Cash Burn

by Michael Berrier

  “Your convict brother assaulting a peace officer is what happened. He needs to turn himself in.”

  Jason didn’t try to step away. “Sure. He’ll do that. The system’s always been fair to him.”

  From across the office, Hathaway chimed in. “Yeah. Poor little felon. Never catches a break.”

  Coach let Jason by. Jason sat on the arm of the sofa. “Like I told you last time, I haven’t seen him.”

  Hathaway brought a hand around from behind his head and with the thumb and fingers made a talking puppet. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Is this normal procedure for you guys? I mean, don’t you have anything better to do than strong-arm secretaries? That make you feel like you’re accomplishing something?”

  “You want to talk about her instead of Flip?” Coach said. “’Cause we can talk about her if you want.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you about anything. I want you out of here.”

  “And I want to surf Cloudbreak, but you can’t have everything.” The PO had both hands behind his head again.

  “Cloud—? You’re wasting my time.”

  Coach waded in again. He couldn’t keep himself out of Jason’s face. “Which one do you want to cover first? The convict brother or the lying secretary?”

  Jason looked from Coach to the surfer. “Isn’t one of you supposed to be the good cop? You’ve got some work to do on your shtick.”

  “We visited your daddy the other night.” Coach, trying to get a rise out of him.

  Jason stared at him. “I guess you didn’t find Flip there, either. You’re doing great work, guys. I’m glad my tax dollars are going to such good use.”

  “I think we forgot to thank him, Tom. Paying our salaries and all.”

  Coach glared like Jason had just missed a block.

  “Well . . .” The surfer dropped his feet onto the floor and stood. “This isn’t going anywhere. We’ll just have to come back later. Give it another try.”

  “You do that.”

  Coach moved in. “I’m going to find him.”

  “I hope you do. Be better than seeing your ugly face around here.”

  The surfer stepped between them. “Cloudbreak. It’s in Fiji. Two miles off Tavarua. Look it up.” He went to the door. “Come on, Tom.”

  Tom didn’t seem to want to do anything but try to crumble Jason with a harsh stare. Jason lifted a hand. “Bye-bye, Officer. Try to keep your head away from convicts.”

  The PO’s jaw clenched. Jason thought he might have gone too far. But Coach did nothing but graze against him on his way to the door.

  Jason watched them swagger to the escalator and descend. He was turning to check on Brenda when his eye caught Vince across the lobby standing in his doorway, waving him over.

  Jason raised his index finger to hold him off a second and went to Brenda’s desk. “You okay?”

  She gave him a brave smile, nodded. “Vince was calling for you.”

  “Yeah, I see him. How’d I get so lucky?”

  For only a moment, her eyes lingered on him. “You just are.” She turned to her computer before anything more could pass between them.

  Her fragrance drifted up to him, and he let himself take in the texture and the sunshine color of her hair. The feel of it was in his fingertips, from last night. He wanted to glide his hands through it here, no matter what everyone would think. He couldn’t pull himself away.

  She looked up. The slightest sideways tilt of her head alerted him to others nearby. Angie Barrett sat ten feet away, and her presence was like surveillance. Brenda turned back to her computer.

  Her ear, the curve of it, its softness, drew his eyes. Two piercings in the lobe were decorated with studs. He’d whispered in that ear last night, held his lips close to it. The memory of the sensation of burying his face in her hair threatened to drive him mad.

  She lifted her phone from its cradle, and her ear disappeared behind the earpiece. It left him taking in the flesh underneath, where her jaw line swept from her neck behind the veil of her blonde hair. He wanted to hide himself in it.

  Brenda turned her eyes to him. A secret smile crowned by a brief frown warned him away.

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  She held her hand over the mouthpiece. “Go,” she whispered.

  But he wanted the touch of that hand again. Wanted again for every pore of his body to be stirred by her, wanted to tear the desk away from between them.

  She hung up the phone and stood. Without another glance at him, she turned her back and strode to the restroom. When the door closed her off, Jason shifted his feet and found Angie’s scrutiny. She lifted her brows a fraction, then went back to her e-mail.

