The apple-red Bentley stopped at the curb at Valtone Distributors, a massive warehouse, and Scotty Rollins braced himself for that storm called Amelia.  He was the one who phoned her.  He was the one who should have seen it coming.  He was the one who could be blamed when the shit hit the fan.

The car door opened and then one four-inch black stiletto shoe with multicolored spikes stepped out, and then another one, and then a full-length black-and-white chinchilla fur coat.  The storm, he said to himself, had arrived.

He nervously dropped his cigarette, hurried to the car, and held the door open as Amelia Sinatra stepped out.  “Sorry to call you out this time of night, Mill,” he said.  It was almost midnight.  “But this shit too big for me to handle.”

But when Amelia stepped out, with only her keys in hand, she wasn’t trying to stand around for him to give her the blow-by-blow.  It was cold as hell.  It was late.  And some fucker was stealing from her?  She high-stepped and walked fast toward the entrance.  Scotty’s lean frame struggled, but managed to keep pace.

“How many sectors?” she asked as they walked.

“Just one so far.”

She looked at him.  “One motherfucker pulled this shit on me?  How much did he take?”

“I just got the final tally.  It looks to be close to half a million, Boss.”

She couldn’t believe what she’d just heard.  She stopped in her tracks and placed her hand inside her coat, on her hip.  “Half a million of my dollars?  I’ll be gotdamn, Scotty!  What the fuck were you doing when he was taking my money hand-over-fist like that?”

“He was slick with his shit, Amelia.”

“Nobody’s that slick.  Half a million dollars?  Oh, hell no!  Ain’t nobody that slick!”

“I hear what you’re saying, but it happened.  We got screwed big time.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“We were able to track back as far as ten months. Around fifty thousand each month is the figure we came up with.”

“Gotdamn.  Who’s pulling this shit?”

“Drag is the sector chief, so I had Ringo and Culverhouse, the collectors for that sector, bring him in.”

“What about his lieutenants?” Amelia asked.  “Their asses might not be innocent either.”

“I agree.  Ringo and Culvy brought them in too.”

Amelia shook her head.  “Half a million dollars,” she said, as they continued walking.  “And they probably would have stolen more if we hadn’t caught them.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” Scotty agreed, as he moved slightly ahead of her and opened the warehouse door.

They entered an enormous warehouse, where legitimate workers working the graveyard shift filled crates with fine wine all night long.  They were employed by Amelia’s legitimate company, Valtone Distributors.

But another crew, the crew purposely not reported on any payrolls or employee tally sheets, were tucked away in a section of the warehouse much further back.  In the shipping end of the warehouse.  They received the filled crates last.  They opened up an unseen drawer at the bottom of the crates and inserted the amount of drug product requested by various vendors.  Then they closed back up the drawer and shipped the wine, along with the hidden narcotics, direct to consumer.  The consumers would then make two payments.  One, legitimately, to Valtone Distributors for their wine.  The second, illegitimately, and cash only, to the sector chiefs for the drug product the consumers would ultimately sell for their own profit.  The sector chiefs would take their cut, usually ten percent, and then give the rest to Amelia’s collectors in the field.  It was an international operation that generated millions.  But when word came down that somebody was finagling with those millions, Amelia didn’t hesitate.  She left her home and drove right over.  It had to be stopped, posthaste, she felt, before anybody else got any bright ideas.

She and Scotty took the stairs to the second floor.  That was where they were waiting: the sector chief, his two lieutenants, and the sector collectors.

Drag was a big man with a reputation for in-your-face harshness.  Big Black, they sometimes called him.  Keke and Punch were younger than Drag, but as his lieutenants they were known as vicious when buyers didn’t cooperate, and fair and understanding when they did.  Drag paid them out of his ten percent cut.  They were his enforcers and he was responsible for them.  If they were the thieves, it was still on Drag, as far as Amelia was concerned.

Drag, Keke, and Punch stood in the upstairs room, looking pitiful, like they knew they’d been caught red-handed and were in real deep shit.  Ringo and Culverhouse, the two boring-looking white guys in suits, were the collectors for Drag’s sector.  And they were as angry as Amelia.  They’d been had too.

Amelia and Scotty walked up as if she was going to walk up to the crowd, but then she walked past them to the desk.  She leaned against it, with her stilettos-clad feet stretched out and crossed at the ankle.  Her fur coat was gathered around her as if it was as chilly in that office as it was outside.  But one thing was certain: fear, like air, was in that room.  They all knew Amelia Sinatra.  They all knew what she was capable of.

She addressed her first question to her sector chief.  She looked straight at Drag.  “You’re short,” she said to him.  “Where’s my money?”

Drag looked as if his heart was going to pound through his chest, and he hated the feeling.    “My bank wasn’t short.  I’ve never been short.”

“So we’re the liars?” Amelia asked.  “So I’m up in this motherfucker this time of night just to tell tales on you?”

“I don’t have your money.”

“What happened to it then?”

“I can’t tell you,” Drag responded, “because I don’t know.”

