Night's Favour (2 page)

“You’re shitting me.
 
Sort of unlucky?
 
Through it?
 
A thousand places the table could have gone —”

“Be fair, sister.
 
The tables did go a thousand places.
 
One of them was through the DVR.”

“You’re telling me we’ve got the bloodbath of the century in there, like someone’s syphoning the local abattoir through the sprinkler system, and we’ve got no footage?”

Elliot looked at his feet.
 
“Yeah.”

“Fuck.”
 
Carlisle remembered her first steps down into the Blues that evening, seeing the tables knocked over, chairs thrown around.
 
Blood, bits of tissue — there, someone's blood-drenched scarf — were everywhere inside the bar.
 
The shelf that held spirits was shattered, the remains of Midori and Galliano and fifty other types of bottled joy mingling with the sea of blood on the ground.
 
Carlisle’s non-skid shoe covers had slipped anyway, and she’d fallen heavily on one knee in the gore.
 
The hand she’d thrown out to steady herself had come back sticky with blood, the latex covering red and tacky.
 
It was the first time she’d thrown up at crime scene in years.

She shook herself out of the memory.
 
So her expensive suit would need dry-cleaning; that was just part of the job.
 
“We might need to wait on Forensics then.”

Elliot nodded, pulling his jacket tighter over the belly middle age and too much time behind a desk had given him.
 
“Hell of a night.”

“Yeah.”
 
Carlisle absently wiped water off her face.
 
“Hell of a night.”

CHAPTER TWO

Val felt like he’d been hit by a car.
 

Curling over the bowl, he retched again, hands shaking.
 
He didn’t remember waking up; he didn’t remember getting home, or what might have happened after his tenth beer last night.
 
He hoped it was only a night — he had a big meeting with the boss this morning.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d lost days of time down the bottom of a bottle.

“Get your shit together, Val.”
 
He spat into the bowl, bracing himself on the edge of the porcelain.
 
Standing up shakily, he felt the nausea rise and curled back over, retching again.
 
He failed to get his tie out of the way this time, and it came back out of the bowl covered in —

How in God’s name was he wearing a tie?
 
He didn’t even have any pants.

He tried standing again, this time managing to get to his feet.
 
Holding himself up on the walls of the toilet, he controlled the shuddering, awful urge to throw up.
 
He spat into the bowl again then hit the flush button.

Slowly — and quietly — he made his way out of the toilet and into the bathroom.
 
He caught a glimpse of stubble in the mirror on the wall and felt confident it was only a night gone.
 
Maybe if he could just get in to the office before nine —
God, what time is it now?
— it’d be ok.

He pulled back the mirror, his fleshy reflection pushed aside as he exposed a collection of white bottles set against a backdrop of tired cardboard boxes, tubes of expired ointment, and half-empty boxes of Band-Aids.
 
The bulk box of store-brand acetaminophen came away disturbingly light —
I bought that just last week
— and he tossed the empty hundred box to the ground, hand trembling towards the Pentazine.
 
Expensive gold, he dry-swallowed four of the tabs.
 
Motion sickness be damned; the drug would take the edge off wanting to throw up his feet.
 
He chased it with some ibuprofen, a generic brand in a white box of fifty.

He started up a good lather to get rid of the stubble.
 
It was then he noticed that his left arm’s shirt sleeve was missing, ripped off by the looks of it.
 
The shirt wasn’t in great shape overall; it had that creaseless arrogance that only came with being rained on.
 
The sleeve was missing from the elbow down, give or take, the frayed end of a blue thread trailing to wrist level.
 
He’d been lying in a pool of good Merlot unless he missed his guess, the sleeve and side of the shirt a gentle pink.
 
The thought of Merlot almost made him heave the pills back up, so he stripped off the shirt and let it drop to the floor alongside the empty box.
 
If he just left all that crap there Baitan would sort it out later.

His belly wasn’t an admirable sight, the booze and the desk job leaving their toll, the flab hanging out over his underwear.
 
John kept nagging him like an old woman, saying he needed to get back to the gym, do some exercise.
 
There was time for that later — it was important to get more drugs, and maybe shave, if he was going to get to work today.

Focus, Val
.

☽ ◇ ☾

Breakfast was a mash of overly bright post-dawn light and harsh jarring sounds.
 
He’d choked back some dry white toast, using black coffee syrupy with sugar as a chaser.
 
After he kept that down, he brushed his teeth twice before leaving the house, jacket slung over his shoulder.
 
He was already sweating through his shirt by the time he almost made his bus, watching it pull away from the stop as he rounded the corner.

The driver of the next bus was a man sitting proud behind the wheel, stamping with binary control at the gas and brake pedals, lurching and cursing his way through the crowded morning streets with nausea inducing irregularity.
 
The only blessing was that no one wanted to sit next to him — even Val could smell the Bacardi sweating through his skin.

He spent his time before his meeting surfing the Internet and drinking bad coffee and stale water.
 
He avoided his co-workers, taking refuge in his cubicle.
 
The office hummed with the gentle background of cloistered productivity, phones and conversations overlaying each other into white noise.
 
All except Werner in the cube next to him; that man shouted into his phone like he was trying to raise the dead.
 
Maybe he was — he worked the marketing angle of the project they were on.

By the time he had his meeting with Davies, the shaking in his hands had stopped, the world returning to normal levels of brightness and colour.
 
He was still sweating through his shirt.

“Sit, Val.”
 
