New Story: The Adjusters #53

Back from traveling. Man, it's nice to be home. Thanks for your patience, folks.

Here is August's installment of The Adjusters, “Intermezzo: Family Counseling Services”, wherein we discover a business model.

As usual, comments welcome.

I'll also remind you that we have a Speculation Thread available for general discussion. (A thread which I read but do not comment on.)


The Adjusters #53 - Intermezzo: Family Counseling Services

James McGregor—Jim to his employees, Jimmy to his close friends—did not hesitate to cross the threshold of the nondescript building in East Los Angeles.

Whatever else one might say about James, and one could say many things about James and not all of them heartwarming, being prone to indecision was not one of them.

When James ran into a problem, James stopped long enough to determine the extent of that problem, formulate a plan to solve said problem, and then enact said plan. That approach had served him well for the previous twenty-five years, from the time he wrestled control of Electro Manufacturing Incorporated away from his then father-in-law and grew it into the largest industrial control panels manufacturer on the West Coast.

That approach had served him well years later when he determined that his then wife—the daughter of the father-in-law in question—after a solid fifteen-years marriage that had yielded two sons, was simply not worthy of being the wife of one of the most successful businessman in Southern California. She was unhappy, and was letting herself go, and he found it increasingly embarrassing to be seen in her company.

When he concluded his wife had become a liability, that she was a problem, he formulated a plan and enacted it without pity. It had been a simple matter to hire a handsome out-of-work actor to seduce and sleep with her while a private investigator followed the couple and documented the affair in exquisite graphic detail. Armed with incontrovertible evidence, suing her for divorce was a short and easy affair. James obtained custody of his sons and left his ex-wife with hardly anything. The one-time lump payment for relocation that his wife’s lawyer did manage to obtain turned out to be less than the fee James had promised the out-of-work actor but never paid due to the poor fellow’s deportation proceedings back to Canada—his visa having expired a year prior, something that had not escaped James’s careful screening of potential candidates—an anecdote which James would have considered poetic had he had any appreciation for poetry.

Continue reading...

Next month: “Intermezzo: Cindy Caprese”.