The Winter of Danilo's Discontent
Danilo Ochoa was not answering his phone.
Mr. Ochoa had been siphoning large sums of money from his business, Ochoa Imports, for months. Causing cash flow problems which had led inexorably to missed tax filing deadlines, late payments, and nasty letters from his suppliers and the bank.
As a rule, Gabe Bergeron, CPA, would have drawn a line through Ochoa Imports on his little client list and moved on to other clients: ones that he might pull back from the brink of ruin. Ones who didn't have the business acumen of an arrogant slug. Who wore red bow ties. Not that slugs wore bow ties of any color.
But Danilo was the husband of Ezmeralda Gutierrez, Gabe's quasi great-aunt. Well, Ezmeralda was the friend, comrade, and co-conspirator of his actual great-aunt, Florence Barnes, and together they had parented the odd Bergeron child after the death of his mother. And Ochoa Imports was half Ezmeralda's, assets and liabilities.
Aunt Flo and Ezmeralda and the aforementioned arrogant Danilo had left Cuba in a stealthy manner decades earlier after the abrupt end of exciting careers in the Direcci n de Inteligencia, the Cuban version of the KGB. Danilo's exit had been a tad more pell-mell than theirs but all three had left the spy business behind them.
Except that agents of the security service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba had visited Gabe with a burning desire to find Danilo. And a guy who might be an undercover FBI agent was asking questions about Mr. Ochoa and lurking? And other large, scary people with ill-defined allegiances had shown up at the moldering warehouse of Ochoa Imports. And said warehouse appeared to have been abandoned?
But when Gabe found the bludgeoned body of one of the security agents, it became clear that Danilo needed saving from more than Chapter 11.
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