Chapter 2 - The Red Declined Screen
The following Monday morning smelled of damp cedar and cedar-elm pollen. Alexander woke at six-thirty, pulled on his Italian running shoes, and ran his standard four-mile loop through the private trails of Westlake Hills. He felt energized. He felt cleansed. The unpleasantness of Saturday night had already been filed away in his mind as a necessary boundary-setting exercise. A man of his stature, moving in the circles he was now navigating, could not afford to be dragged down by the provincial sentimentality of an aging mother who still smelled of mineral spirits and pine cleaner.
By eight-forty-five, he was pulling his slate-gray Porsche Macan—the one he shared with Valerie when his own vintage BMW was in the shop—into the private turnaround of the Highland Lakes Country Club. The morning mist was still burning off the ninth green, revealing fairways so aggressively manicured they looked painted.
He walked into the Pro Shop to pick up a box of Pro-V1s and pay his tournament registration fee for the upcoming Vance Invitational—a charity scramble where he was scheduled to play in a foursome with Richard Vance and two senior vice presidents from Frost Bank.
"Morning, Alexander," said Tommy, the assistant club pro, sliding the sleeve of golf balls across the polished mahogany counter. "Weather’s looking incredible for Saturday. You guys should have a clear track."
"Thanks, Tommy," Alexander said smoothly, pulling his heavy, matte-black titanium card from his wallet and tapping it against the terminal. "Throw the balls and the two-hundred-dollar entry on the house account. And send a bottle of the Macallan 18 down to the locker room for Richard’s locker, will you? With my card."
"You got it, Mr. Martinez." Tommy tapped the touchscreen.
The machine let out a short, sharp, nasal tone. Not the gentle chirp of an approved transaction. A buzz.
Tommy blinked, looked at the terminal, and tapped it again.
The buzz repeated. Twice.
*TRANSACTION NOT AUTHORIZED – CONTACT ISSUING BANK / CODE 04.*
"Weird," Tommy muttered, running the magnetic strip through the side slot manually. "System might be lagging. We’ve had fiber-optic glitches all morning with the storms rolling through."
Alexander chuckled, a dismissive flick of his hand. "Must be. Run it again."
Tommy ran it. The terminal beeped three times in rapid succession, flashing a glaring, crimson box in the center of the display: *ACCOUNT SUSPENDED / FACILITY DELINQUENT.*
The smile on Tommy’s face didn't vanish, but it froze into that precise, glassine mask of country club discretion. His posture straightened by an inch. His eyes slid away from Alexander’s face, focusing somewhere around the third button of Alexander’s polo shirt.
"Uh... Alexander. It’s not the card reader. The house account is flagged."
"Flagged?" Alexander frowned, his brow furrowing with mild annoyance. "That’s absurd. I’ve had that house account since I married Valerie. Richard sponsored it."
"Right," Tommy said, keeping his voice carefully modulated so the two elderly members browsing the cashmere sweaters behind them wouldn't overhear. "Mr. Vance sponsored the application, but the billing profile... it’s tied to an automatic ACH draft out of an entity called Martinez Properties LLC. The system shows the monthly equity assessment and the capital dues for the last thirty days bounced at midnight. And when the recurring draft failed, the master profile auto-suspended club privileges."
Alexander felt a tiny prickle of heat at the back of his neck. Martinez Properties LLC. That was his mother’s corporate shell—the holding vehicle she had set up thirty years ago to manage the hardware store’s parcel and the adjacent storage yards.
*She forgot to transfer the float,* he thought immediately, an irritated sneer curling his lip. *Senile old woman. She’s probably sitting on the porch sulking about Saturday night and let the auto-transfer expire out of spite.*
"It’s an administrative error on my accountant’s end," Alexander said loudly enough for the men near the sweaters to hear. "She’s seventy-one, she gets confused with the online portals. Just override the block, Tommy. I’ll have the wire cleared by lunch."
Tommy’s expression became profoundly regretful, which was club-employee code for completely immovable. "I can’t do that, Mr. Martinez. System rules are hard-coded by the Board of Governors. When an equity account shows ninety days of cumulative billing irregularities or a canceled master guarantor, only the General Manager can manually override it with a certified bank check. Until then... no charges, no greens access, and your name can’t appear on the tournament roster."
Alexander stared at him. "My father-in-law is Richard Vance. He’s on the greens committee."
