CEO Mine

Jason

Every business magazine and news station ran the same headline: Jason Ebony Missing from Public View.

I’d attempted to tell the C-suite that I was touring Europe and exploring investment opportunities in medicine, but nobody seemed to believe it. There wasn’t much I could do about that, other than hope the rumor mill turned into free publicity.

Speculation flew fast and heavy. Was Ebony Corp planning a secret merger? Was the CEO on a burnout retreat due to the heavy workload he’d put himself under? Some pushed the narrative that I was hiding from some scandal, or on a luxury vacation with a mystery woman. Which, to be fair, I would much rather have been the truth.

Social media debates were everywhere. Our stock values wobbled and board members began to panic, but they’d really be panicking when they found out what I’d been up to.

The most annoying part was my family, though. I had no less than a dozen furious voicemails from my mother, demanding answers. My grandfather had sent a single text: “Don’t embarrass the family.”

But I had to do this. If I didn’t, a few rumors would look like child’s play.

The battered car I drove made a concerning grinding noise as I made my way through snow-covered back roads. My usual tailored suits had been replaced by work boots and flannel. I had no driver and no bodyguards, but I’d acquired three days’ worth of stubble. I still looked sharper than my disguise could hide, though it would have to be good enough.

I finally came to the road sign I’d been eager to see, because it meant I could get out of this cramped little beater. WELCOME TO VELVET, WYOMING.

Population? Shrinking. It was an industrial town with wind-whipped streets and ringed with rusty grain silos. Dirt-cheap property values had made it a no-brainer to build our largest remote office here, where freight yards were plentiful and the people were already hardened from surviving brutal winters.

I pulled up to a run-down building, parked, and found my way to apartment B23. Shabby barely began to describe what I saw when I opened the door. A living space with a couch probably from 1975 and a rickety TV stand, a bedroom with a double bed and no sheets, and a bathroom with a leaky faucet. But at least it was temporary.

Why was I, billionaire CEO of Ebony Corp, standing in a crumbling, dusty apartment in a tiny town no one had heard of?

I’d be here until I figured out why our largest remote office was hemorrhaging money for the last three quarters. Which wasn’t my fault, by the way. You trust people to do their jobs for five damn minutes, and suddenly none of the numbers add up. And by five minutes, I mean two years while I worked on building up the technology side of the Ebony empire. Which was flourishing, by the way.

The minute I got back to the real estate side, though? The evidence was obvious. Purchase paperwork for addresses that didn’t exist. Order forms for building supplies for said fake addresses. The heads of department must have thought me stupid, or at least too self-important to check their work. Executives insisted labor inefficiency and a market slowdown were to blame, but I knew better.

If someone, or multiple people, were stealing from Ebony, I wanted names personally. Audits warned people, and fear would make people hide evidence. So I had to be covert. My assistant, Ronnie, would be my feet on the ground back in Seattle. His job? Gather evidence while the CEO was away, knowing the heads would get complacent.

In the meantime, I’d be working as a grunt in my own company, using the fake identification that Ronnie secured for me. Eric Row. I repeated the name a thousand times to get used to it. Eric, who had been transferred from the main office to the remote one.

Delivery volume was going to double after the purchase of a large piece of property in Cheyenne, where Ebony would be building a massive resort. The warehouse was going to need all hands on deck to unload trucks. My ‘new’ resume called me a seasonal freight laborer. Forklift certified, contract labor only. Exactly what they needed.

I had cash in my wallet, a burner phone, and a beat-up 1995 Geo Metro purchased three states over. I looked in the cracked bathroom mirror and nodded to myself. For the first time in years, no one would bow, flatter, or lie to me because of my name. “Let’s see who works when no one’s watching,” I told my reflection.

I was ready to wage war.

My first day working as a ground-level employee at my own company was surprisingly nerve-wrecking. I’d only visited this office as CEO a handful of times, so nobody should recognize me. Especially not with my new, shorter hair, and the dingy grey uniform of a dock worker. I felt like I was on an episode of Undercover Boss (which was honestly where I got this idea.)

As soon as I stepped through the doors, I was greeted by the gruff voice of Logan, the logistics head. My worries of being caught increased, as I spoke with this man on a weekly basis. But I shouldn’t have worried, because he barely glanced at me in my grey shirt and worn jeans. “Are you the new guy?”

