Oh Stupid Heart (15 page)

Once in the hall, she
called her boss. “Where are you?”

“In my office, with a
crabby EA outside, angry because someone messed with his chair.”

She laughed. “Great,
I found out why I have yet to be paid for Taiwan.”

“Tell me who’s at
fault, and I’ll fire their ass.”

“You’ll get no
argument from me.”

“Coco stopped your
check? How?”

“Through her little
helper.”

“Grant?”

“Yep. I’m bringing
the proof up. Do not confront—” A loud clunk sounded in her ear.

Trent’s voice faded in
decibels but rose in anger as he scorched Grant with his cursing.
Stupid,
stupid, stupid.
Telling Trent over the phone was the same as waving a red
cape before an enraged bull.

Desperate to stop him
from doing something they’d both regret, she ran to the elevator. When the
doors didn’t open, she took the steps with Sam in tow. He cursed and complained
behind her for all five levels.

Entering the main
office, she gasped. Her boss had his hands around Grant’s neck. “Trent, stop!”

Sam raced past her,
crashing into Trent, separating him from Grant. All three men sprawled on the
floor.

First, she ran to
Grant’s body and felt for a pulse. “He’s alive.” Next, she gripped Trent’s
shirt as he sat on the floor. “What were you thinking? You can’t strangle your
employees!”

“He’s not an
employee. I fired him.”

“You still can’t
strangle him. All you had to do was tell him he was fired and point to the
door.”

Trent pushed himself
up and glared at Sam before reaching down to help his driver up. “The first
thing out of my mouth, after sharing my real opinion of him was ‘you’re fired’.
The bastard just laughed at me and said he had an ironclad guaranteed contract
for five years.”

“Ridiculous!” Carrie
said, then noticed the worry wrinkles on Trent’s brow. “Trent, you wouldn’t
sign a five-year contract for a temporary EA.”

“Not purposely, but I
didn’t read the fine print before I signed it.”

“But you faxed it to
David, right?”

His pained expression
told her he hadn’t. Her stomach filled with lead. What had Trent committed them
to? “Where’s your copy?”

“I’m not sure. I
think Coco kept it.”

She wanted to yell at
him, but for what? The scheming bitch had even outplayed Dan Marshall. She took
a deep breath and concentrated on the problem at hand. His lawyer, David,
needed a copy of the document as soon as possible. Perhaps Grant retained a
copy in his desk. He seemed the type who would keep evidence of his cleverness
nearby.

After sitting in her
chair, and resetting it, she unlocked both lower cabinets, assigning Trent and
his grumpy driver each a drawer. She expected Sam to bitch it wasn’t his job,
but he just extracted his drawer and walked out to an empty surface in the main
room and sorted the contents from there. Trent followed suit and took a drawer
to his office.

Carrie stayed at her
desk and searched the remaining top drawers. She’d found the document. The
terms of Grant’s contract made her forget to tell the guys they could stop
searching. When she got to Grant’s salary increasing one hundred percent each
year, a black cloud of anger swept over her.

“Get away from my stuff,
you bitch!” Grant snarled.

She pushed her chair
back to avoid being strangled.

Grant flew over the
desk, rolled, and smashed against the wall. He scrambled to his feet just as Sam
and Trent rushed in and slammed him against the plywood covering the still
broken windows.

Carrie grabbed the
contract. “Don’t hurt him. He’s still our employee.” She stormed into Trent’s
office and faxed the twelve-page, small-print document from hell to David’s
number while she called him.

The moment he
answered his phone, she got to the point. “David, we have a problem. Coco got
Trent to sign an employment agreement without letting you read it first. We
need to fire the employee, but he’s confident we can’t, even if we have just
cause. Could you look it over at your earliest convenience for a loophole?
Otherwise, I fear Grant’s going to be the most disruptive employee in the
history of employment.”

“I’ll review it,”
David said. “Just fax—hold on, my secretary is handing it to me now.” After a
moment’s pause he spoke. “Holy shit! Tell Trent I’m only talking to you.”

“It’s really bad,
huh?”

“Any chance Grant has
killed someone or committed felony fraud?”

“Not yet, but if he
continues to work here, a death could occur.”

A loud thump made her
check the outer office. Trent had Grant pinned against the wall and Sam had his
arm pulled back ready to land a blow to the jerk’s head.

“David, I’ll call you
back in an hour.”

She closed her phone
and hurried out to rescue Grant—just the idea, made her sick to her stomach.
She ran to Sam and grabbed his arm with all her might.

“Do not hurt him! I
can guarantee you he’ll press charges.”

Sneering, Grant
added, “And I will, unless the bitch is fired.”

“How about I throw
you out the window?” Trent growled.

Grant smiled upon
receiving Trent’s threat. Something wasn’t right here. The threat shouldn’t
have made him happy unless… “Sam, frisk him. I think he has a recorder on him.”

Grant struggled, but
Trent and Sam proved more than capable of performing her request. Sam located a
miniature digital recorder from Grant’s suit pocket. It was indeed recording.
He erased the content, dropped it to the floor, and crushed it to bits.

Returning his
attention to Grant, he ripped open the tailored silk shirt exposing a furry
chest. “No wires.”

“We should be a
little more thorough,” Trent insisted. “Carrie, could you go down to Jack and
see if it’s possible to get your money wired to your bank?”

“I will, if you
promise not to physically hurt him. Grant will jump on any leverage you give
him.”

“I’m going to strip
him naked.”

She grabbed her iPad
from her desk. “Uck! I certainly don’t want to see anymore of him. He’s vile
enough clothed. I’ll be downstairs with our one working employee.” She paused
then hurried on. Now was not the time to suggest her brilliant idea concerning Systems.

