by Leod D. Fitz
Beside me, the girl made a soft, scared sound and pulled her legs tighter against her.
The manager nodded severely, looking between the two of us. “I believe you. And in a perfect world, that would be enough, but there's more to worry about here than correcting improper behavior.”
That was true. What Patricia had done was illegal. If the man chose to make the matter official, she could face criminal charges.
But if he planned to make it official, why hadn't the police been here when I arrived? And why had he sent the other girl home instead of calling for an ambulance so that the attack and its effects would be properly and professional recorded?
“I had to send one of my employees home early today. I needed her here at work. That's money out of my pocket when she's not here.”
Out of the store’s pocket, more than his.
“It's not like I can dock her pay, either,” Mr. Mount continued. “Not for getting punched out at work.”
He wanted a payout. If I had money lying around, I reflected, I probably would have been willing to pay him off just so I didn't have to listen to his ham-fisted attempts to get me to suggest the idea first.
But money has always been tight for me.
“That's a valid point,” I said, instead. “Perhaps we can work something out. Maybe Patricia can come in for a few hours a day to work it off?”
The man's face darkened. “And put her in the same building with the girl she assaulted? That sounds like a good way to wind up with a lawsuit.”
I nodded. “I see.”
We sat in silence for a few seconds.
The manager's frown deepened. He reached over and casually picked up his phone. “Oh well. Nothing to do about it but call the police, I suppose. It's a shame, though. At best, she’ll windup with quite a bit of community service, of course, and a smear on her record that could haunt her for the rest of her life. Not to mention the fine.”
I cleared my throat. “Patricia, why don't you step into the hallway for a moment so Mr. Mount and I can talk privately?”
Patricia stood up, her arms crossed in front of her, still sniffling as she headed into the hallway.
“Close the door, please.”
She complied
I drummed my fingers on the arm of my chair for a few seconds, my eyes moving from the wedding band on the manager's hand, to the silk tie around his neck, and the recent photograph of him at a theme park with, presumably his son.
I arranged my thoughts and calculated the best way to handle the situation.
Mr. Mount sat still, the phone held awkwardly in his hand as he waited for me to collect my thoughts.
I gave him my most charming smile, which, admittedly, is probably better described as a grimace. “It's a funny thing, the way the world works today. There was a time when a man in your position would know a great deal about everybody in town. You'd interact with them on a daily basis, smile as they bought groceries, ask them how they were doing as they came and went.”
Mr. Mount's eyebrows furrowed as he gave me a confused look.
“In recent years the world has shrunk in many ways, but it's also expanded. Cities have grown quite a bit. People have an anonymity that they didn't have anymore. Take us: we've lived in the same town together, probably for years, and yet I don't recall ever having spoken with you before.”
“What the hell are you—“
I raised a hand cutting him off.
“Half an hour ago I didn't know you from Adam. And you had no idea that I even existed. But then Patricia went and made a foolish decision and brought our worlds together.”
Mr. Mount was beginning to look annoyed.
“Now, if I were a man who had certain talents, I might have taken a few minutes to do some internet research on you and found out that you've been stepping out on your wife.”
“Excuse me!?”
“...perhaps with the cashier on lane four. Let's call her... Jenna.”
Mr. Mount made a short coughing noise, his face going pale.
“It isn't likely, of course. You would have had to do something stupid for me to find that much out about you that quickly. Maybe gotten a blow job within the last couple of hours, somewhere that someone with a camera might have been able to record it.”
The manager's eyes widened.
“Or I might have discovered some back door into your company’s records and found out that your store has been suffering shortages recently, while you, personally, have been spending a bit more than one would expect a man in your position to have.” That was simply a guess, based on his clothing and the photographs around his office, and the fact that a man in a position of power who was willing to extort money from a stranger was probably willing to steal money from his company as well.
From the way he went still, and turned just a shade whiter, it must have been a good guess.
“But even if I had done all of that, I really wouldn't know you very well, would I? Now, if you feel that you need to call the police and get this sorted out, I'll understand. It won’t be pleasant for Patricia, but she’ll recover. I think that the question you really need to ask yourself is this: How well do you want the two of us to get to know one another?”
Mr. Mount was dead silent for several long seconds. When he did speak, his voice was soft. “Get out of my store. And don't come back. You or your daughter, you're both banned.”
I nodded in acknowledgment as I stood.
Patricia was leaning against the wall directly across from the door as I opened it. Her eyes widened and she flinched at the sight of me.
“Let's go.”
She fell in step behind me as we walked down the hallway, rushing to catch up with me as soon as we were outside.
“I'm sorry, Mr. Walter, I didn't mean--”
“Not now.”
“But I just want--”
“Not now!”
Her voice began to waver. “I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to--”
People in the parking lot paused to watch us as we headed back to my vehicle.
“SHUT UP!”
Tears started rolling down the girl's cheeks. “But--”
I opened the door to my truck for her.
