The girl looked positively terrified. She shrank back against the wall, literally too afraid to move.
Shawn leaned within an inch of the girl’s face.
“I said—” Shawn began.
I cut him off. “I said you should leave her alone.” I took a few steps closer. The girl was watching me. Shawn was watching me.
Shawn sighed. “Why don’t you just fuck off, Walker?”
And then something inside me snapped. There were multiple factors behind the anger that exploded within me at that moment. First there was the enormity of the situation itself: I couldn't believe that Shawn Myers was sexually bullying this teenaged girl. Then there was Shawn’s attitude—his obvious assumption that the rules of civil conduct did not apply to him.
And then there was the fact that Shawn had used my real last name, Walker. This could potentially blow my cover if the wrong person overheard it.
In a single fluid motion, I seized Shawn by the tie and collar and whirled him around. Then I slammed him against the adjacent wall. His body made a gratifying sound when it struck the painted concrete.
I could smell the alcohol on Shawn’s breath. I knew what had happened: He had been viewing porn and furtively drinking at his desk, then he had decided to see if he could make one of his online fantasies come true with this teenaged girl.
The girl herself was shocked. She dropped her mop, and the handle clattered to the floor. She backed away from Shawn and me.
Shawn was momentarily incapacitated. I had knocked the wind out of him. But he was a big man and I had seriously hurt his pride. Within a few seconds he would regain his composure and his strength. Then he would demand my full attention.
I didn't want this young girl to witness what might come next: An all-out fistfight between two adult men.
“You might want to take a walk,” I told her, still holding Shawn against the wall.
She walked away, but not before she turned back to me and mouthed the words, “Thank you.”
I didn’t have time to tell her that she was welcome. I had done what I had to do, done what I believed to be right. But why had I done it?
Even as I grabbed Shawn by the collar and pressed him against the wall, I had reason to question my own motives. For the first time since founding Craig Walker Consulting, I had been feeling uneasy about my role in the process of maintaining corporate order. Something about the work I had been doing for TP Automotive made me feel uncomfortable. This uneasiness had begun with the firing of Kevin Lang; and it had been made worse by my knowledge of what awaited Alan Ferguson and Lucy Browning in the coming days.
Was this little gesture of chivalry nothing more than an attempt to redeem myself in my own eyes? To convince myself that Craig Walker was still a “good guy”?—The same working-class boy from Dayton who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps?
No time for subtle thoughts like that now.
When he had hit the wall, Shawn had been stunned by my unexpected assault. Now his shock was giving way to the inevitable rage. He tried to push me backward, and I shoved right back at him, slamming him up against the wall again.
Shawn was intoxicated and I had his tie and collar in my hands. He must have realized that the physical advantage was mine—at least for now.
“You’re finished here, Walker,” he said, gasping for breath. “Is that how you usually treat the hand that feeds you?”
“You aren’t feeding me anything, chump,” I said. “I was hired by your father and Beth Fisk.”
“And wait until they find out that you’ve physically assaulted a member of the TP Automotive management team.”
Shawn knew how important the TP Automotive account was to me. He knew my vulnerable spot.
But I also knew his. I recalled my earlier conversation with Kurt, how the two of us had talked in Cleveland right after we fired Kevin Lang. Kurt had mentioned some “trouble” that Shawn had gotten himself into during his college years. Based on what I had just witnessed, this must have been more than a simple youthful indiscretion. Shawn had done something bad while at OSU; and it had likely involved women.
“Go ahead and tell them,” I said. “And I’ll tell Daddy and Beth that you’ve been sexually harassing a girl young enough to be your daughter.”
“She’s not—”
“Yeah, Shawn, she’s young enough to be your daughter. Why don’t you think about that while you decide what you’re going to do?”
I released him—but not before shoving him up against the wall one final time. For a second I believed that he was going to take a swing at me. Then he thought better of it. Shawn Myers straightened his tie and did his best to assume the posture that one would take in a corporate boardroom meeting. His anger and wounded pride wouldn't let him, though. He leaned close to me. Our noses were only inches apart.
“If I wasn't drunk now—”
“Then you’d do what? You’re a grown man who picks on little girls.” I was surprised that Shawn would make such an admission. But on the other hand, what was a little on-the-job drinking, compared to the behavior I had just observed?
“You don’t know jack shit,” Shawn resumed.
“I know what I saw.”
But Shawn didn’t want to talk about what I had seen. I would have expected as much. Instead he resorted to the sort of threats that most men have left behind by the time they reach adulthood.
“I ought to kick your ass.”
“You want to take a swing at me?” I asked. “I’m right here.”
And in that instant, I really did want Shawn Myers to throw a punch at me. This was irrational, of course. But something about Shawn Myers—and everything he stood for—made me want to thrash him to a bloody pulp.
A long time would pass before I would realize that part of my hatred could be traced to self-loathing. I might not sexually harass teenaged girls; but I made my living as the tool of privileged men and women who treated publicly owned corporations as their private fiefdoms. These were men and women who would throw Alan, Lucy, and Kevin Lang out on the street in the name of maintaining organizational harmony, while they simultaneously tolerated a Shawn Myers in their midst.
