*k-k-k.*
His breath hitched in dry, spastic, uncoordinated convulsions:
“Daniel…?! Daniel Whitaker… is the sole founder and CEO…?! The broke handyman… owns the sixteen-point-nine-million-dollar company that paid our salaries…?!”
Across the dining room table, thirty-two members of the Collins family sat completely frozen, their glasses suspended in midair, their mouths agape in raw, un-calibrated horror as the reality of their absolute, irrevocable ruin detonated through the room.
And at that exact second, tearing up the Indian Hill driveway at forty miles per hour, their red and blue halogen flashers painting the snow in sweeping arcs of emergency color…
Came four heavy industrial flatbed recovery wreckers, their hydraulic winches dropping to hook Martin’s Cadillac Escalade, Gregory’s BMW, and Bradley’s company-leased trucks!
*CLACK.*
The steel towing winches of the lead heavy recovery wrecker hooked onto the front suspension of Martin Collins’s leased Cadillac Escalade with a concussive, metallic snap that echoed across the frozen Indian Hill driveway:
*CLANG-SNAP.*
The hydraulic boom groaned under eighty tons of pulling pressure, lifting the sixty-thousand-dollar luxury SUV six feet into the air, its tires spinning uselessly against the freezing morning mist:
*whirrr-groan.*
Martin Collins stumbled through his shattered front doorway, his cashmere sweater flapping open in the sub-zero wind, his face mottled with purple veins of rising, apoplectic panic:
“STOP! THAT IS MY VEHICLE! I AM AN EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR! YOU CANNOT REPOSSESS A CORPORATE CAR ON A RESIDENTIAL STREET!”
The lead recovery contractor, holding a certified repossession manifest stamped with the raised red-wax dry seal of the **DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY // SPECIAL ADMIRALTY CHANCERY**, didn’t even glance up from his clipboard:
“Vehicle belongs to Whitaker Construction Holdings LLC, Mr. Collins. Lease facility terminated for cause at zero-eight-hundred hours this morning. Step back from the winch or you will be placed under federal arrest for interfering with an active Title Fifty recovery warrant.”
