Hunting Witches (3 page)

“That would make a great first impression,” Nika said. “’My goodness, Mr. Pendleton, that’s a fantastically steady stream of urine you’ve produced. You’re hired.’”

“My god,” Mark said. “This is going to be easy. Well, they invited us both out for lunch, so I suppose you should come in with me.”

“Cool,” Nika said. “Want me to hold it for while you pee?”

“You should pee with me,” Mark said. “We’ll instantly establish ourselves as a power couple.”

“You mean a
pee
-er couple,” Nika said.

They got out of the car, locked the doors and entered the offices of Dynagraph. As soon as they walked in, Mark was hit in the face with a beach ball. This was a surprise, and Mark sucked in his breath and the ball hit the ground.

“AWWW!” said six unhappy Dynagraph employees, their voices falling in unison.

“You let it hit the ground, man!” one of them said.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t know!” Mark said.

“Now we have to buy the code monkeys margaritas,” the employee said.

“Hold on, hold on!” came a voice from the back of the office. Mark and Nika could hear someone running towards them. It was Bo, wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt and a pair of uncomfortably small swimming trunks.

“That’s a do-over, folks,” Bo said. “This guy’s a civilian, for now, anyway. Doesn’t count! Play on!”

A cheer erupted throughout the office. Bo picked up the beach ball and threw it back into play. The people in the office jumped for the ball and resumed their game. Bo wrapped his arm around Mark’s shoulder. “Sorry, man, it’s Extremely Casual Friday,” he said. “Good to finally meet you in person. I’m Bo. You must be Nika!” He extended his hand towards her, and she shook it.

“Looks you guys have a lot of fun here,” she said.

“Well, there’s a balance,” Bo said. “You just can’t see it right now. Come on, y’all! Let’s go to lunch, we’ll talk and take it from there. I’ll drive. You guys like fish?”

The restaurant was called Down ‘n’ Trout, and their Friday special was all you can eat fried catfish and hush puppies. Bo put prodigious amounts of hot sauce on everything and before long, the entire table smelled like spicy douche.

“Here’s the thing, y’all,” Bo said, between bites. “When we started we had some venture capital to help us get going. We’ve already paid them back with interest, and they have reinvested in the company. So we’ve got an office that’s already paid for a year in advance, we’re bringing in money from all of our clients and there’s nowhere to go but up. Nobody else in the county is doing the shit we’re doing. And honestly, if I tell our investors we just snagged a hot-shot from an ad agency in Atlanta, they’ll be happy to funnel more cash into the coffers.”

“You sure found the right people to contact for backing,” Mark said.

“Yeah, man!” Bo said. “My grandparents.”

Nika couldn’t help but laugh. “Are you serious?”

Bo put down his fork. “Hey. Nana and Pappy are fucking loaded. Back when this place was all farmland, they owned about four-hundred acres of it. They weren’t doing anything with it. It was just lying fallow. When the developers came in, they refused to sell. Where the mall is now, and the movie theater, that’s all Nana and Pappy’s land. They leased it to the developers for a hundred years, with an option to renew.”

“Smart business,” Mark said.

“Yeah, man,” Bo said. “I could have hung out, you know, and just waited for them to kick off, because I get the land when they go, but I really thought it was important that I do something on my own, you know? Get some independence.”

Mark’s eyes grew wide, but he held in his laughter and took a quick drink of his soda.

Bo put his elbows on the table. “Look,” he said. “I know how I come off. And I understand what I must look like to you. Some smart-ass rich kid who got lucky. You’re not wrong. I don’t apologize for it. But I’ve also got a business plan, a 401K, some kick-ass health insurance, which we pay fifty percent of, the ability to telecommute when necessary and the world at our feet. Are you really going to say no to this?”

“You haven’t made me an offer yet, Bo.”

“Seriously? I thought you understood. You were hired as soon as you walked through the door. All you had to do was show up. That’s how much confidence I have in you. Go ahead and give your two weeks, man.”

“We haven’t talked about money or anything yet! This is moving really fast, Bo,” Mark said.

“Fine,” Bo said. “We can do this the traditional way. I’m going to write a number down on this napkin. You make a counteroffer, if you need to, on the same napkin. This is very manly, Mark. I kind of like it. This whole bartering thing.”

Bo pulled a pen out of his pocket and grabbed a napkin. He put his arm around it while he was writing, like he was trying to keep someone from copying his test answers. When he was finished, he slid the paper across the table to Mark, keeping his hand over it. He raised his eyebrow, smirked, and took his hand away.

Mark picked up the napkin, holding eye contact with Bo until the very last second. When he looked down at the figure Bo had written, his eyes bulged and he coughed. He slapped the napkin back down on the table and nodded his head.

“That’s fine,” Mark said. “That will be just fine, sure.”

“Two year contract, to start with,” Bo said. “Is that cool?”

“Yes, that’s cool.”

“Are we going to discuss this at all?” Nika asked, offended. Mark slid the napkin over to her. She looked at the figure, folded the napkin in half and put into her purse.

“Continue,” she said, and took a bite of hush puppy.

“I don’t have any of this paperwork with me, because I was distracted by the volleyball game at work,” Bo said, “but I’ll tell you what. Make it a weekend. I’ll extend your room at the hotel for checkout on Monday. Hang out in town. Get to know the area. Come in to the office Monday morning on your way out of town, and we’ll do all the signing and documentation and I-9 forms and shit. You can tour the place, we’ll start getting your office ready and you can start in, say, a month. Does that work out for you?”

Mark and Nika both nodded, dumbfounded.

“Cool,” Bo said. “Now hurry up and finish your dinner. There’s a caramel pie here so good and sweet, it comes with a side syringe of insulin. Coffee’s strong, too.”

