Double Cross

by Carolyn Crane

  “You can’t.”

  “You don’t even like me. What do you care if I fry my brain?”

  “There’s a big difference between not liking a person and wishing vegetablehood on them.”

  “You’ll wipe the drool off me, won’t you, Nurse Jones?”

  “Stop it.” Simon’s making me nervous.

  “Nobody hates being Packard’s minion as much as you do,” he says. “Nobody wants to be free as bad as you. I know you think disillusioning people is messed up.”

  I’m silent.

  “Well, guess what? It’s within our power to walk away from it, declare our freedom right now. We could be free right now, just by telling Packard we’re done. This is the end of zinging people at his command.”

  “Even if we both successfully zinged Avery, which I will not do, we’d be free of Packard for what? Three weeks, tops? And then we crawl back, begging him to show us somebody safe to zing?”

  “No. We’d keep going. Whenever the dark emotions build too high, we’d decide on our own goddamn people to zing. We’d say Fuck you to Packard until we fried.”

  “So we’d zing random innocent people? How is that supposed to appeal to me?”

  “Oh, come on. One zing doesn’t disillusion. They’d recover.”

  I pull into the little spot next to the dumpster, shut off the car, and get out. I want to be my own person more than he imagines. I hit the buzzer. “Is this all about getting me to stop zinging Ez?”

  “Don’t you care that’s she’s innocent?” Simon asks. There’s an angry edge to his voice, and something else there. Desperation?

  We’re buzzed in. We go up and find Shelby alone at the table, working away at her computer.

  “Morning, Shelby,” I say as I start plugging in. I say it in a sort of pointed way.

  “Good morning, Justine,” she replies nonchalantly.

  Simon spreads out his paper files.

  “How was the bus?” I ask.

  “Good.”

  I’m not understanding the bus bit. Did she want to speak with Avery one on one? I give her a look of humorous intensity, a look that digs. She straightens, lips pursed, like she’s offended by my silent query.

  “Early bird gets the worm,” she says finally.

  I plunk down my coffee mug. “What’s the worm symbolize?” I ask.

  Simon snickers. “Do I get a guess?”

  “Is symbol for goal,” Shelby says. “For baseline data.”

  “Yeah?” I raise my eyebrows.

  Shelby purses her lips again and starts typing.

  I let my suspicious gaze linger on her head.

  Simon says, “I’d settle for the rest of the shipping figures. Doesn’t seem to me that we got them all yesterday.” We’ve always felt this is our most profitable area of investigation.

  “I’ll ask him,” I say, eyeing Shelby. “He’s in there, I assume?”

  “I believe so,” she says, not looking up.

  “Yeah.” I go over and knock. Avery opens up right away. He’s in a blue turtleneck sweater, which softens the nerd side of his nerd-thug equation. Actually, it softens the thug side, too. In short, he looks more normal, though there’s still the matter of his piercing gray gaze, and his home-style haircut.

  “I thought they were in the packet,” he says when I ask about the shipping figures we want.

  “Those are way too generalized. We need to match the order to the deposit to the shipping order. It can’t just be, Here’s some orders, and then they were shipped.”

  “It’s not that generalized.”

  “It’s as if you dropped your tracking number the second you went to shipping. Honestly, we just need to track it through.”

  He glowers. “Let me see about it.”

  The rest of the morning is taken up by our pretend work. At around noon, Avery comes out of his office with his coat. “Falafel day at Lenny’s, people. Your best lunch bet around here.”

  Lunch with us again?

  “Wow,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “I don’t want you getting all light-headed from hunger and fail to recognize our total compliance with the directives of our oppressors.”

  “Well, with an invitation like that …” I snap my computer shut.

  Lenny’s is about as busy as it was yesterday. We take the same seats we had before in the same order, too: Simon, me, Shelby, then Avery. Avery suggests two falafel sandwiches each, and then he and Shelby strike up a conversation, part Volovian, part doom and darkness.

