One Ghost Per Serving (10 page)

THE LAW FIRM OF MARGOT, CHICKEN & DAVIS: OFFICE OF MARK BOLLWORM, ESQ.

“Hey Mark, aren’t you friends with this guy that we saw working at The Buckhead?”

Mark rested his hand on his paperwork. Striped Tie held up the Jamesville Tribune. Chronograph joined him.

“It actually says he used to work here. Is that true?” Striped Tie laughed derisively.

“As a paralegal,” Mark said, moving a paper to a different stack.

“He get hooked on drugs or what?”

Mark stopped trying to write his motion. He wheeled back from the desk. “He wasn’t on drugs.”

“Crazy?”

Mark hesitated for a nearly imperceptible second before shaking his head.

A third associate stepped inside around Striped Tie. “You guys read this piece in the Trib? Can you believe we used to have shot boys here? I don’t know if that’s disturbing or awesome.”

“He was a paralegal then,” Mark repeated, “not a shot boy, and would have become an attorney. Get out, all of you,” and wrangled his colleagues out the door. “What are you luddites doing with a paper Trib, anyway? Is this 1995?” Mark shut the door against their reply and returned to his desk with the paper.

He read,
During college, Snackerge interned at the law firm of Margot, Chicken & Davis until he was fired over a robo-signature scandal and blacklisted from the field. Soon after that, he lost his scholarship and disappeared.

Mark touched his shirt collar and rubbed a tiny cross between his fingers.

SAMMY’S DINER & INDOOR SHOOTING RANGE

The manager of the Jamesville Drive-In Theater left the money on the counter and took his jacket from the back of the leather stool, leaving a shabby, hot sauce-stained copy of the paper. The owner, Sammy, turned the paper around with the tips of his calloused fingers and peered down at it through his bifocals.

“Something interesting?” the morning shift cook asked.

Sammy picked it up and skimmed the article. “Somethin’ about Snackerge.” He breathed loudly through his nose as he read. “Ah, now that’s too bad. I didn’t know that.”

“Know what?” The cook laid bacon flat on the grill, where it sizzled.

“Kid’s had a rough go of it,” Sammy said. “I just took him at face value as the most naturally gifted short-order cook I ever seen.”

“Hey!” the cook said.

“What?” Sammy scratched his beard growth with his knuckles. “Take it like a man and learn from it. He’s a maestro, especially in a team. He’s damn fast. His plating is top-notch; I see the disappointment in my customers’ faces when they get a plate done by anyone else. They can tell. And he’s real creative when we’re out of somethin’, when we have too much of somethin’. He has the nose of a rat and the taste buds of a catfish.”

“I’ll let him have that dubious distinction,” the cook said.

“And he’s looked at contracts for me, caught some things I never would’ve noticed. Saved me from a nightmare lease.”

“Good for him,” the cook said with some sarcasm.

“I don’t know about that,” Sammy said, and looked down through his reading glasses to read out loud from the article: “Unable to obtain work in legal support following the scandal, especially after a year he couldn’t account for, Eric returned to Jamesville one day and found jobs at The Buckhead as a shot boy, and at Sammy’s Diner & Indoor Shooting Range as a short-order cook.”

The cook blew a raspberry and got more eggs from a carton.

“The
best
short-order cook,” Sammy mumbled. He took off his glasses, which dangled from a chain on his barrel chest. “It’s too bad, what happened to Eric.”

“What happened to him?” the cook said.

“No idea, but getting fired over some scandal, that didn’t help.”

FROZEN PIZZA DELIVERY TRUCK ON LINGONBERRY STREET

Eric paid $35 for the used freezer, and the lanky seller with muscular calves helped him put it in the bus.

“What do you have in mind for it?” the seller asked, probably checking to make sure that the answer wasn’t something he would need to report to the police, or worse, get in on that action. He treated Eric as an unstable element until proven otherwise.

“I need a place to store my yogurt,” Eric said.

A grin spread across the seller’s angular face and he pointed from the hip like he was drawing a gun. “You’re Taffy’s Dad?”

“Well, yeah. How did you know?”

“I teach phys-ed, when I’m not selling frozen pizzas.”

“Oh? How’s Taffy doing in phys-ed?”

“She’s like a monkey with the ropes, but not so keen on the group thing. Demon at soccer, but I can’t get her to join the team. Born maverick.”

“How did you know she was my daughter?” Eric knew it couldn’t have been the ‘born maverick’ part.

“The article.”

“What article?” Eric said.

The seller held up a finger. “I think I still have it on the counter. Hold on a sec.”

The seller returned and gave the paper to Eric. “Keep it. Already did the Jumble.”

Eric returned to the Princess, sat in behind the wheel, and read the article.

