Undeliverable (28 page)

Ben struggled not to comment on the man’s lack of tact and started a new mantra reminding himself of the short time span the man would be sitting there. “Of course. I’ll just go do her job in the meantime.”

“That’s the spirit!” Reg bent back over his notes, scribbling furiously.

Ben found Sylvia out in the shredding area, disconsolately staring at a piece of ivy stationary. “His highness is requesting your presence.”

“Mmhm.”

He waited a moment and tried again, unsure whether her noncommittal response was due to her lingering distaste for him or whether she was lost in her own world again. “What you got there?”

“Letter to Santa.”

“In the middle of summer? Ambitious. What do they want?”

“A life-size Barbie and glow sticks.” She dropped it in the shredder and clomped down the stairs, thrusting the partially emptied shredding box into his hands. “Care for a go?”

“Thanks, I’m sure.”

He watched Sylvia trudge out of the sorting room and down the hallway, then took himself up the stairs to the top of the shredder. He shook the box out, watching the paper drift down and into the grinding plates that minced the paper. Strips were apparently not good enough; this shredder ground envelopes and letters into a fine confetti. He watched the spinning wheels for a moment, trying to shake off everything from the day; Sylvia’s anger, his near-assassination attempt, Reg’s interrogation. It seemed the old adage was right, bad things come in threes.

Leaving the machine running, he grabbed three more crates in a go, dropping them at the top of the stairs to pour them into the machine one at a time. As he watched, each one was rendered unreadable, having never been read or understood. The readers weren’t supposed to read them, after all. The only person he’d ever seen actually read the letters was Sylvia.

There was a green envelope on top of the next crate, addressed in loopy script to
Poppi
from
Nina
. It was opened, and the letter stuffed haphazardly back inside after the cursory scanning of the readers. It was matching stationary with a small wren watermarked on the back.

He tried to picture the family, broken, but gave up when all he could imagine was his son’s empty bedroom. He threw the letter and envelope into the shredder, followed by the last bin of shredding and watched it all tear.

T
he rest of the auditor’s week went by in almost the same fashion. He kept the cubicle in the warehouse for himself, interviewing staff member after staff member: readers, sorters, and cleaning staff. He requested ancient files as well as reports and data from the previous few weeks.

Ben spent as little time at the Center as he felt he safely could. Since his office had been commandeered, there wasn’t a lot he could do anyway. He transferred some items due for auction into the prep bay, but he couldn’t do anything else as all of the spreadsheets and search engines were on the computer Reg was currently using. So he went home, reading and listening to all of the news about Leonard Moscovich he could get his hands on, papering his living room with this new face, a face either terrified by the mobs he was trying to push through or foolishly grinning at some school photographer’s camera.

At the end of the week, all the staff members were called into the warehouse for a final review before the auditor filed his report. First, the sorters and support staff, then the readers, and lastly Sylvia and Ben.

Sylvia’s review was at noon, right as most of the office workers were headed to their lunch break. She parked a cart from the bullpen beside Ben’s makeshift desk and proceeded to the warehouse. Ben opened his mouth to say something encouraging, anything, but she didn’t even look at him as she left.

She was gone for almost an hour. Ben had completed the cart full of entries and was eating a sandwich, waiting. He almost didn’t notice her come in, she was so much quieter than usual. After placing the sandwich on the table, he stood, brushing off his hands.

“Well?”

Sylvia just shook her head, staring at the floor and went over to the coat rack, taking down her rain slicker.

“Sylvia?”

“It went alright.” Her voice broke and she finally looked up, meeting his eyes for the first time in a week. Her mascara had run down her face and the tears were still standing in her eyes.

The anger that simmered against Reg started to boil in Ben’s head, and he started towards Sylvia, reaching out a hand to touch her face, but she pulled back. “God, Sylvia, what did that asshole say?”

“Nothing, it’s not important. I just—you won’t be seeing me for a little bit. I’ve been given a two-week suspension without pay. I’ll see you in a few days, I guess. Unless we run into each other at the market or something like that.” She turned and bolted for the door.

He ached to go after her, but he just knew that Reg would take his abandonment of the warehouse as a reason to fire him, so he sat again, slowly, and picked up his empty coffee cup, putting it back down after trying to take a sip. After his review would be a much better time to go find her, and it would give her a little time to calm down.

Reg sent him an interoffice memo that afternoon—instead of walking the ten feet to the break room or handing it to him as he went in and out with the cart—that his review was going to be that evening at six, an hour after his shift technically ended. Ben scowled at the paper, wadded it up, and threw it in the trash. That bastard had another thing coming if he thought he could break Ben’s insubordination at the last minute with tricks like that. Passive-aggressiveness only made him furious.

At six on the dot, Ben walked up to the door of the warehouse, paused, then without knocking, threw open the door.

“Mr. Grant, do you know why I’ve called you here?”

Ben stood at the front of the auditor’s desk—his desk—resenting the old, lecherous Sean Connery look-alike in his chair.

“Well, Reggy,” Ben started. Reg flinched. “I assume it has something to do with the audit and the reviews people have been getting all day.”

“Well, yes.” He shuffled his papers and cleared his throat. “Frankly, I’m surprised this place is still running. I’m certainly going to recommend an overhaul in the filing and tracking procedures.”

Snorting, Ben sat in the chair and leaned back, arms crossed. Privately, he agreed with the man, but he would rather be damned than agree with him on anything at this point. Not after he put Sylvia through the wringer like that. “And I’m certain they won’t go through. To reorg will cost money, and if I’ve learned anything this last month, it’s that the postal service hates spending money. If it works, don’t mess with it.”

The paper shuffling was a bit more erratic now, and when Reg realized it had started to make him look foolish, he put them down. “But it doesn’t work. Things are constantly going missing. There is a whole goddamn safe that is empty that should be full of things putting money in our coffers!”

