by Andrew Price
Corbin ran his fingers through his hair. “This one takes the cake. I mean. . . shit! He’s gonna get you now, if it takes the rest of his life. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t fire you this afternoon.”
“He can’t, I’ve got my time in grade.”
“He’s dumb enough to try it.”
“No, that’s not his style. He’ll probably give me a horrible evaluation.”
“That or knife you while you sleep. I’d stop napping in the office for a while.”
Beckett looked at his hands; they were shaking. “Do you think she’ll do anything to him?”
“Does anyone ever? If there was any justice in this world, he’d have been fired years ago.” Corbin pulled his book from his desk. “Of course, so would the rest of us.”
“I guess we should be thankful the government keeps people like him.”
Corbin looked confused. “Why?”
“If they didn’t, he’d be out in the real world labor force. Then you’d never get your order right at McDonalds.”
“Good point.” Corbin stared at Beckett for a moment before rising to close the door. He sat down in the extra chair by Beckett’s desk. “Listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but until this thing is done, you need to stop drawing attention to yourself.”
“You’re right,” Beckett responded too quickly to have considered Corbin’s words.
“Evan, the more people you provoke, the harder it’ll be for you to disappear on June 14th.”
“I agree. You’re right,” Beckett conceded more contritely, only to suddenly clench his fists like a boxer and exclaim: “I just feel so energized right now.”
Corbin turned on his friend. “Dammit! You’ve got to keep the emotion out of this! Emotion makes you erratic. We’ve got to be calm, cool, collected.”
“I know.”
“I’m serious!”
“I know.” Beckett held up his hand as if swearing an oath. “I swear I will do my best.”
“Keep your eye on the prize,” Corbin said, before opening the door again, only to find Molly looking smug.
“Boys.”
“Molly. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“Can’t a girl visit her two favorite coworkers without a reason?”
“Anything’s possible,” Corbin said doubtfully.
Molly pushed past Corbin and seated herself next to Beckett. She picked up Beckett’s dictionary and flipped through its pages. Trying to figure out what Corbin and Beckett were up to had become Molly’s new hobby, a hobby of which they were keenly aware. She set the dictionary in her lap and focused on Corbin.
“So how are things?”
“Unimaginably fantastic,” Corbin replied. “You?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain.” Molly smirked. “My that’s a lovely suit, Corbin. Olive green is your color; it really suits you.” It was clear to all she was toying with him, waiting to spring some big surprise. In fact, it sounded a bit like she was gloating.
“This old thing?” Corbin played along. “Well, let me say, that’s a beautiful blouse Molly. You’ve done something with your hair too, haven’t you?”
“Oh, I’m letting it grow a little. You like?” Molly put her hand to the back of her head and puffed up her hair.
“Very fetching.”
“What do you want, Molly?!” Beckett interrupted.
She smiled. “I’m glad you asked,” she said, patting Beckett’s forearm. “I wanted to be the first to congratulate you on your complete and utter humiliation of one George H. Kak. Nice work, pal! Have ya given any thought to your future?”
Beckett recoiled. “You heard that?!”
Grinning like the Cheshire Cat, Molly pressed her advantage. She struck a nerve and they all knew it. “Everyone heard it. You’re famous.”
Corbin jumped in to buy Beckett time to regain his composure. “Did you want an autograph or something? Is that why you dropped by?”
“Oh, as if.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m glad you asked. I came to use the dictionary.” Molly flipped open the dictionary to a page she marked with her finger. “Oh, here’s the word I wanted. Noun,” Molly read to Corbin and Beckett as if they were third graders. “‘Something exceptionally desirable’. Hmm.” Molly put a finger to her lips. “Or maybe you prefer, ‘something taken by force, stratagem, or threat’?”
“What is?” Corbin looked puzzled.
“A prize, of course. How do you define prize?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Corbin said without missing a beat.
Molly winked at Corbin and sauntered from the room. “Carry on, boys.” She closed the door behind her.
Corbin signaled Beckett to remain silent as he peered beneath the door. Molly’s feet were nowhere to be seen. “It’s ok, she’s gone,” he whispered to Beckett.
“What do you think she knows?” Beckett whispered back.
“Nothing, she just overheard the word ‘prize.’ Otherwise, she would have pounded us with specific questions. Trust me, it’s killing her to think something is going on she knows nothing about. If she knew anything, she would relentlessly throw it in our faces, hoping we either let her in on it or panic and give her more clues. She’s bluffing.”
“I hope you’re right.” Beckett fiddled with a pen. “You handled that well. You didn’t sound surprised at all.” It wasn’t clear if Beckett meant this as a compliment to Corbin or an indictment of himself.
“We can’t afford to be surprised. Whatever happens, just keep the emotion out of it. If we don’t, we’ll give ourselves away. We can’t allow that.”
Beckett nodded. For a few moments, the only sound in the room was the ever-present buzzing of the fluorescent lights.
“Do you think she’s right? Do you think everybody heard?” Beckett stopped whispering.
