~~~~0~~~~
Ashley Meyers came to work at Kenneth’s branch 15 years after he began his reign of terror. She would have been in kindergarten when Kenneth started with the agency. It didn’t take long for the vibrant young lady to become suspicious of Little Kenny Selznick’s secret life. The office walls were paper-thin and his conversations with taxpayers were much too disturbing to ignore. Ashley’s former job in cyber surveillance afforded her resources such as high-end keylogger software which she planted on Kenneth’s computer so she was able to monitor his every step including a disgusting live video feed of the creep.
Ashley was pretty, twenty-something and very conscientious, yet her return rate in dollars was deplorable. She cared much too much about things the Internal Revenue Service cared nothing about such as people, little animals and the environment. Being so concerned, the sweet young lady naturally cared more for her client’s welfare than the prosperity of her employers. Customers, as she referred to taxpayers, always got a fair shake.
Taxman was a stickler and stretcher of archaic laws. Ashley was as honest as Abe Lincoln until it came to nailing people who took advantage of the weak or harmed little animals. In that case, gloves and ethics were taken off and it became a death match. In that arena she moved like a big cat stalking its prey with the same degree of conscience (none). The end justified her means. Taxman, at this very moment, was in her sights and his every action was being squeezed through the tines of her very fine-toothed comb.
She simulated interest in Kenneth as she passed him in the hallway or encountered him in the lunchroom, but she was mistaken to think that every male reacted the same way. Ashley’s attentions made Kenneth’s skin crawl. To Kenneth she appeared innocent as grace – too good, too happy and too pretty – all things he despised. The mere sound of her sweet little voice giggling through the paper-thin walls made him want to ball up his fist and punch her in the face.
Saturday’s were tough on Kenneth and this one was the run up to the worst day in his life. He stumbled backwards horrified at what he found in the mailbox, one lone envelope from the IRS announcing an impending audit. TAXMAN wasn’t frightened at all; he was furious.
Kenneth’s records bordered on psychotically compulsive. They were more than perfect, and whatever might hint at his true identity was buried so deep in a convoluted mass of data that the NSA couldn’t extract it. There would be no scraping, scratching and sweating for him. Piece of cake, he thought, so he called the number right away and set up an appointment, for two weeks from Monday. Tuesday he received a welcome surprise. Ashley was transferred out of his branch,
The happy little good girl was gone. He did a little pirouette dancing around his desk. Ashley laughed as she watched this grotesque display on her laptop. If she posted his little dance on YouTube it would go viral, but that would have to wait.
On the day of his audit, Kenneth walked to the electronically secured door in the rear of the dismal gray room. It was an exact replica of a thousand others across the country. Cheap plastic chairs lined the walls. There were no magazines or televisions, and cell signals were jammed and nonexistent. If you were miserable, you were more prone to make mistakes or so IRS logic went. He pressed the button on the intercom and a curt reply crackled back through the tinny speaker. The voice had a pleasant tone with a hint of country south.
“Please take a seat. Someone will be with you shortly.”
Feeling invincible, Taxman took a seat and tapped out a special song on his cardboard box of records.
TAXMAN — NaNaNaNA — TAXMAN!
A very inconvenient 30 minutes passed before the buzzer sounded and the door clicked open. Ashley Meyers! Taxman was aghast, but kept his cool as she greeted him warmly acting surprised to see him. She ushered him back to her office, one identical to his. She played out her little show of thoroughness as she dug through Kenneth’s records.
When Ashley had first caught onto his game, she went into the big computer and adjusted his tax withholding. Just a little less than the correct amount would be deducted from his paycheck each week. She was an expert and not even Taxman could sniff out that bit of subterfuge, twenty-five bucks a week. Kenneth had been a genius, but Ashley would take him to school. The things Kenneth had done in his zeal to steal, kill and destroy had not been technically illegal, so Ashley needed to invent a little something in the way of condemning and convictable evidence.
Over five years that small change in deductions added up to 6,500 smackaroos. Again, the end justified the means, right? With girlish delight in her voice and a sly grin Kenneth failed to detect, she printed his report, laid it on the desk and turned it for him to see.
“What! This can’t be!” Kenneth jumped up and screamed stomping his feet like an aged toddler. He had never thought to verify his own deductions. Not only did he owe, it appeared as if he had defrauded the IRS. Kenneth knew each deduction would be an individual instance of his unauthorized tampering with company computers.
