Burn (24 page)

Todd recognized the free weight immediately as Luther's commemorative disc. Doren had given them as gifts to all the department heads last spring in celebration of
To the Max with Gregor Tavlin
reaching its tenth year on the air. Todd had outdone himself with the idea, even if he did say so. Each plate had the words
TO THE MAX
custom-cast on one side, the individual manager's name on the flip. Vines hadn't really earned his; he'd only lucked into it by virtue of a slim two-month employment overlap.

The savage irony was not lost on Todd.

At present, Luther wore the anniversary token approximately sternum level. He'd threaded the chain through the hole in the center and attached it back to itself with … Todd leaned forward for a closer look … indeed. A dog's collar clip.

The man had a ten-pound weight hanging from his head on a dog leash. This had to be what Todd had heard about yesterday when he'd instructed Sheri For-man to let Vines take over Rodney's classes at the club. He wondered if Vines had actually worn the contraption during class. He could only imagine.

While Todd watched, Vines began to narrate his own demonstration.

“You got your basic position, ” he said, standing as he'd been since he walked in: shoulders back, arms at his sides, chin level. “That's posture maintenance.”

He began to nod slowly: chin to chest, back up again. He completed five repetitions. Then he repeated the motion to each side, ear to shoulder. “You got your anterior, your posterior, your upper trapezius.”

Todd struggled mightily to appear intrigued.

Next, Luther rotated his head in wide, slow circles. “You got your range of motion. And if you wanna talk abs….”

Moving gracefully, Luther cleared Todd's credenza with a swipe of his arm and a mad flurry of press kits. He climbed up and reclined slowly, arms crossed over his broad chest. When he'd settled into position, his head hung just over the edge of the credenza, the weighted chain swaying over the floor behind him like a pendulum. He began doing stomach crunches.

“Lower back!” Luther called, flipping onto his stomach and lacing his fingers behind his head. He released a pneumatic hiss, raised his chest a few inches off the credenza top, held this position for a few seconds, and lowered himself again. Repeated.

It was unlike anything Todd had ever witnessed, at least in his office. Luther's uncharacteristic enthusiasm was almost enough to make Todd stop wondering what Heather and her mystery man had done together after he'd escaped the rabid dog's attack last night.

Almost.

Todd began to grow urgent. He had to get back down to the parking lot, get the Acura out of there. He could call the company account at Hertz and see about a rental for the next few days.

A fender bender! It had just come out of his mouth to the first person who'd asked. Todd knew he should have planned a better story. He should have given it some
thought.
But he'd just limped into the office in a funky haze. How could he have been so addle-headed?

He wasn't on his game. He just wasn't himself this morning at all.

“Luther, ” he said, “I'm speechless. Let me absorb what you've showed me, and we'll meet again. I really do want to hear more.”

“This here's just a prototype, ” Luther said, ignoring the glaring motion to adjourn. “I'm thinking you'd want to make the real thing out of something … Kevlar, maybe. Lots of padding around here and here. Maybe some Velcro.”

“Tell you what, ” Todd said. “Why don't you draw up a proposal. Like I said, I'd like to hear more.”

Luther's eyes darkened. “This is the proposal.”

Todd thought:
Oh, no. No no no.
He tried to calm his nerves. This was going to take finesse. The look on Luther's face began to make Todd feel like a hostage in his own office. He needed to get out of here.

“I'm just having a little trouble visualizing the practical demographic, that's all.” Todd made a scribbling motion with his hand. “It'd help me if I could see something on paper. A few ‘for examples.’ In the meantime, I've got to run out of here and….”

“You want a for example? I got a for example.” Luther nodded at him. “Check you out. For example. Got in a car wreck I heard.”

“Just a fender bender, ” Todd said. It would be all over the office by now. But if he could get to the car before the lunch-hour exodus, he thought, there was still a chance he'd be able to contain the stupid lie before anybody noticed. “That's all.”

“Sore today though, right?”

“I'm a little banged up, Luther. You can see that.”

“Got a headache?”

“Yes, ” Todd said, “I do. And I can't say it's getting any better just at the moment.”

“Ears ringing?”

Todd opened his mouth, then paused to consider the question.

