Hansen leaned forward, cupping a hand around his ear. “Speak up, boy. I can barely hear you.”
“Five years,” Carter snapped.
“Ah, five years. And in those five years what was the most important thing you learned?”
“That we don’t make mistakes. Ever. Sir.”
“Very good, Beck. Very good.” Hansen applauded in a condescending manner. “When you first started here I thought you weren’t trainable. My bad.”
“Thank you, sir…I think.”
Hansen stared at Carter as he ran his sausage fingers through his crown of fibrous hair. “Tsk…tsk…tsk.”
Sweat formed on Carter’s upper lip and forehead. He headed for the guest chair, needing to sit before he fell over.
“Who gave you permission to sit, Beck? I want you here, standing in front of me so I can see you for what you are, a real piece of…work.”
Hansen opened a desk drawer and took out a bright red folder. He slapped it on the desk and spun it around so Carter could read the heading: Performance Issues—Carter Beck. After giving Carter a moment to digest the heading, Hansen spun the folder again, opened it, and removed a single sheet of yellow paper.
Carter recognized the form immediately. The Company used it to log complaints.
“I received a phone call from a client just after you left last night, Beck.” Hansen raised the document above his head and shook it. “According to the information I have here you were the one who assisted her. But what you told her was wrong. Needless to say she was not happy, and if a client isn’t happy they may seek services elsewhere. If they go somewhere else they take their money with them. If they do that we lose revenue. And that makes me unhappy. So, Beck, tell me again, what is our motto?”
“We never make mistakes. Ever.”
“Yet, you made one.”
“I thought my advice was sound,” Carter said.
The boss stared at Carter a heartbeat longer than necessary then sighed, “I imagine you did.” He put the complaint form back in the folder and took out a multi-page document. A staple in the upper left corner secured the pages. Hansen jabbed the document at Carter. “Do you know what this is, Beck?”
“Looks like a contract.”
“That’s exactly what it is. This is the contract you signed with Allied Brokerage five years ago. Do you remember what it says?”
Carter shook his head. “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well, let me refresh your memory.” Hansen flipped to page seven of the contract and read: “‘Any employee who knowingly or unknowingly provides incorrect advice, suggestions, or answers in any form to The Company’s internal or external clients and/or partners shall be subject to immediate termination. There are no exceptions to this rule.’” He looked up from the document and gave Carter a snaky smirk. “Ring any bells?”
“I’m sorry,” Carter said.
“I imagine you are.” Hansen dropped the contract on the desk, reached in the drawer again, pulled out a loaded Beretta M9 and pointed it at Carter.
Carter’s eyes grew wide. He stepped back until he felt the door behind him. Reaching behind him he found the knob, gave it a turn. The door refused to open.
“I’d like to take a moment and thank you for giving the last five years of your life to Allied Brokerage,” Hansen said. “Your contributions to the Company have been duly noted in your personnel file—though I hardly think you’ll be applying for any other jobs. Unfortunately, it is with great regret—well, not really—that your services are no longer needed. I have no other choice than to terminate your relationship with Allied Brokerage—”
“Please, Mr. Hansen, give me another chance. It won’t happen again.”
Hansen took aim.
Carter Beck closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Click.
No blast. No searing pain.
His eyes shot open and he saw the boss struggling with the jammed firearm. If any chance of escape existed he needed to act now.
Spinning on his heels, Carter grabbed the knob with both hands and threw his shoulder against the door.
The door swung wide. Off balance, Carter nearly fell.
A quick glance around the office—employees sitting stoically at their desks, keying information, taking client phone calls, chatting amongst themselves.
Business as usual.
Carter, juiced on adrenaline and fear, scurried between cubicles like a rat in an experiment.
Elevator doors loomed.
Escape!
Carter’s breathing grew fast and ragged.
Jabbing his finger into the call button, Carter turned.
Hansen’s fat form stood in the doorway of his office, a corpulent finger pointed at Carter. “Get him!”
