Free Faceless by Jus Accardo Page A

note, though.
    Doug—
    Meet me in the lab when you get in. Bring Mt Dew. It’s in the fridge in the office (the one that exploded).
    Good luck with Nader.
    Wentz
    It took some convincing, but eventually Nader let me into the office provided he came with me. I raided the mini fridge—which was remarkably unharmed—under Nader’s watchful eye, pulled out a six-pack of soda, and found my way down to the lab.
    “Name?” the Jim on the left said without blinking.
    I almost pointed out that he’d seen me yesterday, but didn’t bother. “Doug Cain. I’m Mr. Wentz’s new—”
    He turned away and punched in the code. The door opened with a swoosh and he went back to staring down the hall. I shuffled past them and into the room, biting back a very Cain-like comment about the stick wedged up his ass. Wentz wanted to get them to show some emotion? Cain would gladly volunteer to kick them in the nuts. Like to see them keep a straight face then…
    The place was no less hectic than yesterday. No one spoke to me as I walked the center aisle straight to the two large, closed doors at the end. No one even looked. Not that I liked being the center of attention—that was Dez’s thing—but it was almost as if they were going out of their way to not look. That was a little weird. It made me wonder about the comment Nader made the day before pertaining to the short life spans of Wentz’s previous assistants.
    I knocked twice, then pushed through the doors when I got no answer. Wentz was seated at the desk, head down, with a pair of Twizzlers hanging from under his top lip. Despite the candy-fangs, I noticed a difference right away. It wasn’t just his clothes. Work jeans and a simple black collared shirt as opposed to yesterday’s odd business/casual mash up. It wasn’t the tight set of his shoulders and jaw. It was his expression. Yesterday he’d been laid back, almost childlike, and never losing his grin. Today that was gone. This was a man focused. Obsessed.
    I held up the cans and gave them a slight shake. “Brought the soda.”
    “Set it down,” he mumbled. One of the Twizzlers fell from his mouth, and he ignored it. Without looking up from his work, he slid a small yellow paper across the desk and tapped it twice. “Here. Do them in order and be back here by four.”
    I took the paper and skimmed it. It was a list of twenty things. Errands, filing, etc. Number four said to pick up dry cleaning. The only dry cleaners I knew of was at least twelve miles from here and I didn’t have a car. “How—”
    He waved me off. “Go. Busy Bumble Bee today.”
    …
    I checked off the items one by one. The first had me running files from the upstairs office to Donna. Nader wasn’t happy to see me again after the morning soda run and informed me I had exactly one hour and then the office was officially closed for the foreseeable future.
    The second thing on the list was to pull all the boxes labeled April 2007 from storage in the basement. That one sucked. Storage turned out to be a room the size of the old public library back home with almost no organization. There were thousands of boxes, all with random dates, seemingly scattered everywhere. Some with just month and year, others with month, date, year, and even a time.
    After working my way from the front of the room to the middle, I figured out the ones for 2007 had the date underlined twice and were a slightly different shade of gray than the rest. Still, that only made finding them slightly quicker. It still took five hours. Granted I’d rifled through each box as I went, trying to find something on the formula. After twelve boxes of random notes and unrelated files, I gave up.
    The third thing was to bring the boxes to Donna.
    “Hey,” I asked as we unloaded the last batch. “Is everything okay with Wentz today? He seems…”
    “Serious?” she said, smiling. “It’s a Busy Bee day. I’ve been here about six months and I’ve only seen him do it like twelve