She stopped dead, staring into the vehicle as though she expected a nest of snakes to erupt from it and attack her.
I sighed. “Get in.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. She bit her lip and looked at me nervously.
I, meanwhile, was scanning the area, noticing all of the people noticing us.
“I don't want to get in.”
“GET IN THE GODDAMN CAR, PATRICIA!”
The girl's face scrunched up again as though she was about to break out in tears once more, but she stepped up and pulled herself into the vehicle.
I shut the door behind her and walked around the vehicle.
I glanced around again as I opened the driver’s side door. A woman holding her son tightly by the hand was watching us with surprise. A little farther away, I saw a man with shaggy blond hair and thick eyebrows purse his lips and stare hard at me.
Great.
We rode back to the funeral home in silence. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Patricia glance at me several times, but she managed to keep any thoughts to herself.
At the funeral home, she followed a step behind me.
Percy tucked his phone into his pocket as we passed by, and tried to look like he had been up to something productive before I showed up. “Hey, boss! You got a minute? Because I think we’ve got a…”
I ignored him and headed down the steps to the basement.
I held the door to the prep room open for Patricia, then shut it behind her.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
Fresh tears began pouring down the girl's face. “I'm sorry! I didn't mean to hit her, but she was just so mean!”
“Oh my god, that’s not— “
The girl's breath became staggered. “I didn't mean to do it... Please...
I'm so sorry... Please don't hurt me...”
“How can you--” I stopped mid-sentence and blinked. “Don't hurt you?”
“I... I... I didn't... I wasn't....”
I ground my teeth in sudden realization. Patricia's mother had not been one to spare the rod. In fact, she had seemed to be the sort to rely on the rod quite heavily when it came to correcting what she perceived as her daughter's failings.
I took a long, deep breath, closed my eyes and rubbed my face.
I climbed onto the counter that ran along the wall and sank into a comfortable crouch.
“All right, calm down,” I murmured, trying to make my voice as comforting as I could. “Relax, nobody is going to get hurt today. Just, take a deep breath, grab a chair or something.”
Patricia hiccupped a few times but managed, with the help of some slow breathing, to calm down a bit.
“Okay,” I said when she looked like she wasn't going to pass out. “I'm not going to promise that you and I will never come to blows. The truth is, you're a hunter and I'm a monster. Not to mention the whole, 'killed your mother,' thing. The time may come that you try to kill me, or I decide to eat you, in which case, all bets are off. In the meantime, I will promise you that I will never hit you because you've annoyed me, or because you've made my life inconvenient. I might yell at you, or insist that you do difficult or menial labor, but I give you my word, if I attack you, it will be because I want you dead. I won’t ever hit you because you did something wrong.”
Patricia stared at me, blinking for several seconds. “You won't?”
“I won't. Although, for the record, you're going to be cleaning the bathrooms in this place for at least a month.”
“Oh.”
Patricia still looked a bit disbelieving.
I sighed. “So, do you know why I'm upset with you?”
“Um, because I beat that girl up?”
I snorted. “Please. I don't know anything about her, and even if I did, I find the whole 'morality' thing to be a giant crapshoot.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Oh.”
“Let's start with the phone call. Why did you call me?”
Patricia grimaced and wrapped her arms around herself. “The lady at the foster home doesn't like me much. After the last fight, I got into she said that if I did anything else, she'd call the police herself and get me locked up until I'm old enough not to be her problem anymore.”
“And your social worker? She actually seems to give a crap about you, you know.”
“Yeah, but she's always busy. And she's all about following all of these rules. Even if I had called and had somehow reached her, she would have contacted my foster mother.”
“So you decided to make it my problem? Did you know that the guy would try to extort me?”
Patricia looked down, guiltily. “I thought he might do something like that. He didn't say it outright, but he sort-of suggested that if I gave him something, he'd let me go with a warning. I'm not sure if he wanted a blow job or money, but I didn't have any cash, and I didn't want to touch him. He's kind of gross.”
I sighed. “Yes, yes he is.”
“How... how much did you have to pay him, Mr. Walter?”
“Hmm? Oh, I didn't end up having to do that. We came to an understanding.”
“What kind of understanding?”
I waved the question off. “That's not important. What is important is that if you are going to rely on someone to get you out of a jam, you should make sure that you have that kind of relationship first. You and I barely know each other. I'll be honest with you: I almost didn't show up.”
“I'm sorry.”
“And if somebody does go out of their way to help you out, you might try to do them the courtesy of not making them regret that choice.”
Patricia stared at me blankly for several seconds. “What do you mean?”
“Let's start with trying to state your case inside of the manager's office.”
“But I just--”
I raised my hand and Patricia clamped her mouth shut.
“I walked in the door and the first thing you did was try to tell me your side of the story.”
“Yeah.”
“How does that help anybody?”
I could practically hear the rusty wheels in her head trying to turn.
