Psychology of Choosing: River Running

By R. Scott Tyler

In PSYCHOLOGY OF CHOOSING: RIVER RUNNING, book 3 in the Smugglers in Paradise series, the chase comes full circle, landing back in Marge's lap in Portland. They say some things skip a generation, and that seems to apply in Konnor's case. Adding another level of darkness to the series, Boris has begun playing his final game. With statistics, human trafficking, boats, coffee shops, and techno-geeks...the game is being played for keeps.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. Scott Tyler
• Release date: Jan 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370155118

R. Scott Tyler

R. Scott Tyler has been a writer and communicator all his life. He started by writing journals and poetry to express both the inspiration and banality of life as it passed before and around him. To pay the bills he communicated to define process requirements, specifications and operating instructions. Now that he is starting yet another journey he writes to entertain and provoke imagination.

Book preview

PSYCHOLOGY OF CHOOSING

Smugglers in Paradise Series

- River Running –

By R. Scott Tyler

Book Description

In PSYCHOLOGY OF CHOOSING: RIVER RUNNING, book 3 in the Smugglers in Paradise series, the chase comes full circle, landing back in Marge's lap in Portland. They say some things skip a generation, and that seems to apply in Konnor's case. Adding another level of darkness to the series, Boris has begun playing his final game. With statistics, human trafficking, boats, coffee shops, and techno-geeks…the game is being played for keeps.

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CHAPTER 1 – Coffee Tech

Coffee Cream Café looked like it had been carved out of a large, old, hardwood forest where dense, dark wood was plentiful. Even as a server David felt the same calm, quiet, affluence that the customers sensed when he entered the high-tech cafe. The main room was bracketed by two large fireplaces that burned real wood. They radiated warmth and a slightly acrid, smoky scent, chaperoning the main room vigilantly with a flickering, golden light.

David was early for his shift, as usual, and quickly set up his laptop in the corner to glance at his email and twitter news feeds. There wasn't much on email besides the daily note from his parents, Lesli and Mark. His mom and dad were high touch and high tech with their only child. Even though he'd been moving around the country since college, they stayed in touch every day and he looked forward to their updates. After he read the news from home, and assured his parents he was healthy and happy, he moved on to the twitter news feeds.

Getting his news updates this way always felt a bit little like trying to quench his thirst by taking a tiny sip from a fire hose. His favorite news feeds included the crime beat tweeters, news about the local colleges and universities, and a whole group of people that focused on the Coast Guard.

Tonight, among complaints about students drunk and disorderly in public, he noticed the headline BODY RECOVERED IN NEW WILLAPA NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE. When he clicked on the link to read further, this is what he saw:

Wednesday evening city police from Portland, along with patrols from the National Park Service, joined forces to recover a body found by a hiker. The body had been in the water a long time and was wedged between rocks along the Pacific Ocean coast so tightly that recovery in a single unit was not possible. The National Park Service speculates that the female had come into forceful contact with the craggy coastline sometime during the storm that passed through a week ago. The Portland Police made the following statement. Until the coroner and the medical examiner have a go at the body, we won't know for sure whether there was foul play involved. It could be that this girl happened to be in the wrong place when one of our Northwesters blew in.

There were several file photos attached to the piece showing past storms in the area. One of them was even dated last week. David clicked on every picture link to see if there were any photos of the recovered body, or body parts, he thought, but there were none. The article went on to describe the female as ‘in her late teens or early twenties, approximately five feet three inches tall, with closely cropped blond hair and several piercings and tattoos.’ It described two of the tattoos at some length.

While it wasn't totally out of the ordinary for people to die in or near the rocks on the coast, it wasn't often that they died and were never reported missing. David scanned the article again to convince himself he hadn't missed mention of the woman's identity. The police made no mention of withholding the victim's identity pending notification of next of kin. Nor did they mention anything about missing person reports or any other code phrases meant to indicate they knew more than they were telling.