What lies in store for Jamesville’s disappearing act Eric Snackerge? Will he be in his sixties, still wearing his work uniform of suede short-shorts, laced vest and antlers, getting pinched on the butt by eighty-year-old ladies, working a late-night shift at Sammy’s, pushing a plate of pancakes and eggs out of a short-order slot? Watching TV alone in his bus, playing that old record of mistakes in his head, wishing he could have done things differently but being powerless to change them? Wishing his wife and daughter would occasionally remember his existence?

Eric lowered the paper. His blood had turned cold. He sat there so long that the seller was startled to see him when he took his garbage to the curb.

“DZ.”

“DZ?”

“DZ!”

“What!”

Nathan resorted to jumping up and down in front of the Galaxy Force cabinet until DZ turned off the machine.

“What is your panic?” DZ said.

“You have to read this now,” Nathan said, holding out the Jamesville Tribune.

“Read it to me.”

“You’re joking.”

“Just read it to me, will you? Is that too much to ask?”

“You
do
know how to read, don’t you?”

DZ refused to take the paper, so while DZ pretended he was still controlling the game, Nathan read out loud from the article: “‘I saw Eric Snackerge buying cartloads of Quantal Organic Yogurt, which currently has an Amass-and-Win contest on their foil lids. Though nothing in his recent background after his disappearance suggests that he is capable of achievement beyond showing up to work on time in a consistent manner, Eric intends to win this contest. I had to ask myself why this was so important to him. Perhaps he wants to assuage his burden of failure and lost potential. Perhaps he believes that winning the grand prize will somehow make everything okay again. Only Eric Snackerge knows, but he won’t stop until he wins that contest, or gets darn close.’“

DZ maneuvered his tall body out of the cabinet. “Crap.” He strode to his workstation, typed quickly, and brought up a new program.

“What’s that?” Nathan asked.

“Nanosensor controls. We’re using so-called smart packaging for this brand, and the nanosensors monitor and report from the food,” DZ said, popping a candy in his mouth.

“Really? From the pudding?”

DZ went pale and glared at Nathan. “It’s not pudding, it’s
yogurt
. Yogurt!”

“Sorry, my mistake.” Nathan put up his palms to appease.

“Don’t call it pudding.”

“Understood.”

DZ took in a deep, shuddering breath and pressed his eyes shut. A few seconds later, he snapped into action again on the keyboard. “We designed the contest to be unwinnable, but I don’t want to take any chances. I’m activating the hyper-directional sound so the next time this Snackerge joker gets within a few feet of any of the deployed containers, he’ll receive a nearly subconscious message,” he typed again, “telling him to give up pursuing,” he typed some more, “this contest.” DZ stood upright and cracked his back. “It should drive him mad. Maybe he’ll check himself into a private hospital for treatment. Ha, maybe he should do that anyway.”

DZ moved to the kitchen and made himself several tiny cake doughnuts with the small donut machine that resembled his panini maker. “I need info on the family,” he told Nathan through a mouthful of cake. “Wife, kids, relatives, in-laws, friends, coworkers, pets. I want to know where they live; what they do, and how much they make; where they go to school and what their grades are; where they shop for food and how long it takes for them to get to their preferred store; what store discount cards they use.” He wiped the back of a hand across his forehead. “What products they use, everything from chewing gum to fiber substitute to lubricant. Bankruptcy, divorce, mortgages, liens, titles, how they vote, what church they attend, what they read. Anything and everything.”

Nathan didn’t move.

DZ swallowed a piece of donut. “Why aren’t you writing that down?”

“Because I’m not going to do that,” Nathan said.

“Why not?”

“(A), I don’t want to and (B), I’m busy doing stuff that keeps us operational. Get your flunkies the enchanters to do it.”

DZ made a jazz-hands gesture. “Fine, I’ll do it myself if you’re going to be such a diva about it. The enchanters may know how to imbue spirits into a food product, but they couldn’t find their own asses with a flashlight and a GPS.” He stalked off to his office and slammed the door.

Nathan wondered if being diligent about accounting and keeping on top of vendor contracts could possibly be considered diva-ish behavior. He settled on ‘No.’

Ed Fellier, regional legend in the HVAC field, had been dead almost exactly one year. He had enjoyed bird-watching, woodworking in the garage, painting in watercolors, and square dancing, in roughly that order. But most of all, he enjoyed raising his daughter, Willa. He had named her after the great engineer Willis Haviland Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning, and brought her up to continue the Fellier legacy. She had not disappointed him. When he died, Ed left Willa a tidy, painstakingly maintained two-story house with original nineteenth
-
century woodwork, plank floors, stained glass, and fireplace; some family he had never much liked; and the challenge of carrying forth the Fellier HVAC legacy.