Killer Instinct (12 page)

In the morning I slipped out of bed quietly at six, before the alarm went off. After years of getting up at six, my body was programmed. I could hear Kate’s labored breathing, from too much booze last night. I went downstairs to make coffee, bracing myself to encounter Craig, me precaffeine and thus vulnerable, in case he was an early riser. Then I remembered that six in the morning was three in the morning California time, and he was likely to still be asleep, especially after a late night.

The kitchen and dining room were littered with the detritus of the dinner, dishes and serving platters and silverware heaped everywhere. Kate and Susie had grown up with housekeepers picking up after them, and Susie still had someone who cooked meals and cleaned up afterward. Kate…well, Kate sometimes lived as if she did. Not as if I had the right to complain about it, since I don’t have that excuse. I just hate doing dishes and am a slob by nature. A different excuse.

Wineglasses and martini glasses and Grammy Spencer’s cordial glasses cluttered the kitchen counters, and I couldn’t find the coffeemaker. Finally, I located it and put some coffee up to brew, accidentally spilling some of the ground coffee onto the green Corian countertop. Concrete, over my dead body.

I heard a clinking sound, and I turned around. There at the kitchen table, concealed behind a tall stack of pots and pans, was little Ethan. He looked small and frail and like the eight-year-old he was, not the scarily precocious kid he normally seemed to be. He was eating Froot Loops from a giant soup tureen he must have found in the china cabinet. The spoon he was using was a sterling silver soup ladle.

“Morning, Ethan,” I said, quietly so as not to wake the slumbering party animals upstairs.

Ethan didn’t reply.

“Hey there, buddy,” I said, a bit louder.

“Sorry, Uncle Jason,” Ethan replied. “I’m not really a morning person.”

“Yeah, well, me neither.” I went up to him, about to muss his hair, but stopped myself when I remembered how much he disliked people mussing his hair. Come to think of it, I never liked that much either. Still don’t. I gave him a pat on the back and cleared myself a place, pushing aside a stack of Grammy Spencer’s blue Spode china plates, slick with congealed grease from the overcooked steaks. “You mind if I share some of those Froot Loops?”

Ethan shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s yours anyway.”

Kate must have bought them for Ethan when she went shopping yesterday. Her husband gets burlap flakes and twigs. I made a note to register a complaint later. I got a regular cereal bowl from the kitchen cabinet and poured out a generous heap of the carnival-colored little Os and doused it with some of the contraband whole milk from Ethan’s carton. I hoped there’d be some left after our guests were gone.

I went out to the porch to get the morning papers. We got two—the
Boston Globe
for Kate, and the
Boston Herald
for me, the one my dad always read. When I returned to the kitchen, Ethan said: “Mommy said you went out last night to avoid Daddy.”

I laughed hollowly. “I had to go out on business.”

He nodded as if he saw right through me. He jammed an immense spoonful of cereal into his little mouth. The ladle barely fit. “Daddy can be annoying,” he said. “If I could drive, I wouldn’t be home very much either.”

Ricky Festino intercepted me as I was about to enter my office. “They’re here,” he said.

“Who?”

“The body disposal team. The cleaners. Mr. Wolf from
Pulp Fiction
.”

“Ricky, it’s too early, and I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I switched on my office lights.

Festino grabbed my shoulder. “The
merger integration team,
asshole. The chain-saw consultants. They’ve been here since before I got in. Six guys, four of them from McKinsey, and two guys from Tokyo. They’ve got clipboards and calculators and handhelds and goddamned digital
cameras
. They just came from Royal Meister headquarters in Texas, and let me tell you, they left a trail of bodies in Dallas. I heard about it from a buddy there, called me last night, warned me.”

“Slow down,” I said. “They’re probably just here to figure out how to make the two organizations mesh.”

“Boy, are you living in fantasyland.” I noticed he was sweating already. His blue button-down shirt was soaked through under his arms. “They’re looking for
redundancies,
dude. Identifying
non-value-adding activities.
That means me. Even my wife says I don’t add value.”

“Ricky.”

