Free Scrumptious by Amanda Usen

like ice in the sack.”
    “You can’t melt ice with a limp torch, Keith,” Olivia pointed out.
    The mulish expression on Keith’s face reminded Joe of the way his cousin’s kids looked when they were seeing just how far they could push their mother before she lost her temper and applied a smackdown. He lifted his chin. “I want to get my knives out of the office.”
    “Be my guest,” Olivia said. “You want a towel to get the dust off of them? Don’t take too long. If you aren’t out of here in five minutes, I’m calling the police.”
    Keith shouldered past them. Joe gave him a healthy shove in the direction he was going, hoping Keith would turn around and give him another chance. “You want me to go with him?” he asked.
    She shook her head. “Just tell me when he leaves, okay? I’ll be up front.”
    Joe returned to the monkfish tails and picked up his blade.
    “And Joe?” Olivia’s voice was quiet.
    He looked up.
    “Don’t ever refer to fish and my pussy in the same sentence. Got it?”
    He nodded, chuckling. He had wondered if she’d heard that.
    She rolled her eyes and went through the swinging door into the dining room. “Get him out of here, cowboy.”
    ***
    Marlene heard a noise behind her. She glanced up from the potatoes in time to see Keith duck into the office. She nicked her little finger with the swivel-headed peeler. “Damn.” She dropped the potato and the peeler into the five gallon bucket of water and raced to the office door.
    Locked.
    She found Joe on the line, wrist-deep in monkfish, the nastiest bottom-dweller ever to hit the restaurants. “Does Olivia know Keith just locked himself in the office?”
    “Locked, huh? He’s got about two minutes before I haul his ass out of there.”
    “Can I watch?” she asked.
    “Let’s go, sugar.”
    The office door was wide open and the back room was empty and still when they reached the back.
    “Maybe he went out the front,” Joe said, heading in that direction.
    “I’ll check the back.”
    In the dish room, Marlene saw crusted-over sauté pans full of dried-out sauce and half-sheet pans piled every which way. Tea bags, sugar packets, and straws swirled in the clogged drain. The stainless steel sink was full of milky water, ice cubes, globs of swollen noodles, and sogged-out bread crusts. There were so many dishes piled up, there was no room to make room. But no sign of Keith.
    “Holy shit, this place is a friggin’ mess! Where’s Kevin ?” Marlene yelled to make herself heard in the wait station.
    Shane came over to peer at the unscraped, unstacked dish mess, then ducked back down the hall as Joe and Olivia walked quickly through the narrow aisle between the reach-in cooler and the front of the line. When Shane got a safe distance away from the dish room, he called over his shoulder, “I just heard Keith tell Kevin he’d give him a hundred bucks to walk out.”
    “Fuck.” Olivia said what Marlene was thinking.
    Joe laughed. “You’ve got to give him credit for imagination. That’s a good one.”
    “Where’d he get the hundred bucks?” Olivia wondered out loud.
    “Probably out of your safe, kiddo. You really should have let me go with him,” Joe said.
    “That’s it. I’m getting a restraining order.” Olivia stomped out of the dish room.
    “Hey, that doesn’t get you out of KP!” Joe yelled after her.
    Marlene and Joe locked eyes.
    “I was pulling worms out of monkfish when Keith got here,” Joe said. “Ladies choice: dish or fish?”
    “I’ll run the plates through,” she said reluctantly.
    “Sissy.”
    “There is no way in hell I’m cleaning up this whole mess though. Jacques is looking for overtime. He’ll come in a little early. I’m going home to take a nice, hot bubble bath, and pretend this day never happened.” She attacked the dishes with savage force.
    “Uh-oh.”
    “What now?”
    “Marly?”
    “What?” This time with force and impatience. She had a lot of dishes to do and her