Chapter 2 - The Forged Deduction
Daniel did not bother locking the doors of his two-hundred-thousand-dollar sedan as he sprinted across the icy street and burst through the peeling green entrance door of the tenement building.
Down the narrow, unheated hallway, the door to Apartment 1A hung crookedly on a split brass hinge while an eight-year-old girl’s terrified sobs echoed off the cracked plaster walls.
“Please, Mr. Brody, keep your voice down—you’re scaring Maya!” Elena pleaded as Daniel stepped across the threshold into the freezing room.
A heavy-set man with a shaved head and a gold chain over his turtleneck was standing over the fallen grandfather, while a second man was already tossing the child’s winter boots and a stack of picture books into a black plastic trash bag.
“I don’t care if the brat cries all night, Elena!” the shaved-headed man barked, slapping a clipboard against his palm.
“You’re six hundred dollars short on your sublease rent and equipment-breakage fees for November, which means your family goes out on the sidewalk tonight and your old man’s medical oxygen tanks stay with me until the balance is cleared!”
“Step away from the girl and put those books back on the shelf right now,” Daniel said, his deep, commanding voice cutting through the cramped apartment like a whip crack.
Elena spun around, her dark eyes widening in sheer panic as she recognized the tall CEO of Carter Ridge Technologies standing in her doorway in his charcoal cashmere coat.
The shaved-headed man, Brody, sneered as he looked Daniel up and down, failing to recognize the billionaire whose face rarely appeared in the tabloids.
“Who the hell are you supposed to be, pal—some social worker?” Brody spat, stepping forward to shove Daniel’s chest with a meaty hand.
Daniel didn’t take a step back; having boxed at the collegiate level before founding his tech empire, he caught Brody’s wrist in an iron grip, twisted the man’s arm behind his shoulder blade, and pinned him chest-first against the peeling wallpaper until Brody yelped in pain.
“My name is Daniel Carter, and unless you want thirty corporate attorneys and the Chicago Police Department seizing every building you manage by midnight, you will tell me why you just mentioned equipment-breakage fees to one of my night cleaners,” Daniel said coldly.
Brody froze, the blood draining from his thick neck as he realized who was holding his arm.
“Mr. Carter—sir, I didn’t know you knew her!” Brody stammered as Daniel released him and stepped between the thugs and Elena’s trembling family.
“I run Pinnacle Staffing, the third-party vendor your Chief of Operations, Marcus Reed, contracted last year to manage your night custodial crew—Elena owes my agency fourteen hundred dollars for a damaged industrial floor buffer, so we garnished her paycheck down to four dollars an hour and locked her sublease!”
Daniel stared at Brody in stunned silence before turning slowly toward Elena, who was helping the shaking old man back into his chair beside the tiny portable heater.
“Carter Ridge doesn’t use a third-party deduction agency for night staff,” Daniel said, his voice tight with rising fury.
“I personally signed the custodial payroll budget three years ago guaranteeing every cleaner in my tower twenty-eight dollars an hour, full family medical coverage, and a two-thousand-dollar holiday bonus.”
Elena looked up at him with tears shining in her exhausted brown eyes, reaching onto the top of the refrigerator to hand Daniel her latest printed pay stub.
Daniel looked down at the paper and felt his stomach drop: after fraudulent deductions for uniform rental, chemical fees, and an imaginary damaged floor buffer, Elena’s take-home pay for eighty hours of graveyard labor was one hundred and ninety-two dollars.
After Daniel threw a terrified Brody and his partner out into the street and knelt to check on the injured grandfather, the old man looked up past Daniel’s collar with cloudy, watering eyes and gripped Daniel’s sleeve with a violently trembling hand.
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“Jonathan?” the old man rasped in Spanish-accented English, mistaking Daniel for his late father, Jonathan Carter, before blinking hard in the dim light.
“No—you are Jonathan’s son, Daniel,” the old man whispered, pointing a shaking finger at the faded photograph sitting beside his chair, “and my name is Roberto Martinez, the lead battery engineer from your father’s R&D lab who was supposed to receive a one-point-five-million-dollar medical trust after the two-thousand-eighteen explosion that crippled me—until your company’s lawyers threatened to deport Elena if I ever asked where the money went!”
