1 Executive Lunch

by Maria E. Schneider

  Gary nodded, but Dan knew him well enough to know it wasn't a nod of acquiescence. "Sure. But Sedona needs the exposure and experience. I'm glad you'll be there to lend a hand though."

  Now the guy found himself volunteered as babysitter. Oh goody. I was just making friends all over.

  Allen shifted his gaze between Gary and the rest of us in the room. He adjusted the collar on his yellow golf shirt. A tiny bead of sweat might have been forming just at the edge of his dark hair. His eyes finally settled on Gary, waiting for him to invite him to the conference. Of course, Gary hadn't said Allen wasn't going, he just hadn't mentioned Allen at all.

  Gary finally put down the papers he was reading and began talking to us. The meeting was a lot of numbers and nonsense, most of which didn't make sense to me. I used Allen's technique; nodded a lot and kept my mouth shut. I scribbled notes that weren't much more than doodles. Maybe they would matter someday, but I doubted it.

  By the end of the day, I still didn't know what to do about the job. I went home to my own house. It was dark, but comforting with its shiny new locks. Even better, unlike the condo, there was pasta in the cupboard.

  I tossed some in boiling water and mixed up a casserole. Normally, I'd have grilled the chicken, but I sautéed it in butter so that I didn't have to go out on the back porch with the shadows.

  I was done eating when the doorbell rang. I stared at it a while before opening the door.

  Huntington dangled keys again. "Gary called and said you were going to the meeting in Tamarron." He smiled. "I'm glad."

  I grunted. "I haven't decided to go, not exactly. Besides, I thought hiring me was a big mistake?"

  "Can I come in?"

  I didn't answer.

  He leaned against the door frame, his blue shirt and light khakis making him look like he was just another handsome guy out for a casual, enjoyable evening. "Bruce happened to be checking in with one of the local police detectives and your name came up. There's a story going around about you and a mercy call downtown."

  That was one description.

  "I guess you weren't following me after all," he said softly.

  He was too big for my doorway. I stepped away from him without knowing it. He took it as encouragement and came in, shutting the door behind him.

  I backed up another step. His black hair was just a tad long, curling slightly at the ends near his neck. His button down shirt was short-sleeved. He didn't have a tattoo. His eyes reflected an even deeper blue than usual, picking up the color from his shirt. They were not brown.

  "I came by to apologize again." He put his hands on my shoulders, keeping me in place.

  He must have noticed that I was considering running. The two of us stood like that, almost dancing, until I remembered that I needed air. I decided that I also needed more exercise. Breathing hard on short notice was going to kill me.

  He said quietly, "I'm not going to hurt you. I wasn't going to hurt you the other night either. I just want you to stay safe and following me isn't a great way to achieve that."

  "Women die of heart-attacks too, you know."

  He laughed. "I suppose." He rocked back on his heels a bit, relaxing his grip but not letting go. "I'm sorry I made you afraid in your own home. I thought you were playing detective."

  "Just because you aren't who you pretend to be doesn't mean everyone else is up to something," I blurted out.

  He dropped his hands. "What is that supposed to mean?"

  I took a deep breath. "What were you doing at Strandfrost with the bad guys?"

  His shoulders tensed. "What?"

  I didn't back down. "It was you. At Strandfrost. What were you doing there if you're so busy helping with this problem?"

  He eyed me carefully, those same eyes I kept seeing. "So that is where this started."

  "Surely you recognized me!"

  He shrugged. "Of course. But you never--" His head tilted. "Hmm."

  I waited another heartbeat. He didn't look as though he had decided to kill me so I moved back into the living room and sat down.

  He followed, but not too closely. Without making eye contact he said, "I've been hired onto Strandfrost's board to help them clean up their financial scandal. The board voted to solve this internal mess as quickly and quietly as possible, and I am an expert in financial problems. Ideally, the police would never have been involved, but the IRS happened to notice that Strandfrost's deductions for charity funds weren't being delivered to the charities."

  That didn't tell me why he had been at Strandfrost with the bad guys. "And?"

