Termination Man: a novel (8 page)

“Any ideas, off the top of your head?” Kurt asked.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said. Alan Ferguson, at least, would be easy. Men in his position were often so miserable that they secretly
wanted
to be fired. They needed to change their lives; but inertia kept them stuck. So an event like a firing—which forced them to make changes—actually came as a relief. “Let me take these with me, and I’ll present you with a concrete action plan within about forty-eight hours.”  

“That’s what I like about you,” Kurt said. “You’re efficient. An idea man. You can work out the contractual details with Beth. I don’t care what this costs, within reason, of course. UP&S is a company that deserves to be saved, and I don’t want to let a few rabble-rousers screw things up.”

I know what you’re thinking:
I’m a son-of-a-bitch, right?
After all, who else but a son-of-a-bitch would have lured a man like Kevin Lang into smoking pot, knowing full well that it would result in him losing his employment?

Let me tell you: there are two sides to every story; and not every wage-earner is motivated by a pure sense of humble devotion to his job. While I was earning my MBA at night, I spent two years working in corporate security. You hear a lot about the highly paid executives and their golden parachutes. You don’t hear as much about the employees who pilfer from their workplaces. Those who spend company hours working on personal projects. And those who pretend to be busy while they’re actually surfing the Internet. Wage thieves, in effect.

I’m not going to tell you that I’m an angel; but I will tell you this: I have never threatened anyone. I have never planted false evidence. My number one ally against my targets has always been simple freewill.

Here’s what I mean: Notice that I didn’t spike Kevin’s drink with something that would have made him fail the drug test. I asked him if he wanted to smoke pot with me.

And Kevin said yes.

Freewill.

Most of the time, I do my job simply by giving disgruntled employees enough rope to hang themselves. It isn’t rocket science. And for this, corporate employers regularly cut me six-figure checks.

Moreover, you have to keep things in perspective: At the end of the day, everyone walks away, even when they are walking to the unemployment line.

No one gets killed in corporate America.

That was what I believed prior to the job at UP&S.

*    *    *

The next morning I awoke early and checked out of the lakeside Holiday Inn that had been my temporary home for the past few days. I was still thinking about the meeting with Kevin Lang. At first he had been so determined and self-righteous, then he had been taken by surprise and crestfallen in his defeat.

Now, almost twenty-four hours after the meeting, he would be feeling vengeful, wouldn’t he?

As I loaded my luggage into the trunk of my Lexus, I wondered (not for the first time) if I would ever be gunned down by one of my former targets.

Unlikely
, I thought. My undercover identities were airtight. Yes, the FBI or the CIA would have had no trouble tracking me down; but I was safely beyond the range of a terminated corporate employee. I told myself that there was no way that one of them would be able to identify his chief betrayer as Craig Walker. Anyone with that level of ingenuity and wherewithal wouldn't have to spend his days working for someone else.

Yes, there was a certain smugness in this viewpoint; but this sort of self-complacency also enabled me to sleep most nights, without fear that someone would kill me as I slumbered.

I headed toward I-71, beginning the four-hour drive to Dayton, Ohio. Dayton was my hometown, and my operations were still based there, the constant complaints of my employee, Claire Turner, notwithstanding.

My parents and sister still lived in Dayton, and I checked on them at
regular intervals
. Filial and familial loyalty was my one redeeming personal virtue, the only aspect of myself that I did not have to constantly examine for fresh signs of corruption. There were, of course, other aspects of myself that I knew were long gone. I had crossed too many lines over the years to ever think of myself as idealistic or innocent again.

My parents’ house was located in a neighborhood just west of the I-75 corridor. This was the neighborhood I had grown up in, and memories were all around. I drove past the high school that Laurie and I had both attended, and where we had both briefly flourished. Then Laurie had been shot, and I had dedicated my life to making money. There was a little park where I used to play pick-up sports on Saturday afternoons. I noticed that two of the backboards in the basketball court area were missing hoops. Withered clumps of crabgrass had invaded the park’s baseball diamond.

I parked on the street in front of my parent’s home. The Lexus drew attention from a gaggle of youths that were passing by, their breath making clouds in the crisp wintery air. This wasn’t exactly a terrible neighborhood; but it wasn't a great one, either. Lower middle class. If you saw a Lexus or an Audi parked on the street here, you could assume that it belonged to a visitor.

The house was a row house that had been built early in the twentieth century. It had a tiny yard that my mother kept bright with rose bushes during the spring and summer. A set of chipped concrete steps led up to the front porch from the street. If you looked carefully, you could see that the house was tilting ever so slightly against the grey afternoon sky—a foundation issue of some sort. I made a mental note to expedite my next personal project: moving the three of them to a better location.

When I rang the bell, my mom greeted me as always: Like I was ten years old and needed to be told how to dress.

“How can you be warm in that coat?” she asked.

I might have explained that although my overcoat was thin, it contained state-of-the-art fibers that were very warm. The overcoat had cost me more than $400. But what would a spiel like that have accomplished?

So instead I said: “You see, Mom, I’d fall apart without you to look after me.”

She hugged me in the doorway, her hair curlers prickling against my cheeks. 

My father called out to me from his chair in the living room. His big recliner occupied the choice spot directly in front of the television. I could see that he was watching CNN.

“Who the hell is that?” he asked good-humoredly.