  Simon reads the paper and I watch Lenny cook. If things were different, Avery would make a really fantastic disillusionist. We don’t have a paranoia guy. Helmut usually covers paranoia, though obviously I handle it when a target is predisposed to health paranoia.

  I grab part of Simon’s newspaper. As usual, the Dork killing made front-page news. The blue clothes speculation is still going. I think about Otto, and how it bothered him not to be able to level with the cops about the true connections between the Dork murders.

  There’s a sidebar that goes to the main story that profiles the woman killed by the Dorks the day before yesterday. The photo shows her with her nine-year-old daughter. The two of them lived behind her tailor shop. Her husband was killed and the shop burned during the worst of the crime wave, and she’d finally finished repairs this past year. A tailor. I wonder what kind of highcap she was.

  And I’m wondering what kind of person Avery is, too. Janie at the vacuum cleaner store said even if he knew for sure the Dorks were using his product, he’d never give up the names. What is his rationale on that?

  Shelby looks over. “Oh, poor little girl.” She pulls the paper toward her.

  “An orphan now,” I say. “Goddamn Dorks.”

  Shelby and Simon fall silent, expressions carefully neutral, but I have no doubt they’re shocked at my jumping on the subject.

  Avery shakes his head darkly. “Some people,” he says. “Just disturbing.”

  “Is despicable, yes,” Shelby says softly.

  “In what world is this ever okay?” I say.

  “No world,” Avery says. “At the same time, it’s a symptom of a larger sickness.”

  “And that makes it right?”

  I feel Simon stiffen next to me. In excitement or dread, I don’t know. Probably both.

  “No, it doesn’t make it right,” Avery replies with pointed intensity. “I merely made an observation. Sneezing is a symptom of allergies. It’s not right or wrong. It’s a symptom.”

  “Sneezing doesn’t have a mind,” I say.

  Avery fixes me with steely gray eyes. “Everything is a system—that’s my message to you. Everything is a system. Doesn’t matter if it has a mind.”

  “If sneezing had a mind,” Simon says, “I might like to date it.”

  Avery unfolds his napkin and leans forward to address Simon. “If sneezing had a mind, I think me and sneezing would find a great deal of common ground.”

  Shelby smiles. “A taste for drama. You both have very much of that, I think.”

  Avery slides off his seat, grabs two white squeeze bottles from an empty table behind us, and plunks them down on the counter. “Garlic sesame butter. You put it on the falafels. It’s delicious.”

  “Thanks.” I turn the page of my newspaper. System, huh.

  Lenny delivers our pita baskets: half moons of pocket bread stuffed with tomatoes, cucumbers, some other veggies, plus crispy brown falafel balls.

  The rest of lunch is uneventful and we go back to the office.

  At midafternoon, an older woman bursts in the door bearing paper plates of cake. She introduces herself as Linda from the assembly and shipping area, and sets one in front of each of us, along with plastic forks and colorful napkins, just as Avery comes out his office door. I thank her, wondering if he’ll be mad.

  “Cake,” he observes. It’s the kind where layers of yellow cake alternate with white frosting.

  Linda turns to us. “Grumpy Pants hates cake.” />
  “Mostly on a conceptual level,” Avery explains.

  Linda touches his arm. “Conrad’s tenth. It would mean the world to him if you’d—”

  “You think I’d forget? I have something. Don’t tell him.”

  She tweaks his cheek and leaves.

  Shelby and Simon dig in. I toy with mine; I’m not a big cake fan, but it was nice for her to bring it. I should bring something to Ez, I think. I want to bring something to Ez.

  “Of course I have something for him,” Avery mutters as soon as Linda’s footsteps have faded. “That man has given a decade of his best hours to the mindless drudgery of packing my products. Of course I have something.”

  I stare at my cake. We’d noticed that he pays his people pretty well; we’d assumed it was in exchange for secrecy, not a sense of debt.

  Avery continues, “The mindless drudgery of a manufacturing machine I myself created. I find it distressing just to look at that goddamn cake.”