I nodded and immediately had a clipboard thrust into my hands. “You’re in bay 3. Down the hall, third door on the left. I hope you’re stronger than you look.”

Flooring on my first day? I hoped I was stronger than I looked, too. I hurried there and was immediately hit by chaos. Men were smoking by the loading docks, standing next to broken equipment left idle. Why hadn’t I seen any repair tickets? And why weren’t the supervisors writing people up for smoking in the building?

Because they were nowhere to be found. I finally spotted them through the small windows of the heated offices, drinking coffee and no doubt gossiping until the first trucks arrived. A flare of annoyance started in my stomach as I clocked in with the other temp workers. “Are the supervisors always holed up in there in the morning instead of getting ready for freight?” I asked, and all of them nodded.

The bell rang, announcing the arrival of the first round of trucks, and the supervisors finally came pouring out of the office. Someone handed me a pair of gloves, but other than that, I was entirely ignored.

Supervisors wandered the bay with invoices clutched in their hands, which they threw in a pile without comparing them to the actual delivery. A five second glance at the page, another at the stack of boxes, and then a swarm of grunts descended to unload them. That was the extent of the verification process.

No wonder it was so easy to slip in extra ‘purchases’ without actually receiving anything! Even after the boxes were unloaded, nobody bothered to compare what we got to what the invoice stated. I took it on myself to count every crate of stone tile we unloaded from the second truck of the day, then sneaked a peek at the invoice.

We were five crates short. That was easily over a thousand dollars paid out that never made it to the vendor. When no one was looking, I took a picture of the invoice with my phone and sent it to Ronnie to compare with the actual purchase order.

That wasn’t all. I found duplicate purchase orders for the same machine parts, both copies signed off by headquarters, but only one showing up in the system. Fuel invoices stacked up for the broken equipment that obviously hadn’t moved in weeks. Damaged inventory was marked as ‘disposed,’ but was missing from the scrap lot. Overtime had been claimed by department heads, despite them never showing up on the camera feed.

And the trend continued every day. Half-empty pallets showed up marked full. No matter which bay I was put in or how many trucks I helped unload, every time I compared the invoice to the order, they never matched up. My anger grew each shift…but also, so did my muscles. At least there was that, I suppose.

On top of sending evidence to Ronnie, I quietly memorized names. Carl Benton, head of operations. Mitch Doran, purchasing. Lynn Sutter, payroll. All too confident, and all too comfortable.

They had no idea what was coming for them.

But neither did I. The problems started when I helped reorganize a loading manifest in ten minutes, which the foreman had claimed would take hours. My coworkers weren’t quiet about it. “New guy works like management’s watching,” one of them grumbled when they thought I wasn’t listening.

“Maybe the management should try doing their jobs too sometime,” I replied dryly. Several people laughed, but one supervisor did not. He had his eye on me the entire day, but I did everything in my power to pretend I hadn’t noticed.

Night fell early with the arrival of another snowstorm. I walked alone across the dimly-lit parking lot toward my car. I was exhausted, but energized. Everything was turning out to be exactly what I expected. Someone was stealing heavily from the company, if not multiple someones. And they were doing it badly enough that they had to think no one intelligent was looking.

A grim smile had taken up residence on my face, but it faded when I reached my car. I stopped short, disbelieving. All four tires had been shredded, multiple deep knife cuts ripping through the rubber. On the side panel, the vandal had scratched one word:

LEAVE.

I crouched calmly, looking for tracks in the snow. Unfortunately, it was falling fast enough that it already hid the evidence. I didn’t panic, and I wasn’t even angry yet. Cold calculation took over. I straightened slowly and looked across the dark lot. The security camera was facing the wrong direction, hinting that whoever did this knew they’d get away with it.

From across the street, I heard footsteps crunching in the snow. I turned and saw a woman standing in the flickering circle of a streetlight outside the one and only bar in Velvet. She wore a wool coat with a server apron peeking from beneath. The wind swept her hair up and into her face, partially hiding her sharp, tired eyes. She carried a takeout bag in one hand and looked at me with amusement.

Despite myself, I found her pretty in a way expensive cities couldn’t manufacture. She glanced at the ruined tires, then at me. “You must be the new guy.” I said nothing and she tilted her head toward the car. “Looks like you’ve already attracted trouble.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled and pulled some fries from the takeout bag. “Looks like it’s going to be a cold walk home, Eric Row.”