"Fine. Go ahead, dig your heels in, don't show up. I'd love to see how you explain yourself when the boss checks in and finds nobody there."
She slid her sunglasses on and strolled toward the ocean, already rehearsing the scene where she'd watch me get torn apart.
Ten o'clock that morning, a four-inch fire-suppression main on the second floor of the office building, corroded beyond its limit, blew apart.
A muffled boom. A high-pressure column of water punched through the ceiling and roared down through the pipe shafts toward the first floor.
Directly below the second floor sat our company's primary inventory warehouse, packed wall to wall with high-value goods.
Outside the warehouse's heavy steel security shutter, water was rising fast.
Inside were the precision electronic instrument control boards Mr. Greyson had mortgaged his wife's property to afford before the long weekend. Over twenty thousand units. Worth north of eighty thousand dollars.
Ten minutes submerged. That was all it would take. Every last one of them, destroyed.
The entire shipment was scheduled to go out to a major client in Silicon Valley the first business day after the holiday.