Termination Man: a novel (11 page)

As I turned to walk back to my car, I noticed that a gray-clad figure had appeared in the main entrance of the factory: the security guard whose presence I had anticipated. I could see his utility belt and the security company logo on his billed cap.  He was a fiftyish man with a shambling gait and a stiffness that might have come from arthritis or lower back problems. He regarded me with curiosity, but no real alarm—also as I had anticipated.

I waved at him. Rather than coming forth to question me, he merely waved back. I would not have to deliver any excuses. Rare is the vandal or petty thief who arrives in a Lexus LS 460, after all. The guard had no doubt assumed that I was what I would have purported to be: a highly paid vendor salesperson who was verifying the location of his Monday morning appointment.

Most people, I’ve learned, blindly accept the outward reality that is presented to them.

It was Monday morning, and Shawn Myers groaned to himself as he passed through the main entranceway of the UP&S factory, responding to the security guard’s greeting with a perfunctory nod.

His footsteps echoed down the main corridor of the office wing. A woman whom he recognized as one of the office staff saw him coming. She recognized him as well; but she turned suddenly to speak to her companion, who was walking along beside her. A transparent pretext to avoid talking to him.

The people here disliked him.
Well, that feeling was mutual, wasn’t it?

Shawn was late—as usual, though he knew that no one would question him. And besides, he was only a little bit late. Entering the main office area, he glanced down at his Rolex: 8:05 a.m.

He sat down at his desk, which occupied a prominent position at the front of the room. At the TP Automotive headquarters building in Michigan, executive personnel were assigned to individual offices. Things were different here. UP&S had been modeled on the “Japanese style of management”—with all of the office workers housed in one large, open room.

He booted up his computer and checked his email inbox: There was an unread message from his father.

“
Make
sure you dedicate sufficient time to understanding the inventory report this week. All eyes will be upon you next week in Detroit.”

Shawn cursed silently.
Not the damned inventory report again!
Next week he would have to make a day trip to the TP Automotive headquarters for the monthly management meeting. There he would have to explain how the UP&S factory was performing against various efficiency and quality targets. For twenty minutes, he would be in the spotlight, and a room full of TP Automotive managers—including his father—would be his audience.

And he wasn't ready. He wasn’t even
close
to being ready. 

The inventory report was a sea of acronyms: PPM, WIP, etc., etc. It was about twenty pages long, and contained multiple columns and rows of numbers.

The report might as well have been written in Greek.
Or Japanese
, he thought, remembering once again that one of the companies that had previously owned UP&S was Japanese.

He stared across the wide expanse of the office and saw Alan Ferguson and Lucy Browning typing away at their keyboards, oblivious of the fate that awaited them. Right now they were smiling, in fact, obviously in cahoots with each other. They were probably talking about
him
at this very moment.

He knew fully what they said about him behind his back: They said that he was only where he was because his father was Kurt Myers, a vice president of strategic planning, a man who had risen through the ranks of TP Automotive over the course of twenty-six years.

Their disloyalty might have gone unconfirmed, even if it would have been suspected. But the two of them had made a fatal mistake.

Only a few weeks ago Alan and Lucy had scheduled a joint meeting with Bill Prescott in HR. Affecting the role of victims, the two of them had poured out their grievances over the new organization. Bill Prescott had dutifully listened, nodding sympathetically and taking notes, as HR managers are wont to do. He had given Ferguson and Browning vague promises to “look into the situation.”

Then Bill Prescott had just as dutifully reported the contents of the meeting to his new TP Automotive handlers. Describing his sudden revelation as a “confidential and sensitive personnel matter,” Prescott had practically scurried into the meeting room that Beth Fisk was currently using as a makeshift office.

Bill Prescott had been the personnel manager under the old GM-Takada partnership. The man knew which hand was feeding him now; and he was probably waiting for the day that he would be summoned into a closed meeting room and told that he was being let go. There were no such plans as of now—but Prescott’s insecurity about his situation seemed to have given him a desire to prove his loyalty to the new regime.
Smart man.

Alan Ferguson and Lucy Browning, on the other hand, weren’t so smart. According to Prescott, Ferguson had gone so far as to refer to his new boss as a “daddy’s boy.” Bill Prescott had stammered and looked away as he repeated this, clearly uncomfortable with being even tangentially associated with such an insult.

“It’s uncomfortable for me to tell you this,”
Prescott had said. By this time Beth had assembled the entire TP Automotive management team. “
But I thought that you should know.”

Shawn had silently nodded in response. Beth, Bernie, and his father had also been present in the meeting. He had been humiliated in front of his old man. His authority had been undermined.

Seeing Alan Ferguson now, Shawn was seized by a desire to smash the balding middle-aged man’s head to a pulp. He would use a—crowbar.

And then he recalled another crowbar from a long time ago—a crowbar covered in blood. He pushed the memory away. Those days were behind him now. No need to think about
that
.

Craig Walker would arrive tomorrow and take care of Lucy and Alan. He didn’t care as much about the terminations of Nick King and Michael O’Rourke.
In fact, he had recently struck up a friendship of sorts with King.
But wait until Alan and Lucy learned that they were being forced out. Just as soon as Craig Walker was able to deliver the goods on them.

On the subject of Craig Walker: There was something about the consultant that annoyed him—though he could not quite fathom what it was. And if Shawn wasn’t mistaken, the dislike seemed to be mutual.

