Chapter 7 - The Financial War
I stared at the glowing screen of my phone, my heart dropping entirely into my stomach.
Michael was a senior executive at the community bank where I held all of my personal and business accounts.
He had used his high-level administrative clearance to completely freeze and liquidate my life savings.
We had no money to pay for Emily's emergency surgery, no money for our mortgage, and no money for basic food.
He was trying to starve us into submission so we would drop the assault charges against his son.
Lisa saw the sheer panic on my face and asked what new horror had just occurred.
I explained the financial sabotage, watching her resilient spirit finally begin to crack under the immense pressure.
I knew that playing by the legal rules was no longer an option against a man who owned the rulebook.
I left the hospital room and drove my car to a seedy, industrial part of town that I hadn't visited in a decade.
I pulled up to a dimly lit auto repair shop owned by a man named Victor.
Victor was an old high school rival of Michael's, a man who had spent five years in federal prison because of Michael's early corporate lies.
I walked into the greasy garage and found Victor working under the hood of a rusted muscle car.
I told him I needed help destroying Michael, and I was willing to share the blackmail files from Tyler's phone.
Victor wiped his oil-stained hands on a rag and smiled a dangerous, predatory smile.
He plugged my phone into his heavily encrypted computer and began digging through the deleted files on Tyler's cloud drive.
Victor was a master of digital forensics, and he found something that even I had missed in my frantic search.
He uncovered a hidden ledger documenting massive shipments of illegal performance-enhancing steroids.
Michael hadn't just been bribing the coach with cash to keep Tyler on the team.
He had been actively supplying the entire high school football roster with highly illegal drugs to ensure they won the state championship.
Victor traced the source of the steroids to a notorious, violent drug syndicate operating out of the neighboring state.
"Michael is swimming with sharks, Daniel," Victor warned me, his eyes wide with genuine shock.
"He owes this syndicate hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he was using your stolen money to pay off his debts."
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Before I could ask Victor how to expose this information to the authorities, the garage's heavy metal bay doors were violently smashed inward.
A massive, armored black SUV plowed directly into the shop, crushing everything in its path.
