SARAH SENT ME AN E-MAIL .
“Working late. Will grab something to eat on the way home. S.”
She wasn’t more than seventy or eighty feet away from me, in her office, but she decided to send me a message rather than walk over and just tell me. True, she couldn’t actually see me at my desk the way she could when I was working in the newsroom. I was now down the hall and around the corner, working in Home! But honestly, was this what Bill Gates had in mind? That the greatest technological advances in history would be used to make it possible for people who were within shouting range of one another to not speak face-to-face?
I clicked on “Reply” and started to write something and then couldn’t decide what. Finally I opted to say nothing and canceled my reply. Sarah had plenty of reasons to be angry with me, but her e-mail pissed me off. If she had something to say, she could damn well find her way Home! and say it.
“How’s the linoleum thing coming?” Frieda asked, passing by my desk, being extremely cheerful.
“Frieda,” I said, “you only gave it to me an hour ago. Is it a fast-breaking linoleum story? Is page one looking for it?”
She looked hurt. Her face fell. I instantly felt like a shit.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was only asking.”
This was the difference between working in the newsroom, where sarcasm and angry outbursts are the norm, and toiling away in Home! or travel (called “Away!” at the Metropolitan) or our new shopping section (“Spend!”). It was more like a typical office back here. Someone made tea. A card got sent around for everyone to sign when it was someone’s birthday. People were friendly, sociable, decent to one another.
I had to get out of here.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really, I’m sorry, Frieda. I was just being a dick.”
Her eyebrows jumped. I guess people didn’t refer to themselves as “dicks” around here, either.
She left before I could say anything else to offend her.
I went online, looked for some contacts in the flooring industry who could fill me in on the latest developments in linoleum, and as I did so, this sense of hopelessness washed over me. How could it have come to this? It had only been days since I’d written a major piece for the paper about this gang of nutcases who’d planned to set off a bomb at a small-town parade. It was page one, above the fold. The TV stations picked it up.
I was golden.
But that was how it was in the newspaper business. You were only as good as your next story. So what if you got a big exclusive on Thursday. What are you going to do for us Friday?
I had the feeling that someone or something was pressing down hard on me as I sat in the chair. My shoulders were sagging so hard, it’s like they were dragging me down to the floor. I had a shit assignment, my wife was only communicating with me by e-mail, and I’d just been mean to Frieda, perhaps the sweetest woman in the entire building.
I jotted down some contact numbers on my scratch pad, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone and make a call. For reasons I cannot explain, I found myself unable to focus on linoleum. There was something else nagging at me.
I grabbed a copy of yesterday’s paper from one of the recycling bins and found my story about the stun gun salesmen.
Why was Trixie going on about them?
I found their names and scribbled them down on my pad. I decided to start with the one who’d done most of the talking before the assembled officers, Gary Merker. I Googled him. There weren’t many. One was a radio DJ somewhere out west in Arizona. There was a picture of him, along with the other station personalities. Young guy, very thin, bald, wire-rimmed glasses, big smile. Definitely not the guy who’d done the stun gun presentation. Another was a financial consultant up in Maine. No picture. There was a phone number, so I called.
“Hello? Merker Financial.” A woman.
“Is Gary in?”
“Just a moment.”
Some dead air. Then: “Merker?”
“Hi,” I said. Frieda was looking over at me, turned away when I saw her checking on me. “Is this Gary Merker?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for the Gary Merker who’s got some of those new Dropper stun guns for sale. Would that be you?”
“No, sorry. Stun guns? You got the wrong guy, pal.”
I offered my apologies and hung up.
Only one Gary Merker came up when I did a search on the paper’s database. This Merker showed up in a story that evidently had run in the Metropolitan five years earlier, with a Dick Colby byline, no less. It was datelined Canborough, and the headline read, “Three Slain in Biker Massacre.”
Canborough was a city of about sixty thousand, maybe a hundred miles west. It was a college town; the Canborough River ran through it north to south. The college was the main thing that had kept the town alive after the auto parts plant closed down seven years ago, the jobs all having gone to Mexico. I had done a book signing up there once, when my first science fiction novel, Missionary, had come out. Two hundred miles, round trip, sold three copies. The store owner couldn’t look me in the eye when it was over.
