Daniel Price - Slick

“It was Harmony,” I told them with splendorous awe. “She got us.”

The expressions on the men’s faces varied from skeptical to distrustful to downright incredulous.

“You can’t be serious,” said Big Bank.

“How can you be sure?” asked Doug.

“The voices may not have been ours, but the dialogue was. That whole script was a medley of things that Harmony and I actually said to each other, in private, unrecorded anywhere except her memory and mine. She wrote that scene herself.”

The Judge shook his head fast enough to ripple his jowls. “No. No. You’re telling me this girl — this squeaky little mouse — just orchestrated a huge and elaborate media stunt on her own, in less than twenty-four hours?”

“It’s not that elaborate,” I said. “It probably took her one hour to write it, two hours to produce it, and three hours for a trusted pal to leak it to Fox. In fact, I bet that female voice on that tape is her best friend Tracy. As to who played me…I don’t know. I guess whichever one of her roommates does the best white-man impression.”

“But why would she do a thing like that?” Big Bank asked me. “That’s a crazy risk.”

“It’s not so crazy. She knew all about our audiotape. I told her. She knew that if she didn’t cooperate with us, the tape would be released and the voice experts would nail her. So what does she do? She beats us to the press with her very own decoy, knowing damn well it’ll be exposed as a fake, knowing damn well it’ll block us from releasing our own.”

“That’s bullshit.” The Judge threw his desperate gaze onto Maxina. “That’s bullshit. Ours is the real thing. We’ve got her! If we play it for the media…”

Maxina had no intention of responding. She simply kept her cold gaze on me. Snap. Snap. Snap.

“It won’t matter,” I told the Judge. “Once Harmony’s cleared, there’s no force on earth that’ll get the media to consider a second recording. It’s like double jeopardy. They won’t try someone twice for the exact same crime, especially when the first trial blew up in their faces like a gag cigar.”

Doug’s wonder wasn’t as glowing as mine. “God. That’s why she insisted on having a whole night to write her confession speech. She was stalling us.”

“But how did she get this plan?” asked Big Bank. “Where’d she come up with it?”

“We gave it to her!” I told them. “The idea was right there all along! She framed herself, then exonerated herself. She used our very own trick against us!”

“Our trick?” the Judge inquired accusingly.

“My trick,” I admitted. “Yes. I taught her everything she knew. I just didn’t expect her to be such a quick learner.”

“You unbelievable bastard,” said Maxina at long last.

Once again, the room fell silent. In my frazzled state of mind, my practical engine finally stopped running. It was clogged on irony to the point of malfunction. With my mind shut down, there was nothing left for me to do but coast on involuntary reactions.

I lowered my head and laughed.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Yes, of course it would be me. Of course it only makes sense if I’m the mastermind behind this.”

“Scott, are you familiar with Occam’s razor?”

I kept chortling. “Why, yes, Maxina. Yes I am.”

“Good,” she said without a trace of levity. “So what do you see as the simplest explanation? That we were all outsmarted by a nineteen-year old hostess dancer with partial brain damage? Or that she once again took her cue from an extremely devious and talented publicist who just happens to be infatuated with her?”

“It wasn’t my idea!” I said. “It could have been Alonso!”

Even as I said it, I didn’t buy it. Alonso’s version of a clever idea was cybersex with Jesus. Face it, Slick. This was Harmony’s brainchild. She just adopted it from you.

But even that wasn’t the simplest explanation. Immediately, the men in the room glommed on to Maxina’s theory. Big Bank gaped at me in horror.

“You motherfucker…”

“You planned this from the beginning,” said the Judge. “You were scheming with Harmony all along.”

“That’s why you made us give her half your money,” Doug added. “You knew we’d never pay you if this thing happened, so you tricked us into paying her.”

I couldn’t stop chuckling. It was too ironic. Too surreal.

“You put on this whole show,” said Maxina, motioning around. “Right here. Just now. You played this whole ‘noble sacrifice’ bit when you knew all along what was happening…”

Big Bank shot to his feet. “You motherfucker!”

I threw my hands up. “Wait! Wait! Everybody…just stop.”

Amazingly, they did. I took several deep breaths to regain myself, and yet I didn’t have the faintest idea how to defend myself. I couldn’t even find a reason to. I gave Harmony everything she needed to steal the last laugh. And yet still I didn’t see it coming. All this effort, and it turned out I only saved her by accident.

The strangest part was that she’d accidentally saved me, too. I didn’t have to worry about media exposure anymore, or Miranda. As long as Harmony didn’t say my name, Miranda didn’t have a smoking gun. And Harmony had every reason now to keep me a secret. We were locked in a covenant of silence. Together, we were airtight, unsinkable. It would take nothing less than a full double confession to bring us down, and that would never happen.

With fresh sobriety, I wiped my eyes, then looked around the room.

“Uh…”

The only one who didn’t meet my gaze was Jeremy, the ultimate victim of all this. He stared down at his feet, shaking his head, rocking back and forth. He knew now that he’d never get the deliverance I promised him. I gambled his future, I lost, and now I was about to walk away from the table. What could I possibly tell him in this instance? What could I possibly say?

“Jeremy…”

“Get him out of here,” he said. “Get him the fuck out of here.”

“Okay.”

I stood up so fast, I became dizzy. I held my hands out, standing perfectly still until the room stopped spinning.

“Okay. I’m going.”

“I’ll walk you out,” said Big Bank with ominous inflection.

“No,” Maxina replied. “I’ll do it. Someone help me up.”

Big Bank pulled her to her feet. Honestly, I would have preferred his send-off to Maxina’s, but I wasn’t in a position to voice my preferences.

The Judge, Doug, and Big Bank all glared at me as Maxina walked me to the foyer.

“I see the little love mark on your neck,” she said.

“Yeah. I’m sure that was evidence, too.”

“Scott, I’m working at about thirty percent capacity right now. And about five percent of that thirty percent is considering the possibility that you didn’t orchestrate this. But whether this happened on purpose or by accident, whether you’re malicious, incompetent, or just plain jinxed, it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that this did not end well.”

“No,” I said, glancing back into the house. “No, it did not.”

“There’ll be plenty of blame to go around. I’ll certainly get my deserved share. But the biggest slice is going to you. Fair or not, that’s just the way the game is played. I feel compelled to tell my colleagues what a horrible mistake it was for me to hire you.”