Wrongful Termination Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Wrongful Termination

  By Mike Farris

  Copyright 2014 by Mike Farris

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Wrongful Termination

  Mike Farris

  To Susan, my one and only.

  Prologue

  When Satan took Jim Halloran to the mountaintop, showed him the splendor of the world, and said, “All this will I give you if you will bow down and worship me,” only one thought crossed Halloran’s mind—Where do I sign?

  Now engulfed in the plush luxury of a Mercedes stretch limo, looking every bit a giant of corporate industry in his two-thousand-dollar tailored suit, five-hundred-dollar Italian shoes, and two-hundred-dollar silk tie, a single thought again crossed his mind— What will prison be like?

  He had learned the hard way that, when you strike a deal with the Devil, there’s hell to pay.

  He and his limo-mates rode silently as the stretch inched past lower Manhattan’s Foley Square. Up ahead, massive concrete colonnades of the old federal courthouse beckoned, just across the street from the home of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Throngs of protestors and media personnel gathered on Worth Street, awaiting the Halloran entourage.

  Emotion closed Halloran’s throat when the limo slowed to a stop at the curb and a swarm of reporters and hapless shareholders overtook the car. Cameras flashed, video rolled, and voices screamed. Halloran could barely make out most of the words, but a few caught his ear—“Bastard!” “Thief!” and “You’re a dead man!”

  One of his mates gripped Halloran’s knee. “You ready?”

  Incapable of words, Halloran merely nodded. He looked far older than his forty years, as if he had lived two hard decades in the past year. Not even his billion-dollar stock portfolio could buy his way out of what was coming.

  “Remember,” the man gripping his knee said, “head up, eyes forward, and keep moving. Don’t say anything.”

  Another nod then the door pushed open, and sound flowed over them as they spilled out of the car. Flanked by his pinstripe-suit-wearing, briefcase-bearing lawyers, Halloran waded into the crowd. A phalanx of New York’s finest formed a wedge in front of them, parting the crowd like the Red Sea. Hands thrust out with microphones as voices screamed questions.

  “Mr. Halloran, what will you tell the Grand Jury?”

  “How high into the government does this go?”

  “Have you made a deal with the prosecution?”

  Halloran kept his mouth shut, for once following his lawyers’ advice to the letter—something he now wished he had done in the months and years past. The attorneys mumbled “no comments” as they fought their way upstream toward the courthouse door.

  At last they reached the steps, where they paused briefly. As one of the lawyers reached for the door and the other stepped aside to allow Halloran to pass—

  The crack of a rifle’s report echoed through the canyon of buildings.

  Halloran’s head exploded, painting a halo of crimson about his shoulders. He lurched forward a step then crumpled to the ground.

  A brief curtain of silence suddenly descended on the crowd, then raised again in a discordant symphony of screams and shouts. Some dropped to the ground while others sprinted away in all directions. The lawyer who had gripped Halloran’s knee looked around, shock painted on his face along with splatters of his client’s blood. The other lawyer grabbed him and jerked him inside the door.

  A dozen cops simultaneously yanked guns from holsters, ducking as they looked around, scanning the surrounding buildings. Across Foley Square, they saw dozens of rooftops, hundreds of windows.

  Lots of nothing.

  Chapter One

  Even though the room was cool, sweat trickled down my sides. It had already soaked through the armpits of my suit coat, and the collar of my blue oxford button-down had long since wilted. My gray-streaked brown hair was matted at my temples, and I felt a thin line of moisture beneath my thrice-broken nose—tribute to my days as a defensive end at Texas Christian University. I was pushing fifty years old, stood six feet three inches, and weighed two hundred forty pounds, but I shook like a ten-year-old sent to the principal’s office.

  Three humorless people at the end of the table—two men and a woman—didn’t care how uncomfortable I was. In fact, the more uncomfortable, the better they liked it.

  Ellen Estes, the stern-faced chairwoman of the State Bar’s Grievance Committee, turned a page in her notes then looked at me.

  “When did Dr. Reeves alter the medical records?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I just know that it was sometime before I produced them to the plaintiff’s lawyer.”

  “How did you learn they had been altered?”