  34

  Across the lobby, Vince no longer stood in his doorway. Between that vacant space and Jason, the lobby hummed with voices spoken into mouthpieces. Keyboards clicked in a thousand disparate rhythms. Electronic ringing of phones, shifting chairs, drawers opening and closing—the activity used to invigorate Jason’s senses. It amazed him that everything about this job had once stirred him. He used to find meaning in the looming daily deadlines, pressure from customer demands and from growth goals refreshed at every cycle of the calendar, from beating the competition that was as persistent as drooling wolves.

  Over Angie’s head, he stared at the staff that used to be his. Their allegiances had shifted away from him as easily as drifting leaves turned in a current. Except for Brenda, everyone in view belonged to Vince now. The battles Jason had fought for them and with them had all been relegated into histories in their disloyal minds, distant as their adolescent schoolyards.

  Vince’s open door across the lobby was a vacuum sucking the life out of him. Jason felt it pulling away his hopes, the aspirations that used to drive him out of bed every morning with energy surging through him. He took a step toward the open doorway. Soon he was past Angie’s probing eyes, and he entered into the sea of desks and the frenzy of efficiency and urgency that used to fuel him. No one glanced up. Not one of them took the opportunity to seek guidance or the endorsement of a decision. He moved among them with the anonymity of a ghost.

  Vince bulged behind his desk. The flesh of his neck folded over his shirt collar, and where the collar strained at the button holding it together, a bright tie with insanely twisted paisleys was noosed. Vince focused on the paperwork before him, his mouth open, the wet weenies of his lips moving almost imperceptibly.

  Jason decided to interrupt the machinations of Vince’s mind. “You wanted to see me?”

  Vince lifted his eyes, and the close-cropped head came up. He waved his hand to beckon Jason into the sacred chamber of authority.

  Jason sank into the sofa. At least it was on the far end of the room.

  Vince tented his fingers before his chest and began talking. With every word, the left part of his upper lip twisted into a snarl. Jason had never noticed it before. The ugly maw began to remind Jason of something. What was it? An animal of some kind. A species in a jungle stealing among shadowy leaves in reeking air that boiled with heat. A sloth? Was that it? No. Maybe not a jungle. Maybe an arid plain in Africa. A pack animal of some kind, a hyena or a wild dog, bounding over grassland, yammering on and on as it searched for something to devour.

  Vince dropped his hands to the desktop. “Am I getting through to you?”

  Jason had no idea what Vince had been talking about. He stared at the hyena behind the desk, the hyena fit only for a meal scavenged from the rest of the pack. Did hyenas cannibalize?

  “Yeah. Sure,” he said.

  Vince’s worm of a tongue darted over his lips, and words started pouring out again. Words upon words tumbled into the room, spilling innuendo, invective, threats of layoffs, the danger of the complete collapse of the bank, the ruin of them all. It was the end of the world. Armageddon.

  A question hovered in the room. Jason recognized that Vince’s voice had inflected in a way that begged a response. Beyond that, meaning was lost to him.

&n
bsp; Vince spread his hands on his desk. His eyebrows were black caterpillars kissing over his nose, rising, rising. “Well?”

  “What?”

  “I said twenty percent. In case you can’t do the math, that’s four people. Get the door.”

  Jason felt the sofa drawing him into it like soil sucking at roots. He wasn’t interested in rising to play doorman. “You want me to fire four people?”

  Vince’s lips drew tight. “Yes. Do I have to repeat myself? A twenty-percent reduction in force.” He stood and crossed to the door, wafting a trace of cologne that turned Jason’s stomach. He slammed the door. “Your name’s not on the list. This time. I’m willing to let you make the final call on who we RIF, but here’s my list.” He completed the trip to the front of his desk and lifted a sheet of paper, glanced at it, and let it flutter into Jason’s lap. He returned to his chair.

  The room’s walls closed in. Jason felt them compressing the air. He fixed his eyes on them to make sure they weren’t shifting toward him. He detected no movement, but the pressure of the air kept growing. Soon it would be too thick to breathe.

