Free Snitch World by Jim Nisbet Page A

to twist. One fucking year. He turned the stem the other way. The cloth untwisted. If only it were so simple. Times like these, he said to himself, it’s best notto be drinking so much. He lifted the glass and downed half of it. Or not at all, he added, setting the glass back on the table. If you don’t watch your own back, he reflected bitterly, nobody’s going to watch it for you. Not even your own son.
    Maybe especially not even your own son.
    “Phillip …” Marci began tentatively.
    Certainly not your longest acquaintance and best friend from technical college, the sharpest manager you’d thought you ever met, and good-looking, too—although what that latter qualification had to do with the equation, he’d long since forgotten. Why, after all, expect her to watch your back, when she’s obviously been exclusively preoccupied for a long time with watching her own?
    Phillip sighed heavily, and his entire frame sagged. He’d been harboring a lot of tension for a lot of time, and he knew it, even as he denied it. Though he’d seen this confrontation coming for a while, he’d refused to allow himself to believe its subject. Marci Marci Marci. Sold out, copped out, and with a little help from the fiancé, whom Phillip had always pegged as venal, dishonest, corruptible, clutching for the main chance—mere emotional or maybe human entanglements from the past be damned.
    “I’m sorry, Phillip,” Marci suddenly said.
    He almost didn’t hear it. “Sorry?” he repeated.
    Marci said nothing.
    “Are you going to pay that invoice?” he asked.
    “I’ll … see what I can do.”
    “It’s not my fault it was bullshit work,” Phillip reminded her. “Work tasked to me specifically to force me to quit.” He took a beat. “Right?”
    “You’ve no call to take that attitude,” Marci said quickly. “It’s not like we haven’t already paid you—how much?”
    “Well over three hundred thou,” Phillip said immediately.
    “Not bad for one year,” she suggested.
    “One year of my life,” he agreed. “One year without even the time to pick up my dry-cleaning. Though I was looking at it as an investment.”
    “Well,” she said, “what did you do with the money?” Phillip pursed his lips. Less rent on his crummy apartment, and the occasional fleeting and very modest night out, like this one, he still had most of it. “That’s none of your business, Marci. Not to mention, it’s beside the point.”
    “What point?”
    “You’re shafting me. You know it, I know it, all the aforementioned shitheads know it and—what I consider worse?”
    “What do you consider worse, Phillip?” Marci said, suddenly coming on with the acid tone. “Darfur? Bangladesh?”
    “What’s worse,” Phillip said, declining to take the bait, “is that if I knew it I suppressed it, and if I suppressed it it’s because I trusted you and your shitbird husband-to-be.”
    “Let’s leave Billy out of this.”
    “Leave Bill out this? Gladly. Only it’s not possible. Or—hey, maybe it is possible. One thing would make it possible. One thing.”
    “What thing is that?”
    He was testing her attention span. He could hear the strain. She was probably already browsing the latest posts to her bridal registry. The conversation was almost over. All he had to do was quit and they could hang up and everybody could get on to the next multiplicity of tasks.
    “That thing would be this: that you set me up for this from the beginning. You recruited me into the start-up, there was a promise of equity, it was a promise that you never intended to fulfill. True or false? If true, well, sure: I’ll gladly leave Bill out of it.”
    “What are you saying, Phillip?” There was nothing but ice in her voice now, arctic ice, many feet deep.
    “I’m saying … I’m saying …” Phillip stared at the inch of Sangiovese that remained in the second glass, which was actually his third glass. It would have been nice to throw it across the room. A