Read Online No Accident by Dan Webb - Free Book Online Page A

whiskey to do the math, but he knew the odds were against him. Some gamblers placed hedging bets, and the dice were returned to Beto. His mind raced with the possibilities, and the stress knotted his stomach. He wished he had smoked some marijuana. He felt Juanita’s hand at his elbow and he shook it away.
    The next roll was a six. He was still alive. He pressed his hand against his shirt until he felt his medal of San Martín beneath it. Beto needed his help now. Beto cast the dice with gusto and with a shout.
    A three and a four. The gamblers who had wagered for Beto to win cried out as if in pain. Beto didn’t say anything, but his shoulders slumped.
    The big guy at the other end of the table didn’t say anything either. He didn’t even smile. He took his chips, grabbed the girl by the arm and filed out of the club with a couple of his big friends. At the door, he looked back at Beto with undisguised hatred. When the man to Beto’s left took the dice and cast them, it was a much quieter table that cheered him on.
    Beto took a long swig of whiskey and fingered his meager stack of chips. All his winnings were gone. A couple hundred dollars was all he had left. But Juanita was still there. He pulled her by the waist up to the edge of the table and told her to watch his drink while he went to the can.
    The bathroom was opposite the entrance to the club. Beto locked the door behind him and, without lifting the toilet seat, wearily emptied his bladder. There was a little window above the toilet that let out onto an alley, and Beto noted with dismay that it was getting light out. On top of this miserable night, now he had to go into work. Liberty Industries would fire him if he missed another day, which would have been fine if he’d kept all his winnings . . .
    He thought again about the girl he’d been flirting with and this time felt nothing. She’d get a slap, maybe a broken tooth. And what the big boy held back from her, he and his friends would unload on Beto, whenever Beto finally stepped out of the club.
    Beto zipped up his pants and stood with his hands on his hips. After gauging how far up the window was, he sighed, knocked the toilet lid down with one foot, stepped up onto the back of the toilet and lifted the sash. It would be tight, and his clothes would be ruined, but he would save himself some broken bones. Beto prayed for a little more luck as he hoisted his head and shoulders through the narrow window frame. He pulled his body through by wiggling from side to side on his belly like a salamander. The alley into which he emerged was blessedly empty. Beto stood up, looked left, then right, and ran.
    Juanita would be all right. She could make a new friend. She was bad luck anyway.
     

8
    Luke Hubbard hated earnings calls. As far as he was concerned, investors and analysts were ignorant sheep, and he would have preferred to ignore them. Let them read the annual report if they wanted to know how the company was doing.
    But Luke’s vision for Liberty Industries included quick growth. That meant continual capital infusions from investors. That meant that he had to pretend to care about what they wanted. And if what they wanted was a quarterly call to summarize results they could read for themselves, read from a script that the lawyers drafted as tightly as a church liturgy; and if his chief financial officer did most of the talking; and if follow-up questions from investors were strictly limited, then fine, he’d indulge them. It took an hour four times a year, and Luke could spend much of that time sending emails from his smartphone.
    Luke took his smartphone and, with great effort, ignored the flashing red light that announced new email messages waiting for him. Instead, he opened an application called “Bird’s Eye,” and looked at a silent video feed of the interior of his wife’s office at Liberty Industries. Crash Bailey had installed it overnight; Luke wouldn’t have trusted anyone else for the