  He lifted his eyes to look over Vince’s head. Outside the window, the LA air was stacked with seething smog. It diffused the sunlight into an unnatural, hazy glow. Nothing to breathe out there either.

  Vince shifted in his chair. “Aren’t you going to look at the list?”

  Jason returned his eyes to his boss. The frowning face and gritted teeth could have belonged to an undertaker straining at a cut into a cadaver.

  Jason managed to draw in a breath and took up the sheet of paper. Five names.

  One of them was Brenda’s.

  Vince droned on concerning the performance of these five, how they hadn’t met their growth goals, how their loan portfolios were poorly rated. About Brenda, he only mentioned her lack of seniority.

  “You said four. This is five.”

  The twist of Vince’s face made Jason think he suppressed a smile. But it could have been something Vince ate. “I thought you might want to do more than the minimum. Show you can be a team player for once.”

  “A team player.”

  Vince searched out a pink eraser he kept on the desktop, and he busied his fingers with tapping it, turning it, squeezing it. “Tomorrow’s the day. We’re going to do all twenty percent at once. One cut, get it over with. Make the announcement so people won’t think they’re next.” He looked at the eraser as if he could rub out the employees with it. “I wanted to stage it, keep people on their toes, but Mark thought it would be better to just rip off the Band-Aid. So to speak.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about keeping people on their toes. The rewrite of the bonus plan and severance package did the trick.”

  Vince rubbed the eraser against the wood grain of his desktop and swept the pink shavings onto the floor. “Yeah, we’re going to take another look at those. They’re still too generous.”

  “Now that you’re in the executive plan.”

  It brought Vince’s eyes forward. “I can rework that RIF list. The way your portfolio’s shrinking, you won’t cover your own salary in a few months.”

  “Yeah, but fire me for cause and you don’t have to pay my severance, right? Good plan.”

  Now the animal surfaced fully on Vince’s face. This was no sloth, no hyena. A cat’s callousness emerged, a grin widening, insensate. He didn’t reply.

  Jason looked away from the face. On the list were only names, first and last. Labels on personnel files or in org charts. People, yes, but to those who controlled the ledgers, they represented annual salaries and benefits to be cut from a budget with the offsets of the severance packages’ temporary inflections, one-time nuisances for the greater and longer-term good of reduced overhead. When your top line shrinks, you have to make the cuts to keep the bottom line black. Don’t go into the red. He’d lectured his customers on this very thing a hundred times.

  But it was different when the employees were yours. He returned to Vince’s face. Pitiless eyes stared back, the color of deadwood knots and mud. The mouth opened, and it was a bottomless, insatiable cavern. “Get with Margaret and have an HR rep along when you meet with them.” He flipped the eraser onto the desk, and it bounced on its edges until it came to a rest flat.

  Vince brushed at the air with the backs of his fingers. “That’s all.”

  35

  Thirty-two thousand dollars in crumpled bills cast shadows against the lavender-and-purple flower print of the motel bedspread. Flip drew his hands away from them. Thirty-two thousand and change. He rocked on his feet, the carpet crumpling against his heels through holes in his socks.

  The smell of the bills drifted up to him, a green fragrance that always reminded him of his brother. How long ago was it? Twenty years? No, twenty-five probably since they’d shared a paper route as kids, alternating days flinging the folded and banded newspapers, going door to door collecting, splitting the profits down the middle. Flip and Jason were friends then. They shared everything—a room, a dad, a house, food, drink, the paper route. The smell of the money reminded him of that time, of things they shared, the easy and hard things that bound them together.

  For Flip, counting the collections from their paper route was a rote necessity. But Jason reveled in it, his freckled face as concentrated as a fastballer on the mound. He would pinch each bill between his fingers and thumb to make sure he didn’t miss one stuck to another. He would stroke them, dealing them out on the card table in their room in the summertime with their one fan pointed away from the tabletop to make sure the piles weren’t disturbed.

