He’d tried keeping the desk in the window but, facing the office. That spooked him too. Finally, he’d tucked the desk into the corner formed by the window and the right wall, kitty-corner from the office door. He’d still felt exposed, so he set the giant plant behind him, between him and the window. He’d recently requested a second plant, to locate strategically between his desk and the door.
The redhead scrutinized his cornered desk, the plant hiding behind it and the half empty bookcases. He sensed from her the same detached disgust his mother had displayed when visiting his first college apartment. But this woman was Geo’s age—mid-thirties.
He suddenly felt schlumpy. It struck him how difficult it is to make a good impression when you’re sitting down. She’d no way of knowing that at six feet, he nearly matched her remarkable height. She hadn’t gotten close enough to see his green eyes—eyes the girls all squealed about—hell, she hadn’t even shaken his hand.
Her eyes met his. “Is somebody trying to kill you? Because this—” she waggled a finger in the direction of his desk—“is very uninviting.”
First insurance, now feng shui.
Geo’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. “I’ve got a lot to do,” he told the woman, checking the number. “So if you want to leave your little flyers or whatever….” The caller ID came up unknown name but he recognized the 323 number as Kate’s, which meant he didn’t want to answer it.
His attention returned to the sexy redhead. “I’ll call you if I’m interested, how’s that?” He tilted his head so that a lock of his dirty-blond hair fall into his eyes, and tossed a toothy smile most women found alluring. He was considering giving her his business card. His other business card.
I could use this woman, he thought. He’d never seen a tall girl so well put together. Usually they were obese or the opposite extreme, all bandy-legged with linebacker shoulders; human hangers. This one would have made a perfect Venus model No, better: Her breasts were good and round and large. And that hair. Imagine it let loose! A man could get lost in that hair.
She leaned against his desk, crossed her arms, and gazed at him evenly. Geo could smell her, a blend of leather and expensive cigars. And sex. His cell phone buzzed again. Same number as before. When he looked up from the display, the woman’s violet eyes caught and held his.
“I won’t countenance being tailgated,” she told him.
“Countenance?”
“Tolerate.”
Her voice remained smooth; deceptively edgy. “Running your Jeep into my vehicle would be equivalent to driving into a stopped train. If you’re going to continue to drive like that, I’m hoping you’re insured.”
Geo recognized her threat, like an offer he couldn’t refuse. But he also liked the way she looked and smelled, and the impossible purple of her eyes. Even her threat kind of turned him on.
“This is Los Angeles,” he said in the low monotone Kate hated. She called it his Dad Voice. “Everybody tailgates.”
“Not me they don’t.” The woman purred. She stood, strolled to the threshold, and shot him a wicked, challenging grin.
Then she was gone.
His cell vibrated a third time. A different number appeared on the screen and the name Anteaters Thrift Shoppe. What had Kate done, shoplifted? Literally shopped till she dropped? Dead? Geo should be so lucky. He sighed, then flipped his phone open.
As soon as he said hello, Kate came at him with her upspeak. “I understand that we’re in the process of breaking up? And I know you want me out of the apartment as soon as possible? Even though I found the apartment?”
Geo cringed at her series of “questions.” When he’d met her, it had, of course, been endearing.
He responded in Dad Voice. “What is it you want.”
“I want to know why you sent all my stuff to the thrift store!”
What on Earth was she on about? “You told me to take the box by the door to Anteaters.”
“The box by the front door. Not the kitchen door!”
Oh. That did kind of make sense.
“You did this on purpose,” she accused.
Actually, he hadn’t. He’d been trying in earnest to be helpful. While he didn’t want to live with her anymore, he didn’t intentionally want to hurt her, either. Did he? Was it unconscious? Regardless, Geo maintained his monotone. “You said ‘box by the door. ‘”
“Why would I leave a box to go out by the kitchen door? This is an example of how you don’t listen. When we were fighting before? And I said, You don’t ever listen to me? And you said, What do you mean? This is what I mean.”
Why was she calling him at work, anyway? Of course he was pretty much always at work, one job or the other.
“—my friends all tell me you’re screwing your starlets? But I said—”
And Kate had put up with that, actually. A lot of girls wouldn’t. Or his distraction. Or irritability.
“—and make you food and all the time? And make sure you have clean clothes and—”
Probably it would help if he got more sleep. But when? He couldn’t quit this job—the movies easily paid for their own production costs, but they weren’t going to pay his living expenses yet. Not after reinvestments like the new computer, and he really needed to buy lights and stop renting.
“You did this on purpose!” Kate said again. Her voice cracked and Geo knew she’d started crying. “Now I gotta buy back all my shit from them cuz they don’t believe me! You should come down here and fix this. I don’t have money and—”
“This is going to sound cold, Kate, but I don’t have time for you right now.”
He snapped his phone shut and turned it off. No more buzzing, let her voicemail and text herself into oblivion. Or at least until it took the edge off. Speaking of which….
He opened his bottom desk drawer and retrieved a bottle of Don Eduardo Silver tequila he’d purchased in Mexico. From it he poured two fingers into his coffee cup and sucked it down. Maybe in L.A. it was only three but it was five o’clock in…Chicago!