“Everyone on the hallway, that’s for sure. The rest’ll get blow-by-blow transcripts within the hour. But it doesn’t matter, what’s done is done. You just need to stand there and take it. Don’t flinch, don’t panic, don’t cause a scene. Remember, you’re out of here in a month. Stay cool and this’ll pass. Get upset and you’ll give Molly or Kak exactly what they need to rip you apart.”
Beckett grunted. “I’m not normally this bad with stress. It’s just. . . this is a big thing. . . with my family and all. If we don’t get this right.”
“You heard the plan. You know the safeguards, and how we have layer upon layer of protection. Every risk has been considered and countered.”
“I know. I understand,” Beckett’s voice contained a tinge of irritation, but also a hint of fear. Beckett ground something into the carpet with his shoe. “It’s just this waiting. I keep thinking, ‘why can’t it be June 14 already?’ ‘Why can’t I be on the train already?’ I feel like I should be doing something.”
“Find something to fill your time.”
“Like what? There’s not really much to keep us busy here, is there?”
“Then think of something else to do. Write the great American novel, study French or FORTRAN or some other dead language, just channel your stress into something productive.”
Becket smiled. “French isn’t a dead language.”
“Give it time.”
Corbin sat at the bar at the Bluetone swirling the beer in his glass. A neon sign above the bar gave his beer a reddish tint. The bar was dark and smelled of french fries. Burnt, aging high-intensity lights on the stage cast a brownish glow over everything, though a series of recessed lights added bright spots throughout the room. Whenever people smoked, the light from these bright spots lit up the smoke and formed snakelike cones of yellowish light amidst the darkness.
The bar owner, Ronnie “Blue” Beltran, wiped the bar clean. He and Corbin became friends after Corbin started playing regularly at Blue’s bar.
“Did I ever tell you I don’t love my job?”
Blue let out a belly laugh. “Let me think.”
; “I should have been a musician, Blue.” Corbin picked at a tray of peanuts.
“What stopped cha?” Blue asked in a voice made raspy by years of smoking.
“I don’t know. I do not know. I guess, everyone always told me to stay on the track, go to a good school, get a good job, be a success. I never questioned that.”
“Can’t blame other people for the choices you make in life.” Blue pulled a cigarette from the pocket of his Cuban guayabera shirt.
“I suppose that’s true.”
“And it sure ain’t bad advice to get education or to strive to be a success.”
“That’s true too.”
“Maybe you just picked the wrong job. You any good at what cha do?”
“Honestly? I have no idea. I don’t do anything. So I have no way to know if I’m any good at it.”
“You’re one heck of a musician. I can tell you that. Just got to loosen up a bit, and you’d be serious, man.” Blue stuck the cigarette between his lips and searched the bar for a match.
“Well, I’m just talkin’. I’ve made my choice. I’m stuck being a lawyer. Besides, I only play for fun, as evidenced by what you don’t pay me to play.”
Blue laughed again. “I’ll pay you any time you wanna come play full time.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Hey, I’m a businessman, and you a good investment. Might not hire you to get my dog out of jail, but you can play in my bar anytime.”
“Then let’s hope your dog stays on the path of righteousness.” Corbin lifted his glass. “To your dog.”
Blue raised his own glass. “To making righteous decisions.”
Chapter 6
“Have you seen this?!” Theresa tossed a pamphlet onto Corbin’s lap and slid onto the end of his desk. She crossed her legs and smoothed her maroon skirt.
Corbin recognized the pamphlet as the invitation to the office’s summer conference. This was usually held at a ritzy hotel downtown, and it was attended by hordes of industry people, all looking for some advantage to be gained by meeting the office’s senior staff. Cooper Wilson used these conferences to encourage the industry to lobby Congress for more funds for the office.
“Turn to the back,” Theresa said, “you’ll laugh yourself silly.”
Corbin flipped the pamphlet over. “Humma humma humma ‘office continues to struggle in an understaffed capacity’? ‘Imperils the mission’?” Corbin furrowed his brow. “Who wrote this crap?”
“Kak, who do you think?”
“What a lying sack of—”
“Do you think we’ll have to go to this one?” Theresa asked, cutting Corbin off.
“Don’t we always?”
“What’s the date?” Beckett asked. “Maybe I’ll be gone before it happens?”
“No such luck, partner, June 2nd,” Corbin said.
“Shoot.”
Theresa shook her head. “I thought there was some sort of mercy rule: once you’ve been to enough of these, they let you stop attending?”
“You should suggest that to Kak,” Corbin offered.
“Sure, next time we have dinner I’ll mention it right after the dessert course.” Theresa rolled her eyes. She disliked Kak as much as anyone. “At least we get a day off out of it.”
“Day off? From what?” Beckett snickered.
Theresa didn’t laugh. Beckett was treading into an area they had already fought over twice before, and she wasn’t going to let his reference to this ancient antagonism go unchallenged. “From work, what do you think?!”
“What work? Nobody works around here.”
“You know, I take offense at that,” Theresa responded over her shoulder, without turning to face Beckett. “I work hard.”
“I’m sorry, Theresa, but no one here can claim they work hard, especially compared to the real world.”
