Shake the Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

take years to be resolved.  In the meantime, there was a fortune to be made.
    Marc entered his office and strode over to the floor to ceiling windows.  Tampa Bay was a brilliant blue and cars scurried across the distant causeway. He enjoyed looking down on the rest of the world.  All it took was money.  And money brought power.  Money and power.  It’s what he always wanted.  It’s all that mattered.  Everything else was its byproduct. 
    He wondered what his mother thought of him now.  She had always wanted money and power, but not for its own sake.  She wanted it for the envy it induced in others.  Screw everyone else.  Marc Mason thought his mother was pitiful, and his sisters as well.  They had both married morons and were busy spitting out whining, sniveling brats in a vain attempt to fill the empty holes in their pitiful lives.  And then there was his father.  When it came to pitiful, James Marcus Mason, III, took the cake.
    Marc Mason knew his father didn’t want money and power.  He wanted respect.  Respect of his wisdom.  Respect of his integrity.  Respect of his character.  He was pitiful and an idiot.  Now his father’s friends and associates wanted to invest.  They wanted to get on the “M” train.  And yes, he would take their money.    

 
     
     
    CHAPTER 4
     
    A crescent of orange finally appeared above the Atlantic swells, though thousands were still asleep in the towers behind him.  The wet sand was firm under yet another pair of New Balance running shoes. Marc Mason’s father had just completed his daily three-mile run.  The sunrise was beautiful, but not the object of his admiration.  This morning the unimaginable beauty of nature had been overshadowed by a 48 foot Bimini Cruiser that sat gleaming in the new morning light less than one hundred yards off the beach. 
    James Marcus Mason, III, took one last longing glance at the yacht before angling off to the condo apartment he had rented a few weeks before.  These early morning runs had given him a chance to think through all of the changes that were happening.  He also preferred the solitude for another reason.  He wasn’t in the mood to talk, much less explain.  And he was distinctive - his tall stature and the full head and chest of pure white hair that sprang from his perpetually tanned body made him instantly recognizable.  He knew he was often compared to that actor whose name he could never remember.  During a round of bed banter, Elizabeth told him the lawyers had nicknamed him “Toasty.”
    As James entered the apartment he could hear the shower.  He sat down on the edge of the bed and peeled off his shoes and low-top padded running socks.  His hips ached and ankles hurt.  After his last physical, the doctor told him to stay out of the sun and find a less punishing form of exercise.  The shower was still running as he slowly stood up.
    Transfixed by the rivulets of steaming water winding their way down her body, he stood statue-like admiring the twenty-something body.  His wife Lorna had looked like that once, though her hair was a deep red.  It may have been seconds or minutes, but finally Elizabeth Hayes pushed the water from her face and turned.  She peered through the fog-covered and water-splattered glass door with vividly blue eyes and smiled.
    “How was your run, baby?”
    “Fantastic.  Beautiful sunrise this morning.”
    “Are we late?”
    “Yeah.  But the ship can’t sail until the captain’s on board.”
     
    He climbed the steps more slowly than he had 28 years earlier when he was first sworn in as a magistrate of the United States Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida.  Although he was still graceful in his movements, the granite steps to the Miami courthouse seemed steeper after all the years.  James Marcus Mason, III, was only 32 years old when he first climbed those stairs as a federal magistrate.  The federal trial bar justifiably assumed that