Fear Itself

by Jeff Gelb

  Unlike those, however, Brett Hardiman’s performance had been exemplary. But after eight years of procurement improvements and installing a computerized inventory management system, Brett would fall victim to his own efficiency.

  Mark felt his forehead. Did he have a fever? Was he coming down with something? Or was the tension of the moment simply inflaming his skin? He checked his watch. Brett should have arrived by now. Scratching an eyelid, and anxious to get the unpleasant task over with, Mark stood and tugged a Une of wrinkles from his vest, then stepped to his office door and stuck his head outside. Brenda Graves, his secretary, was busy tapping away at her keyboard, a long lock of frosted blonde hair dangling over her forehead. “Brenda,” Mark called to her, so preoccupied by the unpleasant task at hand that he forgot his usual acknowledgement of the tight sweater she was wearing. “Did you call Brett for me?”

  “His line has been busy,” she whispered as if sympathizing with the pressure her boss faced. “Mr. Russell just called me to ask if Brett was in your office yet. When I told him I hadn’t been able to reach him, Mr. Russell said he would send a messenger for Brett.”

  Mark shook his head.

  “You know how impatient Mr. Russell is,” Brenda continued with a sigh. “He told me to call him as soon as Brett leaves.”

  Mark groaned and returned to his desk, collapsing into his executive leather chair. Since Brett had always received outstanding performance reviews, he wouldn’t suspect that his job was in jeopardy.

  And those were the ones most likely to explode.

  With Brett’s violent history, Mark was determined to take no chances. He closed his eyes, massaged his graying temples, and reached for the second drawer on the right side of his desk. With a gentle tug, the drawer glided open to reveal his last resort—a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. As far as Mark knew, the weapon had never even been fired, but with Mr. Russell’s refusal to allow a security guard on the premises, Mark felt there was no alternative but to take drastic measures to protect himself.

  He ran his fingers again through his thinning hair, past the bald spot at the crown of his head, and scratched the back of his neck. The gun was a blatant infraction of the company’s weapons policy, but the termination of so many innocent people was also against all human decency. Somehow, violating the firearms policy seemed minor by comparison.

  Mark groaned. The headache he’d nursed all morning was getting worse. And in his mind, he recalled reports of the gut-wrenching impact of Brett’s massive fist slamming against his challenger’s face. Blood had reportedly squirted from the wound like juice from a grapefruit. Would Brett’s temper flare when he heard the news? Would he lash out in an uncontrollable rage? Would Mark Hopson of HammerStock Industries be the next corporate casualty to appear on CNN?

  Not as long as a gun separated him from Brett, Mark thought as he clumsily flipped open the snub-nose revolver’s cylinder. He decided at the last minute that perhaps the gun should be loaded after all, in case Brett charged and there was no way to stop him other than shooting his legs to slow him down. From his coat pocket Mark retrieved a handful of cartridges and filled the five chambers with shaky fingers.

  Suddenly a light knock sounded at the door. Mark returned the weapon to the drawer, took a final deep breath, and adjusted the cuff-links of his heavily starched white shirt sleeves, then closed his eyes for a moment of brief meditation, his heart racing. He exhaled, closed his eyes, and counted to ten. “Come in, Brett,” he eventually called out.

  Brett Hardiman eased through the door. It was Friday, Casual Day, and Brett was dressed in jeans and a colorful sweater. He looked younger than his 34 years, his face rugged and sporting a full head of dark brown hair without a trace of gray. Brett had maintained an excellent physique through the heavy lifting required of his storeroom position. Normally a stone-faced rock of Gibraltar, a look of bewilderment now marred the big man’s face. Mark motioned to one of two chairs facing his desk and asked Brett to be seated.

  Brett swallowed hard and glared around the room. “Where’s Mr. Russell?” he asked. “I thought the three of us were going to review the latest inventory figures.”

  Mark reacted by clearing his throat. “I want to make this as painless as possible for both of us, Brett,” he recited the prepared statement. “I’m sure you already know that we’ve been downsizing today, and I’m sorry to say that your position at HammerStock has been eliminated, effective immediately.” Mark paused, taking note of the sudden shock on Brett’s face. “I’m sorry to see you go, Brett,” he added. “You’ve done an excellent job here, and I’ve enjoyed working with you.”

