by John L. Monk
“I hear you, Bo. If you’re sure…”
“Yeah, thanks anyway.”
“Okay then. Bye.”
He’d been awfully insistent. We rarely talked on the phone, so I couldn’t tell if it was normal or if I’d been spooked to death by Mrs. Swanson and her damned private investigators.
With nothing left to do, I went to bed.
Chapter 6
There was something wrong with the new guy, Brian: he was rude to customers. On his second day of the job.
While I’d been out chatting with Debbie, Milestone’s developers had installed an emergency update to our login system, and customers had been calling all day with problems. The biggest complaint: I can’t get my email. Normally a problem for the call center, but with the volume so high, management had roped us in to help. As a result, the phones hadn’t stopped ringing for two straight hours.
I heard Brian’s voice from the cube over.
“They’re working on it, ma’am,” he said, followed by a short pause. “Well what should I call you, sir? They’re working on it right now, okay? Yeah … yeah … okay, I gotta go.” Then he hung up and swore.
“You okay over there, buddy?” I said.
“All good, Ted,” Brian said, his tone chipper. “Just another moron.”
Ted Randal, of Vermont, was the name I’d used to get the job. It had taken a long time, watching death notices and ghoulishly calling morgues and hospitals in search of the right guy, but I eventually found him: someone near my age who’d never worked a day in his life. Dead Ted had been disabled from birth with severe cerebral palsy. He’d died in the passenger seat of a friend’s car in a head-on collision. Since he’d never had a job, he never made it into the Social Security Death Index. As much as I hated stealing the poor guy’s identity, I feared using my real name to break the law even more.
“The customer’s always right, Brian,” I said, trying to tweak him.
I didn’t care how good he was—he was whiney. I considered telling the boss about his rudeness but decided not to. It was more important to keep a low profile.
“Why doesn’t that fat fuck take some calls?” Brian said at one point.
“Which fat fuck?”
“Sean—he’s sleeping.”
I stifled a laugh. “Dude, he has a kid on the way. Show some respect.”
The truth was I kind of agreed with him, especially tonight with the call volume so high. But Brian was so obnoxious, the last thing I’d do was side with him.
By about one in the morning the calls had dropped to a trickle, and an hour later the place was dead. Normally that’s the time to get some sleep, but Brian wouldn’t shut up. He kept making jokey comments and asking me things over the cube wall, and that’s when I realized what was going on: he was being friendly. Working nights for so long meant most of my interaction with other people happened over the phone, and even then, limited to very specific topics. That and living in a society that frowned on criminals had stunted me some on the social front, so it came as a surprise to have someone chumming me up.
“Dude, you gotta see this site,” he said. For the third time.
“Um … kind of busy with something. Maybe in a minute?”
In case he glanced over, I opened a bunch of windows to various systems.
“Why, what’s going on? Something I need to learn?”
“Not really,” I said, and clicked a few keys so he’d hear me working.
Just when I was sure he’d fire off another question, my phone started vibrating. I told Brian to hold the fort, then dashed down the hall toward the elevators for privacy.
“Hello?” I said.
“Bo? It’s me, Debbie.” I could hear music thumping somewhere in the background. “You still want that information?”
“I still do.”
Debbie gave me Fruit’s number. I also got his address, in case he hung up on me. She said if I called to say I wanted some Fruit Loops.
“Fruit Loops? Really?”
“Yeah, I know, right?” she said, laughing. “Listen, I have to get back to work. But hey…”
“Yeah?”
“You have my number now. Call me anytime?”
I had to smile. “I’ll do that, Debbie.”
“Till then.”
“Bye,” I said, and hung up.
That’s pretty close to a date, big guy.
I didn’t get many dates, and a date with a stripper was something that happened only on TV. Part of me wondered whether it was a good idea to go out with someone who took her clothes off for a living, but another part stepped in and told everyone to shut up.
Mentally whistling a jaunty tune, I headed back to my cube. Before I got there I noticed an odd thing: Brian, sitting in my chair, doing something on my computer. He looked up and tossed me a casual wave.
“You better not be eating my porridge,” I said, pretending I wasn’t jumping out of my skin at the idea of someone on the computer where I committed felonies on a nightly basis. I should have locked it, but I’d never needed to with Sean.
Brian got up and smiled. “This is the site I was talking about. It’s got like a thousand links on how to make money online.”
What’s with this guy?
“I figure, hey, I got all this time, right? Why not try to make a little money in between calls? See, look here.” He reached over and clicked a link. “This one pays you up to five bucks for writing product reviews. I figure I could just copy real reviews and change some of the words and nobody’d know.”
Now I knew why Brian was working nights—nobody could stand him during the day. I needed to set some parameters.
“That’s great, Brian, but seriously, ask before you jump on my system, okay?”
“I know, man, I’m sorry. I just got carried away. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working nights in a NOC. Know what I mean?”
I didn’t want to talk to him anymore.
“Now that it’s quiet,” I said, “I’m going to get some sleep. You got the phones?”
He snorted, shaking his head. “Now you’re turning into Sean. Yeah, I got it.”
I slumped down and pretended to sleep, loving the silence. In time, I didn’t need to pretend anymore.