He didn't know why this particular floating body stimulated a spot in his brain that made him keep coming back and rereading it. Something about it bothered him and he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He could tell it was going to bother him all night, but it was time to dump his personal stuff into the locker and get ready for another Coffee Cream Cafe shift.

#

The cafe was filled with a plethora of Victorian Era designed furniture. The room successfully accomplished the shabby sheik look, without being shabby. And even though the seating areas that fit couples and quartets into semi-private alcoves had been specially designed and were 100% new and 100% tech, they were built to look original to the space.

They gave seclusion and a sense of being special, both highly prized commodities when doing upscale marketing, to groups that used the spaces. Electric power was easily accessed, as well as dead-zone free wireless service and an almost instant response to customer's requests for many different drinks and foods.

The service was remarkably personal with no focus whatsoever on money, because no cash was accepted. Everything was ordered and paid for via extraordinarily well designed PC, phone and tablet applications, all requiring a credit card and individual user-name in order to sign-up and interact. It was a space that could be used by the pure artist or writer to get that caffeine buzz with no hassle of exchanging money. The ease of use of the application and the relative invisibility of the amount being spent by patrons made for a unique way to separate those with an available checking or credit card balance from their cash as well.

Group leader Karen walked by on her way to the second floor office, getting her last texts in with her grandmother. She gave David a smile and a wink.

He returned the smile and replied, Hi, Karen.

Karen loved employees like David. She had pegged them as educated, intelligent, and non-conformist enough to be under employed, while addicted to gadgets enough to need a steady income.

She still had a couple minutes before she had to clock in and she wanted to finish the conversation with Gran. She texted her answer, Okay, Gran, I’ll stop by on Sunday.

Her grandmother was quick to lock in a time. I'll expect you at 2:00 pm for lunch. Konnor said he would be able to get here.

Karen tried once again to close the conversation, Great. I look forward to seeing you, Gran.

Her grandmother did not typically try to set her up so the mention of another person for lunch threw her off a bit. However, she was the only living relative that Karen kept in contact with and she enjoyed her visits to Cold Press. Gran's cafe was like stepping thirty years back in time to when a cafe was solely about comfort food.

#

David slid his laptop into the leather messenger bag, walked into the employees only area and deposited the entire bag into a small, empty locker. He coded it shut with his combination and went to clock in for his evening shift. Somehow he was going to have to try to set aside his distraction with the new job at the University.

It was Thursday and the crowd was building toward the weekend. His energy swung right along with the ebb and flow of the crowd at the cafe. The slowest evenings were always Tuesdays and Wednesdays. By Thursday night the Monday through Friday work crowd decided they'd had enough of work and were ready to forego a little sleep because they only had one work day left. At midnight that workday would be TGIF or 'Thank God It's Friday' anyway and everyone knew no serious business got done on Friday. Friday and Saturday nights were always the busiest. There were three distinct crowds of people that made up the flow during those nights. The first seating was the after work crowd on Fridays. On Saturdays he called them the BDDs, meaning before dinner dates. The second seating was the BTBs, or before the bars crowd. The last seating (the cafe closed at 2:00 a.m.) was the 'Oh, I decided to skip the bar scene tonight' crowd.

From a tipping perspective, David liked the after work crowd the best. If every segment of the Coffee Cream Cafe was running at full potential David could easily rake in a couple hundred in tips. The crowd was happy to be done with work, generally in a celebratory mood and often feeling generous, especially if anyone they were trying to impress was looking. The two to three hours per week of this crowd could make or break his weekly spending money. The 'Oh, I decided to skip the bar scene tonight' crowd could also be good tippers, but this was less predictable. If David's customer was trying to impress upon him that said customer was skipping the bar scene that particular evening because he was too cool to need it or be bothered by it, David was much more likely to get a significant tip. If the customer actively detested the bar scene, the tip would go the other direction. David didn't understand why he needed to be punished with a lower tip just because the other patrons around the bar hater were happily getting ready for a night of drinking and carousing. It didn't really matter to him. After a year at Coffee Cream Cafe he felt like he had developed a solid ability to read the level of tip to expect from a customer and therefore knew the correct amount of schmoozing to dole out.