  Brett sat motionless, his cheeks turning red.

  “You’ll receive one month’s severance pay, as well as payment for all untaken vacation,” Mark continued as he pushed a manila folder of termination documents across the desk. Brett swallowed hard and exhaled deeply, his temples throbbing like the throat of a frog. “The company will pay your insurance premiums for six months,” Mark added. “And with as much as you have to offer, Brett, I’m sure that you won’t have a problem finding another job.”

  Brett hung his head. Mark watched the glow of redness grow deeper and richer across the dejected man’s face, and cautiously eased his right hand closer to the partially open desk drawer, his fingers inching toward the protective aura of the gun.

  Brett coughed and glanced around the room. “Is that it?” he asked through clenched teeth. “I can’t wait to tell my wife.” He stood and took a couple of steps toward the door leaving the manila folder behind, his head hanging low in defeat, his breath seething.

  Mark exhaled with relief. Brett was obviously angry, but had controlled himself and taken it like a man. Mark scooped up the paperwork and met the despondent employee at the door to shake hands and offer condolences. “I’m truly sorry,” Mark said. “This hasn’t been easy for me.”

  Brett took Mark’s extended hand and squeezed with all his might, crushing his boss’s fingers together. With his other hand, Brett grabbed Mark’s collar and practically lifted him from the floor. The termination papers slipped from Mark’s grasp and glided across the office. “You son-of-a-bitch,” Brett growled. “Don’t expect any sympathy out of me for what you’ve done. I’ve worked my ass off for this company.”

  Mark struggled to speak, cursing himself for having let down his guard. “Brett … I told you … there’s nothing wrong with your … work,” Mark gasped for air. “It’s just a … cost containment measure … that’s all.”

  “Shit!” Brett spat. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Brett slapped him across the face, splitting Mark’s lower lip. “You know, you’re not just firing me, you son-of-a-bitch. You’re firing my wife and my kid, too. You’re firing our house and our cars and everything we own. And you won’t get away with it—that’s a promise!”

  Mark’s face stung from the force of the blow. “Brett!” Mark pleaded. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret. This is … bad enough already.”

  Brett gritted his teeth and rammed a knee into Mark’s groin. As his boss collapsed helplessly to the floor, Brett stepped over the crumpled form and hissed, “There’s more hurt to come, Big Boss Man.” Brett rattled the door knob as he left the room, then stopped for one last look inside. “We’ve got ourselves some unfinished business here.”

  The pain was excruciating. Mark’s vision wavered; a loud whistling sound roared in his ears. He held his crotch as if his hands cupped over his genitals would somehow diminish the pain. Mark realized he’d have to carry the gun at all times—Brett could surprise him anytime, anyplace, and the police couldn’t protect him twenty-four hours a day. Maybe he should even hire a bodyguard to transport him to and from the office. He’d have to be damned cautious every waking minute—

  “Mark!” Brenda called as she hurried into the room. She kneeled at his side and wiped a stream of blood from her boss’s chin with her fingertips. “Are you all right? Do you need a doctor?”

  Mark st
ruggled to catch his breath. “No,” he gasped, slowly shaking his head. “I’m okay. Just give me a few minutes to myself.”

  “But Mark—”

  “Please,” he rasped as he stood on wobbling legs. “Just go.”

  After a brief pause Brenda left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

  Mark staggered to his desk and stared at the gun in the partially open drawer. All of his precautions had proved worthless, but at least he hadn’t been killed. Sweat dribbled down his brow. The throbbing between his legs and his headache merged somewhere in his chest. He felt like he’d been plowed down by a Dallas Cowboys linebacker.

  Moments passed. The headache grew more intense. The throbbing in his ears thudded harder and faster. His hand still shaking, Mark reached for the weapon. His arm felt like a phantom limb, the cool steel grip of the revolver alien to his touch and oddly out of place. He tested the gun’s weight and couldn’t imagine himself carrying a concealed weapon. But just as his hand closed around the pistol to familiarize himself with its feel, the office door jerked open. Mark trembled awkwardly in response, the gun dropping with a dull thud to the bottom of the drawer, blood draining from his face as Mr. Russell stepped inside, flaunting his one thousand five hundred dollars pin-striped suit. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Mr. Russell said as he noticed Mark’s swollen lip. “I guess you were right about Hardiman after all. Do you want to press charges against the bastard?”

