Excerpt: Cashed Out by Michael H. Rubin
Enjoy reading an excerpt from CASHED OUT by Michael H. Rubin.
EXCERPT FROM CASHED OUT
A legal thriller by Michael H. Rubin
Failed lawyer?
Damn right I’m a failed lawyer.
I got a failed marriage. I got three maxed-out credit cards. I got a broken-down office with a mortgage that’s underwater.
Until three weeks ago, I had no clients and no money. Well, no clients except for G.G. Guidry, and he’s just been murdered.
And no money, except for the $4,452,737.17 in cash that G.G. had left with me for safekeeping.
Less than a hundred hours later he was dead. His body was found at the industrial plant site of his company, toxic waste processor Camellia Industries, floating in one of the “holding ponds” in a scummy mixture of petroleum waste, drilling fluid, arsenic, lead, barium, chromium, manganese, mercury, and who knows what-all. The police initially thought that G.G. had been overcome by fumes and had fallen in.
But when they pulled his body out, the cause of death was clear. G.G. had been shot three times. Once in the stomach. Once in the chest. And once in the forehead. He was dead before someone dumped him in all that muck.
******************
How did it all begin? With a knock on my office door that startled me. I hadn’t had a client – or a visitor – in weeks. And no one ever came by on a Sunday.
There he was, looking just like he appeared on all the TV newscasts. Big cigar. Florid face. Mound of swept-back gray hair. Houndstooth sports coat stretched over a patterned black-and-white silk shirt. The utter confidence of a huckster stuffed in a rotund casing.
“Lawyer Schexnaydre,” he boomed, “glad to meet you. I’m G.G. Guidry. Son, this is your lucky day. You’re just the man I want to hire, and when you hear what I want,
you’re gonna thank me.”
He pumped my hand and barged right in.
I was more than a little embarrassed that the notoriously successful G.G. Guidry
saw how I operated. My office is in my house. An old, run-down house. My conference room used to be a living room. Several windowpanes are cracked. The fireplace hasn’t functioned in years. The wallpaper is peeling away at the corners.
Guidry took it all in with a withering glance, stalking around the room, puffing on his big cigar. “Got a real estate deal and a bunch of corporate work, and I need you to paper it up.”
“Real estate and corporate. Got it,” I said, trying not to salivate. The news had been full of stories about the temporary restraining order that had shut down Camellia Industries. G.G. had been making vast profits there, what with Camellia’s “reprocessing” anything and everything, from asbestos-tainted materials to petrochemical plant waste, used drilling mud from oil wells, and spent fracking fluids. G.G. had been a constant
presence in the press, excoriating his opponents and promising to get the plant back up,
running, and even expanded.
How G.G. had gotten to me, I didn’t know and didn’t care. I’d show all the other attorneys in town that I was still a lawyer to be reckoned with, not the failure they thought I had become.
******************
It was a few days after G.G. first retained me and I had started working on his projects when I was awakened at two in the morning by banging on my front door. Dressed only in a pair of boxers, I peered through the peephole to see Guidry in a tuxedo, tie askew, pounding away with his fist.
I turned the lock. He dragged something in, slamming the door behind him. With some effort, he slung a mammoth leather suitcase, secured with a thick yellow mesh strap, onto my conference table.
“You’re my lawyer, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“And what I tell you, as a client, you can’t tell anyone. Right?”
“Right.”
“This,” Guidry said, stroking the leather suitcase, “is confidential. It’s mine.
It’s my corporation’s, and it’s mine.”
“But I thought . . .”
“Hell, I’m not paying you to think. I’m paying you to do exactly what I tell you to do.”
He pointed to the suitcase. “I want you to keep it here.”
“In this house?”
“Of course in this house. If I wanted to put it somewhere else, it would be there by now.
I am a client giving something to my attorney. And you’re going to keep this something
in your office here and give it back to me when I call for it.”
Why was Guidry here at this ungodly hour? Why was he asking me to stash a suitcase for him?
Guidry saw my look of puzzlement. His hand clenched into a fist, hitting the suitcase with a solid thump. “You live, breathe, work, and just barely exist in this cruddy little building. Don’t even think about leaving this house until I call you and give you instructions. Until then, keep this goddamned thing safe. Understand?”
I reluctantly agreed. And that was the last time I saw him alive.
Little did I expect that he would be killed, or that my ex-wife, Taylor, was going to be charged with his murder.
BOOK INFO
CASHED OUT
By Michael H. Rubin
Fiery Seas Publishing
August 15, 2017
Thriller
One failed marriage. Two jobs lost. Three maxed out credit cards. “Schex” Schexnaydre was a failure as a lawyer. Until three weeks ago, he had no clients and no cash — no clients except for infamous toxic waste entrepreneur G.G. Guidry, who’s just been murdered, and no cash, except for the $4,452,737 Guidry had stashed with him for safekeeping.
When Schex’s estranged ex-wife, Taylor, is accused of Guidry’s murder, she pleads with Schex to defend her. He refuses, but the more he says no to Taylor, the deeper Schex gets dragged into the fallout from Guidry’s nefarious schemes, ending up as the target of all those vying to claim Guidry’s millions for themselves.
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A nationally-known speaker and humorist as well as a full-time attorney, Michael H. Rubin has had a varied career. He has also been a professional jazz pianist in the New Orleans French Quarter, a radio and television announcer, and an adjunct law professor.
His debut novel, “The Cottoncrest Curse,” received the Book-of-the-Year Gold Award at the annual meeting of the American Library Association in 2015 and was named the top thriller/suspense novel published by a university or independent press.
Rubin is the winner of the Burton Award, given at the Library of Congress, for outstanding writing, and is a member of the Author’s Guild, the International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, and the International Association of Crime Writers.
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