***
I hadn’t worked out in days. Ripper’s Gym was an ugly little place off Route 28 where all the meatheads came to work off their steroids. I liked Ripper’s because nobody wasted time sitting on the equipment talking to each other.
Because I could afford to, I’d briefly tried a boutique gym with a masseuse and a salon and steam room and all that. They had two bench presses and a hundred exercise bikes, and whenever I asked someone for a spot they acted like I was breaking a rule or something. I’d finally quit when someone turned me in for making “overly masculine sounds” while trying to do deadlifts on a pulley machine.
My exercise routine was prioritized for my career and not my appearance: endurance before strength, strength before size, and avoid size if at all possible. While the meatheads pounded away on triple-stacked benches, I did seventy-five pull-ups and three hundred sit-ups. I did bench presses too, and legs and all that, but my main concerns were lifting myself and not giving in to fatigue. This was a necessity for roof jobs, where I often had to carry up heavy equipment or climb up and down a rope multiple times. No matter what I did, I’d try to finish up with a fast jog on the treadmill. Plenty of cops were fat, and always encumbered by tight uniforms and belts full of gadgets. I liked to think if I ever got caught and needed to run, I could beat them.
After a shower and a protein shake from the glass-faced refrigerators—Ripper’s one concession to the times—I got out my phone and called Fruit.
A man answered. “Fruit’s phone, make it quick.”
“I … uh, would like some Fruit Loops?”
“Oh you would? Who the fuck is this?”
His voice had a sort of gangsta quality to it. I imagined him standing over my body holding a gun sideways with
smoke curling up from the barrel.
“Isn’t this Fruit?”
“It’s Fruit’s phone motherfucker, why ain’t you listen? Hold on.”
Another voice, smooth and friendly, said, “Hey there, fruit fly, what’s your pleasure?”
“Just a guy wanting some Fruit Loops,” I said, and had to stifle a deadly serious case of the giggles. I wondered if he called his house a fruit stand. Or if he ate Fruity Pebbles, or wore Fruit of the Loom.
Dammit, don’t blow it.
“That all depends,” he said. “Feel me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where you get my number, chief?”
I thought quickly. “Some guy I met in a bar, said he felt bad about cheating on his wife so he gave me your card.”
He laughed. “Yeah, he’ll be back, dumb motherfucker. Fat guy, right? Bald? Some kinda lawyer?”
He might have been trying to trick me, so I met him halfway.
“Honestly, I don’t remember too much, but he was fat, yeah. He could have been a lawyer, sure.”
“Uh huh. What’s your name?”
Without thinking about it, I said, “Bo.”
“Well, Bo, you got a place you like or you wanna come by the fruit basket and pick something shiny for yourself?”
No, please, make it stop!
“Uh, one second—ahem! Hold a second, just one second.”
I held the phone away from me and cupped my hand over my mouth, shaking with laughter. It had to be nerves. Worst case of giggles I ever had.
“Sorry, I’m back. Yeah, I have a place, but it may be a haul. I’m out in Centreville.”
“No worries, fruit fly, we deliver—for a price. Where you staying?”
I heard him ask someone for a pen.
I gave him the address of a Holiday Inn near my apartment and told him I could meet my lucky date in the bar at nine. I gave him Sean Powers’ description so he wouldn’t notice me when he arrived.
“Oh, one other thing,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“The guy who gave me the card said you had a girl working for you named Anna. Blond hair, real pretty, some kind of exotic dancer.”
“What about her?” he said warily.
“Any chance I could get her?”
Silence on the other end. For a second, I wondered if I’d been disconnected.
“Well,” he said. “Anna’s kind of new, so we’ll have to see. The man who gave you that card, he tell you how much this is, right? We’re a premium service. Anna’s a little more, and don’t ask how much on the fucking phone, okay?”
“Don’t worry, he told me.”
“Good. See you later, fruit fly,” he said, and hung up.
For some reason, I didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
Chapter 7
I called in sick and said it was bad, and not to expect me in tomorrow night either. Brian was smart. By now, the developers would have fixed the problem with whatever had brought down the mail platform, so he should have an easy night. And in the end, there was always Sean to fall back on. This was good preparation for Brian because my plane left for the Bahamas on Sunday.
Shortly after seven, I arrived at the bar and took a corner booth. I didn’t order anything with alcohol because I wanted to keep my edge. It was Friday night, but the place wasn’t busy. With the nation’s capital twenty miles away and Arlington even closer, people only came to Centreville to sleep or watch TV.
At ten minutes to nine, a black guy big enough to raise eyebrows at Ripper’s Gym walked in with Anna. He stared around the room like he wanted to beat it up. His eyes strafed past me, looking for a fat guy with a goatee. Then he took her by the arm, found a seat near the entrance, and sat watching the doors. Anna sat across from him facing my way.
