Chapter 9 - The Ghost of Gary
Even though David Vance was hundreds of miles away in Gary, Indiana, echoes of his pathetic exile occasionally drifted back to our Chicago headquarters through office gossip.
According to whispers from the regional logistics desk, David had lasted exactly four months in the warehouse audit division before quitting in a screaming fit of arrogant rage. He couldn't handle the physical labor, the lack of an expense account, or the reality that his Wharton MBA didn't mean a thing when he was standing on a concrete floor counting broken wooden pallets in the freezing Midwest winter.
Last I heard, he had tried to land an analyst role at a competing logistics firm across town, but our compliance vetting protocols—which I had helped standardize across the regional chamber of commerce—flagged his termination record and his association with Richard Sterling’s corrupt hiring practices.
He was radioactive. A ghost of ambition without integrity, wandering the fringes of an industry that no longer had room for him.
It was a stark reminder of how thin the line was between being the predator and being the prey in the corporate jungle. In my first life, I had been naive enough to believe that hard work alone was enough to protect you. I had thought that if you kept your head down and did your job, the system would naturally protect the innocent.
I was a fool then.
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Now, I knew that the system only protected those who held the receipts.
And my digital vault was locked tighter than a federal reserve bank.