Heads swiveled in unison, eyes staring daggers at Carter.
Employees rose from their seats.
Ding!
Elevator doors whooshing open, Carter sped into the waiting car.
His rapid-fire finger working the Lobby button, Carter watched a throng of co-workers approach. A sea of eyes blazed with purpose. A new directive.
“Go back to work,” Carter pleaded.
Then he noticed their hands, clutching desktop items. Staplers. Pencil sharpeners. Letter openers.
Just as the group reached him, elevator doors clanked shut.
***
Trying to fix the Beretta, Hansen dropped into his chair, rivulets of sweat trickling down his fat face.
This wasn’t good. Not good at all.
From the depths of his mind a voice spoke:
What about Carter Beck?
“It’s fine. All under control.” Hansen turned the pistol over in his hands and popped out the clip.
The voice chuckled. You’ve sent your staff to take care of your business? Are you . . . crazy? What about productivity?
“Don’t worry. I’ll work them harder this afternoon.” Hansen snatched a handkerchief from his pocket with a trembling hand and mopped his brow.
Smells like overtime pay to me. Unacceptable.
“I’ll make it work. I always make it work!” Hansen looked in the gun’s chamber—clear and clean.
Do you remember the Company motto?
Hansen nodded.
We might overlook one mistake, but—
“I’ll make it right, I promise,” Hansen pleaded.
Of course you will. You’ve always been a company man.
***
Carter felt like Frankenstein’s monster pursued by angry villagers—pitchforks and torches replaced by office equipment.
Holding a hand up to an approaching car, he dashed across the street.
Animal cries vibrated from the approaching horde, hooting like wild animals.
A few yards separating Carter from his Prius, he reached into his trouser pocket, yanked out his keys, and pointed the fob at the vehicle.
Click. Click.
Reaching for the door handle, he could almost taste freedom. He’d make a few well placed phone calls to the New York Times, The Washington Post, letting the world know—
A calloused hand grabbed his shoulder, pulling him backward.
Carter’s head met asphalt with a reality shattering crack, two bloody teeth springing from his mouth. Forcing himself onto his knees, his heart pounded and he couldn’t breathe.
Thwack!
A stapler struck his head. He fell again.
Crunch!
A coffee cup shattered against his face, and he rolled over on his back, wincing from the pain.
A letter opener pierced his chest, and a bloom of bright blood spread across his crisp, white shirt.
On his back, every nerve in the unforgiving clench of agony, Carter stared up at the monolithic building…
…and watched Hansen fall seventeen floors through a spray of glass.
Carter smiled through the pain.
Hansen smashed through the hood of an illegally parked Monte Carlo.
Car alarms er
upted like psychotic invitations to Hell.
Carter’s world falling away, hazy voices penetrated the gloom…
“Say Paul, aren’t you up for a promotion?”
“Sure am. Guess my first order of business is to call All-Glass and get my office window replaced.”
That’s my promotion, Carter tried to say. But darkness had already seized his soul and dragged him into the ether.
Raised in rural Wisconsin, David Greske grew up watching the Saturday afternoon creature features. He has been writing horror stories since the age of seven and one of his first literary endeavors was a rip-off of a Dark Shadows episode. Many years later his stories have appeared in Black Ink Horror, Back Roads, and Thirteen. Whiskey Creek Press published his three novels, Anathema, Night Whispers, and Retribution. Most recently, his chapbook A Fistful of Zombies was issued as an illustrated, signed and numbered limited edition from Sideshow Press Publications. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The Gardeners
Amy Wallace
She wanted to scream. They were at it again.
“I hate you!” she hissed. “Fuckers.”
“Sally?”
“I can’t work! I can’t write. It’s those goddamn leaf blowers, Julio!”
“Oh, Sally—”
“They’re against the law in California. Why doesn’t somebody do something? I bought these great rakes—did you see those, Julio? Out by the garage? Six rakes!”
