Dan Cole used to work for Virgil Smith. Now he runs his own industrial contracting shop, competing for the same big construction jobs that keep coming up in the petrochemical corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. That's the official version.
The unofficial version is that Cole built his business the easy way — by knowing what his competitors were going to bid before they bid it. The first real assignment Virgil gave me was figuring out how that kept happening. Keegan and I couldn't pin it directly on Cole, but the fingerprints were all over VS Industrial's servers. So we took Virgil's BASF bid completely offline, put a decoy bid on the server, and waited. Cole filed his number accordingly. He lost the contract. We won. Nobody could prove anything, but we all knew what happened, and Cole knew we knew.
That should have been the end of our interactions.
It wasn't, because Cole is also the money behind Stella's maid service — the arrangement that had Amber working in increasingly impractical uniforms at his house every day for three months. I know it's a strange scene over there. I know it's gotten stranger as time has gone on. I didn't ask a lot of questions, because I had too much else going on and because I wasn't sure I wanted the answers.
What I do know is that I'd be very happy if that was the last of my dealings with Dan Cole.
Episodes
Loading episodes…