As is the case in most service businesses, where the key customer facing staff are paid much less than any of the management employees, the serving staff had an entire list of acronyms for customers. Of course the acronyms were never shared with management. Acronyms for management were a whole different story. This evening, a couple hours before closing, David waited on a LOFO (LOnely, FOreign, techy guy). It wasn't always easy to tell if a customer had been in before, but this time it was. David spotted him walk through the door and glance around trying to get a lay of the land and decide where to sit. The host at the entrance that does the first level of instructions and separates the newbies and the walk in / walk out coffee drinkers from those that want a seated experience had guided him through the door, but given up after getting him inside. It looked to David like the customer was uncomfortable with having the workings of the unique coffee house explained to him. It had been a busy evening, but it was going on eleven and David was prowling for customers and tips. He hated not being busy and didn't want to start micro-cleaning to stay occupied or clock out to work on personal stuff, both of which were fine with Karen. Strolling over to the LOFO he tried to strike up an easy going conversation.

Hi, I'm David. It's a slow night tonight so if you need anything feel free to let me know directly if you don't feel like going through your ThreeCsServer. The ThreeCsServer was the computerized system behind the extremely friendly GUI (graphical user interface) the cafe required customers to use to order, and more importantly, pay for everything.

In a European accent that David thought of as possibly German, the LOFO replied, What's a ThreeCsServer? Apparently the host hadn't gotten through much of anything with this guy.

Oh the ThreeCsServer is just management's name for this little electronic gadget tethered to the wall. David proceeded to give LOFO an abbreviated version of the user interface. With this type of customer David was well aware that he needed to explain as little as possible and hope that the customer was tech savvy enough, or at least curious enough, to become intrigued and start asking his own questions. There was nothing worse than seeing a customer's eyes glaze over with disinterest, or even irritation, as an unperceptive server blathered on with boring details about the interface system.

By the end of the introduction David had gotten LOFO's real name, Josef, and guided him through enough of the interface instructions to get him registered, get his credit card slid through the swipe and get his first order up on the system. Of course David identified himself as the server assigned to Josef’s nook so that the explanation he so expertly handled would not be credited toward another server's potential tip.

#

The server helped Josef order an espresso and a locally hand-crafted dark chocolate candy. It was Josef's usual measure of the repeatability of this type of establishment. He'd been in Portland for only a few weeks, but had already run through a number of coffee shops that didn't meet his requirements for being repeatable. This one showed some promise because of the technical prowess alone. It was clearly the brainchild of an innovative mind, and most probably, one with more money than business intelligence. Probably some early dot com multimillionaire with money and time on their hands, but no real coffee or food background, Josef figured.

As the server turned and walked away, David, is that what he said his name was? Josef busied himself checking out the WIFI and looking over the interface that he had been introduced to called the ThreeCsServer. According to David there was an app for PC, iPad, iPhone and Android. He investigated the Android version and downloaded it to his tablet. After he logged in, his first thought was wow. He could immediately see the status of his order and realized that David was on the way over with it at the exact moment. A red colored D was floating toward a green colored J in a square that looked vaguely like what might be a map of the cafe. It was a bit small to tell on the tablet screen, but when he tapped on the icon it expanded to fill the entire screen. Two icons were traveling with the red letter D. One icon had a picture of a cup of espresso inside it and the other had a picture of a little truffle. The detail made him smile and he touched the truffle icon. It immediately expanded to show a larger picture of what was probably the exact truffle he ordered, as well as a detailed description of the filling and shell. Okay, now he was genuinely impressed. Josef really hoped the owners put as much effort into producing drinks and edibles as they obviously did to their interfaces.

Josef's tablet made two soft bell tones as David stepped around the corner of the nook that he occupied.

Oh, cool! I see you've downloaded the Android app for ThreeCsServer! David sounded like he was truly impressed by