“Actually, ” he said, “yes. A little bit, to tell you the truth. When I first woke up this morning. Not so bad now.”

“Shoulders hurt? Right on top, maybe a little down the back?”

“Both.”

“Congratulations, ” Luther said. “That'd be whiplash. Stronger neck muscles, you'da come out better.”

“Hmm, ” Todd said. “I see where you're going. Maybe you're on to something here. If you could just sit down and sketch out a few….”

“Ain't no maybe about it, ” Luther said. “Neck's an important motherfucker, but nobody pays any attention. Why bother, right? It just holds your head up is all. But look here. What you got is basically an eight-pound bowling ball on top of a flexible tube. You got all kinds of major nerves runnin’ through there. All kinds of pressure points. Plus a little somethin’ called your spinal cord. You got all kinds of injuries can happen, fuck your shit up good.”

“I suppose I never thought about it.”

“Exactly what I'm talkin’ about. So you get some statistics, right? Some shit about how many Americans suffer from neck problems, whatever. You get some quad case who has to blow through a straw to run his wheelchair around. Find us a doc to say how important it is to Neckercise.”

“Neckercise?”

“Name I been tossin’ around, ” Luther said. He lifted the dumbbell plate by the chain. “The Neckerciser.”

“The Neckerciser, ” Todd said. He smiled broadly,
thinking,
Lord, help me.
“That's great, Luther. I like that. Tell you what: If you're really serious about this, let's take it seriously. We'll need to find out if there are any similar products on the market. If not, we'll need to look into the patent-pending end, see if anybody else is working on this. We'll need to explore the marketing angles. Determine how The Neckerciser stacks up to our existing products. Right now I've got to….”

“You wanna see how it stacks up?”

Before Todd could interrupt, Luther tore the harness from his head. He stormed over to a stack of promotional Abdominators sitting in their boxes in the corner of the office. Vines grabbed a box off the top of the stack and brought it back to the center of the room. He tore the box open and dumped the preassembled product out onto the floor with a clatter.

“Let's stack it up, ” he said.

Luther swung the iron plate around on its chain like some kind of medieval battle flail. Once. Twice. Then he brought it down with a whistle.

Todd jumped at the splintering crunch of the impact. The Abdominator hopped on the carpet and settled again, cracked and mangled. Luther swung the plate down once more; a bit of plastic shrapnel whizzed past Todd's ear like an angry insect. Gears came undone. A tension spring flew. As Todd watched, flinching with every strike, Luther continued to pulverize the Abdom-inator until only a shattered pile of rubble remained.

When he was finished, Luther looked up. He wasn't even breathing hard. “Any questions?”

Todd had reached the end of his patience. “You've made your point, Vines. I told you we'd talk more later, and we'll talk more later. Right now, I don't have time for this.”

“You got more time than you think.”

“Luther, I don't like your tone.”

“Yeah? What you gonna do, call security?”

“That's not very funny.”

“So you still want a proposal.”

“I think it would help.”

“Here's a proposal.”

Luther dropped the weight to the carpet with a heavy thud. He unzipped the hip sack slung around his waist and plunged his hand inside. When he pulled his hand out, he held up something that didn't make sense to Todd: a clear plastic CD jewel case with an unlabeled disc inside.

“You asked for it, ” Luther said. “I came in here, I was all about doin’ business the civilized way. But hey. You want to make it hard, we can make it hard.”

Todd sighed and gave up. “What are you talking about? Am I supposed to know what that is?”

“You don't know what it is?”

“I'm sure I don't.”

“Me either, ” Vines said. “I don't know shit about computers.”

“Luther, I'm not following you.”

“Bet them cops just left could tell us what's on here, though.” Luther waggled the jewel case. “This is the one they been lookin’ for, ain't it?”

Todd blinked.

“Guess you didn't figure you'd see this again, huh?”

As Luther spoke, Todd began to feel disconnected from his surroundings. A sudden floating sensation rose in his chest.

“Luther, ” he said quietly. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“You're a smart guy. You can probably figure it out if you think real hard.”

“I think you're playing games, ” Todd said evenly. “That's what I think. And I still don't have time.”