  Shelby smiles up at him. “The man would be no happier with a million dollars and endless freedom. Cake marks another year in journey that would be the same outcome. Ends the same.”

  “Right, it ends the same,” Avery says. “So why settle along the way? If it all ends the same?”

  “Actually,” I say, licking frosting off my finger. “It doesn’t end the same. You could either get the agony of an awful disease or the shock of sudden death. There’s a big difference.”

  “Mine will be sudden no matter what,” Simon says. “I’ll make it so.”

  “Me, too,” Avery says. “Sudden and violent. It’s the only way.”

  “You guys say that now,” I say. “The bewilderment and panic as the body shuts down? All systems going slowly offline until your consciousness itself is just a thing? You’d hasten that? No way.”

  “Maybe I find a way to beat the odds,” Simon says. “There’s always a chance.”

  “Of cheating death?” I say.

  “Or of it being different somehow,” Simon says. “There’s always a way out of anything.”

  “Good luck. Your body is destroying itself right now. It’s probably using the cake as a fuel to destroy itself right now, but you won’t know until it’s too late.”

  “Is always too late,” Shelby says. “Cheat death and you only change decoration in your dungeon.”

  Simon reaches into his green lunch cooler and pulls out a sixer of Fizzy Yellow, the soda we all had at Lenny’s yesterday. “Thanks for getting me addicted to this stuff, Avery.”

  I take the one he hands to me, thinking it might be a good time to change the subject; this discussion is revealing a bit too much of our group’s weirdness.

  Avery addresses Shelby. “You’re thinking of decorating the dungeon, and I’m thinking about desecrating it.”

  Shelby smiles. “Is still dungeon.”

  “Guys?” Simon opens a Fizzy Yellow for Shelby and she mumbles her thanks. He opens another and passes it to Avery, who takes it and turns back to Shelby. “Yes, it’s still a dungeon, but at that point, it’s my goddamn dungeon.”

  “Dungeon nevertheless. Desecration is merely a form of decoration.”

  Avery laughs, beaming at Shelby. “You guys are nothing like the last government auditors, that’s for sure.”

  I’m staring at the bottle in Avery’s hand. Shit.

  Avery catches me staring. “What is it?”

  “You look good in that sweater,” I say. This flusters him. Which is what I wanted.

  Shelby gives me a quizzical look; I can see the second she realizes what I’ve realized—knockout drugs in the soda. Like the pro she is, she betrays nothing. She simply picks up a folder and hands it to him. “We completed December.”

  Avery looks at the folder. “Thanks.”

  Then Shelby turns away from him and begins to type.

  Avery heads into his office.

  I turn on the music, glowering at Simon.

  He widens his clear blue eyes. “It’s almost the third day.”

  I say, “It was going to be a joint decision.”

  “Was,” Simon says.

  “You had no right,” I hiss.

  “We could have that thing today,” Simon says. “Think about it.”

  “You should not have.” Shelby shuffles some papers.

  I whisper, “You are so off this project.”

  “You know he’s giving us cleansed data,” Simon whispers back. “There is no other way.”

  I huff out an angry breath.

  “Oh! I gave him wrong folder.” Shelby pops up, walks across the space, and knocks on Avery’s door, then she simply pulls it open and walks in.

  Simon’s mouth falls open. “She wouldn’t.”

  The sound of breaking glass comes from Avery’s office, followed by Shelby’s plaintive apologies, then Avery’s mumbled assurances. Scrambling.

  “That didn’t just happen,” Simon says.

  “Oh boy,” I say.

  Eventually Shelby comes out. She maintains that it was an accident—she’d handed him the folders and hadn’t seen the soda bottle. We spend another tense hour pretending to work. Avery doesn’t get knocked out, of course. He’d only drunk a sip. We cut out at around 3 p.m.

  “Are you on his side or what?” Simon demands as soon as we’re out by the dumpster. “Do you think you didn’t just single-handedly ruin our plan and raise his suspicions?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Quiet.” I unlock the car. Simon slides into the back, and Shelby goes around front.