&n
bsp; “About a week after I produced them, the plaintiff’s lawyer called to talk settlement. She actually sounded reasonable, and that didn’t make sense. I knew Dr. Reeves had screwed up the surgery.”

  “So you double-checked?” the chairwoman asked.

  “I had made my own copy early on. When I went back and checked the ones we produced to the plaintiff against my copies, I saw that they had been changed.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I called Dr. Reeves. He admitted he and Alyssa had—doctored ’em, so to speak.”

  “Who’s Alyssa?” a bald man on the chairwoman’s right asked.

  “His partner and my wife. Ex-wife.” I paused. “Now his wife.”

  “Is that when you told the plaintiff’s lawyer what had happened?” Chairwoman Estes asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So, Mr. Muckleroy, you’re telling us you revealed a client’s confidential communication to opposing counsel.”

  I didn’t like the way it sounded when she said it, but I couldn’t argue with it.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  *

  A crowded bar, dark and noisy. Lots of loud laughter. It was Happy Hour, after all. But I sat alone in a booth, longneck in front of me, staring off into space. Not loud. Not laughing. Not at all happy even though I’d already had a few.

  “Hey, Scratch,” a female voice said. “Still making the world safe for big business?”

  I looked into the face of Robin Napoli. I hadn’t heard her come up. At an athletic five ten, she had narrow-set blue eyes that had a way of boring straight through you. High cheekbones, a slightly broad nose, strong jaw, and narrow chin with an olive complexion under long black hair gave her a slightly Mediterranean look. She was beautiful, feminine—and the best damn lawyer I knew.

  “I do what I can,” I said. “How about you? Caught up to any good ambulances lately?”

  “Just the slow-moving ones.”

  I motioned for her to sit, and she slid into the booth across from me. She signaled to a waitress then pointed to my bottle.

  “What do you hear from the great physician these days?” she asked.

  I shook my head but couldn’t answer at first.

  “Something happen at recess to make you sad?” she said. “Are the big kids picking on you again?”

  I laughed. “You know, it’s a helluva thing we do, Robin. This practicing law.”

  “Beats selling insurance.”

  “Did you know she filed a grievance against me?”

  “Alyssa?”

  “And Dr. Strangelove. I had the hearing today. I keep my license, but they gave me a private reprimand.”

  “I wish you’d told me,” she said. “I’d have testified for you.”

  “I was hoping nobody would know. With a private reprimand, maybe they won’t.”

  The waitress brought Robin’s beer, then left. Robin took a sip. “Have you told the firm?”

  I looked at her then started to laugh. Just a little at first, but then I couldn’t help it. I laughed uncontrollably, almost spewing beer through my nose. Robin watched me make a fool of myself without saying anything. At last I calmed down.

  “I didn’t know you were funny,” I said.

  “Voted class clown in high school.”

  “Man, I’m hanging on by my fingernails down there since they settled the malpractice claim against me. I figure what they don’t know won’t hurt me.”

  She sipped her beer thoughtfully while I downed the rest of mine in one gulp.

  “You gotta get out of that place, Scratch. Go out on your own or something.”

  “Hell, I’m nearly fifty years old, with no big clients of my own. That’d be like starting over…and I wouldn’t even have youthful enthusiasm and boyish good looks on my side.”

  “There are worse things than starting over.”

  “I figure if I hang on a while longer, I’ll find out what they are.”

  Chapter Two

  “You got a sec?”

  I looked up from the brief I was working on and waved Meg Kelly into my office. She closed the door and sat stiffly in a Queen Anne chair across from my desk. She was as tall as Robin, and she ordinarily didn’t walk so much as glide, moving with a fluid grace. That day she walked stiff-legged. Her auburn hair hung loosely, curling slightly at her jaw, tightly framing her face. Her hazel eyes blazed with anger.

  I pushed aside the brief and sat up straight in my high-backed desk chair. Behind me, through a solid wall of windows, a hot June sun blistered downtown Dallas. I had already loosened my tie and rolled up my shirtsleeves in deference to its intensity. Fifty stories high, its brightness seemed all the more intense as it shone onto Meg’s face, causing her to squint. I twisted the plastic wand that closed the mini-blinds.

  “You’re moving kinda funny,” I said.

  “Too much tennis.”