  "And I'm solving the problem any way I can," he said. "I don't want to see you or anyone else get hurt. I'm the one that will take the risks, do the real infiltrating where necessary. How I get the job done…is my business."

  He dangled the keys. "All you have to do is play executive. Stay out of dark alleys. Leave everything to me."

  The keys were alien chains that would tie me to the project. I did not reach out and take them. "It doesn't seem to me that playing executive is danger-free. Why don't I just go back to doing my old job and not be in any danger at all?"

  His blue eyes darkened. "I think that is a great idea, but the board thinks otherwise. They want someone on the inside. If it isn't you, they are just going to pick someone else." He reached out and took my hand, turned it upwards and dropped the keys into it. "All you have to do is drive around and let the board think you're doing your part. I'll take care of the real problem. You'll get paid, have your promotion and walk away clean."

  He stood up and walked to the front door before turning back. "Nice new locks." He grinned.

  I rolled my eyes. New locks weren't going to do me any good if I kept letting the bad guys in.

  After I was sure Huntington was gone, I peeked into my driveway. A shiny, new, black Mercedes SUV filled the space. My mouth dropped open.

  I looked up and down the street before racing outside to get the thing inside the garage. The leather seats were...plush. The whole package was beautiful. Sleek. And noticeable.

  If Sean saw me in the thing, he would think I had robbed a bank. Being Sean, he'd started doing background checks on anyone that had talked to me in the past decade.

  I didn't have to drive it, I just needed to get it to the condo. Well, unless I was going to keep playing this silly game.

  Chapter 15

  Gary was in the break room swearing at the coffee machine when I arrived Friday morning. As appropriate to his stature, his curses were mild. His bald head stared down into his cup at though trying to read the coffee grounds.

  "Morning," I said.

  He glanced up at me with a grimace. "How tough can it be to make coffee?"

  "That stuff will rot your guts, I've heard." I helped myself to one of the pints of chocolate milk I had stored in the refrigerator. Before I could peel the plastic lid off, Dan walked into the area. True to form, he immediately staked out the territory between Gary and myself and began talking about himself, his latest project and his progress.

  "Hey, Dan." Gary greeted the younger man without paying any attention to the patter. "You going to get in any golfing this weekend?"

  Dan nodded enthusiastically, taking a golfer's stance even though he wore penny loafers and slacks. "Sure, sure." He swung an imaginary club. "I'm playing out at Meadow Hills. Last time I played there I hit a drive off the first tee so straight you could have followed it with a laser!"

  Gary grinned and leaned around Dan to include me in the conversation. "Do you golf?"

  "Uh…"

  Dan moved in front of me before I could answer. "We should get the group together and go play a round. I'm sure that Sedona would love to join us." He never turned around. I could have choked on my milk and died, and he wouldn't have noticed.

  "Maybe our next company outing," Gary reflected. "Hey, they have golf up in Tamarron. You get your tickets?" Gary leaned over and directed the question my way.

  Not only hadn't I gotten tickets, I didn't
golf. But golfing was asking a bit much for playing the part in my opinion. "Sally said something about taking care of it," I said.

  Dan had no choice but to move sideways and include me in the conversation. By now a couple of other people were milling around. I nodded towards Bruce and Paul. Gary stepped over and slapped me across the shoulders. "If you don't play, I think you should learn. You'd love it. Very competitive sport."

  And the place where all business deals were done. It would just be my luck that Allen's thieving buddies were golfers, and Huntington would deliver clubs to my door tonight. Why couldn't I have a job where I got to make deals in dark alleys like everyone else?

  I was thinking bleak thoughts and forgot to keep an eye on Dan. From right behind me, he said, "Let me know if you need lessons. I can recommend someone."

  I jumped because he was speaking directly in my ear. Before I could move away, the oaf actually dared, in front of all those people, to goose me in the ass. I saw a color between red and hazy purple.

  With every ounce I had, I shoved my elbow through his stomach hoping like hell it didn't stop until it reached his spine.