Davies’ tailored suits were a thing of office legend, fitting a frame that spent a lot of time eating healthy food and doing whatever it was they did down at Gold’s Gym.
 
He stood behind a baroque desk, a screen, keyboard, mouse, and cellphone laid out just so.

Val’s personnel file was open on the desk too, a couple pages marked with cheerfully coloured Post-its.
 
A gold pen, Cross brand embossed on the clip, sat ready on a legal pad.

No notes, yet.

Val shut the office door behind him and settled into a chair designed for thinner men.
 
“Hey, Pete.
 
Look —”

“Hear me out, Val.
 
It’s not what you think.”
 
Davies shuffled a few of the pages of the file, as if he hadn’t already read each page twice.
 
“You’ve been with the company a while.”

That was a bit unexpected.
 
“Uh, sure.
 
Since —”

Davies held up a hand.
 
“Almost five years.
 
Done some good work for us.
 
Really saved our asses in that coding war with Unisys.”
 
He chuckled to himself, as if it was some beachhead victory they were remembering together.
 
“Top performer three years in a row.”

Val shifted a bit.
 
The padding on the chair was worn thin, and he felt like was sitting on raw plywood with sackcloth nailed over the top.
 
“...Right.”

“There’s not really a delicate way of talking about this.”
 
A smile that was more a grimace sat on Davies’ face.
 
“Since Rebekah passed, well, we’ve noticed some changes.”
 
Davies looked at Val’s gut, then picked up the Cross, tapping it on a paragraph in the file.
 
“Fact is, we still need you.”
 
The clock on the wall ticked by a few more seconds, the sounds of the city outside the open windows gentle.
 
“But we need the old you.
 
You’re a wreck —”

“Hey Pete, c’mon.
 
I crank out the code like you need.
 
I’m the first guy to punch in every morning...”

“And the first guy to hit the Blues at lunch.
 
After lunch, you’re back at your desk, but you’re thinking about your next drink.
 
When was the last night you didn’t knock back even just a few?”

“Everyone has a pint after work, Pete.
 
Be serious.
 
We work in computers.
 
And our clients are assholes.”
 
Val tried for some easy camaraderie.
 
“Who wouldn’t drink on a government contract?”

“It’s not like we work in the ER, Val.
 
And if it was the work that was the problem, we could fix that.
 
You work in a team of what, ten guys?”

“Yeah, and they come down for a beer at lunch too!”

“They don’t all go down.
 
With you.”
 
Davies examined a perfectly manicured nail.
 
“At the same time.
 
Fact is, they’re going down to make sure you’re ok.
 
A few of the guys — and I’m not naming names, it’s confidential — are worried about you.
 
They said they want to keep an eye on you.
 
They’ve come to see me, to ask me to ... intercede.”

He grabbed a sheet from the file — this one suspiciously laid out in corporate style — and spun it on the old wooden surface towards Val.
 
“It’s a leave form, Val.
 
It’s on the house. But it’s got conditions.”

Val didn’t lean forward to look at the form.
 
“You’re getting rid of me.
 
Gardening leave.
 
I don’t know if I should be flattered or pissed off.”

Davies tapped the paper again.
 
“Maybe you should just be...
 
Well.
 
I think we both know ‘happy’ is a bit of a stretch, considering.
 
Get your house in order.
 
Drive up the coast.
 
See some friends.”
 
He paused, as if the idea had just occurred to him.
 
“Get some help, Val.
 
See someone.”

Val reached forward to get the sheet, seeing his hand shaking with either anger or the memory of the hangover.
 
Maybe a heavy salting of both
.
 
The form was straightforward — a month of leave, but with a small catch.

“The company wants some return, of course.”
 
Davies looked down in carefully constructed abashment.
 
“We want the old Valentine Everard back.
 
We want you a productive member of the family again.
 
We’re going to ... invest, shall we say ... a few weeks.
 
What’s a few weeks?
 
That’s on us.”
 
Nodding, Davies replaced his expression, looking Valentine right in the eye with an affable smile.
 
It was like watching a super marionette, as if all those management courses had taught him which emotions to try and fake, and when.
 
“But you’ve got to do your share.
 
A part of the bargain.”

It was there in black and white.
 
They’d even helpfully supplied a phone number and a website — probably one of the narcissists in HR.
 
Those fuckers thought of everything with their saccharine sincerity.
 
They wanted him in an alcoholics group of some kind.

“If I don’t sign?”

Davies swapped the grandfatherly smile for a look of grandfatherly reproach.
 
“Well Val, then things might have to get formalised.
 
You know how it is.”
 
As if it was out of his hands.
 
Just one of the boys, Val and him in this thing together.
 
“But we — well.
 
I
don’t want it to get formalised.”
 
He handed the Cross to Val.

After he’d signed —
like there’d been a choice
— he walked out to collect his jacket.
 
He felt as if the entire office watched his walk from Davies’ office to his cube, the air heavy with the silence of funerals.
 
The hessian partitions were covered with the same old crap, charts jostling for supremacy next to Dilbert cartoons.
 
The odd slice of fake humanity was shown with photos printed in cheap colour on the office laser — corporate functions, team building.
 
Outside his own cube, he saw a photo of himself peeking out from under layers of project charts and productivity estimates.
 
It was like growth rings on a tree, those layers — the closer to the heartwood of the hessian backing, the older they were.

He remembered that shot, pulling it out.
 
The photo showed him sprawled on the ground, the thick rope for tug-o-war draped over him and his team buddies.
 
He’d been thinner then, the grin cracking his face one of delight.