The story read: “Canborough may be on the verge of a biker gang war after three members of the Slots, a local gang that makes its money off drugs and prostitution, as well as some legitimate businesses, were shot to death above their own tavern, the Kickstart.”
The story went on to say: “Dead are Eldridge Smith, 29, Payne Fletcher, 26, and Zane Heighton, 25. All the victims were said to be known to police. All were fatally shot, and while police hinted there was something distinctive about the manner in which the executions were conducted, they would not provide further details.”
I started to imagine things. Were they shot in the mouth? Did someone stick a gun in their ears and blow their brains out? Were they lined up in front of each other, and one bullet passed through the lot of them?
That one seemed a bit unlikely. Unless it was a really, really, big bullet. Despite having held, and even fired, a gun in the last couple of years, and having had the misfortune to have been around some, I still knew very little about them, and that was just fine, thank you very much.
The story continued: “The Kickstart is a well-known local watering hole that also features adult entertainment. The shootings occurred shortly after the close of business hours, and the women employed as exotic dancers were not believed to have been there at the time. The Slots own the Kickstart, and were believed to have been counting the receipts in the upstairs office when the incident occurred.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Frieda sneaking another look at me. I waggled my fingers at her.
“Canborough Police say there are three or four small gangs operating in the region, and while none of them is a large operation, they are responsible, collectively, for much of the area’s drug trade. In the past, each gang had carved out a portion of the market for itself, not stepping on the others’ toes, but that now appears to be over.
“The question now may be who is left in the Slots to retaliate. The gang’s reputed leader, Gary Merker, 30, who is also said to be the manager of the Kickstart, was not present when the three members of his gang were killed. Nor was another member, Leonard Edgars, 29.”
I glanced back at my story. It appeared that I had found the right Gary Merker. His associate, the one who’d been zapped with fifty thousand volts, was Leo Edgars.
What were two surviving members of a small biker gang that ran drugs and prostitutes doing peddling stun guns?
And what business was it of Trixie’s?
“I thought maybe you would like a coffee,” Frieda said. “But I didn’t know what you take in it.”
I jumped. “Oh, sure,” I said. “That would be nice. Cream and sugar.”
“What’s that you’re reading about?” she asked. She was scanning the Colby story, probably wondering why she wasn’t seeing the word “linoleum” anywhere.
“Gang shooting,” I said. “I was thinking, an interesting way into the feature would be, what kinds of linoleum are most resistant to bullets and bloodstains.”
Frieda was getting downright scared.
I forced myself to call a couple of flooring experts, just to keep Frieda from siccing security on me, and when it was cookie time in the afternoon, I updated her on my progress. I asked her if she knew, for example, that linoleum had been invented in 1863, in England, by Frederick Walton, who had come up with the word by taking the Latin names for flax, which is linum, and oil, which is oleum, and putting them together. She did not, and seemed absolutely fascinated, offering me another Peek Frean.
I’d had no further communications from Sarah, and I’d sent nothing to her. If she could get something to eat on the way home, then I didn’t see why I couldn’t do the same. I managed to sneak out of Home! a little after four, and as I was heading out of the parking lot in our Virtue, I remembered that Paul was going to be working at his new job after school today. I thought maybe it might cheer me up to see Paul gainfully employed, and get myself a cheeseburger and fries. We never knew whether Angie would be home for dinner, so I didn’t feel any obligation to get home and make sure there was something on the table for her when she returned from Mackenzie University.
I wheeled into the oil-stained parking lot of Burger Crisp. The lot was about half full, and there was trash spilling out the tops of trash containers that looked sticky with old soda. Flies buzzed around the opening.
The squat, square building, all glass up front, looked as though it might have been, in a previous life, a doughnut franchise. There was a row of tables along the front window, then down the right side, in an L shape. At the left end of the long aluminum counter was a cash register, and above it a menu made out of little black plastic letters that fit, crookedly, into grooves on a white background. Written in marker, on a sheet of cardboard and taped to the wall, was the special: “Ch’burger/fries/Coke/$5.49.”
At the cash register must have been the woman Paul said could stand in front of a moving tank and total it. She appeared, in a word, formidable. She was shorter than I, but standing there behind the cash register, she seemed rooted like an oak. Stocky, fridge-like, with thick fleshy arms that hinted at considerable muscle underneath. Slavic looking, late fifties, early sixties maybe, gray hair pinned back, a severe, weathered face devoid of anything you might call makeup, deep creases running down from her nose on both sides of her mouth, and piercing black eyes.
