by Dorsey, Tim
“Disallowed!” said Ingersol, making a big swipe across the report with a red pen. He looked up and saw the postcards in Mahoney’s hand. “Who are those from?”
“Serge,” said Mahoney.
“What now?” asked Ingersol. “Taunts? Threats?”
Mahoney shook his head. “Travel tips.”
“What?”
“Places to eat. Museums. Antique stores. Great hotel deals,” said Mahoney. “Best manhunt I’ve ever been on.”
“Well, it’s over as of this minute!” said Ingersol. “This Serge thing has become an obsession with you. It’s a personal vendetta, and we don’t have the budget for that. Besides, I’ve got some real work for you. Tourist was killed last night.”
“So what’s new?” said Mahoney.
“At the Welcome Center.”
“Ouch.”
“This is a media nightmare,” said Ingersol. “I can just see the British headlines.”
“Any leads?”
“Nothing solid, but it has the stink of the McGraw Brothers.”
“The country music group?”
“No, you putz, the bank robbers.”
“I thought they were in prison?”
“Were,” said Ingersol. “Got sprung two days ago from Talladega Federal.”
Mahoney rubbed his chin. “Isn’t that where Denny McClain did his time?”
Ingersoll nodded. “I drove through Talladega once. Passed by as a stock-car race was letting out at the speedway and got stuck in traffic. Mahoney, do you have any idea what it’s like to be trapped in the Dixie boondocks at sunset with a hundred thousand rednecks all pumped up from watching NASCAR and thinking they can drive like Richard Petty on a full tank of Miller Genuine Draft?” Ingersol leaned back in his chair and stared thoughtfully out the door. “Scariest shit I ever seen in my life.”
“But that’s up in Alabama,” said Mahoney. “The McGraws could go anywhere. What makes you think they headed to Florida?”
“Remember that botched bank job in Tampa last week? The airbag case?”
“Oh, yeah. I couldn’t stop laughing.”
“That was Skag McGraw, the youngest brother. Revenge is a powerful emotion. My gut tells me they’re headed to the bay area. I want you to stay on top of this.”
“Can I go to Tampa?”
“Not a chance,” said Ingersol. “I know what you’re thinking. Serge is from Tampa. You just want to take off on your own wild-goose chase.”
“I swear. It’ll be a fishing expedition.”
“Forget it. You’re going to monitor it from this office where I can keep an eye on you. Let the field agents clean up any messes.”
Mahoney pointed out the door at the wall map. “I’ll use green pins.”
“Knock yourself out.”
14
YOU COULDN’T HELP but like Jim Davenport. In addition to being agreeable, he was incredibly resilient.
He had felt terrible about killing Skag McGraw, despite the circumstances. Everyone was understanding and reassuring—his wife, the neighbors, the police and his company, who gave him a week off to rest, not so much out of compassion but because they didn’t want a distracted employee running over a pedestrian on company time and getting them sued.
A week was more than enough.
Yes, Jim had taken a life, and it was against everything in his nature. He shuffled around the bottom of a funk for five days before deciding “I have a family to take care of,” and he snapped out of it a second later.
Jim was more than ready when his alarm clock went off six-thirty Monday morning. He got up with the rest of the block.
Weekday mornings on Triggerfish Lane were a ballet. Lights and showers and TVs came on in sequence along the dark street. Garbage cans went down the driveways and newspapers came back up in rolling choreography. Most of the televisions were tuned to the same local morning show, Get the Hell out of Bed, Tampa Bay!
Jim Davenport walked through the living room tying his tie. Martha was already in the kitchen, dressed smartly, a whirling dervish. She circled the table collecting empty breakfast plates from Debbie, Melvin and Nicole. “More orange juice?”
Jim sat down with the paper. “Morning, honey.”
The TV in the next room: “…Is too much love bad for you? Hear from the experts!…”
Martha dropped the dishes in the sink and grabbed Jim’s strudel as it popped from the toaster.
“Morning, dear.”
All the households on Triggerfish had the same rhythms. Except one.