“Five hundred grand missing?  Somebody better tell me something!  Oh, yes, they’d better.”  Then she exhaled.  “All of my customers paid up, right?”

Drag nodded.  “That’s right.”

“And protocol calls from you to give that cash to Ringo and Culvy, right?”

Drag hesitated.  “Sometimes,” he said.

Amelia frowned.  “What do you mean sometimes?  I don’t have a sometimes protocol!  The procedure is the procedure.”

Ringo jumped in.  “We kept telling him to cut that shit out, Boss,” he said.  “Over and over we kept telling him.  ‘Drag,’ we said, ‘you know you’re supposed to hand it over yourself.  Not Keke.  Not Punch.  You.’  But every time we went to collect, he wasn’t available, and we had to deal with Kee and Punch.  But since the money bags were always sealed like they were supposed to be, and Drag had put the amount on every bag and signed off on it, we didn’t see no thieving problem.  But apparently there was.”

“You bet your ass there was,” Amelia said and looked at Drag.  “You signed off on the money bag totals every month for the last ten?”

“Like I was supposed to,” Drag said defensively, “yes.”

“And the money was right?”

“Yes.  Every time!  Why else would I sign my name to it?”

“The same reason you would hand my money bags over to two people I don’t know shit about!” Amelia yelled.  “I don’t know Keke and Punch like that.  Who the fuck are they?  You hired them for muscle only.  That was the deal.  They’re your responsibility.  I don’t know if they’re crooks or thieves or saints!”

“I ain’t no saint,” Keke pointed out, “but I ain’t no crook either.”

“Where’s my money, Drag?” Amelia asked impatiently.  Then she reached inside her coat, behind her back, and pulled out a loaded pistol that had been lodged inside her pants near the small of her back.  She stood up, and hurried to Drag.  “Where’s my motherfucking money?!”

Drag leaned back when he saw that gun at Amelia’s side, but he remained defiant.  “I don’t have your money,” he said.  She had invaded his personal space.  They were eyeball to eyeball.  And she stared unblinkingly in his eyes.  Drag didn’t blink, either, and stared back.

“I’m asking you one last time,” she said, and then pulled back the trigger of the gun she had at her side.  Everybody heard the sound of the cock.  “Where’s my gotdamn money?”

Drag heard the sound of that cock too.  But he stared her down.  “I do not have your gotdamn money.”

Everybody looked at Drag.  They couldn’t believe his arrogance at a time like this.

But Amelia believed it.  She’d seen it with her own two eyes.  And she’d had it.  “Enough of this shit,” she said angrily, and lifted her gun.  And fired it right between the eyes.

But everybody was stunned shitless because she didn’t fire it at Drag.  She fired it at Ringo.  She shot and killed Ringo, one of the two collectors.  Scotty was so stunned that he yelled, “ah, shit!” and backed up amazed.

But nobody was as stunned as Ringo.  Because as soon as the bullet ripped through his head, he seemed to look at Amelia as if he couldn’t believe she’d do that to him, and then leaned forward, and fell on his face.

Everybody looked from Ringo’s fall, to Amelia and her gun.  Scotty seemed traumatized.  He seemed beyond words.

But Amelia wasn’t thinking about Scotty.  Or even Drag and his lieutenants anymore.  Her entire focus was on the one remaining collector: Bill Culverhouse.

Culvy began to back up when he realized her attention was now on him.  “What are you doing?” he asked.  “Why would you ice Ringo like that?”

“Where’s my money?” Amelia asked him.

“What are you asking me that for?  How would I know where your money’s at?”

Amelia continued to move toward him even as he began backing up.  She had one hand on her gun, and one hand, with her fur coat opened, on her hip.  They could hear her stilettos stepping high.  “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?” she asked.  “You and Ringo thought you could outsmart the likes of me and get away with it.  And why not?  I didn’t hire your asses.  My husband Bulldog did that.  Y’all came with the company when he died, and I inherited this company.  But the thing I always knew about Bulldog was the way appearances impressed him.  You could be dumb as rocks, without an original thought in your head, but if you looked the part, you were the part to him.”

Culvy bumped into the wall.  He was out of room.  Amelia closed in.

“You looked respectable to Bulldog,” she said.  “You and Ringo both.  Not like Keke and Punch.  Not like those two hood rats, right?  You two didn’t look like crooks so you weren’t crooks, in Bulldog’s mind.  But that shit ain’t nothing but bullshit in my mind.”

She stopped in front of Culvy.  “You saw the opportunity and you took it,” she said.  “Besides, even if you were caught, it would be your word against two hood rats, at least as you saw them.  Why would anybody believe people like them, people named Keke and Punch, over you two respectable-looking men?  Who believes them?  I do,” Amelia made clear.  “That’s who!”

“Thank-you Jesus!” Keke cried out.  She thought she was done for.  She thought she was going to take her last breath on this earth for something she didn’t even do!

