CHAPTER 5
Day 3
Friday morning
9:27 a.m.
The party for Marcus Peerman took months to plan. His promotion to Director of Sales at Swanair, on the other hand, was quick and ruthless. A diminutive 5’3”; his platform shoes gave the extra inches needed to make him seem like a man rather than a child. His pale complexion that clashed horribly with his jet-black toupee forced a great amount of restraint not to laugh. It was truly amazing that his physical looks so much resembled his personality. One look in his eyes made clear that he resented his height and the world would pay for it.
In less than eighteen months since switching alliances from another airline to my location, Marcus was swift in obtaining all his goals. Coming aboard as a consultant afforded his opportunity to lurk about and size up our chaotic management situation. While he befriended anyone that he came across, in reality, he was noting strengths and weaknesses. Figuratively speaking, the knife he twisted in everyone’s back was long and sharp.
He made mention of an ex-wife, but most went under the assumption that he fabricated the story to squash the rumors of his promotion. As it went, Marcus was having an affair with our former manager, Walter Swoon. Walter, in his mid-fifties, was a gentle man who had a good head for business but was easily controlled in his personal life. His wife treated him like shit at company functions. Physically larger than Walter, she left him no choice but to succumb to her harsh lashings. This was when Marcus made his move. Seizing upon Walter’s state of mind, the story went that the old man was more than willing to find comfort in the arms of anyone other than his wife. The affair must have carried on for a good month or so, until Marcus told Walter’s wife. In the end, Walter wound up stepping down from his position due to “health reasons.” We all knew this to be a lie, but ironically, it turned out to be partly true. His wife did not take the news very well and nearly beat him to death.
As for Marcus, his calculated plan worked. Upon his resignation, Walter appointed the little weasel as his successor. Everyone was forced to fall into line or suffer Marcus’s wrath. I hated the little bastard.
“Hi, Marcus.”
I tried a phony smile, but he knew too well that I could not stand him. Once again, he barged into my work cubicle without notice.
“How did it go in Romania, Joe?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine? When I send you to close a lucrative deal, I expect better than ‘fine.’”
I wanted to tell him about the slaughtered whore’s finger and how I would love to shove it up his ass, but I needed the job. He grumbled something about incompetence in the workplace on his way out of my cube.
I yelled as he disappeared from sight “You have a great day too…”, ending with a fading, “…you miserable, Napoleon-like ass,” under my breath. I was aggravated to the point of staring at my contracts with no real inclination of what I was reading. When I finally regained my focus, I was thrust into my next confrontation without a moment’s notice.
“Put five dimes on Dallas.”
As I looked up at Tony Adonis, I displayed my best effort at a grin.
“Well, good morning to you too, big guy.”
Standing about six feet four and weighing an easy 360 pounds, Tony was a living hulk. He exhibited his complete lack of patience for personal pleasantries when his eyebrows formed into a puzzled expression. Noticing that I was waiting on a response, his blasé attempt at a grin was enough to scare the devil himself. I frowned.
“Tony, stop. A child might see your effort and start crying.”
Grin vanished, his massive fist clenched tightly. He repeated the command.
“Put five dimes on Dallas and two dimes on the Jets.”
I knew he wouldn’t go away until I filled his order. Nodding his head toward my phone, his lips barely parted.
“Make the call.”
I made the call. Two rings later, I listened for the usual greeting.
“Yeah?”
“This is Goldilocks, I’m looking for Poppa bear.”
“Go ahead.”
“Five on DL home, roll 2 with JT away.”
“Yeah.”
When I was through betting on the football games, the line went dead, as always. I placed the phone back on the receiver, noticing Tony was watching me play with a pushpin on my desk. Instead of doodling while on the call, I made light on an attempt to push the quarter-inch pin through the front of my computer cover. Fully aware that there was no way I could focus enough power on my thumb to push the end of the pin through the two-inch rigid plastic cover, I tossed it aside.
As if a child curious of a new toy, Tony took the pin and sized up his foe. With an exerted push, his thumb began to turn red as pain should naturally set in, and I unwittingly egged him on.
“Forget it, big guy. It has nothing to do with strength. You would have trouble hammering something that small and unbalanced into the cover.”