“That’s a flock of rakes. A herd. A convention. How do you say it in English?In Argentina we say—”
“Stop it.”
“Sally. You know these poor guys are underpaid. Imagine what they make! They’re just taking orders! Who knows what the company tells them to do? Can you begin to guess what conditions these guys—”
“Are you saying I’m a racist, Julio? Am I a racist?”
“Well…”
“How dare you. I—”
“Listen. The noise stopped.”
Julio looked out the upstairs window. “Hey, Sally, how do you call it here? The roach coach has arrived.”
She stared at his sculpted profile. “Wow, you even picked up ‘roach coach,’ huh?”
He turned and wrapped his arms around her, kissing her neck. “Chiquita, I want you. Look at you, my baby.” He pulled her to the bed, away from the window, and unbuttoned her skirt with one hand, clasping her wrists behind her back with the other. In his eagerness he might have torn off her clothes, but he had great respect for her expensive taste.
Afterwards he was sulky. He was often that way after sex, and she never totally understood why, except for the obvious: Severe Catholic Guilt. After all, he wasn’t from a social hub like Buenos Aires. He was from a town so small she could never remember its name, known primarily for its production of an excellent dessert made with dulce de leche.
He’d come to L.A. to make it in the movies—a goal absurd to Sally, even laughable and sad since he hadn’t the slightest clue what was involved and had very little self-discipline.
She tried to believe in his dream with him. Besides, quirkier successes had been made in this Alice-In-Wonderland town. His beauty kept his foot in the door for auditions, but all he got were odd modeling jobs, mostly for nude gay ‘zines, something which troubled him immensely, though it still fed his ego.
He scraped by financially, mostly with carpentry jobs. Now and then he got work as a gaffer’s assistant, which at least gave him the thrill of being on a set.
He let Sally buy him fabulously expensive clothes from the best shops in L.A., even suits from Barney’s. She’d been eager to support his dreams in a careless, hopeful way, because she thought she loved him. He was indeed very bright—surely that, with the clothes and a general gravitas (which she was learning was really stubborn pride), could count for much. When he hinted that he wanted a Reverso watch he’d spied in a window in Beverly Hills, she looked at the price and said, “Whew!” And he sulked profoundly. Sally broke down and surprised him with it a month later. He’s not getting Phippe Patek, she’d thought firmly. She wanted to say something, but kept the thought to herself.
Guadalupe, her Columbian maid, took Julio’s measure and said little. Sally and she were pretty friendly despite the language barrier, and she suspected that Guadalupe thought Julio was a gigolo. Sometimes, when Sally needed help communicating with her maid, she asked Julio for assistance, which seemed to make him uncomfortable. Sally knew he came from the same kind of poverty Guadalupe did, or nearly. But unlike the maid, he tried to pass for rich.
He had the kind of body which, as the cliché went, looked great with any old thing thrown over it, but now he had acquired a real wardrobe thanks to Sally. Guadalupe watched his growing acquisition of clothes and Italian loafers, and when they came back from their shopping trips, she hung them carefully in the closet.
Though she and Julio didn’t live together—they weren’t that committed yet—he was there a lot. In his shitty little car, he drove to the west side from Koreatown, where he lived squashed in with six Argentineans who barely spoke English, in a very clean, very claustrophobic apartment. Six of them shared one bathroom. Sally’s house had four bathrooms, one for each bedroom. When she spent the night with him, in his tiny, neat room on his single bed (she thought that was sexy), his roommates treated her with quiet awe, partly, she suspected, because of her Jaguar. They knew he got to drive it.
***
When Sally bought the fancy house with the pool in Westwood, she knew she was in for a lot of expense. The pool guy, the chimney sweep, the gardeners . . .
The Gardeners.
There wasn’t much in the way of a front yard—a few big trees and some boxy bushes that separated her from the neighbors. The pool took up the back.
