They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (10 page)

"Is that Lee?" Tracey asked.

I checked the message. SHE'S A BITCH, ISN'T SHE? YOU CAN KILL HER WITH A THOUGHT, RIGHT? YOU SHOULD DO IT.

I glanced up at Spencer, who glanced up from the tabletop at me for a second. Little creepy shit.

"It's not from Lee."

"Dammit. Okay. Okay. We'll try to find a workaround without your friend. Fine. We're trying to
avoid
having to bring in anyone else for this job, anyway, right? We're already getting my girl Rosemary to do the remote sense for us. We're not trying to figure out how many different people in the world we can bring in that could do this instead of us. So what other ways can we do this with the three of us and,
at most
, two others? Forget Lee for now."

My phone buzzed again. DO IT. KILL HER NOW. I HATE HER.

"Will you turn your phone off?" Tracey snapped at me.

I turned it off and flashed a scowl at Spencer. "I think we're making this a lot harder than it has to be--" I started to say, but
Tracey cut me off mid-sentence.

"Is there anybody out there who, like, can do several things combined?" she asked herself loudly. Jim rattled some names off of a secured FBI Post-Human catalog, but Tracey shot them all down. "We need Lee for this," she said, rubbing her temples. "He's supposed to be good at creative B&E. We need him here, where the fuck is he?" So she was gonna put this all on him and make it his fault she couldn't come up with shit. That was fucking Tracey to a T.

She slammed her purse on the table and dug out her phone. "You guys take a break. I need to make a call. Keep trying to get in touch with Lee."

Spencer and I stepped out of the conference room. I headed my ass straight out of the building, pack of smokes in hand and lit one up as soon as I hit fresh air. I made my way over to the fire a
nd water show on the lakefront.

The jets of fire shot upward for an audience gathered around.

I texted Will on my phone: THIS IS BULLSHIT.

He buzzed back: U GET $ YET?

NO. THAT GIRL CALL U YET W/UR $?

Buzz. N.

I let that be my 'I told you so.' ANY NEWS ABT THE FIRE?

NTHNG NEW. NO COPS @ MY DOOR ETHR.

I punched in: NVR AGAIN....FIND A JOB.

IS UR WRK H
I
RNG?

Well, that had fucking backfired. If he only knew. NO.

"Hey," Spencer said behind me, startling the shit out of me. "Want to hear something funny?"

I texted Will LTR and put my phone away. "Stop texting me in there, all right? You're gonna get us both sent to the fucking Pacific."

"She'll never know. She's too busy trying to pull her head out of her ass. Want to hear something funny?"

Christ. "Sure, man. What."

His eyes lit up. "I was in the middle of a major instance playing
World of Warcraft
in there that I've been planning and getting set up for three days. Some asshole has ganked one of the characters in my party five times and he keeps rezzing out in BFE and can't get back to rest of them. Everything's going to fucking respawn by the time he gets back there. So I found this asshole's IP, got his name, social and address; I put a worm on his computer that'll crash his system, wired half his savings to an Al-Qaeda bank account in Pakistan, vandalized three Fortune 50 homepages from his computer and added him to the National Sex Offender Registry."

Why the
fuck
did I talk to these people? "For killing yo
u in a video game?" I clarified.

The joy fell off his face when he didn't get my approval. "Yeah. He's an asshole. If he's like that online, he's worse in real life." He got quiet before he came up with, "Is your friend having problems with his girlfriend or something? She owes him money?"

I shoved him away from me. "Leave my phone the fuck alone. Stay out of it and out of my shit. Stop messaging me in the damn meeting, don't touch my fucking bank accounts, none of my shit, or I will hunt your ass down, do you understand me?"

His posture shrank. "Okay,
Donald
. I won't text you in the meeting. Tracey's about to send you a message," he said, th
en walked off. The little shit.

My phone buzzed again. YOU SHOULD KILL HER - JIM.

Fucking
asshole
.

The phone buzzed again, this time from Tracey: I FOUND LEE. GTF BACK HERE ASAP.

Easy Doesn't Live Here

Will picked m
e up at the Cincinnati airport.

On my flight home, I got asked several times by a steward to please keep my voice down after I'd had more than a few drinks during my layover and decided to voice my opinion about the plane sitting on the runway for an hour. Clive Kimball almost got his ass ejected from the plane and left in Chicago. He also talked a nice old lady's ear off about this bitch he used to be fuck buddies with that was a total cunt now.

I threw my suitcases in Will's backseat, put the window down and lit a cigarette, blowing the delicious smoke out into my Ohio air. Will pulled out right in front of an airport shuttle.

"I
just
got back and you're already doing stupid shit?"

"Settle down, Francine. I had plenty of room." He said this as he roared the car up to fifty in a twenty zone. "Hell, I should have let him hit us so you could sue and get some money out of this trip. Call that guy on TV. 'I'll fight for you . . . and I won't quit. Period.' Jackass."

I exhaled smoke right in his face. "Huh? I wasn't listening."

"Man, blow that shit out the window." He took a sip from the beer he had in his lap. "You need to call that dude and hit him up for the cash you lost because of him instead of taking it out on me."

"I'm not gonna call him."

"Want me to drive to St. Louis and beat his ass?"

"I want you to drive in a straight fucking line if that's possible."