  Mark exhaled deeply. “I haven’t called the police yet, but I will,” he moaned, still trying to catch his breath, “as soon as I get my composure back.”

  Mr. Russell stared back in silence, making no effort to leave. Instead he reached over and swung the office door shut, then casually removed one of the scattered termination papers that had landed on the arm rest and sat in the same chair Brett had occupied moments earlier, his hands folded confidently across his lap. “I’m afraid there’s another change in the organization that you haven’t been aware of, Mark,” he began with an air of superiority. “Since I first came to HammerStock, I’ve wanted to bring a right-hand-man on board who first worked for me in Memphis. I think that time is now, and unfortunately it will be your position that James will be taking.”

  Mark sat dumbstruck. Was this a joke? Suddenly the room swirled around his head.

  “I know this comes as a shock to you, Mark,” Mr. Russell’s words echoed as if from a distance, distorted like Linda Blair’s voice in The Exorcist, “but I have a responsibility to the stockholders.” It was a speech Mr. Russell had obviously made many times before.

  Mark’s heart pounded harder; the whistling in his ears became more shrill and intense. Like Brett, he immediately perceived his own family being fired as well. There would be no Christmas for the kids. And Lisa would be forced to live on an incredibly tight budget. They’d have to give up one of the cars, maybe even lose their home. Unemployment compensation wouldn’t begin to provide for their needs.

  A rage grew like a spreading cancer inside Mark’s chest. He recalled the hundreds of family-time hours he’d sacrificed to be at the office on weekends; how, in every case, he’d executed his boss’s orders to the letter without question. He stared into Mr. Russell’s cruel, heartless eyes and felt his stomach roll. This moment, this agonizing God-forbidding place in time was what blind corporate loyalty had brought him. Hatred coursed through his veins and screamed to escape. An exasperating ear-splitting shriek spilled from Mark’s quivering lips as he wobbled to his feet and reached for the second drawer on the right side of his desk. He heaved to catch his breath.

  And as he pointed the revolver in John Vincent Asshole Russell’s trembling face, Mark Hopson realized that he would be featured on CNN after all.

  War And Peace

  John Shirley

  Butch starts fucking around with the dead girl’s body. “Butch,” I tell him, real dry, “I’m pretty sure that’s not standard police procedure.” This, see, was two years ago; the first time I looked at Butch different.

  Butch has pulled on the rubber gloves, because when there’s blood we watch it real close now. I knew a cop got AIDS from touching a fresh stiff; cop with a cut on his hand turning the dead guy’s bloody face for a better look: Boom, an officer’s ass shriveling up with HIV. We put on the gloves now.

  This stiff is a Chicano girl, big breasted, and she has a little horizontal knife cut about two inches long in the top of her left tit, and there really isn’t much blood, I don’t know why, most of the bleeding was internal. But somebody has …

  Butch says it out loud. “Long thin blade ri-i-ight through the titty and ri-i-ight through her itty-bitty heart.”

  She’s propped up in bed in a motel, wearing a black leather skirt, one red pump, no top, one eye stuck open, the other shut, like a baby doll. There’s some ripped clothes lying around.

  Butch reaches out and runs the rubber-covered tip of his thumb, real slow and tranquil, along the lip of her wound. Then he pinches a nipple. This is making me nervous. I mean, we’re a couple of white cops in the Hispanic neighborhood, shit.

  “What the hell, Hank,” Butch says to me, grinning. “Let’s pump a fuck into her. She’s got one more in ‘er.”

  You get into gallows humor, this job, so I grin back and says, “She’s still warm and soft.”

  But he isn’t kidding. He starts playing with her titties, even the slashed one, and lifting up her skirt. “You can turn your back if you want, or not, I don’t care,” he says, his hand on his zipper. I get this feeling he’s hoping I won’t tum away. “Come on,” he says. “She was a fuckin’ whore anyway.”

