Free Snitch World by Jim Nisbet

he annotated to himself.
    “That’s right,” Marci told him. “How often do you bill?”
    “Every two weeks.”
    “And the last invoice?”
    “Well I’m glad you brought that up, Marci,” Phillip said, assuming the role of aggressor. He took a look at the screen of his phone and paged past the newly arrived pdf along with several recent text and voice messages until he’d accessed his cloud-based consultancy spreadsheet: “$18,375.”
    Despite her considerable crust, Marci gasped. “A tidy sum,” she finally managed to point out.
    “I earned every fucking cent of it,” Phillip said evenly. “Do you know how much of my life that bill represents?”
    “I’m sure it’s on the invoice,” Marci hedged.
    “One hundred and forty-seven hours,” Phillip told her. “Two seven-day weeks of ten-and-a-half-hour days. And just in case forty thousand lines of C-plus-plus don’t verify that I was at least near the job if not on it, your brand-new and totally insulting electronic pass-key system will. I was on the job and on the case—compiling, debugging, running … On fumes, I might add, though I would stipulate they were high-octane fumes. As a matter of fact, Marci, I’ve been noticing something lately.”
    “Don’t change the subject,” Marci said quickly. A little too quickly.
    “Well, Marci,” Phillip said calmly, “I’m not changing the subject. Not really.”
    “Phillip …”
    “When we got into this deal,” Phillip interrupted, “I was promised equity.”
    “And when there is some goddamn equity,” Marci came back, “you’ll be the first to know.”
    Phillip took a beat. He looked at his pasta. Without even tasting it, he knew it had gone as cold as the untouched salad. Cold as the heart on the other end of the phone. Too cold for nourishment. Now he said, as if offhandedly, “I been hearing about an IPO.”
    Marci said nothing.
    “Marci?”
    “Phillip?”
    “Well?”
    “Well what?”
    “I-P-O.”
    “That’d be sweet,” she hedged.
    “Especially if we had something written down.”
    Silence.
    “My bad, of course,” Phillip said simply. “For not getting something in writing, I mean.”
    More silence.
    “My badder,” Phillip continued, still with the calm voice, “for trusting you.”
    Silence.
    “Know how I found out about it?”
    No response.
    “It’s written on the back of the door of the second stall in the 27th-floor men’s restroom. That’s how.”
    Silence.
    “Talk about your sit-down blog.”
    Silence.
    “Huh, Marci?”
    Silence.
    “What’s the deal, here? You know and I know that programmers don’t come much better than me, and the ones that do, you can’t afford. They’re all contractually locked up—and the key to that lock is equity. As if you didn’t know. So I ask myself, Self, what’s with all this pressure? This deal sucks. All I do is work, my work’s never sufficient or good enough, there’s always more to do than any one single programmer can do, and, for the last few months, it’s always been about stupid modules that have little or nothing to do with our original mission statement, which is, get this app up and running and selling, take it public, cash out, and get on to the next thing. Am I right?”
    After a long pause, Marci sighed and said, “That was the deal. It still is.”
    “How many partners are there again?”
    “You know the answer to that as well as I do.”
    “You, Steve, Vikram, Bill, Mary P., Mary Y. Is that all of them?”
    As if reluctantly, Marci filled in a blank with, “You forgot Steve’s father.”
    “Ah yes. The seed money. I guess you’re not going to shaft him.” After a pause, Phillip repeated the statement as a question. “I guess you’re not going to shaft Steve’s father?”
    More silence.
    “Marci?” he said incredulously.
    “Yes, Phillip?” came the chilly response.
    Game over, Phillip said to himself. Phillip turned the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. The tablecloth beneath began