***

The basement door
refused to open. She couldn’t blame Jack for being paranoid after Miss Schnell
and her lunatic nephews tore the upstairs offices apart. They had tried to
break into the server room, where they could have caused serious damage, but
Jack had barred himself inside, keeping his babies safe from the angry
ex-employee and her stupid, but strong relatives.

Carrie called him on
the phone. “Can I come in?”

“Is it lunchtime?”

“No. But you can start
your complaints. If we’ve finished them by lunch, we’ll still go out and eat
while we talk solutions.”

A moment later, the
door opened. Jack stuck his head out into the hall.

“Where’s the boss’s
double?”

“His name is Sam.
Please don’t call him Trent’s double, it’s rude.”

“So is new guy
fired?”

“Not yet, but I’ve
got our lawyer working on it.”

“How hard is it to
fire a person?”

“Harder than you’d
think.” She sighed heavily. “I wish I hadn’t taken the coward’s way out and let
Trent deal with the HR expert on his own.”

Jack huffed. “He
brings in a freakin’ high-priced HR expert, and who do they replace? You, the
person who keeps the place running. What the hell was he thinking, or should I
ask what body part was thinking—I saw her once in his limo. Legs up to her
ass—”

Anger erupted at his
picturesque words. “Could we discuss your issues? And for your information,
everyone’s legs attach to their ass, unless they’ve been in a bomb attack or
something.”

He chuckled. “True
enough.” He gave her his stress ball. “I’ll let you throw it.”

Carrie aimed at the
space between the two servers and tossed it as hard as she could.

It smashed against a
panel on the right server, leaving an inch deep dent, before flying back at a
deadly speed.

Jack saved the day by
capturing the ball a mere inch before it made unfriendly contact with her head.

He dropped it in his
left hand drawer, far away from her.

“Let me tell you
about my two weeks of hell while you’re still conscious.”

***

Carrie took notes on
her iPad. The list of grievances Jack had accumulated during the last two weeks
astounded her. She had seven pages of tiny print.

Some of his issues
didn’t require her intervention, such as an empty paper towel dispenser in the
men’s bathroom. Yet as Jack explained why it was empty, a toilet had overflowed
and someone used them all to soak up the filthy brown water, she changed her
mind and flipped to another page, writing a reminder to talk to their cleaning
service and the building maintenance man.

A large number of complaints
concerned Grant. Trent caused five additional grievances.

As the only employee
coming to work, receiving all this grief pissed Jack off. “In the past, at
least, it was you and me against the walking dead. But I’ve been by myself for
two weeks. I’ve been so miserable, even my Europa withdrawal seemed like good
times in retrospect.”

“I am sorry about
those turtles,” she whispered, tears filling her eyes.

“Don’t start crying.
And if you do, don’t make it about the turtles. Make it about the horrible
list. I came very close to quitting. If I thought I had any chance at all of
getting another job in systems, I would have left.”

Why on earth wouldn’t
he think himself hirable? She would have assured him other companies would love
to have him, except given the list of tortures he’d gone through, if she
convinced him of his true value, he might leave and prove her right.

Instead, she gripped
his arm. “I’m glad you stuck it out. There’s going to be a lot of changes in
the next month and when I’m done, I hope to have a happy, cohesive group of
employees.”

He grimaced. “I’m not
into team sports.”

“But you are! You and
I have been a team for years.”

His head tilted to
the side as he gave the matter thought and nodded. “Because you never once
asked me to do your job, or something impossible, or something I had no idea
how to do.” He glowered as he said the latter.

Carrie suspected he
relived Trent’s abusive behavior when Jack couldn’t replicate the reports she
normally ran. “I’m sorry about those reports. I should have sent you the
location of search macros. They produce themselves when you open them. Only…I
wanted Trent to miss me and see how useless Grant was.”

“You did a good job
there. Trent learned no one, not even the worthless systems person who refused
to work unless given a freakin’ cookie, could get useful data out of the server.”

“You are so far from
worthless, it’s laughable, and if you’d like to get training on the system’s
capabilities, we’ll send you. However, before we do, we’ll need to hire someone
who can assist you in running the place, because at the moment, when you aren’t
here, nothing gets done.” She paused. “I think your absence was why people
stopped showing up. With you in the hospital, no one could get the system to
work and Bob Ott couldn’t do a damn thing.”

“He’s good at hiring
people.”

Carrie doubted he’d
even done that. She glanced at her watch. “It’s close enough to lunch. Let’s go
eat. I want to throw something out that will hopefully make you happier about
putting up with your horrible weeks.”

***

Trent wanted to smash
the bastard, but Carrie had it right. Grant would grab any leverage he could
get. He’d already proved it by demanding Carrie be fired the moment he thought
he had the upper hand.

Sorting through the
desk, Trent pulled out some panty hose wadded in the back of a drawer. By their
length, no way could they be Carrie’s. No doubt they belonged to the prick’s
girlfriend. Great to know, besides forging his name and trying to bankrupt
Carrie, the jerk had spent the rest of his time copulating with Angela. He
tossed them to Sam. “Use this to tie him up.”

Once Sam had him
secured, Trent got in Grant’s face. “So where’s your girlfriend today?”

Grant’s eyes
narrowed. “She’ll be here any moment, and
poof,
your ‘no witness, no
foul’ premise goes to hell.”

“Nonsense. We had to
restrain you when you attacked my employee. Take this to the police and you’ll
see jail time. Not only are we three witnesses to your one, but Carrie has
friends in the police force. And the jury will fall in love with her on sight.
You’ll probably get twenty-five years for attempted murder. But by all means,
call the cops and see who’s more credible. Us or the guy who sends emails out
under my name.”