Chapter 6 - The Visitor in Federal Custody
The subterranean detention ward of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago smelled of industrial floor wax, cold concrete, and bitter, rotting pride.
Logan Sterling sat on the edge of a stainless-steel cot bolted to the wall of his solitary cell, wearing an oversized orange institutional jumpsuit.
His styled hair had been buzzed down to the scalp; his expensive manicured vanity had been completely stripped away, his hands and ankles secured with heavy steel transport chains as he waited for his transfer to the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute.
The heavy steel slider door buzzed open with a loud hydraulic clank.
Arthur Ross walked into the cell.
The seventy-four-year-old attorney did not hurry. His bespoke leather boots clicked rhythmically against the concrete with a slow, deliberate cadence. He wore his heavy charcoal overcoat over his three-piece suit, his posture commanding, sovereign, and entirely unbothered.
Logan flinched back against the concrete wall, his bloodshot eyes widening in a mixture of feral hatred and visceral panic.
"Arthur...?" Logan spat, his voice cracking into a dry, hoarse rasp. "Did Scarlett send you? Did she read my appeal? Does she know how much I regret what happened at the law firm?"
Arthur stopped three paces from the cot, looking down at the broken young man with the clinical detachment of a surgeon viewing discarded tissue.
"Miss Vance did not read your appeal, Logan," Arthur said softly. "She tossed it into the incinerator chute at the tower without opening the clasp."
Logan’s breath hitched. He slumped forward, his transport chains rattling violently against the steel belt around his waist. "She can't just erase two years of marriage! I built Horizon! I gave her a home in Lake Forest! I have rights under the state domestic relations code—"
"You surrendered your rights on the morning of November 14," Arthur interrupted, his voice dropping into an octave of freezing, subterranean iron. "When you threw a black credit card across a conference table and told the daughter of Arthur Vance that she was an uneducated waitress who needed your permission to survive."
Arthur reached into his coat pocket, pulling out a single, certified legal certificate stamped by the Clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court:
FINAL DECREE OF ABSOLUTE DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE
PETITIONER: SCARLETT VANCE
RESPONDENT: LOGAN STERLING
DISPOSITION: UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER OF ALL MARITAL PROPERTY // TOTAL CIVIL RESTITUTION AWARDED TO PETITIONER IN THE AMOUNT OF $62,400,000.00.
Arthur laid the document on the stainless-steel table.
"Your name has been permanently expunged from every commercial registry, every logistics charter, and every banking syndicate in the United States, Logan," Arthur said. "Under the law, you are a bankrupt felon whose assets have been seized to reimburse the pension funds of the men and women you tried to rob."
Logan collapsed onto the cot, burying his face in his cuffed hands, weeping with the raw, ugly agony of a man who realized that his vanity had left him completely alone in the dark.
"Tell her... tell her I'm sorry..." he sobbed through his fingers. "Tell her I would give my life to speak to her once..."
Arthur turned his back on the broken prisoner.
"You had a life, Logan," Arthur whispered softly. "And you traded it for forty million pieces of silver."
May you like
Arthur knocked once on the heavy steel slider door.
The bolt slid back, and Arthur walked down the echoing corridor into the bright morning sunshine of Chicago, leaving Logan Sterling to weep in the concrete shadows where he would remain for thirty-two long years.