  "Ooof…"

  I turned around to tell him what I thought of him. The look on Gary's face gave me pause. Executives did not engage in street fights. They used drawn out ladder-climbing wars to get even.

  Too bad there wasn't a ladder around. I'd hit Dan over the head with it.

  No, no. I could be professional about this. I could play polite executive and still call him on it.

  My voice squeaked, but I forced the words out, hoping for shocked innocence rather than rage. "You scared the daylights out of me, patting me on the behind like that!" Dan was not yet able to get air. "Here, quick," I rushed over to the water cooler and filled a paper cup. "Have some water."

  I tripped. Really. I mean, I don't know what I had planned with the water. I had a half-baked idea that I could force it down his throat while he wasn't able to breathe, but he was bent over, gasping for air. When I tripped, the water sailed out, soaking his head.

  He sputtered, and his face got redder.

  "Uh..." I backed up. I grabbed some paper towels from above the sink. "Let me get that."

  Okay, I should have stopped there, but I was still angry. I took a half-hearted swipe at mashing his nose, knowing it would look like I was dabbing his face, but he moved. I ended up slapping the top of his head. The towels caught in his now wet hair gel.

  He backed up a step. One of the paper towels was still gummed to his head. I reached to retrieve it, but succeeded only in knocking it sideways. It slid down the side of his face, taking his hair with it. What looked like brown, perfectly combed hair was a toupee that slid right off the top of his head and then dangled over the back of one ear.

  No one said anything. The room was deathly quiet except for Dan's gasping, and in that moment, even he stopped trying to breathe. Out of the corner of one eye I saw Turbo walk up.

  He snapped his mouth shut and moved back down the hallway without looking back. I don't know if his pants were on fire or if he was trying not to cry in public. His prize pupil, undercover agent, executive extraordinaire had just participated in a petty hair-pulling contest.

  I cleared my throat. "I, uh, do believe, perhaps I will just…not help any further." I stared at the torn paper towel in my hand, not sure what to do with it. I was still mad, but it was nothing compared to the beast in front of me. Thankfully he was more concerned about righting his missing hair than attacking. I used the time prudently and followed Turbo's tracks, moving at least as fast as he had, maybe faster.

  Huntington was going to fire me now for certain. I wasn't so sure that it was a bad thing. He was crazy if he thought I was going to put up with getting grabbed just to catch one lousy thief. "No way, no how, mister."

  Of course, at this rate, even the criminals looking to find a new contact weren't going to want anything to do with me. Huntington may as well fire me. I just hoped that Gary would at least let me go back to being a lab rat.

  I sat in my office stewing and waited for the phone to ring.

  It wasn't ten minutes before Sally knocked. Maybe they sent her to tell me the bad news. Cowards.

  She came into my office and shut the door. She leaned against it, her short auburn hair catching static from the door and dancing wildly. "Tellme, tellme!" She bit her lip and held her hands prayerfully towards the ceiling. "Tell me that you actually did cut Dan Thorn-in-my-ass' balls off?"

  My eyebrows shot up at the venom in her voice. "Well, uh…"

  She spun around gleefully. "A toupee?" Her voice was nearly a shriek. "There is a God!"

  I was afraid she was going to have a stroke from sheer happiness. "Uh…"

  "That little prick grabs my ass every time he has an excuse to visit Allen! I've complained several times and all I get is the, "are you sure?" from the morons in human resources and from Allen."

  "He does?" While the good old boy network didn't like a scene, surely they wouldn't look the other way if it were that serious. "Why haven't they done anything?"

  She took two steps forward and sat down in the visitor chair. "Allen promised to talk to him, and he did. Since then, Thorn-in-the-ass has taken to accidentally running into me. He gets close and gets his hands on me, but I can't say he actually grabs anymore."

  That didn't cut it with me. "I'd have--" I blinked and stopped. "I guess I already did that."

  She chortled happily. "I know! I want details! Details!" She leaned forward, her brown eyes full of fire. "Did he actually cry? I heard there were tears running down his face!!!"