Still, the gardening was lackluster. She approached her neighbor, Fran, a pear-shaped housewife with an absent husband and a noisy teenage son.
“Hi, I’m Sally. Fran?”
Smiles, handshakes.
“I was thinking of hiring a gardener. Do you know anyone?”
Fran looked uncomfortable. She looked over Sally’s shoulder, avoiding eye contact.
“We all use the same gardeners. Great price—fifty dollars a month,” Fran droned.
“Fifty a month! That is good. But…I’m no gardener, and I was imagining something a little more…colorful.”
“Well. We’ve never used anyone else.”
They saw the head gardener standing off in the distance and waved to him. Fran addressed him in rapid-fire Spanish that seemed to have its origins in “How To Speak To Your Maid.”
That seemed to close the conversation. Any efforts to discuss the gardeners with other neighbors went the same way: a shrug, a frown, a dismissive wave.
***
The first week she moved in, she and Julio were woken by a tremendous noise. Leaf-blowers screeched, garbage cans clanked, hedge-clippers reduced the bushes to the same, square shape.
She went outside to meet and greet. The head gardener was Signor Manuel, a tall, stooped man with a shaggy moustache and a heavily lined face. He wore sunglasses. In fact, they all wore sunglasses; which, while it made sense, looked a little unusual. Other Mexican gardeners didn’t all wear shades. These guys were kind of odd. And she never saw their truck arrive or leave. Sally shrugged. So they were eccentric. She was born and raised in California where eccentricity was the norm.
She had one conversational gambit in Spanish.
“Hola, senor.”
“Hola, senorita.”
“Com esta usted?”
He shrugged. “Muy bien.”
“Oh, well…mucho trabajo…poco dinero!”
(Much work, little money.)
“Si!” His mouth curved in a smile, showing a row of brown, broken teeth. A few were missing and the front two were lined in gold: the old-fashioned Mexican fillings called “windows.”
“Heh. Si, poco dinero!”
She guessed they were going to be, if not friends, no
t…she bit her lip…enemies. What a weird thing to think.
The other gardeners—five of them—pretended not to watch this first meeting between the mistress of the manor and El Jefe.
But they did watch from behind their shades as they wiped sweat from their brows and wielded huge, rusty hedge clippers. The illegal leaf blowers never stopped.
“Eh, Senorita—we take out tree for you.” Senor Manuel pointed to an overgrown Ficus that threatened to take over the yard. Scary looking roots humped up throughout the lawn.
“Oh. Well. That sounds expensive. How much?”
“Fifty dollars.”
“Gosh! Okay.”
“Weh. Good price.”
(Weh? Maybe this was some Toltec dialect she’d never heard. Weh.)
“Um, senor, does that mean you take out the stump, too?”
He looked at her blankly.
“El stump,” she said, stifling a nervous laugh. “Um…el cut?” She made slashing and lifting motions.
“Si! We take care of tree. Tree no good here.”
***
When she told Julio everyone on the block hired them for fifty dollars, he took to calling them “The Mafioso Gardeners.” When she told him they would take out the horrible Ficus for only another fifty, he looked impressed.
A few weeks passed in a chilly truce with the gardeners, Sally’s nerves growing increasingly worn by the noise.
The tree was still there.
And then the awful thing.
Her roses…
They were the first things she’d ever planted. At her favorite nursery she selected Passion’s Pride, Snow White, Moroccan Morning, English Cream, and Pale Fire. After a long, dirty afternoon—happy, scratched, shoulders aching—she sunk into a perfumed bath and luxuriated for a long time, proud of her efforts, anxious to enjoy the fruit of her labor.
She made a cup of tea when she got out of the tub, but before the first sip, she fell asleep.
The late nap became an early bedtime.
She woke at dawn, excited as a kid on Christmas morning, and ran outside barefoot in her pajamas to look at her roses.
They were wrong.
HELP! WANTED: Tales of On-the-Job Terror Page 15