Free The Consultant by Bentley Little Page B

and we have to have proof. I mean, what do we have so far? Acting creepy and conducting some odd interviews? He hasn’t actually done anything wrong. You saw those executives this morning. They’re behind him.”  
    Craig picked up his burrito. “This isn’t looking good.”  
    “No,” Phil said, “it’s not.”  
    ****  
    “Tyler?” Angie said incredulously after Dylan had gone to bed and Craig had told her about his day. “I don’t believe it.”  
    “I can’t believe it either. And I saw it. I keep trying to figure out if there was some way the consultant could have goaded him into it or tricked him into saying what he did.”  
    “Do you think that’s what happened?”  
    Craig sighed. “No. I want to think that. But no, I don’t.”  
    “I thought he was your friend. Why would he trash you like that?”  
    “I have no idea.”  
    “At least they’re taking your side instead of his.”  
    “Unless they’re trying to build a case against me.”  
    Angie smiled. “Now you’re just being paranoid. They didn’t want to get rid of you; they wanted to get rid of him.” She paused for a second, looked into his eyes. “Maybe you should have let them.”  
    He shook his head. “Even if Tyler for some reason hates my guts, he’s still one of my strongest programmers. And I need him on that OfficeManager project.”  
    “Well, you don’t need to be bosom buddies to work together. You just need to be professional.”  
    “And I think we both can be.”  
    “Speaking of consultants,” Angie said, “they’re hiring some to look at the Urgent Care.”  
    “What for?”  
    “That’s what we want to know. We’re already making do with half the budget we had five years ago—and we have twice the number of patients. They got rid of half of the salaried employees in favor of the per diems, who flake out on us almost every weekend. If they’re looking to cut, I don’t what more they can do. And it’s a complete waste of money. We don’t have to hire consultants to ‘study’ the Urgent Care. All management needs to do is talk to the doctors and nurses who work there. We know what needs to be done.”  
    “You think they’ve already made their decisions and are just looking for consultants to back them up?”  
    “You know I do. Those gutless wonders obviously plan to screw things up even more than they already have, only they need to have a ‘study’ they can point to in order to justify their actions when we raise hell.” She sighed. “Their mission statement is that everything is for the patients, but they compromise patient care every time they cut our budget or do things like waste money by hiring consultants.”  
    Craig was silent for a moment. “You don’t know the name of the consultants they’re using, do you?”  
    She smiled. “I knew you would ask that. And I wondered myself. So, yes I do. I asked Pam when she called, and she said it’s some healthcare-related consulting firm called Perfect Practices.”  
    He let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “At least it’s not BFG.”  
    “That doesn’t mean these guys are any better,” she pointed out.  
    “I think it does,” he said.  
    ****  
    Something was up.  
    Craig knew it even before he went upstairs to his office. He didn’t talk to anyone while coming in from the parking lot, but there was a weird energy in the lobby, an almost tangible tension that reminded him of the day the A.I. merger hadn’t gone through and half of senior management had jumped out of the crashing plane with golden parachutes.  
    As he rode up the elevator to the sixth floor, sharing part of the journey with a silent woman he didn’t know who got off on the fourth, the feeling did not go away, and when he saw half of the programming staff crowding the open area in front of Lupe’s desk, he realized that whatever had happened, it obviously involved his division. His mind began running down scenarios as he