Wounded Animals (Whistleblower Series Book 1) (2 page)

“I’m not sure that I do.”

“Do not call in sick to work tomorrow. Do not avoid speaking with your boss. Just tell her that it cannot be you who goes down to Dallas this time. She must send someone else.”

I didn’t like going to Dallas, but it was part of my job. My awful half-dead job. But what was I supposed to say to the man who could bring a rat back to life? “Okay, I understand. I’ll tell her that Grace is going to be on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy and I need to stay local so I can help her.”

“Ahh, excellent.” He stood up and wiped his hands on his jeans. “It has been nice speaking with you, Candle. I have an early flight tomorrow, so I must get home to bed.”

My throat tightened. “Wait, I have so many questions. Who is this guy in Dallas? Why will meeting him cause such a terrible thing? Who the hell are you?”

Kareem placed his hands on my shoulders and looked deep into my eyes. I felt myself relaxing, somehow, as if against my will.

“Do not worry about any of that. It will be better if you don’t know. Stay with Grace and be a good husband, and consider taking her and moving far away, to another country. All of this will then pass from your hands and you will never have to worry about it. If you do that, you will never see me again, and you will have a happy life. If you go on this trip, I cannot protect you. I cannot protect anyone.”

I blinked, and he turned around the corner of the alley. I was alone.

CHAPTER TWO

I slept well that night, for the first time in forever. Grace’s baby bump made her snore like a lawnmower, and I usually couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I was going to be unemployed and without health insurance in a couple months.

But I woke up refreshed, feeling like I didn’t even need coffee to start the day. I turned over in bed, greeted by the curve of a pregnant belly. The thing frightened me, but I couldn’t have said why. I’d heard my baby’s heartbeat. I’d seen its demon-like appearance in those blurry ultrasound pictures. Something about the countdown of three months until fatherhood was like a weight, growing a little every day.

I have a twenty minute commute to work, and some asshole always seems to ride my bumper. There should be a law about tailgating people at six o’clock in the morning. Drive friendly, jerks. I usually play this game where I slow down as much as possible until he’s forced to pass me. Then, I speed up and ride the car’s bumper, giggling to myself the whole time.

The point of that story is that some guy tailgated me that morning, and I didn’t even think twice about it. Kareem was the only thing on my mind. It had been twelve hours since he’d reanimated a rat in front of me, turned water into wine, and sneaked a stun gun in my back pocket.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that, despite all I had seen, that none of it had actually happened. I wasn’t drunk, but the two-and-a-half rum and Cokes were sufficient to cloud my head, and I had to factor it into my memory of last night. But was it enough to make me buy into the man’s power of suggestion? And what could he gain from trying to keep me from going to Dallas? If this were a long con, I couldn’t see anything beyond the surface. If Kareem were some home invasion artist, you’d think he would be encouraging me
not
to miss my trip to Dallas.

I pulled up to the office at a hair past 6:30 and rushed inside. IntelliCraft’s Denver office building was the envy of the Denver Tech Center area of town. Four stories tall, with massive glass windows and spacious mountain views on three sides of the building. I used to love coming to work here.

Up the stairs to the third floor, swiped my keycard to enter the cubicle farm. My lungs pulsed as a trickle of sweat ran down my chest. These fifteen extra pounds of sympathy pregnancy weight I’d gained were starting to wear on me, like a water balloon taped to my belly.

I crossed the cube farm and said hello to a couple of the late-shifters in Support, who were usually already gone by now. That meant some of the six o’clockers hadn’t showed. Since they’d announced the closing of our office, those absences were becoming a regular occurrence. Most days, the building was like a ghost town. The salespeople, at least the ones who were sticking around to collect their severance, all worked from home. Only the support team still bothered to come into the office.

I’d moved to Colorado for this job. Hell, they’d even recruited me. They’d brought me here, and now they were cutting me loose. Hard not to feel resentful about it.