Drag and Punch thought so too, and let out sighs of relief.  Tears streamed from Punch’s face.  He knew how close they had been to certain death.  If Amelia would have never suspected Ringo and Culverhouse, they would have been dead.  But she didn’t fall for appearances.  She didn’t fall for the okey-doke.  They looked at her, with renewed respect.

But Amelia was still staring at Culverhouse.  “Drag messed up.  He should have never left those money bags with Keke and Punch.  But when he did, you figured you had it made.  Two black nobodies against your powerful word?  Against two men who’d been with this organization since its inception?”

She placed the gun to Culverhouse’s head, and spoke with clenched teeth.  “Where’s my money, motherfucker?  You got five seconds.”

Culverhouse was panicking.  “But I don’t have your money!”

“One.”

“I’m telling you the truth!”

“Two.”

“I never took a dime of your--”

“Three.”

“I don’t have your money!”

“Four.”

“Okay!” Culverhouse yelled, to Scotty’s shock.  He thought the boss had gone over the deep end.  But she was right?

“Okay,” Culverhouse said again, before she counted him out.  He looked her in her big, bright eyes.  “I can get it,” he said.

“You won’t be getting a gotdamn thing,” Amelia responded, pointing the gun at his head now.  “Where is it?  Unless you shit it out of your ass right now, you’d better tell me where.”

“It’s at my place,” Culverhouse said.  “Alright?  You ain’t got to point that gun at me.  It’s at my place.  I’m single.  I live alone.  We thought it would be the perfect place to hide it.”

“Where at your place?”

“Through a slit in my mattress.”

“All of it?” Amelia asked.

“Give a take a few thousand, yeah.  We figured it wasn’t that much in the large scheme of things.  You deal in way more money than that every day.  We figured you wouldn’t miss it.”

“You figured right,” Amelia said.  “What you took ain’t shit to me.  But that’s not the point.  Sons-of-bitches who lie to me and steal from me ain’t shit to me either.  You stole from me, motherfucker.  That’s the point!”

“We saw our chance and we took it,” Culverhouse pleaded. “Anybody in our position would have done the same thing.”

“But the bags were sealed,” Scotty said.

“Their money bags were sealed,” Culverhouse admitted, “but Ringo realized that every time we bought our collection into the warehouse, we were always allowed to bring out bags into the counting room and dump them onto the pile of money for the counters.  And they counted the money, but not as a single collection.  They counted it along with every other collection on the table.  So we put a small slit in each bag, got out what we agreed to take, and glued it back together.  Nobody noticed the difference.  We figured we could steal millions without detection.”

“You almost did,” Scotty said.  “But what you didn’t know was that we weighed each bag as it crossed the threshold into the counting room itself, well before it was opened and thrown onto any pile.  That’s why they weren’t concerned when you opened your bags.  We noticed how little your bags weighed compared to others.  It took nearly a year for an auditor to pick up on it, however, but we eventually did.”

“And now,” Amelia said, “it’s shit-hits-fan time.”  And she shot Culverhouse, even as he pleaded for her not to, straight through the heart.

She stood there, staring at Culvy, and did not turn back toward the others.  “Drag, Keke, Punch?  Get back to work.”

They all smiled.  “Yes, ma’am,” they said in near-unison, and began leaving.

“And Drag?”

Drag stopped, as did Keke and Punch.  They all looked at her.  “Yes?” Drag asked.

“Nobody handles my money but the people I handpick to handle it.  Understood?”

He nodded.  “Yes, ma’am.  It won’t happen again.”

“You personally bring it in from here on out,” Amelia continued.  She didn’t want to hear any of that won’t happen again shit.  “I’m not assigning any more money collectors to your sector at all.”

“Yes, ma’am.  And thank you,” Drag added, which wasn’t easy for him to say.

It wasn’t easy for Amelia to hear.  “Just do your job,” she ordered.

He nodded, and he and his lieutenants left.

Amelia opened her coat and tucked her gun back inside her pants in the small of her back.  She turned to Scotty.  “Clean up this mess,” she said.

“I got it,” Scotty replied.

“Pull all collectors.  That’s one of Bulldog’s rules that has outlived its usefulness.  From now on the sector chiefs will bring in all collections.  No more middle men.  The chiefs will be one hundred percent responsible.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Scotty said.

“And no tossing money on piles anymore,” Amelia added.  “I want each sector to have their own stall and counter.  I want the money from each sector counted individually, not collectively.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Then Amelia exhaled.  “Get a crew over to Culvy’s place.  Get my money.  But you go too, just in case anybody else gets sticky fingers.  Those stealing Amelia’s money days are over.”

Scotty smiled.  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Then she looked at the two collectors who had been in her employ.  She should have felt for them.  She knew, despite what they had done, she should have felt empathy for their plight.  But she’d lived a hard life, an abusive, bitter life, and she didn’t know what empathy felt like.  When she needed it, nobody gave any to her.  Nobody felt bad about her plight.  Why was she supposed to feel bad about theirs?  How was she supposed to feel it?

“Clean up the mess,” she said again, and left.