  “We don’t know that, Butch. All we know’s a motel manager found a stiff.” But he goes on playing with her. “Butch—no fuckin’ way,” I say. “They called her family from the ID in her purse, her fuckin’ mom might show up and come in and see that shit. ‘The white police officers were fucking my dead daughter, Mr. DA! I’m suing the department’s ass!’ I mean, Christ, are you …” I didn’t finish saying it.

  He steps back, the same cool grin, but then he catches the tip of his tongue in his teeth like he was just kidding.” Fuckin’ with ya. Gotcha didn’t I.” He walks out past me. But I see him re-arrange his dick in his pants as he went. He has a hard-on.

  Believe it or not, I read about it in the papers. No one called me. I’m just coming off vacation but, shit, somebody should’ve fucking called me. Delia, Butch’s wife—the wife of my partner, my best friend—turns up dead in the trunk of her own car, and no one calls me.

  Now I’m over at Butch’s, just being there with him. Making us some coffee. It feels funny, looking at Delia’s stuff in the kitchen. My own wife Jilian gave Delia those dish towels; Love Our Planet machine-embroidered on them. Some kind of soybased dye used in them. My wife goes on these spending sprees in Berkeley.

  Delia not long ago re-did the kitchen, and put everything in its place, and picked out the curtains and the other new gewgaws about two weeks before; spending too much money, Butch had said. But the kitchen now looks like a picture out of Ladies’ Home Journal. And then some dirtbag strangled her, and her new kitchen things all seem like placemarkers for her going. You knew me for years. I babysat your kids. Where am I now?

  I’m just a patrolman, but I see dead people all the time, mostly old people that croak out, and I got to make a report. But this is different: Buteh’s wife Delia, she babysat my kids, made me and my wife dinner. She could be bitchy but Man liked her and Ben liked her and Ashley liked her and we were used to her. And some bug killed her to make a point, and put her in the trunk of her car. I was glad I wasn’t on the detail that found her, after two days … the smell of someone dead two days in a trunk; someone that you fucking went golfing with.

  I look through the door at Butch sitting on the couch quiet as a mannequin in a store window. Butch wears a yellow golf shirt, and tan Dockers pants, and brown loafers with tassels, and no socks. He has that same butch haircut, going a little gray now, that got him his tag, whic
h he says he wears just because you pretty much never had to comb it. Although I think he wears it because his dad had one, his whole life. His dad was a Marine Corps flyer, stationed right here in Alameda, a real big old hard-ass who shriveled up like a used condom with cancer and died whining. I shouldn’t talk about him like that, but I always hated the old fucker.

  The Gold Tins are searching the house. Just a routine, but it ticks Butch off. “Treating me like a fucking suspect,” he says. “God, Delia.” Starting to cry again. His eyes are still red from crying for two days. He was talking about Delia for hours, what a patient woman she was, how she put up with all kinds of shit being a cop’s wife, worrying about him, and it ends up they got her and not him, and how it isn’t right. The captain was there for an hour or so of that, yesterday, a hand on Buteh’s shoulder, sometimes starting to cry himself, and later on the captain tells the reporters from the Oakland Trib, “This is genuinely tragic. Officer Behm feels it so deeply. He’s got just about the biggest heart of anyone I know.” And he talks about Buteh’s work with the Eagle Scouts and the vocational fair, lots of good stuff he’s done.

  I tell Butch, “They’re looking for stuff that could connect your wife with a killer, like a letter, say—I mean, no offense but they got to consider maybe she had an affair, Butch, and her boyfriend did it. You know?”

  He snorts, “Boyfriend. Not Delia, not ever.” There might be a little contempt in the way he says it. He starts to say something, doesn’t say it, then he goes on, “What the fuck is the point of looking for a boyfriend when they got the message painted right on the car?”

  Meaning the spraypainted graffiti on the side of her car. They found her car, her body in the trunk, in the Oakland ghetto, right there in gang-banger country, and spraypainted on the side in red was “WAR.” And the killers sprayed a little circle around the bumper sticker that said, “OPOBA.” Oakland Police Officers Benevolent Association. To let everybody know that they knew this was a car belonging to a cop, and the woman was a cop’s wife.