Steven Womack - Way Past Dead

“You think legal’ll turn this over to the DA?” one of the suits asked.

“Well, buddies, this is some pretty dang blatant fraud going on here,” Phil said. “I ain’t seen nothing like this in a long time.”

“It’s a good one all right,” I said, pulling my invoice out of the briefcase. “You got the guy dead to rights.”

“Heckfire, maybe the guy’ll move to California and try out for the Lakers,” Phil said as I slid the invoice across the table.

He opened the envelope and unfolded my bill, then let out a long whistle. “Dadgum, Harry, this is a pretty good hit here. Five thousand for a week’s work?”

One of the young suits let out a disgusted snort, like the insurance company was some kind of benevolent organization that was always being taken advantage of.

“My deal with you was that if I didn’t get the evidence, you paid nothing, and if I did, you paid double my normal rate as a bonus.”

“Well, what in the hell’s your normal rate?”

“Four hundred a day plus expenses,” I said. “On par with the rest of the industry. Five days, plus mileage, expenses, and the videotape charge. And you got a twenty-four-hour day out of me, rather than the standard ten.”

I fought my normal codependent urge to seek approval by lowering the bill.

“Phil, when you consider what I’ve saved you by not having to pay this joker disability for the rest of his life-not to mention scaring off other people who’d like to try the same thing-my fee’s a pretty good deal.”

“Yeah, well, I just hope I can get this by accounting.” His voice had dropped, in tone and volume, and became filled with what he hoped I’d interpret as concern. Nice act.

“Why don’t I touch base with you tomorrow and see how it’s going,” I suggested, standing up. “I can provide you with receipts and further documentation if you need it.”

Then I tightened my gut and let fly with the next one. “How long do you think it’ll take your accounting department to cut the check.”

“Oh,” he drawled. “They’re pretty quick. Generally takes about forty-five days, maybe sixty if they get backed up.”

I swallowed hard; sixty days, assuming they’d pay the bill at all. In sixty days, they’d have to send the check to me in care of the homeless shelter. There was no way I could float that long.

I got this real bad taste in the back of my mouth.

“I’m sorry, Phil, but I’m afraid I’m not comfortable with that. I’m a small, one-man operation. Sixty days is going to cause me some real cash-flow problems. I was thinking more along the lines of ten days.”

Phil shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing I can do about it, buddy. Procedure … It takes as long as it takes.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the two suits grinning. You little bastards, I thought, you’d probably scream like scalded dogs if your paycheck was an hour late.

What could I do? Powerless little man confronts faceless corporate bureaucracy. Powerless little man goes down the dumper. I could be a real jerk and demand the tape back, but then I’d lose the account forever.

Next thing I know, I’m on the elevator, jammed in next to a crowd of exiting employees at five-thirty, fuming, frustrated, hacked off once again. So much for this being a glamorous business. Wonder how Doghouse Riley did it all those years?

I stepped out onto the sidewalk, amid the throng of people heading back to the parking lots to begin the long commute home. I wondered where the hell next month’s rent was coming from.

“Damn it,” I muttered. Then I saw it. A wire-mesh trash basket on the sidewalk about three feet high, one of those heavy-gauge metal city-owned types with a black-and-white sign on it that said PLEASE DON’T LITTER.

I reared back and kicked the shit out of it, yelped, then began the long limp back to my car.

I was lower than whale effluent. I couldn’t even bear to go back to the office. I cranked up the Mazda and made my by now ritual passage in front of the police barricades before heading over the river into East Nashville. Being preoccupied with money, among other things, I remembered that I was cashless. There was a drive-up ATM machine at a bank on the right, so I pulled in and withdrew a twenty; one of the last, few dwindling times I’d be able to, I feared.

Going home alone to my apartment was equally unappetizing as spending more time in my office. It was still early enough in the year for the sun to set early, but the darkness was no longer that oppressively heavy blanket that sends everyone to bed by ten. I needed to be around some people that I wasn’t in conflict with, so just past the Earl Scheib Body Shop, I turned in to the parking lot of Mrs. Lee’s.

Ever since I moved to East Nashville, following the precipitous drop in lifestyle that accompanied my getting fired from the newspaper and subsequently divorced, Mrs. Lee had become a kind of surrogate parent to me. My own parents retired to Hawaii a year or two before my divorce, and apart from occasional phone calls and the obligatory holiday visits, we don’t see each other that much anymore. Mrs. Lee’s Hunan Chinese restaurant had become my refuge, despite the fact that Mrs. Lee exhibited few nurturing instincts toward me. Hell, maybe it was just that she remembered my name, which in this day and age is nothing short of remarkable.

Excuse me. I guess I am feeling sorry for myself. On top of that, my toe still hurts where I kicked the wire trash barrel.

I parked next to an enormous GMC pickup truck with a rack of emergency lights on the top, recognized it, and smiled.

“Well, look who’s here,” I said as the heavy glass doors of the restaurant hissed shut behind me. Lonnie looked up from his disposable plate-everything in Mrs. Lee’s was throwaway except the food-and shook his head.

“Look what the cat drug in.”

“Let me get a plate,” I said. “I’ll join you.”

I walked up to the counter just as Mrs. Lee was turning around from the window into the kitchen with a scowl on her face.

“Gweat,” she said, pointing to Lonnie. “Fust him, now you. You two give my prace a bad name. Too many car wepossess-” She stumbled. “Car we-”

“Now why would car repossessors give your place a bad name?”

“This neighborhood,” she barked. “People afraid to come heah. Think you pick they cars up.”

“Now, darling, that says more about the neighborhood than it does about us, doesn’t it?”

She half smiled at me. “Smaht-butt. What you want tonight? Let me guess. Szechuan chicken.”

“Unless you’re sold out.”

“Hah!” She turned to the window and yelled something to her husband in rapid-fire Chinese. At least I think that’s what it was; for all I knew, it could have been Venusian.

I laid my twenty on the counter and turned back to the tables. Lonnie had a folded afternoon newspaper held out in front of him as he ate absentmindedly. I stood there a moment, waiting. It’d been a roller-coaster ride of a day, and I was glad it was nearly over.

“Heah you go, mistah investigatah,” Mrs. Lee said, sliding the white Styrofoam plate across the counter to me. She grabbed the twenty and returned sixteen bucks in change. One of the things I loved about Mrs. Lee’s was you got more food than anyone could possibly eat for four dollars.

“How’s Mary?” I asked, gathering up little packs of soy sauce and a plastic fork.

“You doan worry about Mary,” she instructed. “Mary not you problem.”

Mary was Mrs. Lee’s high-school-senior daughter; gorgeous, honor student, sweet, untouched. Hell, I’d keep her away from me, too. I’d tried over the last couple of years not to let my affection and admiration for her grow into anything more inappropriate than necessary.