“They say who stays and who goes. This is like corporate
Survivor,
only the losers don’t get to go on
Jay Leno.
” He took the little bottle of hand cleaner out of his pocket and began juggling it nervously.

“How long are they here for?” I asked.

“I don’t know, maybe a week. My buddy in Dallas told me that they spent a lot of time pulling up everyone’s performance reviews. The top twenty percent got invited to keep their jobs. Everyone else is deadwood to be lopped off.”

I closed my office door. “I’ll do what I can to protect you,” I said.

“If you’re here,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I be here?” I said.

“Because Gordy hates you?”

“Gordy hates everyone.”

“Except his butt boy, Trevor. If I still have a job and that douche bag becomes my boss, I swear I’m going to go Columbine. Come in here with an Uzi and do my own ‘performance review.’”

“I think you’ve had too much caffeine,” I said.

The day was long and exhausting. Rumors of impending disaster had begun to run through the halls.

At the end of the day, as I rode the elevator down to the lobby, the other passengers and I watched the flat-screen monitor mounted on the elevator wall. It showed sports news (the Red Sox were a half game ahead of the Yankees in the American League East standings), news headlines (another suicide bombing in Iraq), and selected stock quotes (Entronics was down a buck). The word of the day was “sapient.” Today’s “celebrity” birthdays were Cher and Honoré de Balzac. A lot of the guys find the elevator TV thing really annoying, but I don’t mind it. It takes my mind off the fact that I’m in a sealed steel coffin dangling from cables that might snap at any moment.

When the elevator doors opened at the lobby, I was surprised to see Kurt standing there, talking to the Corporate Security Director, Dennis Scanlon. Kurt was wearing a navy blue suit, white shirt, and striped silver rep tie, and he looked like a vice president. Clipped to his left lapel was a blue temporary Entronics badge. The Corporate Security area was off the lobby of the building—I guess because that’s where the Command Center and all the other security facilities were.

“Hey, man,” I said. “Why are you still here? I thought your interview was this morning.”

“It was.” He smiled.

“Meet our new Corporate Security officer,” said Scanlon. He was a small, froglike man with no neck and a squat body.

“Really?” I said. “That’s great. Smart hire.”

“We’re all excited to have him join us,” Scanlon said. “Kurt’s already made some very shrewd suggestions for security improvements—he really knows the technology.”

Kurt shrugged modestly.

Scanlon excused himself, and Kurt and I stood there for a few seconds. “So that was fast work,” I said.

“I start Monday. There’s an orientation and a boatload of paperwork to fill out, all that crap. But hey, it’s a real job.”

“That’s really great,” I said.

“Listen, man, thank you.”

“For what?”

“I mean it. I owe you one. You don’t know me very well, but one thing you’ll learn is, I never forget a favor.”

I joined Kate in bed after checking my e-mail one last time for the night. She was wearing her usual bedtime attire—extra-large sweat-pants and extra-large T-shirt—and watching TV. During a commercial break, she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance last night to ask you about your interview with Gordy.”

“That’s all right. It went okay. As okay as an interview with Gordy could go. He basically taunted and threatened me and tried to pump me up and deflate me all at the same time.”

She rolled her eyes. “What a jerk. You think you’re going to get the job?”

“Who knows. Probably not. I told you, Trevor’s more the Gordy type—aggressive and ruthless. Gordy sees me as a wimp. A nice guy, but a wimp.”

A really annoying commercial came on, and she pressed the mute button. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. At least you tried.”

“That’s how I figure.”

“As long as you let him know you want it.”

“I did.”

“But do you really?”

“Want it? Yeah, I think I do. It’ll be more work and more stress, but I think if you keep your head down around there, you don’t go anywhere.”

“I think that’s right.”

“My dad always used to say that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

“You’re not your dad.”

“No. He worked in a factory all day and hated it.” I was lost in thought for a moment, remembering my dad’s hunched shoulders at the supper table, the missing fingertips on his right hand. His long silences, the defeated look in his eyes. Like he was resigned to whatever crap life handed him. Sometimes he reminded me of a dog whose owner beat him every day and cowered whenever anyone came near and just wanted to be left alone. But he was a good guy, my dad. He didn’t let me get away with cutting school, and he made sure I did my homework, and he didn’t want me to live the same life as him, and only now was I beginning to realize how much I owed the old man.