“Just hold on there.” Uncrossing his arms, Ben leaned forward to lean on the front of his desk. “That was before I even got here. I haven’t lost an item since. We’re pretty sure Mrs. Biun was the one who cleaned out that safe prior to leaving, too. Have you found her to ask yet?”

The auditor wrinkled his nose and looked down. “No, not as such. But we’re looking.”

Leaning back again, Ben muttered, “Try a tropical island off of France.”

Reg frowned. “Say again?”

Ben raised his voice. “I was simply making a suggestion as to where you can put this audit.”

The glare that the auditor directed at Ben was meant to be scathing but simply came off as constipated. “Well, if talking about organization and documentation isn’t going to make any kind of difference, let’s talk about you.”

“Yeah, and what about me?”

“First, your attitude has been deplorable through this entire investigation.” Reg gave a mighty sniff and gestured at Ben’s crossed arms. “Prime example, right here. You’ve completely closed down, you’re treating me like some kind of villain, and you are incapable of taking constructive criticism.”

Ben leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on his desk. “Let’s just call that a personality conflict. Something about you taking over my space, flinging accusations, and making my coworkers cry has just rubbed me the wrong way.”

A flush of red started to work its way up Reg’s face, and he struggled to retain his control. “You were
ordered
to offer this investigation your every cooperation.”

Ben snorted. “This isn’t the army; you can’t order me to do anything.”

The auditor was almost shouting now, struggling to control himself and leaning forward to brace himself on the desk. “We pay you to do as you’re told.”

Ben shrugged and smiled. “Well, I haven’t hindered you in any way. I’ve given you access to all of my files and even tolerated working from a ten-year-old laptop. What more did you want?”

The grinding of Reg’s teeth was audible from where Ben sat. It was music to Ben’s ears, and if it was a precursor to him losing his job, he almost didn’t care anymore. It was worth it to stick it to this pompous son-of-a-bitch. “A helpful attitude would have been nice. Your behavior has made it difficult to do my job here.”

Ben stopped smiling and checked his watch. “Too bad, you didn’t get it. Let’s move on, because we’re making no headway here, and it’s after six.”

“Fine. To the heart of the matter it is.” The auditor pulled the last sheet of paper off of the stack. It was a claims form, one of the ones that went in the repackaged claims. He turned it over to show Benny’s flyer on the back. The next piece of paper was an auction receipt. Again, it showed Benny’s face on the reverse. The third sheet of paper was a return-to-sender form. And now there were three of Benny’s faces staring up at the two men.

Ben felt himself start to go cold, his heart alternately thundering and whispering in his chest. He couldn’t stand the thought of the slimy bastard having been anywhere near anything having to do with his son.

Reg was more settled now, fingers steepled, and he leveled his accusations one-by-one. “You have been making illicit copies, you have been illegally adding these flyers to government forms, you have been littering this office and the auction with these pleas for help, you have been coming in progressively later and later, and you were even reported drunk at the office one day.”

Ben tried to speak but had to clear his throat and try again. “I have never been drunk on the job.”

“Your coworkers beg to differ. Stop interrupting.” The auditor knew he finally had the advantage, had finally found the weakness he had been searching for to try and take this new employee down a few notches. “You have hassled your coworkers, emotionally blackmailing them into participating in your schemes to defraud the U.S. Postal Service for your own ends. You have abused the databases at your disposal that are for the sole purpose of returning lost and insufficiently addressed mail.”

There was a twitch in Ben’s jaw and his hands were clenched at his sides. Everything the man said was true, but did he honestly think that Ben cared about any of that? That this list of offenses was anything new to him? He had known exactly what he was doing, what he was taking advantage of, and he had no intention of apologizing for it. “Are you finished?”

Reg smiled, satisfied to finally deliver what he considered the knock-out blow. “Almost. To sum it up, you are wasting this department’s resources, and you are a menace in the workplace. My recommendation is that you be replaced as quickly as possible.”

“Is that what you recommended for Sylvia, too?” Ben stood, leaning over his desk. “Replacement?”

The auditor actually leaned back a bit, for once taking into account that his prey outweighed him by a solid 60 pounds. “Her crimes are much smaller. No, I recommended counseling for her kleptomania actually. To stop her before her crimes escalated into stealing items that were actually valuable instead of mail destined for the shredder. She seemed to take it rather hard.” Reg frowned and shuffled his papers.

“Counseling. Of course she took it hard. Do you have any idea of her history?” Ben slammed his hand down on the desk to cut the auditor’s response short, causing the man to roll warily away from the desk. “Of course you don’t. You never bothered to look into any of the people here, why they do what they do, you just came in and started tearing this place apart.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I am also recommending Jillian for counseling. Her habit of talking to that urn of ashes in there is repulsive and a sign of deep imbalance. We can’t have anyone here going, as it were, postal.” Reg tried to give a grim chuckle and started to put his papers hastily into his briefcase.

Ben stepped back from the desk, aware that he was pushing this little man too hard and couldn’t bring himself to care. The only thing holding him back from reaching across the desk to throttle him was the fact that he couldn’t look for his son from jail. “So the question becomes, why replace me? Why not the others you deemed problematic?”

Reg stood, straightening his suit jacket over his beer belly. “Because you wasted governmental money in this pathetic attempt to find your boy, and you have been an active menace to other employees here.”

“Pathetic?” What little thread of control Ben had managed to retain frayed to the snapping point. “The attempts to find my boy are not pathetic. What’s pathetic is you coming in here trying to run everybody’s life, thinking you know so much better. You are a prideful waste of humanity who revels in knifing people in their weaknesses.” Ben’s breath was coming in ragged hisses between his words now.