Free Since the Layoffs by Iain Levison

and concerned for Tommy, and the gesture annoys me. I pretend to listen to him as he walks around and describes things to do, and I wonder when he will go home.
    “Kenneth?” Brecht calls over to Jughead, who is still staring straight ahead.
    “Yes?” Jughead screams.
    “Jim’s here, you can clock out now.”
    “It’s Jake.”
    He looks at me for a moment, as if absorbing this information into the deepest recesses of his brain. His eyes assure me he will never make that mistake again. He never will. “Jake,” he says.
    Jughead walks out wordlessly, and Brecht says, in a low, conversational voice, “Did you ever notice that kid is hard to understand?”
    I shake my head.
    Brecht shrugs and continues walking me down the aisles. “Oh,” he says off-handedly as he moves a bag of Wenke chips from foot level to the top. “Was there a problem at the drug-testing center?”
    “No, no problem. There was a long wait. I needed to—”
    “I’m going to need that clean drug test.”
    “You’re going to get it.”
    Two and half hours later, Brecht is still here. He is back in the office. I have already done most of the things I was expected to do tonight and would be smoking out front, if there was no chance he would catch me and give me a five-minute patronizing lecture about it, when he calls me into the back room. It is dark in there, but for a small black and white TV he has brought in. He has been watching videos from the surveillance cameras from the past week, like a football coach going over game tape. I expect he has drawn up a chalkboard somewhere with x’s and o’s, game plans for how we can better serve the customer.
    “Jake, we’ve got a problem,” he tells me.
    Oh, Christ. He’s noticed I’ve played with the camera dates. He knows I’ve had Jughead work for me late-night. He knows, he knows, he knows. He knows everything.
    “I’ve been watching videos from the past week.”
    “Yeah?”
    He hits play, and there is a picture of me, behind the counter. I can’t read the date and time on the video. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
    “Me behind a counter?”
    Brecht takes off his glasses. “Jake, I’ve watched all the videos from last week.” He looks at me, so earnest, and in his eyes I see all the knowledge of all my crimes. He has pieced it together somehow, the altered surveillance, the newspaper articles of the murder, everything. “In all those videos from last week, I don’t see a single employee wearing a smock.”
    Wearing a what? That’s what this guy has been back here doing? In my relief, I offer information. “We weren’t wearing smocks until you showed up,” I tell him.
    “Tommy told me you were,” he says, shaking his head.
    Oh, Christ, what have I done now? I’ve gotten Tommy into trouble while trying to get myself out. He sees me still standing in the doorway. “Thanks Jake. Just get back to the front.”
    Brecht finally leaves at two in the morning. While he is leaving, he puts his jacket on the counter to go back into the office to get something he has forgotten. I reach into the jacket pocket and pull out a hotel entrance card, Kellner Suites. I know where that is, about two miles away, up Route 40. I drop the card back into his pocket as he comes out of the office.
    As soon as he is gone, I fall asleep. We don’t get another customer until after Tommy comes in at seven. Or maybe we did, and I just slept through it. I guess we’ll find out when we look at the video.

FIVE
    I get back to the store for my night shift at 7 p.m., and Tommy is waiting for me with my first paycheck from Gas’n’Go.
    Four hundred and eighteen dollars, after taxes. That doesn’t seem like much for two weeks of non-stop work, but it’ll get my TV back from the pawnshop. Added to the eight hundred I’ve received from Ken Gardocki, I can now pay rent, turn my heat back on, maybe even look into a cheap cable package.
    And things get better. Tommy, who has been demoted to clerk