She fixed them on me and said, “What want?”
Some kind of accent, Russian, Turkish, Croatian, I had absolutely no idea. “The special,” I said, looking around, wondering where Paul might be. “The cheeseburger special.” There were people sitting on swivel chairs bolted to the floors, eating burgers, dipping fries into tiny containers of ketchup, off chipped Formica tables.
“Here or go away?” she said, her words clipped as if each one were chopped off at the end with a butcher’s knife. For a moment, I thought she was asking me to leave.
“Uh, to go,” I said. I thought the ambiance at home might be better, although the way things were these days, probably not by much.
I handed her a ten. She dug her short, thick fingers with chipped nails into the cash register tray and handed me my change.
“Thanks,” I said with my usual charm. She didn’t even look at me.
Next to the register the counter was raised up, and it was like a salad bar in reverse. Before me, behind glass, were the toppings. Pickles, onions, relish, tomato, hot peppers. Two identical-looking women-these had to be the twins Paul had mentioned-were working shoulder to shoulder. They were younger, but not necessarily more attractive, versions of the woman who’d taken my money. Large, soft, and doughy looking, with arms like hams. They both had their blonde hair streaked with black, pulled back and tied into short ponytails.
They were being handed burgers fresh off the grill, asking customers how they wanted them garnished. That’s when I spotted Paul, standing at the grill, flipping burgers, living his life’s dream.
“Hey,” I said.
He didn’t hear me the first time, so focused was he on his job. He had a huge apron, which years ago might have been white, tied around his waist, a white cap pulled down over his hair.
“Hey!” I said, again, and Paul looked over, and his eyes went wide and his mouth opened.
“Dad?”
I just smiled and waved. He was working, and I didn’t want to interrupt him. I just wanted him to know that I was there.
He didn’t look at all happy to see me. But that’s the way it is with kids. They’re always embarrassed when their parents show up. Make an appearance at their place of employment, and they want the ground to open up and swallow them whole. I thought it was too bad I hadn’t worn something stupid, maybe a ball cap on backwards, to make Paul’s humiliation complete.
One of the twins had grabbed a cheese-covered patty off the grill and slipped it into a bun. “Whatcha want on it?” she asked me.
I started pointing to toppings. “Hold the onion,” I said.
“Peppers?”
“Sure, a couple.”
I watched her pile everything on, then put the burger, with some fries, into a takeout Styrofoam container.
“Dad, what are you doing here?” Paul was standing next to me, up very close.
“Jeez, hi,” I said. I looked to see who was on the grill. Another kid about Paul’s age had filled in for him. “So how’s it going?”
“Why are you here?” he asked again.
“I’m getting some dinner, okay? Is that a problem?”
“Dad, you can’t eat here.”
I shook my head. “What, did I embarrass you? All I said was ‘Hey.’ If they had a drive-through window, I’d do that, you wouldn’t even have to know I was here at all.”
“Dad, just…” He pulled me aside, away from the counter and toward the door. “Just don’t eat here.”
“What is your problem?” I said, shaking his arm off me. “I just wanted to show an interest, for Christ’s sake.”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” he whispered. “You can’t eat here. You can’t eat this stuff.”
I glanced down at my foam box and then back at him. “What, you’re watching my diet for me now? If I want to have fast food once in a while, I’ll have it. I had a cholesterol test six months ago and I’m fine, thanks for asking.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Paul whispered. “This place is a fucking death trap. The meat’s bad. I’ve been burning everyone’s burger all day, making sure it’s really cooked, just in case.”
“The meat’s bad? What, why?”
“You know that big thunderstorm last night? Well, the power went off here, and the freezer was off for hours, didn’t even come back on till, like, just before lunchtime, I guess, and everything had thawed out. The burgers had been at room temp for ages.”
I swallowed. “Are you serious?”
Paul looked over my shoulder. “You could get, like, cheeseburger disease from eating this. I can’t talk to you anymore. They might figure out what I’m telling you. Just don’t eat this, Dad. I don’t want you to fucking die on me.” He paused a moment. “I think the fries are okay, though. They’re actually pretty good.”
He turned to go back to his post and this time I grabbed his arm. “Wait a second. Are you telling me, all these people here, they’re eating potentially contaminated food?”
