Zander Melton wasn’t the brightest student in law school. He wasn’t as adept as his classmates at retaining information. And what he lacked in actual intelligence, he more than made up for in his ability to see where the pieces on the board were moving. Zander was a strategist, and a good one, at that. His strategic thinking slingshot his legal career leaps and bounds above his peers. His more intelligent attorney friends didn’t outthink him. He watched and found loopholes long after the case was tried and over. More often than not, it wasn’t that his briefs were better written. No. Zander watched, reading the writing on the wall, paying attention to minutia skipped by colleagues. Because of this, his track record for predicting the outcome of jury trials and other cases decided by judges was better than ninety percent.

“Zander Melton.” One of the drawbacks of practicing law outside an established law firm? Besides not having a cool-looking building, reception area, and waiting room? Answering every call yourself. Zander grabbed the closest yellow legal pad off the cheap second-hand desk he found at the Goodwill or Salvation Army. He couldn’t remember. Zander found some of the office furniture outside of soon-to-be-closed businesses. He spent so much time researching that the desk had varying piles of documents closed and opened Oregon state law books. A couple of the books had Snickers wrappers holding their place, as were some Burgerville burger wrappers strategically placed, keeping piles of paper from sliding off the solid wood desk. Without thinking, he started taking notes.

“Unger. Slow down.” Zander picked up a cup filled to the brim with cold coffee, sipping it as though it were hot. “Yeah. Okay. I’m ready.” Zander quickly scribbled Heaven Sent Dairy, question mark, Tri-Cities Iowa, and a name: Floyd Patterson. “Unger, are you sure about this? Mhmm.” He took another drink of the coffee, grimacing at the cold, bitter flavor. “I am not going to drive to Iowa to talk to some random dairy farmer about selling his property for pennies on the dollar, Unger. I don’t know if you know anything about Midwest farmers, pal, but they are not as dumb as you might think.”

Zander tossed the legal pad back on the desk, standing up and stretching. “No. I don’t care how much you think we can make from him. Until you personally talk to him, Mark, I will not waste my time coming to talk to him. You got it?” A trash can next to the desk brimmed with trash. Most of it was from Burgerville, Zander’s favorite fast-food restaurant in Portland. His clients watched him eat all the time, never gaining a pound. It was as if God blessed him to eat whatever he wanted when he wanted. And looking through his trash, you could see why people thought that! “Call me back after you talk to him,” Zander said, ending the call.

Glancing out his home office window, he watched three dogs walking Barb, their human. He waved at Barb as she passed by with her two Great Danes and a tiny toy poodle. The contrast between the three dogs was laughable. Zander might have laughed at such a ridiculous picturesque view, but he knew Barb wasn’t doing all that great since the death of her husband a few weeks ago. The dogs were her way of escaping the grief; the walk was theirs.

Zander knew the names of all three dogs: Zeus, the gray Dane; Feradoe, his dalmatian coloration confusing dog breeders; and last of all, Tiny Dancer, the toy poodle. Barb walked the dogs down to the end of SE 27th and Division. Her single-family, two-story house was on the corner of 27th and Clinton, just a few doors down from Zander. Zeus and Feradoe ran wild in her backyard, putting their heads over the wooden fence and greeting each passerby. Zander didn’t think Barb let the poodle out of her sight, probably tucking it in with her each night. She wore a bright, rainbow-colored tracksuit that shifted colors in the light. A floppy sunhat adorned her head, which accented her bug-eyed sunglasses.

Barb waved back the young attorney, smiling the usual fake neighbor smile, the one that said stay on your side of the street. She wasn’t unfriendly per se. Barb didn’t like people. And after her husband Robert passed? She really didn’t want to engage with anyone. At all. Zander was one of the few people she would stop and talk to, complaining about the weather, the traffic, or the people taking up her valuable oxygen. Barb was the kind of woman who would get into a discussion with Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or anyone touting a version of the Bible other than hers and intentionally start a fight – all so she could throw them out of her house – immediately after she invited them in! Zander did his best to be nice to her, but it was tough on his best days.

Staring at the legal pad, he was thinking about what Mark Unger felt was a slam dunk idea. Laundering money through a dairy farm in the middle of nowhere Iowa. Mark would handle all the financial transactions and cash movement with connections of the Zaterelli family. The last thing Zander needed was heat from either the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Internal Revenue Service. Both three-letter organizations sent shivers down his spine, a few close calls with both less than a month ago. But Unger was right – if the dairy was slowing in production, which it was, and if the Zaterelli family backed the business, increasing the output slightly, cash could trickle in, leaving the investors with clean money. It sounded easy enough. A configuration of moving from one account to another. The trick was the international laws, the protections of corporate empires, and how to leverage all of that against Unger so that Zander Melton’s reputation would be untarnished if something were to go wrong. And, Zander’s instincts said that someone, somewhere along the line, would get greedy and flip to the IRS or, worse, the FBI.

A dairy farm in middle America, thousands of miles from Portland. Zander hated outdoor things anyway, except for an occasional excursion to the beach or a road trip to Multnomah Falls. Otherwise, he stayed in the city. Zander added another note: Environmental Protection Agency + RDG Plastics = environmental disaster. As an afterthought, he scribbled three question marks following the words ‘environmental disaster.’ He leaned back in the rickety office chair, also a dumpster dive, imagining the possibilities.