After a moment, I decided to help her along. “If I listen to you first, what will the manager do? Will he say, 'oh, I didn't know that's how it went down, gosh this has all been a big misunderstanding?' No, he'll get angrier, probably call you a liar, and I'll have even more to deal with. You were making a bad situation worse, and you were behaving like a child.”
Patricia's mouth fell open.
“Don't look at me like that. You know it's true. Catch a child in anything and the first thing they do is try to tell a version of events that paints them as a victim. Maybe their story is mostly true, or maybe it’s mostly false, but they always want to make sure that everyone knows their side of it.”
Patricia looked like she had a response to that, but she managed, wisely, to swallow it.
“I know you wanted to tell me your side. Everybody does, but even if you were in the right, one hundred percent the good guy, noble and virtuous and all of that shit, there was nothing to be gained by me finding out right then. I didn’t walk into that store looking to be a noble defender of truth and justice. I was there to deal with a problem you couldn’t.”
“Oh.”
“And then there was your behavior on the way out of the store.”
“On my way out? What did I do wrong then?”
“What am I?”
“Huh?”
“I'm not human. What am I?”
“Um, you're a ghoul.”
I nodded. “Exactly. I am a ghoul. A monster. A supernatural creature whose existence is, and must remain, hidden. The best way for me to do that is to be as personally anonymous as possible. I don't want people to look at me twice. I don't want them to think about me after I've left, or to stop when they see me in a store and remember that time when we met. On a good day, I can travel all over town without a single person remembering that they ran into me.”
“I never really thought of it like that.”
“Which is why you probably didn't even notice how many eyes turned our way when you had your little fit in the parking lot, crying, acting like you were scared of me.” I hesitated. “I suppose, in retrospect, that makes sense, seeing as how you thought I'd be giving you the rubber hose treatment once we got back, but the point is, you drew people's attention to me. That is incredibly rude in the supernatural community. Now, the chances are pretty good that nothing will come of it, but that doesn't matter. Everything we do, every chance we take is a crap shoot. A roll of the dice. It may be unlikely that we'll roll snake eyes, but if we do, the consequences are dire. You may not have put me in a lot of danger, but you gave me one more opportunity to get unlucky and wind up dead.”
Patricia sniffed and rubbed her nose on her sleeve. “I'm sorry, I had no idea I was doing all of that.”
I let out my breath in a huff. “Anyhow, it's all handled now. More or less. We're both banned from that store, by the way. No skin off my teeth, but I don't know how much that affects you.”
Patricia shrugged.
“Well, good.” I stared at her for a minute. “Do you need a ride home, or something?”
Trish bit her lip. “Um, since I’m here anyway, what if I did some work?”
I was about to tell her how very inconvenient it would be for me if I had to spend the day watching her, when it occurred to me that there were a few things that needed doing that I didn’t have the time to do, and Percy was too lazy to bother with.
“All right. Come with me. I’ll show you where the cleaning supplies are, and you can start mopping the floors.”
Trish looked disappointed.
“Sorry, kid, most of the work at most of the places you’re going to get hired in your life will involve
doing boring, menial shit. Hell, even if you get a really cool job at a really cool place, you’ll find that a surprising amount of your time will be spent doing boring, menial shit.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
Ten minutes later I was back in the prep room and Trish was scrubbing my floors.
So, this was what it was like to hire someone who actually did what you told them to do.
A knock on the door brought my attention back to the employee who never did his job.
“What the hell do you want, Percy?”
“We have a problem, boss.”
I raised an eyebrow and waited expectantly.
Percy cleared his throat. “So, it turns out that one of Nicky’s boys, Phillip, knows a guy in the area who likes to party. Anyhow, this friend calls Phillip up looking to score, only Phillip’s out of town at the moment, so he tells the guy about us, I mean, he was trying to do us a favor…”
I made a rolling, ‘get on with it’ motion with my hand.
“… right, so, the guy comes by and I don’t have anything and I can’t think of what excuse to give, so I told him we’re sold out. He told Phillip. Phillip told Nicky. Now Nicky thinks we can move major product through this place and he’s coming by on Sunday to collect his money and talk to us about how much product he needs to be sending us to maximize profits.”
I drummed my fingers on the desk and stared thoughtfully at Percy for several long seconds.
Percy looked uncomfortable. “And I thought you might want to know that. You know, because we can’t move major merchandise. And we don’t have any of his money.”
“He’s coming tomorrow?”
Percy nodded.
“Do you know what time?”
“Late afternoon, early evening. Apparently, he spends the morning at Church, then has a big family lunch and some sort of family hangout for the first part of the afternoon.”
I grimaced. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“What are we going to do, boss?”
I rubbed my face. I knew that this was going to need to be dealt with soon, but I thought I had a little longer to figure things out. “I guess I’m going to have to come up with some kind of answer for that out in the next… twenty-eight hours or so.”