“You should really turn your desk around,” a different woman told him. “You’re going to get caught one day by someone who cares.”
Geo spun in his chair again to face Chloe, one of his inside-sales girls, carrying a stack of multi-colored files.
“Like the Baroness,” Chloe stated, trying to squelch a smirk.
Geo recovered from guzzling his exceptional tequila and coughed out, “Who?”
Chloe strutted to his desk but stood next to it, didn’t lean against it like the redhead.
“I saw her leaving your office. That tall woman? She’s the new company president.”
“Since when?”
“Monday.”
“Yesterday Monday?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What happened to the old company president?”
Chloe raised a shoulder, let it drop. “Nobody seems to know.”
“Hmm.” He considered this. Grimy. “What did you need?”
Chloe told him. But he found Chloe distracting as well.
Sales “girl” was a misnomer—she was almost thirty. Where the new company president dressed like a lawyer in silk and wool and high-heeled sling backs, Chloe had on a lacy button-down over flared pants and flat heeled, black mary janes painted with flames. A fashionable blend of cute and dangerous. A chocolate martini to the Baroness’s cellared cabernet. The Baroness was complex, refined. Chloe was ripe.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Of course,” Geo lied. “I’ll fix it.” He took the stack of folders from her.
“And I fixed the McCreery account. He did pay us. I chased that down with accounts payable and he’s back with his standard monthly order again.”
“Good.”
She pursed her lips. “You�
��re welcome.”
He nodded and sent her away with his toothy smile.
Yeah. His second job was definitely getting to him. At “the other side of thirty,” as they’d so graciously described it at his 36th birthday party, he found that less than seven hours of sleep left him fuzzy-headed and easily distracted. Geo seldom saw a bed for more than four hours. At least not a bed for sleeping.
Naked women cluttered his thoughts the same way they cluttered his life. Porn stars, even the amateurs he used, got to thinking they were really stars and behaved accordingly, all temper tantrums and bad manners. One thing he appreciated about his day job: He was the star here.
At least he had been. With the old company president. From his window he saw the Baroness—and how dubious a title was that anyway?—saw her stroll across the blacktop toward a yellow Hummer. The yellow Hummer she’d told him not to tailgate. It was parked next to his Jeep.
Geo snatched his car keys off his desk. He trotted around the U of the top floor, down the gentle curve of the wide steel staircase, past the retinal scanners and out the door.
He slowed once he got outside. Heat came off tarmac in visible waves and immediately a puddle began forming in the middle of his lower back.
“Leaving early?” he called to the amazing redhead.
“Are you.” She had her own Dad Voice.
Geo smirked.
She gave her enigmatic smile, cocked her head like a curious animal. “Did you check with Scally?”
Geo waved away both the question and his boss’s name. “Never.”
“I’ll have to take that up with him.” Still grinning, she opened the door to her vehicle.
Geo noticed the near-silence. The late afternoon heat kept the animals sheltered. Not like at night, when the air filled with the cries of night birds and songs of insects that sounded like they must be as big as a person’s head. Mornings and evening, hawks perched on the streetlamps, many of the lights too new yet to have been outfitted with bulbs. The industrial park was so actively encroaching on wildlife that Geo had once found a coyote in the passenger’s seat of his open-top Jeep, eating half a club sandwich he’d left there.
He glanced toward the hills, where graders and bulldozers sat perched in front of a large stand of trees. He’d hiked those mountains; Kate was a backpacker and knew the terrain. Sloped. Nothing too steep or treacherous. That’s what the Baroness’s vehicle was built for. Water and trenches and steep-ass mountains. But it sparkled in the drenching sunlight. Not a speck.
“How come you went with yellow?” he asked. “Shows dirt.”
“I always have it cleaned after I take it out.”
“I thought you’d tell me you had two of them. One for work and one for play.”
The Baroness’s eyes hooded almost imperceptibly, and her nostrils flared. “That would be excessive.” She shut the bright yellow door without slamming it and rolled down her window silently. “One more thing, Geo. I expect you to change your outgoing phone message. Today. Before you leave.”
Geo felt himself blush even in the heat. He’d forgotten about that message; he’d recorded it after a late night at the office with the old company president.
“You’ve reached Survivanoia’s BiiiiiiIIG MAC DADDY! If you’ve got my money, press one. If you’re calling to purchase goods, press two. Wanna see my grill? Leave a message.”
Yeah, the old company president had kept more powerful stuff than tequila in his bottom desk drawer.
Thinking of the message and the man who helped him record it left Geo smirking again He walked in front of the new company president’s Hummer. “I’ll change it from home, I promise.”
* * *
“So then what?”
“I got in my Jeep and tailgated her home.”
“Like home home?”
“Naw. Where I get off the 405 to the 101, she keeps going.”
Geo leaned back in his chair and grinned at Ed Bloodworth.