The truth is all about interpretation—and who is involved…
I took a step backward. Shawn wasn't going to take a swing at me, and I wasn't going to take a swing at him. It was time for this standoff to end.
Shawn stepped around me and walked back toward his desk.
“This isn’t over,” he finally said. “This isn’t over by a long shot.”
And about that much, Shawn Myers was right.
Chapter 32
I left the UP&S plant full of rage. I felt like I often had back in high school, when my team had lost an important game, and it was too late to take out my aggressions on the opposing team. When a healthy young man is filled with rage, that excess energy tends to channel itself one of several predictable directions.
My first option was to pummel Shawn Myers until he fell unconscious; that wasn't really an option. Failing that, I would have liked to hit the weights; but there was no fitness room in my hotel.
What I decided upon, therefore, was a third but by no means inferior option. I wanted to feel Claire’s fingernails digging into the skin of my chest and back. I wanted to feel her bite my shoulder hard enough to draw blood, as she sometimes did in the throes of passion. I wanted to let her to vent her unquenchable hunger and fury against my own.
I called her and told her that I wanted to visit her in her room. She was staying in one of those extended-stay motels, under an assumed name, of course. We had both rented rooms some twenty miles from the UP&S plant, and in opposite directions. I was staying on the north side of Columbus. Claire was staying south of the city, just beyond the I-270 beltway loop. As I drove toward Claire’s hotel, I cracked the window, even though the December air was frigid. I tuned the radio to a hard rock station and cranked up the volume.
I was still full of hostile energy when I arri
ved in the parking lot of Claire’s motel. She had rented a first-floor room, so her door opened directly onto the parking lot. I rapped twice on the door.
She greeted me in a pair of gym shorts and a sleeveless blouse that was completely inappropriate for the first week of December in Ohio. I kissed her in the doorway, pushing her up against the frame of the open door. The early winter sun had set hours ago, and the parking lot was dimly lit; but anyone could have seen us, silhouetted as we were by the light in her room.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” she asked, barely breaking the kiss. She began to unbutton my shirt. I could feel the cold air rush against my skin. “Something’s up with you,” she said.
She could always read me, because we were so much alike—as much as I hated to admit it.
“Let’s just say I’m glad I’m not a real employee at UP&S.”
“Well,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t think that either one of us is cut out for the typical corporate gig.”
As she took my hand and guided me inside her room, I took a moment to reflect on what she had just said: Although I had become an expert in the fields of management science and organizational strategy, I would not last a day as an Alan Ferguson or a Lucy Browning. There was no way that I could nod my head politely and take orders from a Shawn Myers—or a Kurt Myers, for that matter. Ditto for Bernie Chapman and Beth Fisk. I dealt with corporate managers as an outsider, always on an ad hoc basis, secure in the knowledge that while they might be renting me, they had not purchased me. There is a difference between these two states.
Claire closed the door behind us and killed the lights. We were both undressed in a matter of seconds. I pulled her clothes off with what was left of that rage from the confrontation with Shawn; and she responded in kind.
Afterward, as we lay together on the queen-sized motel bed, our bodies pleasantly sheened with sweat, I happened to glance over at her handbag. Her $400 Coach purse was propped on the nightstand, the kind that hotels always stock with local phone directories and copies of the New Testament. (I suspected that Claire would not have much use for either of these.)
I happened to notice the grip of a pistol protruding from her open purse. I had known that Claire always carried a gun with her. Another remnant from her irregular, disjointed youth. But it was a subject that we had never really talked about before.
“I didn’t notice any suspicious characters lurking around the parking lot,” I said, gesturing toward the purse. “But I see that you’re prepared in the event of a break-in.”
“You know that I always carry a gun with me,” she said. She leaned across me and removed the pistol from her purse. A snub-nosed revolver. “It’s a .38 special,” she said, cradling the gun in her hands.
“Just like the old rock band,” I observed, in reference to a Southern rock band that had been popular in the 1980s.
“Yeah, just like the rock band. Do you want to hold it?”
“No thanks.”
Claire leaned across me again and put the gun back into her purse.
“I’ve been carrying that gun since I was around twenty,” she said. I hadn’t asked for an explanation; but I didn’t interrupt her. Claire rarely opened up about her past, or her feelings.
“I think you already know that I went through a rough patch. Well, my entire childhood was a rough patch.”
“Yeah, that’s what you’ve told me. In so many words.”
“I got good grades in high school,” she said. “But growing up in this little blue-collar town, thirty miles west of Detroit…Well, I’d always planned on going to college. But those plans got derailed.”
“By a guy,” I interjected. Needless to say. What else would it have been but a guy?
“That’s right. His name was Jamie Watkins. And he was one of the big football jocks in our graduating class in high school. He also sold drugs.”
Having grown up in a lower middle-class, blue-collar setting myself, I didn’t necessarily see the contradiction here. Strictly speaking, athletes should stay away from drinking, drugs—or anything else that could harm their bodies or get them into trouble. But that injunction is most strictly observed in the wealthy suburbs, where overly attentive parents hover over their budding progeny, writing checks for expensive prep schools and personal trainers.
