“CD?”
“Jenny, I want to thank you again for taking charge last week. That was a terrible thing for this agency. For all of us.” He shook his stylishly barbered head. “A terrible thing.”
Jenny nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“But I have a clear idea of what Gordo had intended for his team and I want to honor his wishes.”
Jenny looked at the floor. Damn. Damn Gordo to hell. He had reached up from the grave to fire her. It was all for nothing. She had killed Gordo for nothing. Was there no justice?
The CD was rattling on in his unctuous tones about Gordo’s hard work and great leadership, skills that he had valued in Jenny herself. Jenny’s head snapped up.
“So now we’re looking at the job of copy supervisor on Gordo’s team. The job has gone empty long enough and I know that Gordo meant to promote you into it.”
Jenny’s eyes widened. She put her hand to her mouth. Her breath caught. Gordo. Gordo had valued her. Liked her, even. Gordo had intended to promote her. And she had killed him. She looked up to smile at the CD, but caught him glancing at Carol. Wait. Carol? What was wrong with this picture?
“But at the end of the day, I have to satisfy all our fine account execs and some of them feel that Carol also displays all those qualities. So what are we to do?”
He was looking at her brightly, although it was almost certainly a rhetorical question. She tried to look confident, interested. She couldn’t risk a look at Carol for fear she might leap up and strangle her.
“So,” the CD went on, “I have decided to wait a little while. I’m sure this will sort itself out very quickly.”
Carol was nodding and smiling. Jenny tried to do the same. The CD stood up and shook both their hands. “Better to have these things out in the open,” he said fatuously. “I’m a believer in complete transparency,” he lied.
Jenny and Carol left his office and Carol walked quickly away.
That night, as usual, the two teams were working late. Traffic had just called to tell Jenny the Chinese food was in the conference room when Carol appeared at her cubicle bearing two waxy white cartons. She put Jenny’s order down on her desk, along with chopsticks and napkins.
“I thought we should talk.” Jenny watched stone-faced as Carol pulled the desk chair from her old cube and rolled it over to Jenny’s, sitting and opening her own carton.
“You deserve that promotion,” Carol said sweetly. “You worked for it.” She lowered her voice. “You killed for it.”
Jenny opened her mouth to contradict her but Carol said quickly, “It was your plan. You deserve the credit. And the reward.”
Jenny nodded and opened her own Chinese food, as if this were a normal conversation between two colleagues.
“So, tomorrow I’m going to tell the CD to take me out of the race.”
Jenny stopped eating and stared at her.
“I don’t want to compete with you. After all, we’re friends, aren’t we?”
Jenny was still suspicious. Could Carol be for real? What an idiot. “Thanks, Carol. Are you sure?”
“Jenny, I’ve never been so sure of anything.”
Jenny couldn’t believe her luck. She felt her face flush, her heart race. She was going to get the promotion. She was safe.
Carol was smiling at her.
Jenny’s breathing grew more labored. Light-headed, she panted slightly, trying to take in enough air. Her peripheral vision seemed to contract. Carol.
“Carol?” With an effort, Jenny managed to stutter the one word.
Carol was watching her placidly. “Everything okay?”
Jenny stood unsteadily, her breathing ragged, her vision blurred. Her face itched, her arms and chest too. She scratched at her face, feeling welts that seemed to erupt and when she looked down she saw bloody pus on her fingers.
Carol was standing now too, still calmly watching. Jenny staggered to the end of the aisle, into the hallway, trying to call for Traffic, trying to scream.
Some of her colleagues were coming back from the conference room with food containers. She put out a hand to stop them, mewling, her voice gone, her breathing ragged. With mounting horror, she felt her bladder give way.
“Look,” Carol announced behind her. “Jenny’s doing Gordo. What a riot!”
Colleagues popped up and gathered around, giggling nervously.
“Look, she’s got the red welts and the zombie walk down perfectly,” Carol was laughing. Wikipedia had promised that the symptoms would mimic peanut allergy, but this was surprisingly perfect.
Sure enough, several of her coworkers were laughing and pointing. Jenny felt her airway constricting. Weakened, she dropped to her knees. She forced a hand into her swollen mouth. If she could make herself vomit maybe she could live.
“Oh my God, the hand thing. This is too funny,” someone squealed.
Traffic came at a run. “God, Jenny! No! What’s happening? Is that blood?”
“It’s okay. It’s a goof,” Carol told her. “I think it’s catsup.”
Traffic was grinning, still a little uncertain. Jenny tried to call to her, tried to signal, something. Anything.
She fell over on her side and felt her eyes roll up. She could still hear the delighted shrieks of her colleagues, laughing uproariously. Laughing at her.
SLO Pizza
by John A. Miller
John A. Miller is a professional artist as well as a writer. He is also a former businessman, a background he may have made use of in this new story for EQMM. His first work of fiction, Jackson Street and Other Soldier Stories, published in 1995, won the California Book Award. It became available as an e-book in 2011, as did his latest novel, The Power of Stones. The Oregon resident is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Cutdown, Causes of Action, Tropical Heat, and Coyote Moon.
Tony Packer, Ph.D., clipped a couple of VC firms that should have known better for twenty million dollars and one particularly fine California morning took it, as they used to say, on the lam. One year later, I was sitting in Roscoe Jackson’s office near the top of the Transamerica Pyramid watching a peregrine falcon dismember an unlucky pigeon on the ledge outside Roscoe’s window and beaming like a man who just filled an inside straight. Or the village idiot, depending on your point of view.
“What are you so happy about?” Roscoe asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Two things,” I told him, holding up two fingers for emphasis. “First, I can tell you with absolutely no doubt whatever that the estimable Dr. Packer has gone to earth in neither Europe nor Asia.”
“That’s not what the police and the FBI think,” Roscoe pointed out. Roscoe was a rainmaking partner in San Francisco’s most powerful law firm, and his client in this matter was the larger of the two Palo Alto venture-capital firms that had provided mezzanine funding to Dr. Packer’s software startup firm.
“They’re idiots, the lot of them,” I replied, waving a hand dismissively. “Listen, Roscoe, you know as well as I do that law-enforcement agencies, the FBI included, have an absolutely abysmal record of solving crimes where the perp isn’t a certifiable moron. And, hard as it may be to believe, they’re even worse when it comes to skip-tracing.” I shook my head. “In this case, they’re never going to find him because not only is our man not a moron, in fact, he happens to be a bona fide genius.” I pointed at the file on his desk containing all there was to know about Tony Packer, except, of course, his present whereabouts. “Graduated from college at sixteen with a computer-science degree, a doctorate in math from Berkeley, post-doc work in high-energy physics from Princeton, and a chaired professorship at Stanford before he was thirty.”