As always, I was aware of the oxygen delivery tubes that ran from his nostrils to the little oxygen tank that followed him everywhere. This was a key part of his emphysema treatment. I didn't know much about emphysema except what was personally significant about it for my family: It had transformed my father from an active man to a mostly stationary one who was tethered to his polyurethane lifeline.

“It's the meanest dog in the neighborhood,” I said, answering my father’s question.

The house smelled of my mom’s cooking; and behind that were the faint odors of mildew and residual cigarette smoke. There had been no smoking in this house since seven years ago, when my father was diagnosed with progressive emphysema. But Dad had smoked for more than thirty years in the house prior to that. Nothing, short of an exhaustive professional cleaning, can remove the redolence of tobacco smoke from the house of a long-term smoker.

"Hey, here comes Mister Big," my sister Laurie called to me. I was always glad to see her, and I turned around in the direction of her voice, wondering what sort of mood she would be in today.

Laurie wheeled herself through the doorway space between the living room and the main hall of the house. Her wheelchair made the floorboards creak. "How many leveraged buyouts did you manage to pull off today, hotshot?"

There was absolutely no malice in her ribbing. A lifetime ago, when we had both been teenagers, Laurie and I had been competitive about everything. School, sports, grades, our social lives—you name it. Only two years ahead of me, Laurie had been the big brother that I never had. She would call me a wuss or a jackass when I fumbled a play on the football field. If she found out that I had a crush on a particular girl, she would tell me that I had better give up, because the girl was way beyond my league. (
This remark seldom carried its intended sting, since I had a pretty easy time attracting female attention, even in high school
.)

In those days, Laurie had been a high school athlete herself, a golden girl who managed to excel on the playing field and the volleyball court as well as in the classroom. My father had raised us both as if we were his sons. Laurie was pretty but she was also tough. A lot of the local boys admired her from afar, but only a few had the guts to ask her out. She used to have this disdainful stare that would quickly send the more timid ones packing. Laurie could hold her own with anyone, even in our tough neighborhood.

I think that this was the source of our camaraderie. I idolized Laurie as I might have idolized an older brother. (
Though I would never have told her this, not in a million years.
) Laurie was a fighter.

But Laurie had not been strong enough to stop a bullet. She had been working nights and weekends at a local convenience store when she was shot. This was a year after her graduation from high school. Laurie was nineteen and she had almost scraped together enough money to begin classes at Wright State University. She had already been accepted. She had wanted to become an engineer.

Laurie would later tell me that she had known something was wrong when the young man in the ski mask entered the store. To begin with, it was July and the weather was sweltering.
Who wears a ski mask in the middle of summer?
The clock had read 12:42 a.m. Laurie remembered this because she had just checked the time when the robber appeared. Less than an hour had remained on her shift.

She could remember the young man's demand for money, and she could remember reaching beneath the counter to press the silent robbery alarm button, the one that simultaneously contacted a private security company and the Dayton Police Department.

She could not recall the shooting itself. Her doctors said that this was common; victims of violence were frequently unable to remember the last moments leading up to their attacks. “I remember thinking, ‘I've got to activate the alarm,’” Laurie told me. “And then I just freaking blanked out.”

Laurie’s shooting prompted a widespread public outcry about the problems of crime and inner-city violence—along with a lot of handwringing about the decline of American youth. Laurie’s tragedy seemed perfect for a made-for-television drama: The bright, ambitious young woman who is struck down in her prime by a senseless act of violence. The local media took the bait. For a while the
Dayton Daily News
practically adopted her, running weekly updates on her condition as she lay in the hospital. The newspaper and a local Dayton television station also promoted numerous fund-raising events that various local organizations held to defray her mounting medical expenses.

My family mostly appreciated the attention and the public sympathy. For a while it had seemed that that entire world was united to help Laurie; but fresh news stories and fresh tragedies inevitably crowded her out. Laurie was shot in mid-July, and by mid-September the rest of the world had moved on. But not us—and certainly not Laurie. We couldn’t move on.

Nor were we able to see justice done. The young man who shot Laurie had come from the predictable background of a fatherless household headed by a shiftless, drug-using mother. We never saw him punished for what he did to my sister. He was killed in a drive-by shooting two weeks after he had shot Laurie, while the police were still hunting him.

“What are you looking at, bub?” Laurie asked. “Did I spring a third ear, or something?”

It occurred to me just then that I had been staring at her, lost in my own memories.

“No third ear that I can see,” I said. “I’ve had a long drive, that’s all.”

“You’re getting old, Little Brother.”

This from a thirty-seven year-old woman who had spent the better part of two decades in a wheelchair.  You could still see traces of the old Laurie sometimes, a spark here and there. But eighteen years of being confined to a wheelchair had taken their toll. I could tell that a lot of her banter was contrived, an act put on for my benefit. Nevertheless, I admired the way Laurie handled her disability. God knows I would have had trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

“You’re two years older than me,” I reminded her.

“Yeah, but I got the looks from our parental gene pool—not to mention the brains.” Leaning forward in her wheel chair, she gave me a playful punch on the arm.

“Where are you off to next?” my mother inquired from the kitchen.

“Columbus,” I said. “So not far from here. I should be able to make it home some on the weekends.”

“Any company I might have heard of?” my father asked.

“I doubt it,” I replied. “It’s a small company that got started as a joint venture between GM and a Japanese outfit.”

“What are you going to be doing there?” Dad pressed.

“Oh, the usual,” I said. “Helping them with human resources matters. Personnel efficiency. That sort of thing.”