Tracey turned up that Lee hadn't come back to the meeting for a good reason. He had gotten drunk on a bottle of Patron from the conference room Sunday night and t-boned his car into a minivan at two in the morning. He had priors and an outstanding warrant in the state, so after the fire department cut him out of his car, he resisted arrest, every dog within half a mile that wasn't fenced in came to attack the cops, and Lee was tazed into unconsciousness so they could throw him into a holding cell at the Hollister Police Department. They weren't talking about him being Post-Human, even with the dog thing, he had apparently been able to keep that under wraps during his ea
rlier arrests, but every minute
he stayed in custody was another minute for them to find out and call the SCEIA and their psychics.

Right off the bat, Tracey started her shit about 'dealing with Lee's situation.'

I was fairly Scotched-up by that point. "Tracey, just cut him the fuck loose from this group. It was a DUI. There's nothing for them to get suspicious about. He's not gonna tell them shit."

"Are you fucking high right
now?" was her response to that.

"Don't fuck with him. Or you and me will have problems."

"We already have a problem. Lee knows way too much about all this to be talking to cops."

"He's not 'talking to cops,' he's sitting in a fucking cell. Just, fuck, Tracey, just take my fee, all right?
Take my fee," I dug out the thousand bucks she had given me the day before and put it on the table. "Here, take your money back, take my $5500, shit, take whatever my cut would have been for the job.
Leave Lee alone. Add that
money
back in to your budget to make it work, but leave him alone. I'm telling your right now; leave him alone."

She scooped the hundreds up off the table and recounted them like I had fucking shorted her. "I'm
not paying his bail," she said.

Damn
bitch
, man. "Fine. Take it his bail out of his share of the job and his fee."

"If you're prepared to vouch for him, then that's where we are."

"I'm not--for fuck's sake, just leave him alone. Don't fuck with him.
That's
where we are. Don't turn this into London."

"If that's what you want, Don."

After that, she
still
couldn't shut the fuck up about Lee and kept going on about the whole thing. Just making shitty comments under her breath about him and all kinds of crap. We got into a shouting match, and I finally left telling her to go fuck herself and slamming the conference room door. I had already told her how to deal with the fucking vault door. They could figure the r
est of the shit out themselves.

Not even twenty steps out the fucking door, and she texted me that she would be in touch as to what my part in the job would be, which she would have to figure out without me because I had decided I was 'too good to help plan.' I walked for two hours, probably muttering with rage like a crazy homeless person, trying to calm myself down. I just stayed in my h
otel room until my flight home.

Will put us on the highway back north, tailgating the fuck out of people. "Are you really not gonna tell me what the job was?" he asked like it was inevitable I
was gonna spill my guts to him.

I ignored him.

"Just give me a hint."

"Shut the fuck up."

"Just tell me."

I flicked my cigarette at his face, "No, dick."

"You owe me, man. I'm driving your ass around and staying on stand-by to help you out for days. And you won't even tell me about where you've been living it up while I did that?"

Fucking Will and his damn pouty shit. "I'll tell you to go fuck yourself and shut up. Y
ou pick which order you do it."

He dropped me at my place and stopped answering my calls after that because he was too busy sulking like a kid.

I went back to work and started hitting this bar by the factory before I went home every day. Four days after I was back on the line, I got called into some shit meeting about my breaks getting too long and my errors spiking since I had taken bereavement time for my 'aunt's funeral.' Helen from HR thought I might need to see a grief counselor. I played along and tried not to look irritated with the whole thing.

A week after the meeting in Branson, drinking beer alone at my place became a nightly thing after I came home from the bar. I kept searching the Internet for stuff about the Wilmont fire, checking to see if Lee's name came up in an obituary or anything and searched Tracey's name with nothing coming up about her from anywhere.
Every time
I heard people pass my door, I turned down the TV because I thought it might be cops about to battering ram it down. Will didn't return my calls or texts, and I still hadn't heard shit from Tracey about the job. I didn't care if she included me or not but the not knowing was killing me. I texted her about it but she didn't text me ba
ck.

Nine days after Branson, a knock came at my door at about eleven o'clock at night. I turned down the basketball game on TV and set my beer down. This was it. This had to be it. But on the other side of the peephole in the door, some bald, hairless, tattooed Hispanic kid in shorts and a wife beater with a fat duffel bag slung over his shoulder stood alone in the amber circle of the security light on the wall. He kept looking around like a bird.

"The
fuck is this?" I asked myself.

I eased the door open a crack. "Yeah?"

"HeymancanIcomein?"

"What?"

"Hey, Don-nie. CanIcome in?"

The kid's bald head had been burned red by sun and wind. All his hair including his damn eyebrows had been shaved off. His hands never stopped moving and twitching restlessly. The shoes were some
kind of thick, padded, customs
they didn't sell in stores. And he talked ninety miles an hour.

A fucking speeder at my door. I hated these fuckers
more than fliers and psychics.

I did not need this shit. "Look, man, I don't know what this--"

His shoulders slumped for a half-second before he cut me off. "Rory. Rory, youknow him-m, right?"

God dammit. Even dead, Kamikaze managed
to do his best to fuck me over.

"Sorry," I shook my head. "Don't know anybody named Rory."

The kid had no patience and couldn't hide it. "I knowyouknowhim, man. Okay?" He laughed a rapid-fire cackle. "You knowhim, you know." He put his hands out in front of him and lifted one leg up like he was flying. "You know," he laughed. "He's a talkybitch. C'mon,man, canIjust come-canIjustcomein?"

"It's late, and I'm going to bed. I got to go to work in the mor--"

The kid put his hand on the door and pushed against me. Hard.

"JustcanI come in for a minute?Ijustneed to sit down for aminute. Rorysaidyouwereallright."

"Rory lied. I'm not all right. And let go of my fucking door," I raised my voice, "Before I turn this into a big scene that all my neighbors feel like they need to call the cops about."