“Jason? You know, you’re really good with Ethan. I love the way you are with him. I think you’re the only adult who pays him any attention. And I really appreciate it.”

“I like the poor kid. I really do. He’s kind of warped, I know, but deep down—I think he knows his parents are jerks.”

She nodded, gave a sad smile. “You identify with him, maybe?”

“Me? He’s the polar opposite of me when I was a kid. I was Mister Outgoing.”

“I mean, you were an only child with parents who weren’t around much.”

“My parents weren’t around much because they worked their asses off. Craig and Susie are too busy going to Majorca with Bobby De Niro. They don’t want to be around their son.”

“I know. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” I looked at her.

There were tears in her eyes. “We’d give anything to have a baby, and they’re lucky enough to have one and they ignore him or treat him like…” She shook her head. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Am I allowed to tell them what I think about the way they’re raising Ethan?”

“No. It’ll just piss them off, and they’ll say, what do you know, you don’t have a kid. And it won’t make a difference anyway. Besides, the way you connect with Ethan—that’s what’ll really make a difference in the kid’s life.”

“But it would still be fun to tell Craig off.”

She smiled but shook her head again.

“Hey,” I said, “I got Kurt a job at Entronics.”

“Kurt.”

“Kurt Semko. The Special Forces guy I met.”

“Right, Kurt. The tow truck driver. What kind of job?”

“Corporate security.”

“Security guard?”

“No, the security guards in the building are rent-a-cops, contracted out. This is to do the inside stuff—loss prevention, monitoring the comings and goings, whatever…”

“You don’t really know what they do, do you?”

“I have no idea. But the security director was thrilled to hire him.”

“Well, then, you did a good thing for everyone. It’s win-win, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s win-win.”

14

The next morning I unwrapped the CD box of
Business Is War!
and popped the first disk into the CD player in the Geo Metro. The narrator sounded like George C. Scott as Patton. He was barking out orders about “your battle plan” and “the chain of command” and saying, “highly trained and cohesive units with good leadership suffer the fewest casualties.”

I was so totally pumped from listening to Old Blood and Guts, the four-star general, as I imagined the narrator—though he was probably, in reality, a paunchy little dweeb with thick glasses who hadn’t been able to make it in AM radio—that I was ready to barge into Gordy’s office and just demand the promotion. I was ready to kick ass and take names.

But by the time I got to the office, I’d come to my senses. Besides, I had to drive to Revere to demo a thirty-six-inch screen for the Wonderland Greyhound Park—the dog track. Though I didn’t think the guys who go to the dog track would care about the difference between a regular old TV monitor and a plasma flat panel. I didn’t return from Revere until midafternoon, which was just as well. Gordy tends to be in a better mood after lunch.

I dragged Festino into my office and had him read over a couple of contracts I was hammering out. No one was better than Festino at deconstructing a contract. The problem was, he didn’t sign too many of them. He reminded me of how Ethan, when he was a couple of years old, had memorized this potty-training DVD his parents constantly played for him. Ethan had every word and song memorized. He became an expert in potty theory. But for years he refused to use the potty. Festino was like that. He was a genius at contracts but couldn’t land one.

“Uh, Houston, we have a problem,” Festino said. “Paperwork says ‘FOB destination,’ but they need it shipped to Florida, right? No way in hell the equipment’s going to get to their loading dock before close of business.”

“Crap. You’re right.”

“Plus, I don’t think we want responsibility for the equipment in transit.”

“No way. But they’re going to flip if I tell ’em to change the paperwork.”

“Not a problem. Call ’em, tell ’em to authorize an override, change it to ‘FOB origin.’ That way they get the equipment six weeks earlier—remind ’em that ‘FOB origin’ orders go out the door first.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good work, man. You’re right.”

I was on my way to see Gordy when I noticed Trevor leaving Joan Tureck’s office. He looked uncharacteristically grim.