Free They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy by R. D. Harless Page B

y'know?"
    "We just need him to lift a door, not build a space shuttle. Can you call him?"
    "That's not a good idea. I'm telling you, he's not somebody you want to work with. I don't want to contact him."
    She icily said, "I'd prefer to work with people we know for this."
    "No. We're not calling him." I took another hit of Scotch. Yeah , at nine a.m. My phone buzzed.
    "Is that Lee?" Tracey asked.
    I checked the message. SHE'S A BITCH, ISN'T SHE? YOU CAN KILL HER WITH A THOUGHT, RIGHT? YOU SHOULD DO IT.
    I glanced up at Spencer, who glanced up from the tabletop at me for a second. Little creepy shit.
    "It's not from Lee."
    "Dammit. Okay. Okay. We'll try to find a workaround without your friend. Fine. We're trying to avoid having to bring in anyone else for this job, anyway, right? We're already getting my girl Rosemary to do the remote sense for us. We're not trying to figure out how many different people in the world we can bring in that could do this instead of us. So what other ways can we do this with the three of us and, at most , two others? Forget Lee for now."
    My phone buzzed again. DO IT. KILL HER NOW. I HATE HER.
    "Will you turn your phone off?" Tracey snapped at me.
    I turned it off and flashed a scowl at Spencer. "I think we're making this a lot harder than it has to be--" I started to say, but Tracey cut me off mid-sentence.
    "Is there anybody out there who, like, can do several things combined?" she asked herself loudly. Jim rattled some names off of a secured FBI Post-Human catalog, but Tracey shot them all down. "We need Lee for this," she said, rubbing her temples. "He's supposed to be good at creative B&E. We need him here, where the fuck is he?" So she was gonna put this all on him and make it his fault she couldn't come up with shit. That was fucking Tracey to a T.
    She slammed her purse on the table and dug out her phone. "You guys take a break. I need to make a call. Keep trying to get in touch with Lee."
    Spencer and I stepped out of the conference room. I headed my ass straight out of the building, pack of smokes in hand and lit one up as soon as I hit fresh air. I made my way over to the fire a nd water show on the lakefront.
    The jets of fire shot upward for an audience gathered around.
    I texted Will on my phone: THIS IS BULLSHIT.
    He buzzed back: U GET $ YET?
    NO. THAT GIRL CALL U YET W/UR $?
    Buzz. N.
    I let that be my 'I told you so.' ANY NEWS ABT THE FIRE?
    NTHNG NEW. NO COPS @ MY DOOR ETHR.
    I punched in: NVR AGAIN....FIND A JOB.
    IS UR WRK H I RNG?
    Well, that had fucking backfired. If he only knew. NO.
    "Hey," Spencer said behind me, startling the shit out of me. "Want to hear something funny?"
    I texted Will LTR and put my phone away. "Stop texting me in there, all right? You're gonna get us both sent to the fucking Pacific."
    "She'll never know. She's too busy trying to pull her head out of her ass. Want to hear something funny?"
    Christ. "Sure, man. What."
    His eyes lit up. "I was in the middle of a major instance playing World of Warcraft in there that I've been planning and getting set up for three days. Some asshole has ganked one of the characters in my party five times and he keeps rezzing out in BFE and can't get back to rest of them. Everything's going to fucking respawn by the time he gets back there. So I found this asshole's IP, got his name, social and address; I put a worm on his computer that'll crash his system, wired half his savings to an Al-Qaeda bank account in Pakistan, vandalized three Fortune 50 homepages from his computer and added him to the National Sex Offender Registry."
    Why the fuck did I talk to these people? "For killing yo u in a video game?" I clarified.
    The joy fell off his face when he didn't get my approval. "Yeah. He's an asshole. If he's like that online, he's worse in real life." He got quiet before he came up with, "Is your friend having problems with his girlfriend or something? She owes him money?"
    I shoved him away from me. "Leave my phone the fuck