Anna had changed since our days at the mansion together. Her blond hair, once long and straight, was now teased-out beyond all sense of proportion. And that sense of fun I remembered from our nights together was gone completely. Worse, the scary armor she wore during the day was missing, too, and looking at her, I could tell she needed it now more than ever. The whole time, she sat in the booth staring into her lap, not saying anything. When the bartender asked whether they wanted anything, the big guy said, “Water,” in a loud, mean voice that made me think he wasn’t Fruit. When the bartender asked Anna if she wanted anything, he said, “She don’t want nothing, okay?”
A few minutes later, the bartender came by my table.
“Hey,” I said, low enough so it didn’t carry. “Can you do me a favor?”
“What’ll it be?” he said.
“You see those two over there? The guy and the girl? Don’t look—yeah, you know who. That big guy’s her pimp and she’s basically his prisoner. If you call the police, she’ll say she’s not.”
The bartender sort of froze up on me. “Uh, okay. I don’t…”
“You don’t have to do anything, just keep cool. I’m taking her out of here, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call the cops until we’re gone. Just wait a few minutes, that’s all.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want any trouble. You need to go.”
“I plan to,” I said. “Here’s a tip—for the Coke.” I dropped a hundred dollar bill on him and watched him gape. “Wait before calling the cops, all right?”
He gazed at me, torn between greed and his common sense. Then he nodded.
Careful not to draw Anna’s attention, I made my way to where she and the thug were sitting. When I was halfway there, Anna glanced up. The way her eyes widened, I could tell she recognized me. I held a finger to my lips: shhh.
From my right jacket pocket, I pulled out the M26 taser I’d bought but never used and fired two darts into the big man’s exposed side, delivering 50,000 volts of non-lethal technology to his nervous system. He seized up, muscles locked, and made a long vibrato scream before flopping forward. I’d hoped the one cartridge would knock him out like it always did on TV, but it didn’t. So I popped on my other cartridge and tased him again. This time he flopped around even more and knocked the table over onto Anna, who curled up for protection.
I shoved the table back and grabbed her hand. “Come on!”
Anna left with me, casting a last, furtive glance back at the thug. I did too—he was drooling white froth from his mouth, and I worried I’d killed him. I hoped not. That was one door I never wanted to open.
I didn’t want to take her to my place, so I got on the toll road and headed east, toward Great Falls. Along the way, Anna kept to herself, withdrawn like she was at the hotel bar. I had this vague notion I should both say something and keep quiet at the same time, so I compromised.
“You want some music?” I said. “I have a few Ramones CDs.”
“Who?” Her voice came out in a half-whisper, hopeless and lost.
“Never mind.”
When we pulled into Mrs. Swanson’s drive, Anna’s head popped up in horror.
“Turn around!” she said.
“What? Why?”
“I can’t go back there, he’ll think I’m awful,” she said. “Just please, take me to your place, okay? Please?”
Wondering who she meant by he, I turned around. I must have heard her wrong. If I were in her condition, I wouldn’t want to face Mrs. Swanson either.
I couldn’t take her to my place because it was filled with things I’d rather she not see, like the four different cutaway safes I practiced dial manipulation on. Then there were the mounted lock assemblies I used to hone my lock-picking skills. Bad enough I had to hide them during the day, in case a maintenance man came by to fix a leak or do a surprise pet inspection. Leaving Anna there alone was out of the question.
“Where are we going?” Anna said.
“My buddy Ted’s out of town for a few weeks. He won’t mind if you stay at his place.”
“So you don’t want me either,” she said quietly.
“Huh? Oh, no, it’s not that. It’s just my house is a mess and T
ed’s is closer.”
I thought she’d stopped thinking about it, but then she said, “Why do you have a key?”
“I’m supposed to check on it every week, but with you there I won’t have to.”
Anna looked uncertain. “You sure he won’t mind?”
“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Ted’s not all that excitable.”
I wasn’t making fun of her. But it was kind of funny, putting it that way, and yeah, I knew I’d go to Hell for it.
Ted’s apartment was in Chantilly, which was pretty close to my place in Centreville. When we pulled into the assigned spot and parked, Anna began crying.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Fuck no!” she shouted. “Why’d you shoot him for? Are you crazy?”
“Anna, I didn’t shoot him—I tased him.”
“Twice! He’s gonna be so mad, and Fruit will find us and kill us. Why did you do that? Where the hell did you come from, anyway? It was that woman, wasn’t it? Aw, Christ.”
This was why anything to do with Mrs. Swanson was best avoided if you could solve the problem yourself. She didn’t believe in half-measures. I guess I didn’t either.
“You know it was,” I said.
Anna let out a string of curses. Her vocabulary hadn’t improved since our days together.
“Hey,” I said. “At least you don’t have to do all that … you know, anymore. Right?”
She gazed at me with something like wonder. “Bo, you’re sweet and stupid, but you don’t know shit. Sorry, but it’s true.”
That summed me up, all right. I got out and opened her door like a regular gentleman.
When we got to the apartment, Anna said, “You’re sure this is fine?”
“Absolutely.”
Inside, the place was the same as I remembered it—covered in dust, but otherwise neat.
“Give me a minute,” I said. “I need to go check the mail.”
The only mail Ted got was check stubs and advertisements, though I always watched for anything personal or unusual. If anyone found out Ted had been somehow resurrected and healed of his afflictions, it’d ruin everything.
