Paxton by Dale Mayer

Author:Dale Mayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Military, Romance
ISBN: 9781773365749
Publisher: Valley Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2022-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

“Hey,” Cherise said gently.

“How’re you doing?” He still stood in the hallway, just looking at her.

Stepping back, she motioned him inside. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he replied, finally stepping in.

“Well, you were standing there, kind of oddly,” she murmured.

“Yeah, I was,” he agreed. “Just a strange feeling to see you standing here, waiting for me.”

She looked at him in surprise, then shrugged. “I know that sounds kind of corny, but, for what it’s worth, I had been waiting for you.”

He wandered in and sat down on the couch. “You won’t believe what Mitch told me.” When she sat beside him, then Paxton leaned back and went through all that Mitch had told him.

Stunned, she just stared at him in shock. “Good God, and, of course, all of that is highly illegal.”

“On so many levels,” Paxton agreed quietly. “And Mitch’s afraid he’ll get in trouble.”

“For colluding and essentially paying a bribe, yes,” she noted, “though it’s not fair that he should get in trouble, when all he was trying to do was get back to work, and he’s the victim, one they essentially extorted money from.”

“That may be what saves him in the end,” Paxton noted, with a nod. “But there’s never anything good about those kinds of games.”

“Yet people play them all the time.” She frowned. “I’m not terribly impressed to hear that’s what he went through either.”

“No, I can’t imagine doing this, just for money it seems,” Paxton shared.

“Because it’s official military medical records being screwed around with,” she noted. “Which means, I’ll have to open up every one of the cases that Wesley was involved in and verify if these people are legitimately cleared to go back to work, not to mention finding those who are truly incapable of working. Surely the bigger part of the fraud was listing healthy people as permanently disabled.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s true. For a lot of us, we’ve been busting our humps, trying to get back to the work we love,” Paxton stated. “This is the work we love. This is the field we went into, and we don’t want to just sit here and do nothing for the rest of our lives.”

“And yet,” she asked, “how many do you think are like you guys?”

“I’m sure there are some,” he replied, “but I can’t hazard a guess at what the stats would look like. Odds are it’ll be heavily weighted to those trying to get paid not to work.”

“I hate the whole thing. It’s really depressing. I’m pretty sure we’ll find several more, you know? … Like you said, if a handful of you wanted to get back to work, how many more were happy not to?” Paxton nodded. “Monday morning,” she said, “I’ll have to dive in deep on all that.”

“Plus we have enough to start an investigation now,” he agreed. “So that’ll take however long.”

She groaned at that too. “That won’t exactly be a smooth and simple task.”

“Hopefully it won’t be too bad,” he noted cautiously. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a completely bad process.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.