“Let's pop it in yours, ” Luther said, nodding toward the PC on Todd's desk. “We'll see what time it is.”

Todd took his throbbing ankle down from the desk. He sat up straight in his chair. He placed his hands flat on the desk in front of him. He found a spot on the desktop just past his fingertips and focused on it. He sat this way for a while.

Finally, he looked back at Luther. He chose his words carefully.

“If that's what you'd like me to believe it is, ” he said, “where did you get it?”

“Got this from a guy down in IT, ” Luther said. “Darrold Franklin. You know him?”

“I don't know everybody in the building.”

“Yeah, well, my man Darrold ain't hard to miss. He's the only brother down there in the egghead ward.” Luther kicked Abdominator fragments out of his way and plopped down in one of the chairs facing Todd's desk. “I bring him in a few CDs now and then, few blank discs, he'll dupe copies for me. Did up a pyramid workout for him. We got a back-and-forth kinda thing.”

“Is that so?”

“Thing to know about Darrold Franklin is, this is one uptight black man. Single dude, spends all day on computers. Then he goes home, and what's he do? Stays up all night makin’ up his own programs and playin’ these crazy games, all that shit. I've seen his place, it's like somebody dropped a nerd bomb in there.” Luther shook his head. “Always thought that shit was for skinny white boys who
couldn't get laid, but there you go. My man D benches 290 since I been helpin’ him out. That don't make him less paranoid, though. Strange cat. You still listenin’?”

“I'm listening.”

“So Darrold gets to work early one day couple weeks back. And he sees your ass comin’ out the back office with one of them discs they keep up in there. Now, somethin’ like that, that just kicks Darrold's inner geek into high gear, you know what I'm sayin’? He goes and takes himself a look. Figures out pretty quick which disc is missing. And what do you know? It's one they just did up. Building log for July.”

Luther folded his bulging arms.

“Now, my boy tells me how after they back it up end of the month, that shit gets erased off the system automatically. But he knows a couple tricks, right? Just 'cause you erase something off a computer, it ain't necessarily gone. And it's only been a day, so he figures he can probably get it back. Which he does. And once he's got it, he burns himself a copy, just in case.” Luther shrugged his shoulders. “In case of what? Who knows, man. That's just Darrold. Like I told you, the cat can be paranoid.”

Todd said nothing. He could barely hear Luther over the roar in his ears.

“Now when the police come around, looking for that missing disc, Darrold's already thinkin’. He's thinkin’ there must be
somethin’
on this bad boy you don't want the cops to find. Somebody musta been in the building who said they weren't. Or somebody wasn't in the building who said they were. See, he knows you used
my
badge to get in that room, 'cause he looked up the record for that day. So he calls me up and
tells me he's got somethin’ for me. Figures a brother might want to have it. You know. Just in case. That's why they call it backup, right?”

Luther waggled the jewel case again.

“Then what Darrold does is, he goes back and makes sure that shit is gone off the system for good. Some program he wrote himself. Way he explained it, it's like writin’ down a word and then writin’ different words over the top of it like a million times. Point is, he goes back and nukes that file for real, covers his tracks. Just in case there's anything there might mess me up with the cops.”

It was the most Todd Todman had ever heard Luther Vines speak at one time. It was possibly more than Todd had heard Luther Vines say ever. He found that it was more than he could process. He thought of Heather.

“So.” Luther put the disc back into his hip sack and zipped up. “Here's what I'm sayin’. And you best listen up. You listening?”

“I'm listening. I told you, I'm listening.”

“My time is here. That's all it is. It's my turn.”

“Luther, let's talk about this.”

“Oh, we gonna do more than talk about it. You're gonna make it
happen.
Just like you said you would. Dig?”

“Luther, ” Todd said. His own voice sounded strange in his ears. “It isn't that easy! This kind of thing takes time. We've got to lay groundwork. We've got to develop strategies. We've got to—”

“Bullshit, ” Luther said. “This is easy as you wanna make it. Deal's a deal.”

“Be reasonable, ” Todd said. “I know we have a deal. And I don't go back on my word. But with everything
that's going on around here now … this company is under siege, Luther. We've got to batten down the hatches or we'll all go down.”