“Well, Little Kenny, after doing a little, no, a lot of digging, I could not come up with one bit of proof that you have done anything officially wrong.” Kenneth took a deep breath and sat back. “So, I had to help the firm make its case against you. We both know what you’ve done, but all the evidence in existence made you look like a hero to the IRS although a scumbag to the rest of the world. So, let’s say, I just helped them along a bit. You see, Little Kenny — my background is cyber security and those skills cut both ways.”
Kenneth slumped down low in his seat again; his bowels loosened and turned to water at the realization of his predicament. His voice sounded unsure as he tried a weak protest. “You wouldn’t – you’d never get away with… It’s all lies.”
She got up from her seat and walked lithely about Ken as he cringed in his chair. In one hand she held nearly a ream of paper printed with neat paragraphs of text and photographs of his ‘clients’.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what all this is,” and she menacingly shook the stack of papers. With the other hand she lightly grazed his cheek with a long pastel pink nail. The only time in his life a woman other than Malvina had touched him. Arousal stirred in his loins and he wished, prayed and feared it away thinking, not for this one. Not this…
Kenneth stammered, “What do you want?”
“Oh, nothing for me personally, Mr. Selznick. This is payback time for all those people you put through hell. It’s time for you to walk through a little hell yourself.” The sound emanating from Kenneth’s intestines was frightening.
“Are you going to be sick Little Kenny?” She passed him a wastebasket and he threw it across the room. It cracked against the wall and landed in three pieces on the floor.
“What I want,” she took a breath and continued, “is for you to be gone forever. This stack of paper is bulletproof enough to put you away for… well, forever, I think. And this here,” she wiggled a USB dongle that hung on a chain around her neck, “…this here is the same data – almost a gigabyte of pictures, video and spreadsheets of every person you dragged through the coals and how you did it. Now, you and I know that the firm doesn’t give a wit for these people. And people don’t usually swing from the gallows for being an ignominious dirt bag. So, I doctored the trail of evidence and in your own words, ‘NSA couldn’t crack it’. It’s great living in the computer age, isn’t it?” She was smiling as if she were having a friendly chat with her best girlfriend.
Kenneth was silent and glared at her with murder in his eyes, but he was as much of a coward as his father.
For theatrics’ sake, Ashley slammed the ream of paper on the table. “You’ll be glad to know that this is not what I gave them.” She drummed her nails on the stack. “No, you are being hung for tampering with your withholding. All you’ll likely get is five years in a posh federal prison. Learn Ping-Pong or take up painting. Take advantage of your new-found free time, Kenny — ”
“What?” Kenneth looked confused.
“Have a nic
e trip.” She gave him a dainty kiss on the cheek, and then rapped her knuckles on the door.
“Wait a minute,” Kenneth said and Ashley held the door and whispered to the men outside.
“What are you going to do with all that BS evidence?”
The sound echoed in the room as she threw the ream of false evidence in a bottom drawer of a metal file cabinet.
“I don’t know… I haven’t decided yet,” she said flatly and opened the door.
Two sharply dressed Treasury agents walked in. The case had already been made against Kenneth and processed by the proper authorities. The largest officer presented Kenneth with a warrant for his arrest while the other read his Miranda rights. Kenneth Selznick was charged with wire fraud and willfully defrauding the Internal Revenue Service. They cuffed him and led him away. There wasn’t a lawyer in the country that would willingly advocate for an auditor who cheated on his taxes, so the court appointed him a marginally effective attorney grateful for the experience of his first case.
Kenneth was tried, convicted and sentenced to five years without parole. He was lodged in Protective Custody and served out his term washing dishes and cleaning toilets at the maximum-security Federal Prison on Bird Island.
Someone came to meet Kenneth on the day of his release, but it wasn’t Mother. She had died two years before of a massive heart attack. The authorities offered to escort him to her funeral, but he declined. Besides, those festivities were cancelled due to lack of interest.
Kenneth recognized who she was right away. She had aged five years but was still cute and he was still pissed off. She drove a newer blue Mustang convertible and wore oversized sunglasses, the latest fashion of the day.
“Why’d you even come? You’re the reason I ended up here in the first place.”
“Really, Kenneth? Think about it. You’re the only reason you ended up here.”
“But you set me up. I never rigged my withholding. You did that.”
He walked as she idled the car alongside. The only sound was the car’s fat wheels crunching in the pea gravel bordering the old asphalt road. The heat radiating up from the car added to the heat of the humid day. No other cars came by.
“Come on, get in. I’ll give you a ride. It’s a long hot walk”. She stopped and popped open the passenger door.
Kenneth kept walking, and without turning his head said, “I’ve been walking for five years.”