I pressed the power button on my computer to boot it up, then went to make some coffee. The ancient laptop took two or three minutes to get to the Windows screen, so I had plenty of time. I shuddered from the customary static electricity shock when I opened the door to the kitchen.

Standing in front of the coffee maker, watching brown tar dribble into the pot, I felt the sick delayed reaction of a hangover creep through my brain. Maybe the drinks had clouded my judgment last night, more than I’d realized. Difficult to say.

After returning to my desk, I settled into my chair and clicked through all my emails. In the folder I reserved for important people, right there at the top with a red flag marking it as urgent, was this email:

From: Roche, Alison

To: Candle, Tucker

Subject: Clear your calendar for 7 tomorrow. I’ll be at the office to meet with you.

My jaw tightened. Just as Kareem had predicted, she wanted to meet with me. You might think it’s not unusual for a boss to want to meet with her direct report, but Alison hardly ever showed up in person for such things. Seeing her at the office was only for special occasions.

I felt that urge again to quit, to walk out and say screw all this. But, I wanted that severance check. And they’d be looking for a reason to fire me so they wouldn’t have to give me one. If Alison said meet, I’d have to do it.

I went about my business, trying to persuade myself that I wasn’t part of some grand plan. Not that I had any success believing it.

At seven on the dot, she strode through the door. She caught my eye and waved a hand toward a conference room, so I grabbed a notebook and pen and followed her.

She was wearing heels today, which meant somebody important was coming. We were usually business casual, which meant a lot of things to a lot of people. But heels, now that was serious shit.

She didn’t utter a word to me as she entered the Aspen conference room and took a seat at the table. I wondered why she chose this place… it was designed for large groups, with a bulky table that seated twenty. I debated if I should sit across from her or in the chair next to her. She made the decision for me when she pointed to one on her left.

As soon as I sat, she said, “did you get the training scheduled for the Keller account?”

“Their account manager wants to handle it himself, so he’s going to go on-site and we’ll do a post-mortem when he’s back.”

“Good. One more thing off our plate.”

She opened a notebook full of text and traced a pen down a list of items. Surely she hadn’t needed to appear at the office to talk about the Keller account. They were barely worth the effort we put out for them.

“I need you to go back down to Dallas,” she said.

Pressure built behind my eyeballs and I had trouble swallowing. “I, uh, I thought they were all staffed up?”

“Four out of the last boot camp failed their final exam and the company has decided not to continue with their employment. They have already started a new boot camp class of alternates, as of today. They’ll be in HR meetings, but you’ll need to be there in the morning to begin the Design On-Demand product training. I’ve already reserved a room for you at the Beachwood and purchased your travel, to expedite the approval. Sorry for the late notice, but it was the earliest I could arrange, so I appreciate you being flexible here. I forwarded the confirmation to your Outlook this morning.”

I had a fleeting memory of last night, practicing what I was going to say when Kareem proposed this scenario to me. Something about Grace not being able to get along without me? That I had a judo tournament this weekend I couldn’t miss? While I was sitting there wracking my brain, I could see Alison losing her patience.

Bed rest, that was it.

She tapped her pencil against the notebook. “Did you have some questions or something?”

“It’s just that, the thing is, it’s about Grace.”

“That reminds me, I saw her at the gym yesterday. Hard to believe she’s six months pregnant. Looks fantastic, if you ask me. Seeing her on the bike, sweating it out like that… made me wish I’d taken better care of myself when I was pregnant.”

Okay, so the bed rest excuse was out. Time to try something else.

“Don’t you think maybe someone local would be better suited?”

Her faced hardened. “What are you saying to me, Candle? I’ve already bought your plane tickets.”

I tried to engineer of another line of defense, but each idea dried up on my lips.

She gripped the pencil, which bowed under the pressure of her fingers. “Nobody likes this situation. But you, Candle, I don’t understand you at all. You had an opportunity. You had a way to get above all of this, and yet you won’t take it.”

