John Gilstrap - At all costs

They drove for fifteen miles, seeing nothing but shacks and endless forests, all situated on near-vertical slopes. “Why would anyone ever want to live here?” Jake wondered aloud.

Finally, they came to Homer and Jane’s Roadside Diner, whose status as the only restaurant in this part of the state was plainly illustrated by the number of old cars and pickup trucks in the parking lot. The building was classic backwoods construction. The red brick center section may have had some charm in its youth, but as time had worn on, wooden additions had been slapped onto both ends of the place, with an eye toward nothing but efficiency and economy. Overall, the place had a droopy, unappealing feel. Not that it mattered; every window in the place displayed the profile of a live diner. More important, according to the sign affixed to the brick, Homer and Jane’s had not only a telephone but rest rooms as well.

The van’s suspension moaned painfully as Jake piloted the vehicle into the crumbled and pockmarked driveway. “What do you think?”

“I think-” Carolyn stopped before she could complete the thought. “Oh, God… take a look at the newsstand.”

The gravity of her tone brought Travis forward. “What newsstand?”

Jake didn’t see it either at first, but when he followed her finger, his stomach flopped. In the windows of their coinoperated dispensers, three competing newspapers-two from West Virginia and one from Washington, D.C.-displayed pictures of the world’s most notorious environmental terrorists. Instead of the old Wanted-poster shots, however, the press was using current photos lifted from their driver’s licenses.

“Shit,” Jake said. “Looks just like us.” Something about seeing the story in the paper made the threat to them more palpable.

“Well, we certainly can’t go in there,” Carolyn said. “Those people are eating breakfast. Half of them are probably reading about us as we speak.”

It was a very good point. Wanted posters, as such, never posed much of a threat. People rarely made eye contact to begin with, and they certainly didn’t remember pictures of people they’d never met. In a tiny community such as this, though, where everyone undoubtedly knew everyone else, strangers couldn’t help but draw attention. When the focus of that attention was the very people whose pictures appeared before them in the paper, God only knew what might happen.

“I can go in,” Travis volunteered. “I don’t see any pictures of me.”

Instinctively, Jake and Carolyn started to say no, but then stopped.

Jake arched an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

“C’mon, Mom, I can do it.” Travis was anxious to prove himself. “Hell, it’s only a phone call.” Simultaneous glares silenced him, and he rolled his eyes. “I meant, heck, it’s only a phone call.”

“This isn’t a game, Travis,” Carolyn scolded.

“I know that, but Jesus-um, I mean Jeeze- why risk you guys getting recognized when the only thing I have to do is make a phone call?”

Another very good point, drawing another shrug from Jake. “I don’t see why not.”

“But Harry doesn’t know him from Adam,” Carolyn countered.

“He’ll know who I am after I tell him,” Travis offered. “C’mon, you guys, just tell me what to say, and I’ll say it. Then he’ll tell me, and I’ll tell you.”

Maybe it really was that simple. “Have you ever made a collect call?” Jake asked.

“Uh-huh. Remember that time in Amarillo when the Tawingos’ car broke down? I called you collect to tell you I was gonna be late.”

Jake and Carolyn looked to each other for some sound reason to say no but couldn’t find one.

“Okay,” Carolyn said with an uneasy sigh. “Here’s what we need you to say.”

As he watched his son climb out of the back of the van and stride purposefully toward Homer and Jane’s, Jake enjoyed a moment of intense pride. Here the kid’s world had been turned completely inside out, and yet he truly wanted to help. Much was left to be done, of course, and this adventure was far from over, but as ridiculous as it sounded, Jake felt that they were more of a family at this moment than they’d been in years.

“I wonder how Harry will react,” Jake mused aloud.

“I’m sure he’ll be relieved,” Carolyn said.

“Yeah, right.”

Carolyn’s maternal uncle, Harry Sinclair, owned more of Chicago’s Miracle Mile than any other single investor. Widely known for his intense loyalty to his friends, and his ruthless business practices, Harry was both feared and revered, all depending on which side of the negotiation table he was seated. Harry was a man accustomed to winning, regardless of the cost. Rumors abounded of competitors threatened into submission, but none of the accusations were true-at least not in the sense that people imagined.

Harry Sinclair knew only one subject-business-and he played the game with a passion matched by only a few. Jake had met the man only twice, yet he had the old bastard’s mantra down cold: “You can always tell a sucker,” he’d told Jake back when he and Carolyn were just dating. “He’s the guy who believes that the game is over when the other side gives up. Growing up on the South Side, I learned the real secret to winning. As long as the other guy can stand, the game’s still on.”

The lecture was the only form of speech that Harry Sinclair knew; and from that very first day, Jake couldn’t stand the man. He was the embodiment of everything that was wrong about business-the very attitude that allowed the Pennsylvania coal-mining barons to send Jake’s father into hell every day, knowing full well that the fetid atmosphere in those tunnels would corrode his lungs. For people like Harry, business was just a euphemism for crushing people who didn’t have the means to fight back. They were bullies, pure and simple, differentiated from the schoolyard variety only by their expensive suits and silk ties.

During that first meeting, convened out at Harry’s estate, and carefully orchestrated to intimidate the unsophisticated coal miner’s kid who was sniffing around his niece, Harry laid it all out on the table. Sitting in his $2,000 chair and sucking on a thirty-dollar cigar, he told the story of a Korean grocer named Kim Po, who refused to sell his store to make room for Sinclair Plaza, a sprawling, fifty-story granite and glass office/retail complex on Michigan Avenue.

A man who prided himself on always playing by the rules, Harry got zoning approval to build his vanity tower, anyway, bringing his building within six inches on three sides and the top of Po’s grocery. The Korean filed suit, of course, at which point Harry began his siege, filing a countersuit alleging emotional distress, and beginning an escalating war of legal fees which Po knew he could never win.

After six months of warfare, fought in the trenches of the courthouse, Po caved in and offered to sell his store. Harry refused. “I’d already spent that money on legal fees and architectural changes,” he relayed to Jake. “I offered him forty cents on the dollar, though, and he turned me down.”

With the value of his property dangling below the payoff price for the five college educations he’d leveraged against it, Po did the honorable thing. He dug in to make the best of things.

But, as Harry pointed out, he could still stand. When Sinclair Plaza finally opened, the old man made sure that the space just inches away from Po’s store was leased to a competing grocery, which coincidentally specialized in everything that the Korean sold, only more of it at a lesser price.

Harry ended up declaring victory on the day he finally bought the ruined grocer’s real estate as the only bidder at the trustee’s sale.

Predators like Harry Sinclair drove federal regulators nuts. For the last two decades, they’d worked tirelessly to keep the old man honest. They’d nabbed him only once, back in the late seventies when the IRS found enough indiscretions to justify a five-year prison sentence.