Conversation over dessert was easy and cheerful. The ride back to the office consisted of Bo playing tour guide, pointing out places of interest (“I wrecked my first car there! First time I threw up in public was right on that sidewalk. It was so gross, but you never forget your first time, right?”). Back at their car, Mark and Nika both shook Bo’s hand.

“Thank you so much for the opportunity, Bo,” Mark said. “We’ll hammer out the details on Monday.”

“For sure, man,” Bo said. “If you have any questions about anything over the weekend, give me a call. I’ll probably be here.” He gave Mark a business card.

“Bo, what do you know about the town we drove through to get here?” Nika asked.

“What, the Keep?” Bo laughed. “Elders Keep. It’s a fucking ghost town, man. Bell Plains just dwarfs it. There’s nothing over there but yesterday.”

Nika nodded her head and got into the car. Mark and Bo talked for a few more seconds about directions to the hotel. She was unconvinced by what Bo had said. She had heard those drums. She had. There was no way to talk her out of that fact. Maybe a little exploring was necessary.

***

The hotel had shitty Wi-Fi, and Mark’s laptop wasn’t listening to commands. “It just churns and churns and churns and I can’t even get online,” he whined.

“We can use my phone as a hot spot,” Nika suggested.

“Nah,” he said, closing the computer lid. “It’s nothing that can’t wait.”

Nika, however, was burning up her data plan looking at real estate. “Housing in Bell Plains is stupid expensive,” she said. “Even a shitty little one-bedroom house is going for three times what rational people would ask.”

“They can get away with it,” Mark said. “The town is growing, so is the housing market.”

“I really think we should take a look at that Elders Keep place,” Nika said.

“Bo said it was a dump.”

“I liked what I saw when we drove through.”

“You want to go there tomorrow and try to solve The Case of the Missing Apostrophe?” Mark laughed.

“It’s not that far away from your work,” she said. “We might find someplace nice for less money.”

“Money is about to not be the object,” he said.

“Still,” Nika said, “there’s no sense in blowing it just because we have it.”

Mark shrugged. “As usual, you have a point. Hey, speaking of ‘blowing it…’”

Nika laughed. “You are about as subtle as a train wreck.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “Come on, babe. When’s the last time we had hotel sex? Our honeymoon?”

“About that,” she said.

“Well?” he said, slowly pulling down his sleep pants, which were decorated with dinosaurs.

She rolled her eyes. “Well, cut the lights, big boy.”

Mark stopped. “I thought, maybe, we could leave the lights on.”

Nika fluttered her eyelashes and waved her hand in front of her face, like a fan. “Oh, Mister Pendleton,” she said, in her best Southern Belle accent. “You do think of the naughtiest things.”

“It’s just lights,” Mark said. “I can probably think of naughtier.”

Then she put his finger over his mouth, and it didn’t matter anymore.

***

“Hotel sex is the best!” Mark exclaimed. “Good goddamn!”

“I agree, sweetheart,” Nika said, “but if there’s any way we could keep the discussion to ourselves, and not involve all the people around us eating pancakes in this restaurant, I would appreciate it oh, so very much.”

It was Saturday morning, and a conservatively dressed couple was staring at Mark and Nika like they had just pooped on their waffles. Mark smiled and raised his cup of coffee towards them, in salute. The couple looked down at their plates.

“So, what are we doing today, Admiral?” Mark asked, the volume of his voice lowered.

Nika picked up a newspaper from the empty chair next to her.

“House hunting,” she said.

“I thought you said the Bell Plains houses were too expensive,” Mark said.

“They are.”

“Even with what I’m getting paid?”

Nika shook her head. “Honey, I’m glad for the money, but I don’t trust it. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, and we need to save as much of it as we can.”

“You don’t think Dynagraph is solid?” Mark asked.

“I think Bo is a delightful madman,” Nika said. “I think he’s got a good thing going right now. But I also know that if it falls apart, which a lot of upstarts do, he’s going to be fine. We’re not. So if we can hold back on our spending even just a little, we’re going to be better off in the end. Cutting back on housing costs is an easy way to do that, if we can find the right place.”

Mark laughed and shook his head. “All right, Navigator. What did you do?”

“We are going to spend our morning running around the charming little town of Elders Keep with a real estate agent, looking for a new place to live,” she said.

“Were you planning on asking me about that?”

“No.”

Mark pursed his lips and nodded his head. “Well, all right. Can’t hurt to look, right?”

“My thoughts, exactly,” Nika said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mark said. “Bell Plains, Elders Keep, wherever. It’s not Atlanta.”

***

Penny Renfro was smiling too much.

Standing in the driveway, watching the Pendletons plan their future, with their smiles of hope and far-away stares of romantic love, Penny clenched her right hand into a fist. Her bright orange acrylic nails stabbed into her palm, and the pain gave her something to focus on besides the adorable God-damned Pendletons. She was sick of tired of pretending to be nice.

Now the black woman was snapping out of her reverie and they were getting back into their car, so happy, and they were waving at her with giant grins on their faces.

Penny Renfro smiled back, waving with her left hand, so the Pendletons wouldn’t see the blood dripping down her right wrist. She watched them drive away, conflict and anger running all over her, a scream building in the back of her throat. It was important to have new people in the Keep. Her business depended on people moving into the Keep. Penny knew she was overreacting.

But why these people? She had despised them from the moment they had shaken hands in front of the real estate office. She hated the sound of their voices, the way they looked at each other. As a professional, she would make sure the purchase went through as quickly and as seamlessly as possible. It wasn’t like she couldn’t use the commission. She kept waving as they drove away, imagining their cute little car with the sunroof exploding into a sweet cleansing ball of flame and petrochemicals, the screams of the Pendletons echoing off the empty houses, her own laughter reaching the ears of God, where it was taken as a living sacrifice, and was found acceptable.