Ashley gave up and drove away.
It was five more miles to an active bus stop. Kenneth’s shirt was soaked in sweat. The locals had seen this played out many times before. He hopped the first Greyhound to come along and got off in the first town of any size. There he secured a job as a dishwasher in a greasy restaurant that served mostly farm hands and transients. After two years, he could honestly say life wasn’t too bad. It was better than anything he’d had up until prison. One thing he had to thank Ashley for, the extermination of Malvina the Malevolent from his life. Ashley had not killed her; well, maybe she had... He couldn’t know for sure, yet he couldn’t see why she would have. They might have got along well.
Not having the constant presence of that beast in his life any longer, his head was screwed on straighter than it ever had been. It had taken the first year working in that dive to save for a laptop computer powerful enough to do what he needed to do. Until then he’d used the PCs at the local library, which were not much better than boat anchors. Now, two years in, he’d rented a small storefront and opened a little accounting and tax business. He’d still wash dishes until his business was going.
Ashley Meyers had all that proof, and so far as he knew she still had not revealed the secrets of Taxman. This was her one act of mercy. Yet as good as things were, Kenneth lived in constant fear she would one day reveal his secret. Hopefully, Ashley would consider this little podunk town a deep enough hole to crawl away and die in, as she had said in her very succinct terms.
Kenneth stacked dirty dishes into a gray tub alongside a table recently vacated by six hungry farmworkers. He looked up, and seated at the next table was Ashley. She had a ream of papers sitting under her left elbow.
“How you doing, Selznick?” Selznick was what they’d called him in prison.
“Okay. The job’s not so bad. The pay is terrible, but I’m good. What do you want?”
“I want to tell you I lied,” said Ashley.
“Oh, really? About what?” said Selznick, acting innocent.
“You armed?”
“I’m a felon. I can’t own a gun.”
“I lied to you about having enough proof to send you away forever. I set you up only so you would stop ruining people’s lives.”
Kenneth’s caterpillar-sized eyebrows lifted. “And all the phony records with the changed withholding that sent me to prison?”
“Well, that was real. Just… it was me, not you, that jimmied the records,” said Ashley as she hung her head in shame. Kenneth could not tell if the contrition was a put-on or not. He almost felt sorry for her. She mumbled and slid the stack of paper towards him. The USB dongle sat on top. Kenneth slipped the stack into the garbage bag hanging from the side of his cleanup cart.
He nodded, and Ashley looked confused. Two men in blue windbreakers approached the table.
“Ashley Meyers?” a dark haired one asked. He was six-two with square shoulders and an angular jaw.
“Yes,” she said acting flattered by the attention. “Who wants to know?” He flashed his FBI cred pack and Ashley’s tanned skin turned pale. “How did you know I’d be here?”
The agent asked her to stand and turn around, “We’ve been following you for months, tapped your phones and read all your emails.” At last her confident look crumbled and her face filled with fear as the officer clipped cuffs on her.
Kenneth opened his shirt, peeled off the adhesive tape, removed the tape recorder and let the rig clatter onto the table.
Smiling broadly, Kenneth Selznick stood and watched the entourage exit the restaurant. The elderly waitress he had worked with for the past few years asked what the ruckus was all about.
Still smiling, he said, “Oh, just the end of a story.” She looked perplexed as he collected dirty dishes from a table, and as he pushed his cart of dirty dishes to the next, Kenneth hummed.
TAXMAN — NaNaNaNA — TAXMAN!
The End
Thank you for taking the time to read my tale.
M. Matheson
I must offer my thanks to Melinda Matthews, without whom this story would not have been as great as it is. She helped edit and offered great suggestions that added another 2000 words to this tale.
She has written some great books
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About Me the Author
Other than dying a slow pleasurable death from the incurable disease of writing stories, I am a 58 year-old retiree, father and husband. After raising four daughters who are all well into adulthood, my wife and I are now bringing up a very active four-year-old boy. We live in Sacramento, California.
Early in life I was sidetracked by a maniacal dysfunctional lifestyle. I was glad to find later that those same troubles made for great storytelling. I’ve been blessed to take a wide bite out of life from motorcycle outlaw, jail chaplain to Pastor of an inner-city church and missionary evangelist. I have seen a lot and traveled a lot. Many things I wished I'd never seen or done and some I can't wait to do again, but each and every scrap makes fantastic fabric from which to weave a grand tale.
My greatest joy would be fulfilled if you simply enjoyed reading this tale.
Peace,
Mike Matheson
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