Chase dried off her hands and popped open her laptop. She always checked her email before driving in to work. There was nothing there but the usual collection of junk email and updates on the lives of her family. Her parents were headed off somewhere on another adventure and her younger brother had managed to add another doctorate to his already impressive collection. What she was hoping for was a day off work, but today wasn’t going to be the day.
She shut down her laptop, packed it into its bag, donned her business clothes, tied back her hair, and painted her face for the day. She grabbed her purse and her computer and headed towards the door. She paused briefly, placed her hand against the door, and thought about where she had to be. Nothing happened.
Chase let out a sigh and headed down to the garage. It was hard to tell what she did for a living in her black pantsuit with her black leather case trailing behind her. She might have passed for one of the men in black or a government agent, but she was just an accountant.
The firm she worked for specialized in helping corporations to survive or avoid bankruptcy. Her fellow accounts had dubbed her “the Plumber” because she was good at finding and fixing cash leakages in floundering companies.
The choice of accounting as a career made sense. Numbers were her thing. She could do math before she could speak. Chase had struggled to learn English as a child and had barely passed her foreign language course requirement in school. But she had always pulled straight A’s in mathematics.
The elevator in her building was old and slow. On the way down she worried about being late for her appointment. Traffic was generally heavy at his time in the morning and her car didn’t always start. Marco had been after her to buy a new one, but she loved her car. It just needed a tune-up. Still, it would be nice not to be late for once and even nicer to show up early.
The elevator finally came to a stop and the doors opened. Chase stepped out of the elevator to find herself on the eighteenth floor of a downtown high-rise instead of the second level basement garage of her apartment building.
Chase checked her watch. She was early and this made her smile. She liked being early. It gave her time to catch her breath, clear her head, and attack the job with zeal. There would be no irritation, no anger, no easy distractibility; none of the things that would lead to mistakes. She walked into the reception area, announced herself, asked for a cup of coffee, and made herself comfortable in a soft chair.