  Her enthusiasm was rather catching. A grin worked its way across my face. "It is not funny! It was an accident."

  "Yeah, just like his little accidents. In some ways, he's worse than those thugs that came in and attacked." She shivered. "I mean, I expected it from them, or at least…" She faded off. "But every day I see Dan, and every day he acts like he's one of the boys, and I'm just here for his entertainment. You know what I mean?"

  I kind of did, but I wasn't sure I had ever felt as bad as the look she was giving me. "He's a real loser."

  She shook her head. "But he's not. He has everything. He's got a great job. He's paid tons of money, and he gets to travel all over. For a loser, he gets it all. I guess it's always that way."

  I bristled. "He'll get what's coming to him."

  She touched her pink lipstick on the corners and grinned at me slyly. "He just did, now didn't he?" Then she giggled. "They'll never fire him for something as trivial as grabbing an ass now and then. Not when he's the big finance marketing guru. But a toupee! I can't believe we never guessed!"

  "It appeared to a be a rather small one. Woven into his hair, you know?"

  Sally grinned. "A toupee! This is just great! I'm going to collect hair jokes off the web and put them up on my door. This is going to be soooo good!"

  The guy probably would have been less embarrassed had I cut his suspenders off and his pants had fallen on the floor.

  "There's this other guy," Sally gushed. "His name is Chris Ladwell. He sits down on six. Next time he comes to my office, can I call you?"

  I rolled my eyes. "No! I'm trying to get ahead here, remember?"

  "At least you have hair!"

  We busted out laughing until a knock on the door interrupted.

  Bruce had a question, and Sally used the opportunity to breeze down the hall to make sure everyone else had heard about the incident. Dan was going to have a hard time facing his co-workers for the next several weeks. Too bad. He should have kept his hands to himself.

  After Bruce left, Tam came by to help me move my things to my new office. He poked his head around the open door and said, "Jerry was going to help, but I offered instead." He smiled shyly. "Gotta suck up to the new boss."

  "Come on in." I wasn't sure I should bother to move things. They were bound to fire me later this afternoon. I looked at Tam, not wanting to tell him that I was a failure and the mov
e was off. Then again, what harm was there in moving? They could fire me here or there, it didn't really matter. "Glad...you're here to help." Tam was one of the best guys on the team, a short Asian with typical straight black hair. He was incredibly intelligent, but he had one or two nasty habits. Namely, he misplaced things. He could spend two straight hours doing a magnificent soldering job under microscopic conditions and then lose the board on the way to installing it.

  Turbo regularly did a check in the men's bathroom on three different floors to retrieve forgotten soldering tools, miscellaneous capacitors, hard drives and other paraphernalia.

  "I'll help you pack the boxes," I said, eyeing my desk trying to decide what to save.

  Tam was too quick. He dragged in two boxes and started piling pens and papers into the first box. "Nah, you don't have much stuff."

  I grabbed my laptop and winced when he put my little steeple clock on top of the other stuff in the box.

  "It won't get broken, don't worry," he reassured me. "I'm going to move one box at a time." He traipsed out into the hallway.

  I called Turbo and told him the move was underway and asked him to check the bathroom in the next couple of hours.

  He grunted. "More likely it'll end up in the lab. He tends to stop there to check on his tests. As long as he doesn't start unpacking the boxes in there, we should be able to recover most of it. Are you going to be in your new office or your old one?"

  Tam popped back in. Getting work done in either office would be impossible, and I really didn't want to talk to Turbo right now. He was bound to bring up the incident with the toupee. "I'll stop by if you need something. Otherwise I'm going to go home and start packing for the trip to Tamarron. Is there anything I need to know before I leave?"

  There was a rather lengthy pause before he said, "No, it can wait. Have a safe trip."

  Tam absently stuck one of my favorite pens behind his ear. He draped a power cord over his arm and a mouse around his neck, all while continuing to put some stuff in a box. He mumbled something about needing a cart for carrying the computer monitor and off he went to the lab.