  Flip would sit in front of the fan, its breeze the only thing cool in Inglewood that summer, but Jason would rather sweat than have his money ruffled. Flip would watch as Jason counted and recounted until his fingers took on a slick coating as gray as lead. After ten minutes, Flip would be ready to go outside and toss a baseball around, but not Jason. Once he was in the money, Jason couldn’t be pulled out.

  “Hey, Daffy,” Flip would say to him in the heat of those afternoons in their room with the door closed and the fan pressing air against his face. The cartoon character’s name seemed the perfect fit for his brother when he was in his money.

  Over the years that followed, they took their own odd jobs, and their interests divided, Flip into sports and Jason deeper and deeper into money-making schemes he called business. Jason’s love of money overtook all the other loves but one. One girl.

  In the end it wasn’t money that separated Jason from his brother and his father and from everything else they used to share. Not Jason’s obsession with getting all the power and toys and trappings as he grew into a man.

  It was the girl.

  Flip didn’t need a yearbook to picture Danah as she was in high school. He remembered her walking through the quad in her cheerleader uniform on game days, the boys stealing glances at her shape and the bounce of her walk. They must have wondered why a girl like that was with Jason instead of the homecoming king or quarterback. Flip wouldn’t have understood either if he hadn’t seen them together at the house, their fingers entwined on the sofa, their voices low and excited. Talking about their future.

  He couldn’t think about Jason without remembering Danah. Their senior year. Their absorption in one another. As a sophomore, Flip’s classes ended later than theirs. He would come home fresh from the showers after football or baseball practice or from the weight room. The house would be suspended in midafternoon stillness, the presence of a girl as distinct as a flower in a locker room. It might have been her fragrance or the distant murmuring of a keener voice or just a sense that the ordinary male doldrums had been breached by something subtler. At some point Jason and Danah would emerge, maneuvering conjoined down the hallway, enthralled with one another.

  Flip, the little brother, an interference, an annoyance. He felt this new distance from his older brother and resented Danah, but he said nothing.

  Until the night he came home and Jason was g
one. Dad that night shouted into the phone, cursing Jason but looking at Flip as if the whole thing were his fault. Dad slamming the phone down and shouting orders at Flip before phoning the police. Flip driving south alone in his truck, driving by himself at seventeen into neighborhoods where Jason and Danah should never have gone.

  Now, in the motel room, he tried to will himself not to let his thoughts go further. But they leaped ahead. A dark, crowded barroom, men older than him by decades sitting huddled over beers and shot glasses at the bar and at dimly lit tables. They looked at him, and one of them threw a joke his way, but Flip wasn’t in the mood. He asked about Danah. None of them joked after Flip popped the bartender to the floor and he was afraid to get up to face him. From the floor, the guy nodded toward the back room.

  Now, twenty years and two jail stints later, Flip clamped his eyes shut, pushed his palms against the lids as if he could shut down his mind by closing off his sight. A girl like that, in a place like that.

  The picture of her as he first glimpsed her in that back room was still enough to make him want to drive his fist through one of these sheer motel room walls. She’d been beaten unconscious. Her clothes were shredded. It sent him into a fury. Afterward, the cops cuffed him while two of the men lay leaking blood into the sawdust-littered floor. One of them dead.

  Flip growled through gritted teeth and shook his head. Thoughts of Jason always took him there. Why had Jason left her? And why would she have entered a place like that to begin with?

  Eastlake Youth Authority. No bail for juveniles, just line up for your hearing and cool your heels in YA while they figure out the plea bargain. The investigators only got out of Danah what happened with Jason. She couldn’t coax any memory of the attack back into her head. All she could recall was walking into the bar. After that, nothing. But with her injuries and the evidence of the rape, the prosecutor didn’t want to try Flip for murder and might have passed on the charges completely if the dead guy hadn’t been averaging twenty-seven points a game as a starting point guard for CSU. There were plenty of witnesses willing to put Flip at the scene, they had his fingerprints all over the baseball bat, and to cap it off, they had the confession he’d offered up.