Chapter One

Notice of Default

From Distressed Asset (Book 1) by Giraffe Attack. An excerpt from the opening of the chapter.

The last claim I ever denied belonged to a seventy-eight-year-old widow named Esperanza Delgado. I want that on the record up front, because it's going to come up.

Her roof had been hit by golf-ball hail in August. The photos were bad. Shingles split like bad teeth, a soft spot over the master bedroom, water staining in the drywall in the shape of what her claim narrative described, sincerely, as "a sad duck."

I found the exclusion in eleven minutes. Pre-existing wear and tear, roof age exceeding twenty years, see Section 4(c). Her roof was twenty-one years old. The hail didn't care, and neither did Section 4(c).

I typed the denial letter with the template. We regret to inform you. I regretted nothing. I had stopped regretting things around year three. Regret is a billable hour you never get paid for.

It was 4:49 p.m. on a Tuesday in Tucson. The air conditioning at Saguaro Mutual Home & Auto was set to "morgue." Brenda Kolb from the next cubicle over was eating a hard-boiled egg, which she did every day at 4:45 like a ritual sacrifice, and the whole floor smelled like a sulfur spring had died in a gym bag.

"You denying the duck lady?" Brenda asked.

"Section 4(c)."

"Cold." She said it with admiration. Brenda once denied a claim for a man whose house was hit by a meteorite, a real one, on the grounds that it was technically a "falling object of non-terrestrial origin" and his policy only covered terrestrial ones. She got a plaque.

I hit SEND at 4:50.

At 4:51 the sky got a stamp on it.

I didn't see it happen at first. I heard it. Everyone did. It was a sound like the world's largest rubber stamp coming down on the world's largest desk. KA-CHUNK. It came from everywhere. It came from inside my teeth.

The windows on the fourth floor of Saguaro Mutual face east, toward the Rincons. Usually you get mountains, a strip mall, and a billboard for a personal injury lawyer named Ricky "The Hammer" Salcido.

Now you got letters.

They hung across the sky, red, translucent, a few miles tall. They stretched from the mountains to wherever the sky curved out of sight. They were slightly crooked, the way stamps always are when someone in a hurry does them.

DEFAULT.

Somebody on the floor screamed. Somebody else laughed, the high nervous laugh of a person whose brain has stopped filing things in the right folders. Gary from Auto dropped his phone and stepped on it.

Brenda put her egg down.

"Huh," she said.

Then the box showed up.

It popped up about eighteen inches in front of my face. It was blue, semi-transparent, and had rounded corners like an app designed by people who'd had a meeting about rounded corners. I tried to swat it. My hand went through it. It moved with my head, politely, like a waiter who won't leave.

I read it twice. Then I did what I always do with a document from a financial institution. I scrolled to the bottom.

There's always a bottom.

"Message and data rates," I said out loud.