“Don’t give me that. You can’t compare the private sector to the government. I’m doing a public service, which requires careful deliberation. The private sector can’t do that, all they care about is profit. Besides, what do you expect, we’re underpaid. Do you know how much they get paid? I do. I worked in the private sector before I came here.”
“For six months, ten years ago.”
“It was enough, let me tell you. If they want me to work like I’m in the private sector, they need to start paying me like I’m in the private sector.” Theresa jabbed her finger against Corbin’s desk for emphasis as she spoke.
“That still doesn’t explain why people here don’t give an honest day’s work.”
“I don’t accept that!”
“Really? How much of your day is spent playing solitaire on the computer?”
Beckett and Theresa both raised their voices.
“That’s not fair! This is a stressful job. I need something to relieve the pressure.”
“What pressure? There’s nothing stressful about this job!”
Theresa slid off Corbin’s desk and circled around toward Beckett like a boxer in a ring. Despite her tight pencil skirt and her unstable heels, she moved smoothly from years of practice as she wore nothing else. “Nothing stressful?! We make decisions that affect real people.”
Beckett stiffened. “No we don’t. We just review files to make sure money was spent properly.”
“It affects people. Not to mention, the support around here is miserable.” Theresa’s face contorted with disgust. Her nose flared, her forehead wrinkled, her eyes narrowed and seemed to come together to a point, and she bared her teeth as she curled her lips. “They do nothing,” she hissed. “I even have to write my own letters because my secretary is totally worthless. Now, she should be fired!” Theresa yelled in a voice that was strangely reminiscent of a Disney villainess. “People like her make the rest of us look bad!”
Beckett was temporarily startled by her tone.
Theresa squinted her eyes. “And let me tell you, I don’t see you working any harder than anyone else!”
“I sure don’t,” Beckett admitted, “but I don’t pretend I work hard.”
“I don’t pretend either,” Theresa gasped.
“Ok, tell me one thing you’ve finished in the past month.”
“That’s not a fair measure of what I do!”
“Then what is?”
“I’m not going to argue with you about this.”
“It doesn’t bother you that taxpayers are working hard to support my napping habit?” Beckett’s tone sharpened.
“I don’t nap at the office!” Theresa barked indignantly.
“Face it, if you had to hire someone for a job that mattered, you’d never hire anyone who worked as little as the people do in this office, including yourself!”
Theresa stepped toward Beckett, shaking her finger in his face. “Not everyone wants to work in a dog eat dog environment. I don’t want a job where my boss can fire me because he doesn’t like me or because he thinks I don’t work hard enough. I want the security this job provides, and you don’t have a right to criticize my choice.”
“That’s enough, both of you!” Corbin said, rising from his seat and pulling Theresa away from Beckett. He ushered her toward the door, where she stomped off down the hall. Corbin watched her march the length of the hallway before turning to Beckett.
“You’re just determined to be all kinds of popular around here aren’t you?”
“She started it.”
“Yeah, and she was gonna finish it too.”
“I’ll drop by later and make it up to her.”
“Why do those sound like famous last words?”
Chapter 7
Every criminal scheme needs a moment where the schemers stop thinking of it as a theory and start thinking of it as a fact. If that moment doesn’t come, the scheme never attains reality, it just slowly fades away into the realm of forgotten dreams. But if the moment does come, the plan takes on a life of its own, an inevitability, and it gains a momentum which pulls the participants relentlessly toward their fate. No one could sa
y exactly when Corbin’s plan became a fact, but by early May it had.
Corbin and Beckett sat on opposite sides of Corbin’s desk. The door was closed and one of the extra chairs was pushed against it to stop anyone from barging in. Corbin reached into his leather wallet and pulled out various items. “Observe: one social security card, phony; one social security card, real.” Corbin set the two cards down side by side. “One Virginia drivers license, real. Another Virginia drivers license, phony. One Pennsylvania license, phony. You tell me, what’s phony, what’s real.”
Beckett picked up the social security cards. They were identical except for a nearly imperceptible coffee stain on one card. The Virginia drivers licenses also were identical, except for a frayed edge on one card and the laminate on the other appearing thinner and cheaper.
“Pretty amazing, I’ll give you that.” Beckett rubbed the social security cards with his thumb. “They even feel similar. Still,” Beckett held up the card with the coffee stain, “you can’t fake a coffee stain.”
“Actually, you can. It’s a digital image I added to the card.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“What about the licenses? Which one’s real?”
Beckett examined both Virginia licenses closely. “My money’s on the one with the frayed edge and the professional lamination.”
“Wanna bet lunch on it?”
“Apparently, not.” Beckett returned to the social security cards. “Where did you find the paper?”
“Staples. The clerk thought I was crazy feeling all of their card stock.”
“These are amazing, but I’m no expert. I don’t look at these things for a living. A banker might not be fooled.”
“My banker was,” Corbin said matter-of-factly.
“What?!” Beckett snapped.
“I switched banks this weekend, and I used the phony documents to do it.”
“And you lecture me about taking risks?!”
“Someone had to test the documents. That was always part of the plan. Since I used my real numbers, the risk was low if things went wrong. Even if the cops got involved, they would assume something went wrong when the DMV issued me the license. They’d probably just make me get a new one.”