Maybe the problem was that his father had taken a special liking to Craig. His father had spoken with the outside consultant in private, and had obviously taken him into his confidence.

By contrast, his father almost never shared secrets with
him
. More often Kurt was asking him questions about what he was doing, as if his father were perpetually afraid that he was going to screw up, to fall short of expectations.

Like the email he had received this morning about the upcoming monthly meeting and the inventory report.

The damned inventory report.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. Nor could he afford to put it off much longer.

For a moment he allowed himself to consider ways by which he might avoid the monthly meeting: He could feign illness, or come up with some other excuse that would require his presence elsewhere.

Then he came back down to earth: Evading the meeting would not be an option. His father would be in attendance. And his father would expect
him
to be there, and to show up prepared.

This meant that he would have to go back and talk to Lucy yet again. She had already explained the report to him twice. She would go through the motions of explaining it a third time if he told her to; but secretly, he knew, she would be mocking him the entire time.

Shawn stood. He considered all the places that he would rather be at this moment. They were many: Ft. Lauderdale during spring break, his favorite sports bar in Detroit, or the Peach Factory—a strip bar that he had discovered since his temporary move to central Ohio. Hell, even the living room couch of his rented condominium would be a vast improvement over this setting.

As he approached with his copy of the inventory report in hand, both Lucy and Alan stiffened. They tried to appear relaxed and casual;
but they gave themselves away, didn’t they?

For a moment Shawn considered the possibility of going over the report with Alan. And in almost the same moment he discarded the idea. According to Bill Prescott, Alan had been the most disrespectful and brazen in his attacks. There was no way that he could ask Alan Ferguson for help.

“Lucy,” Shawn said. “I want you to explain the inventory report.”

Alan opened his mouth to speak. But Shawn cut him off in mid-sentence.

“Alan,” he said. “I’m not talking to you. Is your name Lucy?”

“No, Shawn. My name isn’t Lucy.”

“Then why don’t you stay out of this conversation?”

Alan bit his lip and returned his attention to his computer screen. He began to tap away at the device’s keyboard, his strokes much harder than necessary, Shawn noticed.

“You mean the report we discussed twice before?” Lucy asked.

“I mean the inventory report.”

“That’s the one I meant, too.”

Shawn studied the woman before him. Who did she think she was? Lucy Browning was plain-looking and easily thirty pounds overweight. Shawn thought about some of the young women who writhed onstage at the Peach Factory, the ones who so eagerly grasped the dollar bills he tossed at their feet. He forced himself to imagine Lucy up on that stage, and considered how ridiculous she would appear. She would draw mocking catcalls and boos from the patrons—and Shawn would be the one booing the loudest, eager to savor her humiliation.

Where did a woman like this find the gall to disdain him, simply because she had mastered the intricacies of a stupid inventory report?
The way Shawn saw it, the contents of the inventory report were mere details—the sorts of details that people lower down the organizational ladder were hired to understand and maintain.

But right now these were the details that he needed. And this woman—this contemptible, overweight woman—stood in his way.

“I’m your boss,” Shawn said pointedly. “Do you understand what that means?”

He caught the flash of anger that appeared in her eyes—and the way that she quickly subdued it.
She wanted to talk back to him, didn’t she?
But she didn’t have the courage to say anything to his face—so instead she and Alan would talk and plot some more behind his back. Well, within a few weeks it wouldn’t matter what either of them did or said. Today, though, he needed her help—however grudgingly it might come.

“Of course I understand,” she said. “I’m not questioning your authority.”

“Then why don’t you do what I ask?”

“I have tried to do what you ask. Shawn, I’ve done my best to explain this to you. I’m not sure what the problem is.”

The problem
, Shawn thought,
is that this damned inventory report is too confusing, and this fat, insolent woman d
oes
a poor job of explaining it.
He felt the sudden urge to smash something. Preferably something attached to Lucy’s person.

“Well, your best isn’t good enough.”

There
, he thought.
Let’s see what she does with that.

“This report follows industry standards,” she said. “It’s the same report that we’ve been using here since the doors were opened. The managers from Takada Press and GM both used it. They had no problems.”

“Are you implying that there’s something wrong with
me
?”

To Shawn’s immediate disappointment, Lucy didn’t rise to the bait.

“I’m only telling you the history of the report,” she said.

Shawn knew that he was not going to triumph here if he insisted on a head-to-head debate over the clarity of the inventory report. He knew that the inventory report that his subordinates had prepared
was
in fact in compliance with industry standards. His father had told him as much. He also knew that a very similar report was used within all of the directly owned factories and subsidiaries of TP Automotive.

On some level, he knew that his inability to grasp the inventory report was his own fault—but not
really
his own fault. He had been backed into a corner where he was forced to deal with matters to which he was not well suited. He wasn't an inventory report kind of guy.

Shawn had always found corporate minutiae to be inexpressibly boring. During his college days, he had shied away from the heavy-duty business courses, gravitating toward the lighter classes where a gentlemanly C was practically a given if you put in a modicum of effort. After joining the management team at TP Automotive, he had continued to shy away from the nitty-gritty operational details. He was a big-picture person, he had decided. There were plenty of grunts who could be hired at a pittance to crunch numbers and strain their eyes over densely packed Excel spreadsheets. This was what the grunts had gone to college for, after all. Well, let the grunts have it. He wanted none of that for himself.