Paul shrugged. “Yeah, they are. But they’re not my dad.”
“Paul, cheeseburg-hamburger disease can kill people. It’s that E. coli virus or whatever. You can’t mess around with that. If these people are eating this stuff, they’ve got to be told. Has anyone been sick yet?”
“Some guy came in a while ago, said he got a bad burger at lunch, felt like he was gonna puke. He talked to Conan over there,” he nodded toward the woman on the register, “and she practically threw him out the door. She’s a fucking linebacker.”
I swallowed hard. My mouth was starting to feel very dry. Paul could see that I was pondering what to do.
“What?” he said. “What are you thinking?”
There was an elderly couple at one table, cutting a burger in half with a plastic knife. At the next table, a guy who looked like some sort of city worker, orange vest and jeans, hard hat on the seat next to him, chowing down on a double burger. And then, two tables over from him, a mother with two small children. She was unwrapping the foil covering on burgers for each of them.
“Kids,” I said, to myself as much as to Paul.
He looked around. “What?” he said.
“Kids can die,” I said. “They can die from hamburger disease. It can cause kidney failure.”
Paul’s eyes were getting wild with panic. “Jesus, Dad, what are you going to do?”
I was feeling pretty panicked myself. What, exactly, was I planning to do?
And then I just acted, without even thinking. I took a few steps over to the mother feeding her kids, bent down, and said to her quietly, “Don’t give them that.”
She looked at me, pulled back in surprise. “Excuse me?”
Paul, behind me, said, “Dad, what the hell are you-”
“The burgers,” I said, ignoring him. “Don’t let them eat the burgers. They had a power failure here. There might be a risk of E. coli and-”
“Oh my God,” she said, reaching across the table and grabbing the burgers out of her children’s hands.
“Mouuum!” one whimpered angrily.
The guy in the orange vest turned around, looked at me. “What did you say?”
“I just, I heard, the burgers, they may not be safe to eat,” I whispered urgently.
“Fuck,” he said.
The mother whirled around. “Do you mind?” She nodded toward her small children.
The guy in the vest turned around and tapped the older woman, the one sharing a burger with her elderly husband, and whispered something to her. He pointed at me, and when the woman caught my eye, I nodded.
“Dad,” Paul said.
“Thank you so much for telling me,” the mother said. “We come here all the time, although the kids usually want to go to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal and-”
“Dad,” Paul said.
“You see,” I told her, “my son just got a job here, and he was telling me that-”
“Dad,” Paul said.
Finally I turned around. The woman from behind the register was standing there, glowering at me.
“What you saying?” she asked. I noticed that, hanging from her right arm, was a baseball bat.
“What’s wrong, Ma?” asked the twin who’d put the toppings on my burger.
I tried to remain calm, nonconfrontational. “I had heard, I understand that your freezer went out. For several hours.” Tried not to make it sound like an accusation, more like a statement of fact.
“What you know about my freezer?”
“It’s just that, if the meat had been thawed for some time, there’s a risk that it could be contaminated. And I understand there’s already been one man who’d eaten here at lunch-”
She raised the bat. “Where you hear this?” She turned those black eyes on Paul. “You tell him this?”
Paul’s voice squeaked. “This is my dad.”
Eyes back to me. “You get out.” She brought up the bat, ready to swing, just as her two daughters started coming around the counter.
“I’ll have to call the health department,” I said, trying to stand my ground but knowing I was a moment away from bolting.
“Go ahead and fucking call them,” said the twin. “See what happens, Mr. Big Asshole.”
There wasn’t anyone in the restaurant who couldn’t hear what was going on. No one was eating. People were getting up, leaving their unfinished burgers on their trays, not bothering to dump them into the trash.
Ma’s eyes bored into mine. “You go or I smash your fucking head in.” And then, to Paul, “You, you fired.”
He peeled off his hat, untied his apron, and tossed them over the back of a swivel chair. We both backed our way out and said nothing to each other until we were safely in the car and driving down the street. Blood was pounding in my ears.
“Way to go, Dad,” Paul said. “You just lost me my first job.”
