Chapter 323: Crazy Costumer

The M4 was doing what it did on open road when the phone connected through the speakers and Elsa’s voice came through.

"Liam."

"Yeah," he said.

"You need to come to the store," she said. "There is something here that needs to be handled by you specifically."

He looked at the road ahead. "How bad."

"Come," she said.

He gritted his teeth, felt the specific feeling of a night that had already contained more than enough and was apparently not finished with him, and looked at the junction coming up ahead.

He turned the wheel.

The M4 drifted through the junction, the rear stepping out and finding grip again on the other side of the turn, and he straightened up and pressed the accelerator and headed toward the store.

---

He heard it before he got through the door.

A voice, male, the specific register of someone who had decided they were not being heard and had concluded that volume was the solution to that problem. Liam pushed the door open and came in.

The store’s main floor was empty of customers, which made sense given what was happening near the front desk.

A man was standing there, somewhere in his late forties, wide through the shoulders, wearing a suit that was expensive enough to carry its own opinion about the people around it. His face was red in the way faces went red when the blood had been up for a while and had not found anywhere to go.

He was leaning forward over the desk with one hand flat on it.

Elsa was on the other side of it, her posture straight and her expression doing the specific thing it did when she was managing something she found deeply unreasonable while maintaining the surface of a professional who had not yet lost patience.

James was standing slightly to the side, his striped shirt still neat, his tie still slightly off-center, and he was looking at the man with the expression of someone who had made a decision about this situation and was currently in the process of acting on it.

"I am telling you that the report your company produced was incorrect," the man was saying. "And I am telling you that the person who produced it should not be employed by anyone handling anything more complicated than a sandwich."

"Sir," Elsa said, "if you could allow me to explain the methodology behind the—"

"I don’t want methodology," the man said. "I want results. Results I paid for. Results I did not receive."

"You cannot speak to her like that," James said, flat and direct.

The man turned and looked at James with the expression of someone who had just been interrupted by furniture.

"I can speak however I choose," the man said. "And when your boss shows up, which I strongly suggest someone makes happen immediately, I am going to make sure you are no longer employed here either."

Liam cleared his throat.

The sound was not loud but it landed in the right moment, the specific pause between the man finishing his sentence and anyone else deciding what to do with it, and both James and Elsa looked toward the door.

"Liam," Elsa said. The relief in it was genuine and immediate. "You’re here."

"You said it was important," he said, coming further into the store.

"Who is this," the man said, turning toward Liam with the same energy he had been directing at the desk. "I’m in the middle of something."

"This is the owner," Elsa said.

The man looked at Liam.

He took in the age. The clothes. The fact that Liam had clearly come from somewhere and had not stopped to change whatever he had been wearing there. He looked at all of it and arrived at a conclusion that his face did not bother to conceal.

"You must be joking," he said. He looked at Elsa. "Stop wasting my time. Get me whoever actually runs this operation."

"I run it," Liam said.

The man looked at him again. "I said stop joking."

Liam reached into his jacket and produced a business card and held it out.

The man took it and looked at it and looked at Liam and looked at it again.

"I see," he said. He set the card on the desk. "I see why everything here is the way it is. You have a child running the operation and then you wonder why the work is incompetent."

"You can leave," Liam said, his voice carrying the specific quality of something said calmly by someone who meant it completely, "if we are not meeting your standard. Nobody here is obligated to work with someone who speaks to the staff the way you have been speaking to them."

The man stared at him.

"There is no need for that," he said, his voice dropping slightly from where it had been, the volume adjusting itself without him fully deciding to adjust it. "I am already here. Let us simply get this done."

"Alright," Liam said. He gestured toward the office door. "This way."

---

The office was the same as it always was, the desk and the chairs and the lamp and the window looking out at the back of the building. Liam sat behind the desk and the man sat across from it and for a moment the arrangement seemed to recalibrate something in the man’s posture, the desk doing what desks did when they sat between two people and established which side was which.

"Tell me what the problem is," Liam said.

The man told him.

It took about ten minutes and involved a distribution network that was losing money in places the man could identify on a spreadsheet but could not locate in the actual operation. He had commissioned a report from Elsa’s team three months ago and the report had come back with recommendations he had implemented and the bleeding had not stopped.

Liam listened.

He asked two questions. Both of them specific, both of them about the part of the operation the man had described most briefly, which was the part that contained the actual problem.

The man answered.

Liam sat with it for a moment.

"The report was correct," he said. "The recommendations were correct. The implementation was not." He looked at the man directly. "You implemented the supplier renegotiation but you did not implement the scheduling restructure alongside it. They are dependent on each other. Running one without the other is like fixing one side of a leak and wondering why the floor is still wet."

The man looked at him.

"The scheduling restructure," Liam continued, "is what closes the gap. It is also the more complex piece to execute because it requires buy-in from your floor managers rather than just your procurement team. That is probably why it was easier to start with the supplier side." He paused. "But easier is not the same as sufficient."

The man was quiet for a moment.

"How do I implement it correctly," he said.

"The person outside this office," Liam said, "is the one who designed that section of the report. She knows every layer of it. She is the only person in this building who can walk you through the implementation properly and make sure it actually sticks."

The man looked at the desk.

"So you need her," Liam said.

The man’s jaw moved.

"And before she helps you," Liam said, "you are going to apologise to her for how you spoke to her and to my staff out there."

The man looked at him.

"That is the arrangement," Liam said.

---

They came out of the office together.

James was behind the desk now, his eyes going to Liam first and then to the man, reading the situation the way he had gotten better at reading situations over the months he had been here.

Elsa was standing near the shelving on the far side, reviewing something on a clipboard, and she looked up when they came out.

The man stopped.

He looked at Elsa.

Then he bowed his head.

Not a small nod. An actual bow, brief and deliberate, the specific gesture of someone doing something they had decided to do properly rather than halfway.

"I apologise," he said. "For how I spoke to you. It was not appropriate."

Elsa looked at him.

Then she looked at Liam.

Liam looked at the wall.

She looked back at the man. "Thank you," she said, and her voice carried the specific composure of someone accepting something gracefully.

"She is going to help you work through the implementation today," Liam said. "Be patient with the process and you will have what you need."

He looked at Elsa.

"Be nice to each other," he said.

She pressed her lips together and the smile came through anyway. "Okay," she said.

Liam looked at James.

James gave him the small nod of someone who had watched something happen and had filed every detail of it.

"If that is everything," Liam said, mostly to the room, "I am heading out."

He picked up his card from the desk where the man had left it, put it back in his jacket, and went to the door.