  “I was trying to further the investigation,” he says once we’re on the road. “You were trying to fuck it up, Shel.”

  “You were fucking it up,” she says.

  I say, “Both of you were out of line.”

  Simon says, “I didn’t realize you were the boss.”

  “I didn’t realize you two were so willing to compromise our only chance to save people’s lives.”

  “Nobody is compromising,” Shelby says.

  Simon leans up between us. “Do you think he doesn’t suspect anything? He saw Justine look at the bottle, and then you go in and knock it over? You think he’s not having it tested right now?”

  “Shelby’s not an idiot.” I turn to her. “You gave him the wrong folder at the outset?”

  “Yes.”

  I nod, impressed with her quick thinking. We ride in tense silence until Simon’s. He gets out and slams the door.

  I turn to Shelby. “What’s going on?”

  “I could not let it be.”

  “Do I need to know something?”

  “Not officially,” she says.

  “Unofficially?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Are you with us on this?”

  A pause. Then, “Yes.”

  I pull out and make a U-turn, heading toward her place, not entirely thrilled with that hesitation. “There’s no time to find another way to catch the Dorks.”

  “I am aware. I do not want more people killed.”

  “I like him. I do,” I say.

  Her pretty lips tighten in a secret smile. “He is good man.”

  “What if we, you know, fired you? Just got you out of it? Let Simon and me do the dirty work. Let us be the ones.”

  “It would be complicity all the same. To not warn him.”

  “You can’t keep preventing us like this. I mean, Simon shouldn’t have done what he did. But going forward.”

  “Do not worry,” she says sullenly.

  “You’re with us.” More a question than a statement. “You’re with us on this.”

  Her pointed look is a loud Yes.

  I smile wistfully. “You remind him of his mother.”

  Tiny Shelby smile. “I am sure I do not.”

  We drive in silence. She’s in a good mood, for her. She hasn’t even bent Gumby. When we’re almost at her place, she turns to me. “I am so sorry, I have not asked. Have you heard from …” She stops short, like she doesn’t want to say
his name. Like it would hurt me too much.

  I shake my head. “It’s bad. This feels so severe. He doesn’t even want to speak with me!”

  “You do not know.”

  “It’s not too late for you, Shelby. Let us kick you off the case. I just don’t know how this can work. How can you be on both sides?”

  She traces a shape on the passenger window. “That is my question to myself, yes.”

  I choose my words carefully as we near her ramshackle apartment building. “Will you tell me if anything changes?”

  She sits there, pondering the glove compartment.

  “If you’re not with us anymore?”

  “If I am not with you, yes, I will tell you.” She gets out, not looking back.

  I swing by the government offices and head up to the mayoral floor, hoping to get information. I find Sophia in Otto’s office suite, sitting behind her desk in the front room. Her red hair is in a chic, almost sculptural blowback style, and her green suit has a slight shimmer. I’m relieved to see she didn’t accompany Otto to Washington, D.C.

  She raises one unnaturally perfect brow. “What do you want?”

  I bite my lip. What I want is something more than text messages, but I can’t say that. Nothing would give her more glee than to know Otto’s angry at me.

  I say, “Can you tell me the name of the hotel Otto’s staying at? I didn’t get to ask him, and I need to send some stuff.”

  This is quite true; I want to have orders of egg foo yong and egg rolls delivered to his room from an area restaurant. He often forgets to eat when he’s revitalizing.

  She makes very little effort to conceal her smile. “You don’t know where he’s staying?”

  “Would I be asking you?”

  She smiles. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure if I can give out that information.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course you can.”

  She stares at me and I look away. She laughs. “Oh, Justine, if I wanted to snatch your memory, I’d snatch it. As for Otto, he is a man of his word. He says what he means, and when he doesn’t say something, it means he didn’t intend to say it. He must not want you to know.”

  “Of course he wants me to know.”

  “That doesn’t appear to be the case.” She sits tall, polite professional smile, polite professional words. “Can you think of any reason he wouldn’t want you to know where he is?”