Eldon wasn’t like the others. The others, well, they were like her father. Pigs, basically. Always with the jokes. Tit jokes. Ass jokes. Any kind of sex joke. You’re a stripper, people can say whatever they want to you. Even if you’re not a whore, you’re a whore. Grabbing your butt when they walked by, pressing themselves up against you at the bar, all hard under their jeans, even when you’re back in your regular clothes. What did she expect, exactly? The place was run by a bunch of biker types. You wanted a bunch of gentlemen? Go work someplace else, lady.
Eldon, he was one of them, but he wasn’t one of them. Didn’t even have an actual motorcycle. Had this old Toyota, the guys made jokes about him. He always treated Miranda, eighteen now, like a lady. Thought her name was Candace, though. He was the only one called her that. Everyone else called her Candy. Let’s have a lick of Candy, they said. I’d love to eat Candy, they said.
So dumb, she thought, coming up with a name like that. Thought it sounded like a good name for a stripper when she applied for the job. Stupid.
But Eldon, he called her Candace, talked to her like a person. Asked what she wanted to do with her life, like he knew she was destined for something better than wrapping herself around a pole for a bunch of horny drunks.
“I like numbers,” she said. “Maybe, like, something financial. Planning, or accounting, doing people’s books for them. I look around here, they’re wasting so much money. They could be saving a lot.”
“No shit?” he said.
“They have a course, at the college?” she said. “I’m going to see if I can take it, learn more stuff. I don’t like the dancing.”
“Yeah, you’re good though. You bring the people in.”
“They’d come in and watch anyone does what I do.”
“You should do what you want to do. You’re smart. No offense, but you’re too smart to be up there doing that, you know?”
She told him that Gary, the guy who ran the Kickstart, he kept pushing her to work upstairs, where lots of the other dancers made extra money on their backs, or their knees.
“That’s not right, him pushing you like that,” Eldon said. “Not right at all.”
He had a nice smile. Not huge. Just the corners of his mouth coming up, like he wasn’t just smiling, but he was thinking about why he was smiling. He did odd jobs for Gary, dope runs up from the city, upkeep on the Kickstart. The heavy-duty stuff, like when someone from the other gang in town started cutting in on your territory, and you had to go out and teach somebody a lesson, beat the shit out of somebody, blow up a car, that kind of thing, Eldon gave that a pass. Let Zane do it. Or Eldridge. They were fucking crazy. They were made for that kind of work.
Eldon thought it was great that Candace was going to take a course to better herself. “You got a car? If you don’t, I could drive you up to the college in my Toyota, you could check it out, this financial stuff. On days that you have a class, I could take you there, bring you back, we could get something to eat after.”
So he drove her up. She didn’t have the marks, or the money, to enroll full-time, but she was able to take a couple of courses. She was a natural. She’d dress real plain, bulky sweaters, try to look like someone else, in case some of the male students recognized her from stripping at the Kickstart. Eldon would come by when her course was over and drive her home. “Stop here,” she’d say along the way. “I gotta go in and buy the new issue of Money.”
She said to Gary-they called him Pick behind his back sometimes but not to his face-he could save some money by changing around some of the bartending shifts, he had too many people during the slow parts of the day, she could draw up a better schedule?
“The fuck you talking about?” he said. She explained it to him. He said, “Shit, you’re right.”
She had other suggestions for him, how he could negotiate better deals with his restaurant suppliers, how the girls upstairs could charge more for certain things some guys really liked. What the hell, as long as she didn’t have to do it. She told him how he could be putting his money from prostitution, and the cash from dispensing dope, in legit investments, make it look like it came through the Kickstart legally.
“How you know all this shit?” Gary wanted to know.
She shrugged. “I like this stuff.”
“Math,” Gary said, shaking his head. “I don’t get it.”
And he didn’t. Miranda figured that if he had to rely on profits from a legitimate business, he’d go tits up in no time. It was only because the markup on drugs was so high, the profits on prostitution so huge, that he managed to keep his head above water.
“You’re amazing,” Eldon said. “I’m gonna talk to Gary, see if he’ll put you in the office full-time, you won’t have to take your clothes off anymore.”
She took them off for him, though. He wasn’t the first man she’d ever slept with. But he was the first she slept with more than once. Was this what it was like for her sister and Don? How many men were there out there who weren’t total assholes? Had she and Claire found the only two?
Claire phoned her. Their dad had come out of a bar, looked the wrong way crossing the street, got flattened by a tractor-trailer hauling pigs to a plant where they’d be turned into bacon.
No shit. She had to laugh.