  I got up, locked the door, and then walked around behind her. I squeezed her shoulders and began to massage. Her muscles quivered like knotted cords under my big hands. Her silk blouse felt cool to my touch.

  “What do you do if someone’s doing something unethical and you know about it?” she asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like billing a client for full days when he’s not working on their files. Or ordering up fifty thousand dollars worth of work that doesn’t need to be done. Or billing a client for going on vacation. Or billing a client for a meeting in Chicago when he’s really in Boston doing something else.”

  “Oh, that kind of unethical.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That kind.”

  “So this is not just a hypothetical.”

  She slumped in her chair and leaned back. Though I couldn’t see her face, I knew she had closed her eyes. “It’s Malloy,” she said.

  I exhaled through pursed lips. Meg had hated working for Tripp Malloy since the day she’d started as an associate at Black West & Merriam ten months earlier. Like me, she found him to be an insufferable ass. Fueled by a gigantic ego and an inflated, but unrealistic, sense of self, Tripp exuded arrogance. To the associates who worked for him, he was patronizing and condescending, speaking only to display his importance, assign work, or criticize. To his partners, he was arrogant and controlling—but he made money for the firm, which lined our pockets, so we tolerated him.

  The firm’s management committee kissed his ass for that same reason and compensated him handsomely. For the past ten months I had fought a losing battle to free Meg from his clutches. My limited success had been in filling fifty percent of her time, so that Tripp only half-owned her.

  “What’s he done now?”

  “It’s that big securities fraud case for Patterson McBain set for trial next month.”

  I knew the case. It had consumed virtually all of Meg’s—and several other associates’—free time in the past month. I steeled myself for another of her self-induced rants.

  “We got a ruling today on our Motion for Summary Judgment that’s been pending for over a year,” she said.

  “And?”

  “The judge granted it.”

  “On the whole case?”

  She nodded. “Case over. We win.”

  I squeezed the back of her neck and worked my way up. She tilted her head forward as I ran my fingers along the base of her skull.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “He still wants us to summarize the depositions and index the documents. With the same deadline.”

  I let my hands drop to her shoulders again, resting them for a moment.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a mystery to me.” She patted the top of my hand. “Don’t stop.”

  I began kneading again as she slumped farther in her chair.

  “If there’s not going to be a trial, you don’t need to do it,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “And even if the other side appeals—”

  “Oh, they’re going to,” she said.


  “Even so, you don’t need it on appeal. All the appellate court will look at is the record on the Motion for Summary Judgment.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “And if you lose the appeal and the case gets kicked back to the district court for trial, you don’t need it until then.”

  “And if we win the appeal, we never need it,” she said, finishing my thought.

  “Tell me again exactly how many depos and boxes of documents we’re talking about.”

  I moved my hands around the curve of her shoulders and down her upper arms. She held her arms close to her sides, her hands folded in her lap. As I squeezed her biceps, my thumbs brushed lightly against the sides of her breasts. I jerked my hands back to her shoulders, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “About fifty thousand dollars’ worth,” she said. “And that’s not all. I’ve seen some of the bills. In the last six months, he’s been billing twelve and fourteen hours every day, when I know for a fact that he’s not working that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Mr. ‘The Associates Need to Bill Twenty-Two Hundred Hours a Year’ spends more time in his office reading the Wall Street Journal and making up charts and graphs on our hours than he does working on the case. We’re doing more work on it than he is, and we’re not billing that much.”

  Tripp had attained legendary status for analyzing the associates’ numbers—hours worked and dollars billed—then using his analysis to pressure them into working longer hours. He even patrolled the office on weekends, taking attendance. I lumped him in with other partners who wrongly valued quantity of hours over quality of work.

  She paused, as if she had more to tell but was afraid to.

  “Go on,” I prompted.

  “My legs are awfully sore,” she said. She leaned her head back and looked up at me with her lower lip stuck out and droopy eyes.

  I moved to the front of her chair and knelt. She wore a short black skirt that ended above her knees but had shifted to mid-thigh. The material created a tent over her upper legs, throwing a dark shadow that mercifully blocked my view any higher. I slipped my hands around and kneaded her calves. Through the smooth nylon of pantyhose, I felt firm muscle built from years of competitive tennis playing. She slumped farther in the chair, pushing her knees toward me. Her skirt edged higher.