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Escape to the Sun

 

Before she became The High Priestess of Punishment, and before her subjects worshipped her at The Altar of Subservience, Empress Raquel was my beautiful girlfriend. We had been together for many years. In fact, we had been by each other's side long before she became the most revered dominatrix from Miami to Tampa.                      

We closed our Michigan Private Investigator business in the fall of ‘09. In my early fifties, I was getting a little long in the tooth to take lucrative side jobs as a bodyguard along with the late hours that came with them. Instead of dreading yet another nasty Michigan winter, with its never-ending low winter sun (a total misnomer, because you rarely saw the sun at all), we packed up and moved to sunny Sarasota. 

In spite of the recession, Sarasota was booming, so we opened a small personal training studio on the main drag, Tamiami Trail. It afforded us the perfect place to work out while paying sky-high rent. The landlord, whom we now refer to as Dead Tom, in order to distinguish him from other Toms we know, had grown increasingly crabby after 3 years due to the large motorhome I kept parked out back.

Since we never heard of a landlord reducing the rent, we negotiated a 3-year lease for another two-story unit 1 mile

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away. Our new landlord was under the impression that we would use the rooms on the second floor as offices, but gyms don’t require much office space. Instead, we converted the second floor into apartments, which subsidized our rent enough to make the total monthly obligation only one third of what we had been paying Dead Tom. 

After we moved, Dead Tom pointed out a tear in the bathroom wallpaper and stiffed us out of our three-thousand-dollar security deposit. It is the nature of Florida landlords to do so, but it was my nature to retaliate. 

As we only lived 5 houses away from our former building, I spent a few hours at night ensuring that Mr. Greedy would not be able to re-rent the place into the foreseeable future. This included (as one might assume) sawing off all of the water spigots in the rear of the shopping center just before midnight, which flooded the adjoining residential streets until the wee hours of the next morning. 

If you ever saw a typical Sarasota commercial water bill, you would wholeheartedly agree that Dead Tom should have just paid us what he owed. Most of the fresh signage that was spray painted on the building did not flatter his prowess as a landlord. Nasty smells suddenly emanated from all of his empty units. The County Inspector was summoned for a host of code violations that only a disgruntled former tenant would know about. 

Overly vindictive, you say? Then I didn’t make my reason for doing so clear enough. Satisfying? Goodness yes, especially when Tom emailed us with horrific threats, spurring me on to even more innovative paybacks. 

We heard through other tenants that Tom would rant about us whenever he picked up their rent, vowing unimaginable retribution. But not long after, we also heard that Tom’s wealthy wife had begun collecting rents on the 

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first of every month, as 65-year-old Tom’s back problems became too severe for him to drive. 

By the time he checked himself into Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Tom discovered that his chiropractor’s diagnosis of a herniated disk was actually stage 4 bone cancer! We were appalled at the news (for nearly ten seconds) and reassured ourselves that surely we weren’t the source of any stress that encouraged the cancer to spread (Karma). Tom lasted for one more month, and that is how he successfully transitioned from being simply Tom to Dead Tom. Part of the aftermath was that when AL of AL’s Wheels from next door to us moved out, he received his entire deposit back! Just people helping people, that was us. 

 

Chapter 2

Back in Business

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Our new gym’s location was in fact quite old, and a myriad of plumbing issues dogged us for our first year. The strip center was only half rented out, despite terrific frontage on busy Tamiami Trail. 

One of our clients, a retired and bored Los Angeles police detective, lamented one day that nobody was hiring anyone over 65 in Sarasota and, although he loved his wife, he was steadily going stir crazy.

I suggested that the former cop open a Private Detective Agency right here in Sarasota. Immediately he confided that he had no idea about how to do so, especially when it came to marketing. But his biggest fear was that he was no longer suited to endure the odd hours entailed in being a Private Investigator. I assured him that Empress and I would “work” for him as needed and that her website skills, combined with my own tried and true marketing tricks, would guarantee the success of his business. 

Three months later, I announced to our gym clientele that we were back in the PI business as a sideline, and Sarasota Discreet Investigations was born. Soon Empress and I were working overtime with two lucrative businesses that left us with little time for ourselves. We both agreed that we needed some type of outlet for what sparse free time we had.