As he did most mornings at precisely 3 A.M., Serge screamed himself awake from another vivid nightmare involving a slaughterhouse and Mousketeers. He went into the living room brushing his teeth and turned on the three stolen TVs stacked in a pyramid. CNN, MSNBC and C-SPAN. He sat down on the couch with a clipboard and took notes.
“International observers report polling irregularities in the outlying mountainous Huizenga states, where voter turnout is close to one hundred percent as peasants arrive en masse to cast ballots in defiance of the guerrillas…”
Serge scribbled an urgent action item on his clipboard: Don’t take democracy for granted!
More news, more action items. Serge watched until he felt confident he had a handle on the world, then turned up the volume to hear the sets from the kitchen while he prepared a gourmet breakfast. He flipped a southern omelet and checked his watch. “Oops.” He whipped off his chef’s hat and ran out the front door and stood in darkness in the middle of the lawn.
Headlights came around the corner, and a station wagon slowly rolled up the street. Serge dug in his feet and crouched. A newspaper sailed out the station wagon’s window. Serge caught it on the fly and ran back inside. He spread the sections across the floor and went over them with highlighters.
Finally, Serge showered with all-natural pumice to get deep into his skin. Serge had a theory that most people’s brain activity got gummed up through improperly maintained pores, and he worked diligently each morning to get his in working order. When his pores were happy, Serge was happy, and he turned the cold faucet all the way off and stood under the steaming-hot stream as long as he could stand it. Just as he was about to yell, he reversed the faucets, shivering for sixty seconds, timing himself on his diver’s watch. He turned off the shower and leaped from the tub, throwing two victorious fists in the air. He was completely alive, ready for Today.
“DON’T YOU WANT your strudel?” asked Martha.
“Running late,” said Jim, folding his paper over to the next section.
“But you have time to read the sports.”
Jim knew better than to answer.
“Debbie, strudel?”
No answer.
“I’ll take it, Mom,” said Melvin.
“Okay, but you’ll have to eat it in the car.”
Martha kissed Jim good-bye, then grabbed the keys and the handle of Nicole’s child seat and herded everyone out of the room.
Jim went back to his paper. “I’ll read the sports if I want.”
“I heard that,” Martha yelled from the front door.
“I love you.”
“Love you, too!”
SERGE WAS GIVING a pep talk to his porch plants when he witnessed the tightly controlled bedlam of a mother singlehandedly loading three children into a Suburban. It reminded him it was time to get his own kids up.
He went back inside and slowly opened the door to Coleman’s bedroom. Coleman was on top of the sheets in his BVDs, a shiny string of spit hanging from his open mouth to the pool of saliva on his pillow.
Serge quietly closed the door. “Better put that Mensa application on hold.”
He checked on Sharon. She was out, too, snoring like a biker. He leaned over and made a buzzing sound near her ear. Sharon swatted insects in her sleep. He leaned closer and buzzed again. Sharon half opened one eye.
“You’re an asshole!” She rolled over and covered her head with the pillow.
Serge went in the b
athroom. “I’m flushing your coke!” He hit the toilet lever.
Sharon was out of bed in a flash. Coleman, who heard Serge through the wall in his sleep, arrived in the bathroom doorway the same time as Sharon, and they collided and fell down.
“Just kidding,” said Serge. “You know, you guys might consider getting in some kind of program. Just a thought.”
Serge marched with purpose for the kitchen table. Sharon and Coleman yawned and followed. Serge sat down and picked up his clipboard and pruned his “action items”: “Locate first edition, Islands in the Stream, enclose in protective mylar cover. Research university microfilm, Murph the Surf (legend or loser?). To Buy: used 21mm wide-angle lens w/polarizing filter for Diane Arbus-like portraits of unusual, compelling people you meet at bus stops and in public library (each one is special, has a story!). Change voter registration again: party too mean-spirited. Construct Adirondack chair for porch like one in that watercolor. Optional (if time permits): Rent ground-penetrating radar to locate network of secret 1940s organized-crime escape tunnels in Ybor City.”