I had nothing to say to that, so I sat back and nodded.

“They’re in the Irving office, not the downtown office. Your rental car is at Enterprise. All of this is in the email I forwarded you.”

“I assume I’ll be working through the weekend on this one?”

“They have an aggressive boot camp schedule for this group, so yes.”

With that, she stood up and swept past me, leaving me alone in the oversized conference room. I stared at a motivational poster boasting about
OPPORTUNITY
. Flung my pencil at it.

CHAPTER THREE

November in Denver and November in Dallas were two entirely different beasts. In Denver, you could expect snow once a week, but light jacket weather most days. Dallas, on the other hand, was wet and cold and miserable and there seemed no place to escape the misery.

I got a stiff reminder of the weather as soon as I exited the D-F-Dubya terminal and entered the open garage to wait for the rental car shuttle. A mist of cold humidity pressing against my face and neck. Clammy like early morning fog.

Vague memories of living here when I was young drifted in and out, going down to Austin and Lake Travis in the summer, out west to Big Bend for vacations. There were, at times, things to like about Texas.

And it’s hard to say if I would have despised Dallas as much as I did if I’d come here for different reasons. Maybe if I weren’t there to train the replacements for my co-workers—many of whom were friends—in Colorado because the company intended to shut all the satellite offices down and rehire everyone in Texas.

Or maybe I wouldn’t have despised the company so much if I could understand their reasoning. But their moves made zero sense to me. How many decades of knowledge were they going to let walk out the door, for seemingly no reason? I could get worked into cold sweats just thinking about it.

As I waited for the shuttle, the earbuds pumped calming music into my brain. I liked a little Josh Ritter or John Fullbright to ease into Texas slowly, and then something a little more upbeat to sweat to in the hotel exercise room, after the workday. Travel always functioned better with a soundtrack.

My phone buzzed, and I unlocked it to view a text from my aunt:

We need to talk about your father

I locked the phone again and stared at my reflection in the black glass screen for a few seconds.

Aunt Judy wanted to talk about Dad, but I had no desire to hear about that man. Whatever was going on with him, I didn’t want to know about it or have anything to do with it.

The anniversary of Mom’s death was coming up next month. I always knew when it was coming, but that didn’t stop me from feeling surprised at how sad I felt on the actual date. And why was I thinking of this now?

Since I already had my phone out, I sent Grace a text to let her know I had arrived, just one word:
here
. We didn’t usually talk on the phone until nighttime. She knew I’d be busy at work, and I knew she hated to talk on the phone. Must have been the only woman I’d ever known who couldn’t stand chit chat. Straight to the point. I liked that about her.

A man came to wait in line for the shuttle next to me, gabbing on the phone pressed against his ear. Couldn’t help but overhear the whole conversation, and I turned down the music to get a better listen. His wife had apparently forgotten that the kids’ soccer-practice-pickup schedule had changed for the playoffs, and now he was going to have to miss his poker game because of her mistake. How did parents manage to have any time for themselves?

The shuttle arrived and I boarded while Kareem’s warning flashed in my head. A bad man among the trainees. A catastrophic thing would happen if I met him.

Why hadn’t I made him be specific with me?

Or maybe the whole idea was crazy. As if some IntelliCraft trainee was going to be the destroyer of worlds.

***

I pulled open the glass front door of the office building in Las Colinas, a wealthy neighborhood in the town of Irving. Technically Irving, but everyone called it Dallas. The sprawling metropolitan city encompassed dozens of towns.

Even though I’d been here a half dozen times over the last six months, my entrance didn’t warrant even a head nod from most of the cube dwellers. I was an outsider.

Unlike the office in Denver, their cubes were tall. Hardly any of them were decorated, no cute figurines atop the rims or funny posters thumbtacked to the sides. Pictures of family, little kids’ drawings, but hardly any personality. So professional. So stuffy.