Free Bad Thoughts by Dave Zeltserman Page A

amusement. He had an urge to grab Poulett and kick his smirking face in, but he swallowed it down and kept walking. At the door, he turned and addressed the room, announcing that due to his remarkable service he was being given two weeks paid leave and the rest of them could just go screw themselves. Someone threw a half-eaten doughnut at him. He barely got out in time to avoid the barrage that followed. DiGrazia hadn’t been as lucky. His eyes burned as he picked part of a tuna fish sandwich out from under his jacket, but he kept his mouth shut.
           Outside, they got into Shannon’s Grand Prix, with DiGrazia behind the wheel. Shannon broke the silence, calling his partner an asshole.
           “I don’t know what you’re bitching about,” DiGrazia mumbled, stone-faced. “Two weeks paid leave sounds pretty good to me.”
           “You’re an asshole.”
           “You’re repeating yourself.”
           “Yeah, well, in this case it’s well deserved.”
           “You didn’t give me any choice,” DiGrazia said. “It was either get you on leave or get another partner. And I don’t want another partner.”
           Shannon sat quietly, his face forming a peevish look. Finally, he thanked DiGrazia for spreading the word about his fainting.
           DiGrazia started laughing. “You’re really losing touch with reality, aren’t you, buddy boy? There were half a dozen fellow officers in that apartment watching me drag you out of the kid’s bedroom. Think about it.”
           The ride turned silent again. Finally, Bill Shannon asked to be dropped off at an address in Brookline.
           “I need to see my therapist real bad,” he explained.  
 
    Chapter 9  
           Susan Shannon had been out of it all day, making mistakes, losing her concentration. As the afternoon wore on, her frustration built, severely creasing her brow and tensing her small face. When she lost an hour’s typing by hitting the wrong mouse button, the color dropped right out of her. She sat frozen, struggling against the impulse to smash her computer against the wall. Then she stood up, her body rigid, and held her breath before heading towards the ladies’ room. Sid Lischten, one of the law firm’s partners, spotted her and was about to start bitching about how long it was taking to get his contract typed up. He opened his mouth and then closed it. Even though Susan Shannon stood only five-foot-one and weighed at most ninety-five pounds, at that moment she didn’t look like anyone you wanted to tangle with.
           When Susan saw herself in the ladies’ room mirror she let out a disgusted giggle. Her face looked like a ridiculous parody of itself—frozen into a hard, anxious mask.
           She leaned over the sink and splashed cold water over her face. After a while she could feel the hardness softening. She glanced in the mirror and saw her face was almost back to normal, only a little tightness stiffening her mouth.
           There were obvious reasons for her anxiety. The workplace was stressful as all hell. The associates for the most part were bastards, the partners petty little tyrants. They were adapting well for the nineties, cutting three secretaries and dividing their work among the remaining four. The official message given to the office staff was just be thankful you have a job. The unofficial message was a little more blunt; if you complain about having to work lunches or coming in an hour early or leaving an hour late, then your ass—even if it’s as pretty as Susan Shannon’s—will be out on the street.
           But that was only a small part of it. She could live with all that. What she couldn’t live with was what was happening to her husband. As much as he promised her this year would be different—that he was making progress with his therapist—she knew it was going to turn out the same as it always had.
           It