"I know who your father-in-law is, Alexander," Tommy said softly, sliding the golf balls back behind the counter, out of Alexander’s reach. "Which is why I’d really suggest you get this sorted out before he arrives for his nine o’clock tee time."
Alexander snatched his titanium card off the glass. "Unbelievable," he muttered, spinning on his heel and marching out into the blinding Texas sunshine. "Incompetent, bureaucratic garbage."
He climbed back into the Porsche, slammed the door with excessive force, and stabbed at the Bluetooth dial on the steering wheel, dialing his mother’s landline.
The phone rang. Once. Twice. Four times. Five times.
Then the mechanical click of the ancient cassette answering machine kicked in:
*"You have reached Teresa Martinez. I am either with a customer or working in the yard. Leave your name, your number, and what size lumber or hardware you need after the tone."*
*BEEP.*
"Mom!" Alexander barked into the car’s interior microphone. "Pick up the damn phone! Some clerical idiot down at Highland Lakes just locked my member privileges because your auto-draft bounced! I don’t know what kind of passive-aggressive game you think you’re playing because of dinner on Saturday, but it is not funny! You are embarrassing me in front of Richard’s peers! Call the bank, wire the quarterly assessment immediately, and have them send a confirmation receipt directly to the club manager! Do it now!"
He hung up, breathing heavily, his hands gripping the leather wheel until his knuckles went pale.
He took three deep breaths, adjusting his rearview mirror. He was overreacting. Of course he was. She was an old woman living in a decaying bungalow in a neighborhood being eaten alive by hipsters and condo developers. She had probably forgotten the password to the business portal, or she was sitting on her hands trying to force him to drive out to Holly Street, sit on her faded floral couch, eat a slice of her dry lemon cake, and say he was sorry.
*I am not apologizing,* he told himself savagely, putting the Porsche into reverse. *I am thirty-four years old. I run an architectural practice. I don't beg a hardware store clerk for lunch money.*
He drove down Bee Cave Road toward his firm’s office—a sleek, exposed-concrete suite in a renovated mid-century warehouse off South Congress. He parked in his reserved spot, grabbed his leather messenger bag, and walked through the heavy steel-framed glass doors, ready to lose himself in the elevation drawings for the lakefront spec house that was supposed to make his career.
His office manager, Chloe—a twenty-four-year-old Pratt graduate with thick tortoiseshell glasses and an perpetually anxious demeanor—was standing by the copier. When she saw him enter, she didn't say her usual bubbly "Good morning, Alex."
She looked like someone had just told her the building was wired with dynamite.
"Alex," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper as she hurried toward his private office, closing the glass door behind them. "Thank God you’re here. We have a massive problem."
Alexander tossed his bag onto the marble-topped credenza. "If it’s about the landscape drainage on the Vance terrace, I don't want to hear it. Tell the site supervisor to hold off until—"
"It’s not the terrace," Chloe interrupted, her hands shaking as she held out a thick stack of white papers. "It’s Lone Star Building Supply. And Texas Structural Glass. And the mobile crane operator for the Barton Creek foundation pour."
Alexander froze, his coat half-unbuttoned. "What about them?"
"Lone Star just turned two flatbed tractor-trailers around at the gate of the Barton Creek site," Chloe said, her voice cracking. "They wouldn't drop the structural steel. They wouldn't even let our foreman offload the framing lumber."
"Why the hell not?" Alexander exploded. "We have a rolling thirty-day net commercial account with them! We’ve had it for four years!"
Chloe swallowed hard. She pointed a trembling finger at the top sheet of paper.
"Lone Star called our primary desk at eight-fifteen," she said, her voice barely audible. "They said the master commercial line wasn’t frozen because of late payment. They said the corporate guarantor personally walked into their corporate headquarters on Airport Boulevard at eight o'clock this morning, revoked her personal asset pledge, and officially severed the underwriting bond."
Alexander’s stomach dropped. Not a gradual slide—a dead, sickening plunge, like stepping into an empty elevator shaft in the dark.
"What did you just say?" he whispered.
Chloe looked at him with wide, terrified eyes. "Alex... who is Teresa Martinez? Because Lone Star said that without her signature and her commercial real estate portfolio backing our trade account, our credit limit with them isn't three hundred thousand dollars."
She paused, her lower lip trembling.
May you like
"They said our credit limit with them is zero. Cash on delivery only. And they’re demanding eighty-four thousand dollars for last month’s materials by five o'clock today, or they’re filing a mechanics' lien against your client’s house."
***