It’s different at the fringes of society, where a star athlete might also be a pothead, a drunk, or even a criminal. I could easily picture this Jamie Watkins. I had never met him; but I had known plenty of his kind during my own growing-up years.
“Did you get into drugs too?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Hell, no. I always knew that that would have been a point of no return for me. I did get really into Jamie, though. He was tall, and broad-shouldered, and he had a pouty smile that could melt your heart.”
“Gag,” I teased.
She swatted playfully at me. “He was also great in bed.”
“Not better than me.”
Claire rubbed the moist skin on my chest. “It would be a close contest. Jamie would have given even you a run for your money.”
“So how did he mess things up for you?” I asked, not wanting to hear anything more about Jamie’s body, or his pouty smile, or his performance in bed.
“Well, we started going together during our senior year. I had been accepted at Michigan State; but he talked me into hanging around in that damned town for an extra year. We moved into this little trailer that he rented on the outskirts of town. He couldn’t hold a job, of course. Mostly he supported himself by selling drugs.”
“Is that why you bought the pistol?” I asked. “Because you were afraid of the shady characters who were buying drugs from your boyfriend?”
“No,” she said. Claire rolled away from me and gazed up at the ceiling. “I bought the gun because I was afraid of Jamie. After only a few months, things started going badly for him. He had this vision of himself as a kingpin. You know—like all the ‘gangstas’ you see in MTV rap videos. But in real-life, it didn’t work out like that for him. He wasn’t making much money, and he had these people threatening him all the time. So he started to become really depressed, moody. He would pound the walls of our trailer sometimes at night.”
She let out a long sigh. “Then came the day when he started pounding on me. It was just a slap her and there, at first. Then one day I said something that he didn’t like, and he beat the shit out of me.”
I was almost incredulous. There was no way that I could reconcile the present-day image of Claire the Ice Queen with a small-town girl who allowed her dropout boyfriend to use her for a punching bag.
She looked at me. “I guess you want to know why I put up with it.”
“Yeah. Why did you put up with it?”
“I tried to leave, actually, several times. But then he would track me down at a friend’s house or wherever I was staying. He would make nice, giving me another glimpse of the old Jamie. Then I would move back in and the cycle would begin again.
“But one night he was drinking and high, and he started talking all this crazy shit, and I was scared to even be in the trailer with him. I made some excuse to leave. Said I had to go visit my parents. And Jamie says, ‘You lying bitch, you hate your parents. You’re not going anywhere.’ And so I tried to leave anyway, and he grabbed me and started beating me.
“When I woke up, I was in a bed in the county hospital. He had beaten me unconscious, and I guess he was afraid that he had crossed the line this time and actually killed me.
“A county sheriff’s deputy took him into custody that very night. The deputy asked me if I wanted to file a formal complaint and I said ‘Hell, yes’—even though I knew that Jamie would be out in a few months, at the most.
“When they discharged me from the hospital, the first thing I did was buy the gun. A week later Jamie came looking for me. The sheriff had let him out on bail, of course. He found me at my cousin’s place when there was no one else around. I walked out on the front porch
and he was there with a bouquet of flowers. I guess he believed that even though he had put me in the hospital, we were going to begin the whole thing again.” Claire laughed bitterly. “Sure he did. That’s exactly what he thought.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I walked out onto the front porch with the gun behind my back. I was smiling like I was going to come back to him. And then when I got close, I pulled out the gun and rammed it up against his throat, so that if it went off, it would have taken off the top of his head. And I said, ‘Jamie, if you ever come near me again, it will be the last thing you ever do. Because I’m going to put six holes in you, and then I’m going to reload and put six more holes in.”
She rolled back against me. “Jamie’s face turned white. He went away. I could see him shaking as he walked toward his car. After that I never saw him again.”
“That’s one hell of a restraining order,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it got that son of a bitch out of my life forever. Since then I’ve always kept the gun with me. But I don’t really need it for protection anymore. Not in the circles that I move in now. Today it’s more of a good luck charm, a reminder that I’ll never be a victim again.”
Interesting, I thought. Most women would carry a piece of jewelry or a family photo around as a good luck charm. Claire’s good luck charm was the .38 special that she had used to threaten her abusive ex-boyfriend.
“Anyway, she said. “Enough about me. What got you so fired up tonight?”
“Shawn Myers,” I said. “I had a little discussion with him that didn’t go so well.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“No. Not really.”
I decided that I shouldn’t tell Claire what I had seen tonight—or what I had done. Not yet. I was still assessing the situation. My conflict with Shawn Myers might escalate from here, and it might blow over. Nothing was to be gained at this point by making Claire aware of these details.
Nor was I worried about Shawn attempting to press himself on Claire, even though she was easily the most attractive female at UP&S. Claire Turner was nothing like the daughter of the cleaning woman. The preceding story had only reinforced my belief that Claire Turner could take care of herself.
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