His face turned red. Crazy as it sounded, he was angry at the pin. Nothing would get the best of him. Releasing a furious grunt, he forced it deep into the cover as the blood dripped from his finger. I stared as he bathed in the afterglow of victory. Licking the blood from his finger, he broke out one of his personal cigars and lit up in our smoke-free office. He only smoked Cubans. Dipped into a special mixture of food dye and illegal narcotics that he mixed himself, the concoction enhanced the effect of the cigar while changing the smoke to blue. He displayed a few simple rings before heading back to his cube.
While a silly, little incident, it was a microcosm of his life. Tony Adonis saw everything as a challenge. It didn’t matter that it was an inanimate object. He was truly angry at the pin and would not stop. A rational person would have stopped once the pain began. Very few would have gotten to the point of seeing blood, no less continuing on. That set him apart from most bruisers.
Tony was a software programmer, but not your typical computer writer. He was your typical goon who was uncharacteristically intelligent. To look at him in business clothes was deceiving due to his round stomach. He was pure muscle. From the little I gathered, his younger days were spent playing high school football and causing chaos. Notorious for having his hand in every illegal cookie jar, there was little he couldn’t attain. The only reason he wasn’t dead was due to a little luck and the love of a woman.
Tony’s older brother Salvatore was heavily involved with the mob. As typical of that line of work, Salvatore had enemies. While driving home one night, the brothers were victims of a planned hit. Salvatore died instantly, yet aided in part to his massive structure, Tony survived. The months spent recuperating in the hospital were brutal. Miraculously, with the support of a lovely young nurse, Tony recovered completely. That beautiful woman turned out to be his wife. Her tenderness and love were the missing ingredients that he needed to make him whole. That was over a decade ago. With a baby girl to keep him in check, he mellowed somewhat. But make no mistake about it. There was still something very wrong with him. His short temper could instantly cause him to erupt to the point of no return. I had seen him choke the attendant off the ground at a Wendy’s just for screwing up his order. To try to stop him was a lost cause. While he respected that I had no fear of him, it was not because I could physically fight back. I knew he could rip my limbs off, so I thought it unnecessary to worry about it. That, he found interesting. That was how I earned his respect. It took time for him to confide that he still did a little ‘side’ work. Nothing much, just a little collecting from the deadbeats who tried to welch on their gambling bets. He received fifteen percent of what he collected, bringing us to one of the many scams. I was recruited to be his front. By my laying his bets as if they were my own, Tony put himself in a no-lose situation.
When he won, he collected his money through me. When he lost, I followed his command to not pay and they send him to “collect” from me. This recouped fifteen percent of his losses, since he was collecting his own losses anyway. He made so much pocket money that I wondered why he worked here at all. My own personal theory was to show some legitimate work on the books. Not to mention his love for hacking into software to cheat the system. So, I guess it all made sense in the end.
The ringing of my phone broke my thought pattern. Caller I.D. showed Scott wanted something next. Rather than answer the call, I wandered across our cubed maze of an office to his location. When I got to his side of the room, I noticed he had his miniature radio on and was rocking out. I was glad to see him handling the hooker incident well. But then, he was so good at hiding emotions that I really didn’t know how he felt about it. Or for that matter, about anything else. Hence, the perfect salesman. Noticing my presence, he lowered the volume.
“Car service picks us up tomorrow night at 7.”
“For what?”
“For the Sinclair account. The overnight business cruise. You know, the meeting we set up weeks ago to land this fucker.”
All at once it flushed into my mind. I completely blocked out those thoughts. For a second, I felt a chill as I wondered if I had blocked out the hooker’s death also.
Breaking up my realization, Scott bopped me in the head with his rubber stress relief ball.
“Hmmm? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I forgot about it. I’ll talk to you later.”
Heading back to my desk, I collected my thoughts on the deal. I had some serious thinking to do on many issues. If I completely forgot about the cruise, what else had slipped my mind? I usually remembered everything. If that changed, what else was wrong with me? Life was funny; it only took one or two things before a domino effect happened. As I entered my cube, I found a moment to laugh aloud.
There were five more bloody pins pushed into my computer cover.