7) Friday, January 10th
– “Shoot the Bastard!”
The ninth-floor
elevator opened and Vern Cooth stormed forth,
comb-over deteriorating markedly with every step. Following him were two men in suits
(“lawyers” David mouthed towards Mick) and a tall, dark-haired, square-jawed,
power-suited woman in her mid-30’s, bootheels
clicking as she marched into the Research Division like a Panzer lieutenant
following Rommel into Africa. Following
them came a pair of Screaming Eagle Kommandos in black Kevlar body armor and black nametags… Capps and Perfile… toting briefcases and
assault rifles.
“Ahhh…
Christ, Vern,” Pete Myers scowled, “it ain’t
Cleveland here, Jack’s only two years younger than I am…”
“That Gobelman’s office?” Vern pointed. Not one of
the researchers would afford him even the courtesy of a nod, so Cooth waved at the glowering Amazon behind him. “This, here, is Kristi Chaine,
she’s head of the Research Division, effective six AM this morning…”
Mick, panting, half theatrically…
offered a limp hand, simpering “Pleased to make your acquaintance…”
“Shut up!” the new Research chief
snapped, slapping his hand away and approaching the door to what was now her
office, rapping severely. “You are
trespassing in my office, Mr. Gobelman; if you do not
leave these premises at once, you will be subject to prosecution. Attorneys are here, and security…”
The elevator tolled again and a man in
a gray custodian’s uniform with the nametag Gus stepped out, toolbox in hand,
and was immediately braced and served a sheaf of documents by the two attorneys
who’d remained behind, by the elevator bank.
They conferred in heated whispers – Gus finally gave Pete Myers a
helpless shrug.
Vern Cooth retained the sour glare of a man who’d just found a
fly in his soup. Waving his arms to
encompass the rubbernecking Researchers, he shouted: “Do these people work for
Research? They do?” he answered himself,
“…then get the hell back to doing whatever you’re supposed to be doing, if you
want to keep your miserable jobs. Kristi’ll address certain changes to departmental personnel
and policy once this… this incident…
is settled…”
Gus navigated the maze of cubicles
effortlessly and with a plentitude of embarrassed
smiles. “Sorry, guys, orders,” he said
at every station before reaching Jack Gobelman’s
office and removing a ring containing about seventy keys from his belt, fit one
into the lock and pushed the door open a crack, allowing muffled obscenities,
one fat fly and, also, a fetid feedlot breeze to ooze out. “Open,” he proclaimed to Vern, “but I think
he’s piled furniture against the door…”
“Gobelman!” Cooth pounded the
door. “Gobelman! This is malicious and
seditious endangerment of government property.”
He looked back to some forty hostile stares, then cleared his throat and
turned to the Screaming Eagles, waiting with their devices. “Take the bastard out, take him down. If you have to, shoot the bastard…”
So the Screaming
Eagles shoulder-rushed the door, which trembled, slightly, at the first
impulse, then a little more… furniture tumbling at the third try. They squeezed through the aperture, followed
by Vern, his new Research Manager and the attorneys, finally by several of the
Research people, ignoring Kristi Chaine’s orders to
disperse. Vern Cooth
hopped atop Jack Gobelman’s desk looking, for all the
world, like a goddam king hoptoad
waiting to spear another of the room’s numerous flies out of the air, David
reckoned, pointing at the Research honcho crawling under the desk on hands and
knees…
“There he goes!” the redfaced new Manager of the Federal Communications
Commission pointed downwards. “Shoot the
bastard… shoot
him…”
One of the mercenaries dropped to a
knee, opened his briefcase and withdrew a futuristic weapon while the other
one, Capps, kicked Gobelman’s desk. Goblin scurried out, still on his hands and
knees and, as the Screaming Eagle drew on him, Pete Myers lunged and struck his
arm, spoiling his aim.
“Oops!” he apologized.
“Clear the room!” Vern directed his goons, and the other mercenaries drew their weapons on the
Researchers still in Gobelman’s office. They retreated hastily, but not before Mick
tripped the mechanism raising Goblin’s blinds, allowing the rest of the
Department a panoramic view of Cooth’s coup-de-etat.
“Let me take him,” Kristi Chaine told the
janissaries, one of whom smiled, making a he’s-all-yours gesture as Jack rose
to his knees, swallowed a belt of something clear from the bottle he was holding…
vodka, David figured, or maybe paint stripper.
She reached into her purse and pulled out a small, black box… a taser… and, as the mercenaries slammed Pete Myers up
against the glass wall of the office seized him by the hair and smashed his
face against the barrier until blood flowed , Gobelman began crawling towards the door until his putative
successor tasered him in the ass, though
inexpertly. As the deposed Research
Chief began to howl and dropped the bottle he’d been holding with a foul odor
breaking loose, Vern Cooth leaped from the desk,
wielding a canister of pepper spray, spritzing the
besieged bureaucrat across the back of his neck… then, when the howling Goblin
had flipped over like a wounded bug, across his face. Presented with a clear shot, now, Kristi tasered Gobelman again, directly
in the genitals, this time; Vern kicked him, then resumed spraying, as if
taking out a particularly resistant cockroach until one of Eagles, Perfile, pushed him away, hauled the Research Chief up,
punched him in the stomach and then cuffed him, while his partner, Capps, was
fitting bracelets on Myers.
“Mission accomplished!” Vern crowed,
brushing a sweaty cowlick from his brow.
“No benefits for you, no Caribbean
retirement, you’re going straight to jail…” the FCC’s new Manager wagged a
finger in front of Pete’s bloody face while Capps forced him down across Jack Gobelman’s desk… cuffed, a nightstick across the back of
his neck.
“Call Mercer,
somebody…” Myers gasped.
“Who’s Mercer?” Vern demanded of the
faces behind the glass. “Is he a
reporter… an attorney…”
“Anybody making unauthorized phone
calls will be dismissed, immediately…” Kristi Chaine
chimed in over the sound of a dozen cellphones being
flipped open... then shut.
Soon enough, the Eagles had hustled
their septuagenarian prisoners off, followed by Vern Cooth,
himself now strutting like Patton through Sicily, pretending to ignore the
flies circling the brown puddles punctuating the scene of the coup d’état and humouring the chittering
attorneys at his either ear, leaving Kristi alone in the wreckage of her new
office.
“This place reeks…”
She squeezed back
through the door, marched to the adjoining office belonging to Elaine Ford.
“This yours?”
“Why… yes…”
“Not any more. Clean out your desk, you’re retired,” Kristi
declared, returning to Goblin’s deposed domain holding her nose after looking
Elaine over, head to sensible shoes, “…or, if you’d rather, fired for cause, in
which case… no pension, no bennies. I
have my own team coming onboard, and there will be changes… and I’ll have
designers up to make something out of this pigsty. And fumigators! My God, that horrible little man… he’d been
using the wastebasket as a privy!” Her sharp, beringed
hand flailed out, knocking Cuzio’s cold endive and
meatball soup onto the floor. “Don’t
worry about the carpet; it’s coming out, too.
Any questions?”
Nothing, not even a
smart reply from Mick broke the silence… the juniors casting rueful glances at
David Lee – half expecting him to reply, half-relieved that he didn’t.
“Wanna take a bet on the Cowboys?”
Kristi taunted her new subordinates.
“Give you seven...”
¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
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