Geo thought of Ed as Little Eddie. Ed, Geo knew, considered Geo a rich, smarmy bastard. But fate had brought them together some seven years back. Now they met once a week for dinner. Often, as now, they went to I’ll Tell Ya’s, the restaurant name a play on the owner, Attalla Reznavi.
Abundant blond wood made the large rectangular room bright and inviting. Classy but friendly, not upscale, and definitely not “cozy.” I’ll Tell Ya’s had no menu; instead Attala interviewed you and told you what you would be eating.
Eddie scooped a mound of baba ghanouj onto a pita triangle. “Where’s this Baroness live?” He spoke with a hint of New Jersey accent even though he’d grown up in L.A. just like Geo.
“Dunno. Hell, I didn’t know who she was until six hours ago. She drives this car, I looked it up. It costs nearly as much as my first condo.”
“Don’t tell me it’s a—”
“Hummer.” Geo nodded. “Open top H13 Omega, in Africanized yellow, with the Exploitation Package.”
“What’s that, like the off-road package?”
“Right. And a tailgate spare carrier and chrome everything-they-make-in-chrome.”
Eddie’s brow knitted. “You kinda sound like you’re stalking this woman. Or at least her car.”
“I used to be a gearhead is all.”
“Ah, so you’re jealous.” Ed seemed pleased. “Speaking of jealous, your girlfriend—”
“Ex.”
“—called me today.”
“What’d she want?”
“Wanted me to pretend to be you and get some stuff out of hock or something?”
Geo explained about Anteaters and the box by the door. “It really was an accident.”
“Whatever.”
“Did you help her?”
“I was down in Santa Monica, there was no way I could make it on time. But I said a lot of I’m sorries and that seemed to cheer her up a little.”
Attala came to the table, smiling as always. He wore a crisp and fitted off-white linen dishdasha. The ankle-length garment’s green trim made it sporty, an image reinforced by Attala’s Teva sandals.
Usually, he started with a checklist: Are you Kosher? Vegetarian? Any food allergies? Geo and Ed were regulars, so Attalla no longer gave them this preliminary interrogation, he jumped right to the salient questions. “You are having look like good day or bad?”
Ed shrugged. “You mean by my own personal gauge, or in general?”
“Ah.” Attala bobbed his head sagely. “Yes, so is bad day from home or is bad day from work?”
“Unemployed.”
“Okay, bad day from work, non. And is end of month. Rent, non. Yes, I know what you need.” He turned to Geo. “And you sir, Mister Geo, look like what today?”
“Never better.”
“Very wonderful. Very wonderful look like for you. Okay.” He pointed a stubby copper finger at Ed. “You need fried chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy, and soda. Regular, not diet. And dessert. Apple dumpling look like is best. For the very wonderful gentleman, we bring a porterhouse and a double shot of whisky. Bourbon. Is best with the grilled cow.”
Attalla drifted off. Ed laughed to himself. “One day I’m gonna get that steak.”
“Why not just lie?”
“I tried that once. I’m doing great today, I told him. He squinted at me and said, ‘Look like liar’s platter!’ and stormed off. Had one of the busboys bring me my meal.”
“No way! What was it?”
“Mushy asparagus, overcooked liver, and instant rice.”
Geo guffawed, sipped his lemon water. “Well, maybe I can help you help yourself. You said you found a new location?”
Ed sat up straight. “Have I! Spacious house, brightly lit, hardwood floor, white shag carpet.”
“Nice.”
�
��In front of the fire place!”
The men grinned at each other.
“And,” said Ed with flourish, “a private beach.”
“All that house and a beach? How’s the kitchen?”
Eddie nodded. “Got one of those butcher block things. Real big one. You could probably, you know, use it.”
“When do the owners come back?”
“Not for three months. He just bought an island and they need to go furnish it or something.”
“Excellent. You never steer me wrong, Eddie.” Geo dug his wallet from his pants. “What are they paying you to house-sit?”
“Nothing. They felt that letting me live there was payment enough.” Ed’s tone said he conceded.
Geo fished three one-hundred dollar bills from his wallet.
“You’ll get that doubled after we shoot. And dinner’s on me.” Ed brightened at the money and the fact of a free meal. Geo smirked. “You wanna’ be in this one?”
“Nope.”
Geo clucked his teeth. “Waste of a good cock.”
Ed always turned red at sex talk. He didn’t watch porno, didn’t even like cable-friendly sex. “How come everybody has this knowledge of…me?”
“You must have had a chatty girlfriend. So how big is it anyway?”
“I have no idea.”
“Liar.”
Ed flushed to crimson.
“Everybody measures it,” Geo stated. “Especially our generation, we grew up with that candy bar with the ruler right there on the wrapper. And if you don’t measure it, you have some crazy girlfriend that does.”
Eddie stared into his water glass, stuck the fat floating slice of lemon with his fork. Geo dipped a triangle into the baba ghanouj and savored it. He had never gotten Ed to tell him, but word on the street put Ed’s endowments in the double digits. All the more impressive given his mere average height. Plus how lanky he was. Lanky and pale with a mop of unruly red hair. An actual redheaded stepchild.
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