“What’s with the stupid clipboard?” said Sharon.
“If you don’t visualize what you want to accomplish, then you won’t accomplish anything.”
“That’s the stupidest shit I ever heard!”
“What are you going to do today?”
Sharon lit a Marlboro and tossed the lighter on the table. “I dunno.”
Serge heard a kitchen utensil rattling against glass. He turned to Coleman, eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.
“Would you like an omelet instead?” asked Serge. “I can whip one up in a second. Really, no bother.”
“Can you put peanut butter in an omelet?”
“It’s usually better without.”
“No thanks.”
Serge turned. “Sharon? Omelet?”
Sharon was rubbing cocaine into her gums.
“Sorry, I forgot,” said Serge. “You’re on the all-blow diet.”
Outside on Triggerfish Lane, twenty cars sequentially backed from driveways and accelerated down the street like a B-17 squadron rollout on an English tarmac.
Serge trotted out the door to the Barracuda, untucking his tropical shirt to cover the .38 automatic in his belt.
Jim Davenport came down the steps across the street with his briefcase and headed for his business car, a ’92 Saturn.
Serge waved. “Big day ahead?”
“Huge,” said Jim. “Yourself?”
Serge checked his front pocket for a spare ammo clip. “Same old same old…”
They waved again and got in their cars and drove off in opposite directions.
Jim made good time in morning traffic listening to the local zoo radio team. The zoo team was playing another ingenious prank, dressing up as jail prisoners and running through neighborhoods knocking on doors, asking people to saw their handcuffs off.
Jim arrived early for work. He was an eleven-year employee at Apollo Consulting. He had taken the penknife over the money clip for his tenth anniversary. Jim loved the job variety of consulting. Every week a different office, different company, different city. Jim went over their books, observed management, interviewed employees, then wrote brilliant reports that spun off unprofitable subsidiaries and pancaked steep organizational charts.
Jim was a genius at the quick sweep, coming up to speed rapidly in new surroundings and instantly zeroing in on assembly-line snags, brainless marketing campaigns and which executive was the cancer on the corporation. But Jim’s real strengths were the intangibles, the stuff other consultants couldn’t account for with their computer models and time-motion studies. Jim had an extra-sensitive high-gain emotional antenna and could practically see the ambient human aura in an workplace like a giant mood ring. Jim found the temperament of large groups of people working together ebbed and flowed like a single gelatinous organism. Over time, companies displayed distinct personalities. Some were sunny and optimistic, others clinically depressed. There were the giddy, the unctuous, the circumspect and the terror-stricken.
Jim targeted the dysfunctional ones for surgical fixes that paid immediate dividends to stockholders. Flex-time for working moms, beefing up human resources, production incentives. Sometimes it was as simple as a more cheerful paint scheme or getting rid of lettuce in the cafeteria salad bar once it turned brown. Jim’s bosses at Apollo loved him. So did the people he interviewed—finally, someone who will listen to us! Jim believed he was making a difference.
Business exploded, and Apollo soon found it was spending way too much on travel down to the booming Tampa-Orlando corridor.
The Monday after his week off for killing Skag McGraw, Jim drove across town to the newly constructed Apollo office. He drifted through morning rush traffic on Interstate 4 with the radio on, zoo DJs running handcuffed through a day-care parking lot. Apollo Consulting had built its new branch in an expanding business park near the I-75/I-4 nexus. Jim pulled past the guard shack just as the DJs were arrested for public endangerment by Tampa police, who unhandcuffed them, then handcuffed them. Apollo had built an impressive office. There was even a handball court, the sort of thing Jim might recommend in one of his reports. Jim walked in the lobby, and a secretary told him he needed to call the home office immediately.
Jim got on the phone. “I see. I see…”
Apollo had just been acquired in a hostile takeover by Damocles Consulting, Inc.
The new company said it planned to keep the Florida operation—maybe even increase it—and nobody had any reason to worry.
