half-empty cans of old lead-based paint, fly spray, turpentine and the like.

    If you put the turpentine right there, the half pint container of lead based paint there and the rusted can of fly spray here... you could push an irregular chunk of brick wall inward and to the side.

    She closed it, and dimly heard the clatter as the magnetic latches reversed and knocked the cans over onto their sides. Putting them back where they seemed to belong would not do a thing.

    The other side of the wall was still a large echoing space. There were some sawhorses and battery operated power tools, really nothing much at all.

    She walked to the back corner of the basement, right underneath her bedroom. There was a small table, a yard-sale chair and a rolling clothing rail beside it. There was one clothing bag hanging there – and hangers waiting.