Jim arrived for work the next day and half the staff was gone, just like that, replaced by young, sharp-looking, humorless drones from a corporate incubator in Simi Valley. Jim tried to make small talk and get to know his new colleagues, but they made him go away with a set of efficient nonverbal cues that they had picked up in a training class.
Jim’s first assignment under new management was an injection-molding firm in Clearwater. He set about it the same old way, but he began getting a different vibe from the employees. Jim wasn’t quite sure, but something seemed a little odd about these people. They ran away when they saw him.
Jim didn’t know it, but word was out that Damocles was in the building. Jim shrugged it off and went back to the business park and wrote one of his finest reports.
The next morning, when Jim arrived at work, the receptionist told him the new office manager wanted to see him. Jim went upstairs and knocked on a mahogany door with a fresh brass nameplate.
“Come in.”
Jim stuck his head inside. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Young?”
“Have a seat, Jim. And please, call me Turk.”
He held up Jim’s latest report. It was marked heavily with red felt-tip.
“We need to revise some things in here.”
“Like what?” asked Jim.
“This stuff about employee chemistry.”
“My experience has been—”
“And this section about adding positions on the assembly line…”
“Right, I—”
Turk scribbled some more with his red pen, then looked up. “We have to drop at least eighty jobs company-wide.”
“What? That’s crazy!” said Jim. “They’re so understaffed now it’s a safety issue. I documented it all.”
Turk set the report down on his desk. “We can’t use your suggestions.”
“Something wrong with them?”
“No, they’re perfect. But you see, these companies already know what they want to do before they call us.”
“They do?”
“They do. Say a company wants to position itself for an acquisition. It’s carrying too much payroll. It needs to slash X jobs to get the stock price it wants. We come in and recommend they slash X jobs and then write a report to support that conclusion.”
“That must make the employees mad.”
“Furious.”
“Since it’s already been decided, why do we ge
t involved?”
“You’ve heard of going postal?”
Jim nodded.
“I don’t know if you know this, but we’re not really in the consulting business.”
Jim was confused. “What business are we in?”
“The employee-violence-abatement business. The American workplace is getting too hot. Employers can no longer be whimsical with peoples’ lives without having to worry about getting shot or something. Call it the decay of our culture. Our role is to allow top managers to say, ‘Hey, I wanted to keep you on, but the consultants made me do it!’ ”
“We willingly take the blame?”
Turk smiled. “It’s how we’ve become the biggest in the business. That and the fact that we save an incredible amount on in-house training. We have no idea how to advise these companies. We don’t even know what the fuck some of them do.”
“What does that say about our profession?”
“They’re already saying it: Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, consult.”
“So my job now is—?”
“To draw fire. Like when a fighter jet dumps metallic chaff and incendiary decoys to lure away surface-to-air missiles.”
“I’m chaff?”
“Chaff.”
“Is that good?”
“Pays well. That’s as good as it gets.”
15
JOHN MILTON HAD A REALLY BAD JOB.
Everyone kept telling John this. Guys who tarred roofs in Miami in July told him. So did drainage workers in septic tanks. And the people who fixed downed power lines in the rain. And airport cavity searchers. And the team that travels as the Harlem Globetrotters’ opponents. And a new Star Trek character without a speaking part who beams down to the hostile planet with Kirk, Spock and Bones…they all kept saying the same thing: “John, have you got a really bad job!”
John was a substitute teacher at a public school.
John tried to make the best of it, but it was hard to reach students when they were tampering with ankle monitors.
John lived in a tiny apartment in west Tampa that overlooked box compactors behind a Wal-Mart. It was one of those old three-story jobs that sprouted around Tampa in the fifties, powder-blue trim and the complex’s name in cursive letters on the side. But the sturdy construction had far outlasted the desirability of the neighborhood, and living there had gone from modest quaintness to a decidedly dicey proposition. All vegetation was dead, soot ran halfway up the outside walls, and a row of six-hundred-dollar sedans nosed against the building, dripping oil, Prestone and brake fluid that ran to the storm drain through cigarette butts, broken beer bottles and spent phone cards. It was called “Splendid Acres.”