One Prayer Away (23 page)

Standing quickly from her desk, Barbara put her finger to her lips and gestured for Mitchell to keep quiet. Her pace was fast as she rounded the counter and stood next to him. When she spoke, her voice was a low, frantic whisper.

“Mitchell, what did you do?” The panic in her face startled him.

“Me?” he asked, pointing to himself in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“I've just never seen him like this; he's furious.”

“Who?

“Chris.”

Mitchell followed the direction of Barbara's gesture and noticed that his partner's office door was closed. That was very uncommon. Both of them kept their doors open unless they were in a private meeting with a client.

“Why?” Mitchell asked, still unsure of what Barbara
was talking about. “Does he have someone in there with him? Did they upset him?”

Shaking her head vigorously, Barbara answered, “No, Mitch. There's no one in there. He's angry at
you
. The door has been closed ever since he slammed it a half hour ago.”

Mitchell turned his attention to the closed door once more. Rewinding the weekend in his mind, he couldn't think of any reason why Chris would be angry with him. Although Mitchell had taken the unscheduled trip out of town, he'd still taken the files with him and had used his laptop computer and the hotel's complimentary highspeed Internet service to work on the accounts. What he didn't get done in Houston, he'd stayed up late last night and worked on. But Chris wouldn't know about the delay in him working on the files anyway. He'd not spoken directly to his partner since Thursday night.

“Let me go put my stuff down in my office,” he said to Barbara. “Then I'll see what's up.”

“No,” Barbara said, catching him by the arm. “He told me to tell you to come in his office as soon as you got here. He wanted that to be your first stop.”

This was more than bizarre. Mitchell had never seen so much fear in Barbara's eyes nor heard so much terror in her voice. He took a quick review of the past few days once more. It suddenly dawned on him that he hadn't checked behind Lisa when she went through the files in Chris's office. If she threw something away during the purge project that she shouldn't have, it would be too late to salvage it. The trash had been picked up on Friday, and it would be extremely embarrassing if Chris had to go back to a client and ask for information to replace what he'd already been given. It would make him appear incompetent, and professionalism in the company that Willie James Jackson had founded wasn't up for discussion.

“Okay,” Mitchell said as he released his belongings in Barbara's hands.

Taking slow, hesitant steps, he walked toward Chris's door and stood in front of it for a moment. Mitchell was surrounded by an eerie feeling. He would exchange his pounding heart for the stomach flutters he felt just moments ago any day. He turned to take one last look at Barbara and saw her standing quietly, clutching his leather jacket in her hand as if whatever was behind the door he stood in front of might eat him alive once he entered.

“This is crazy,” he whispered to himself, barely moving his lips.

It couldn't be as bad as Barbara had described. Even if needed files had been destroyed, Mitchell was willing to take the blame and accept the responsibility to personally make it right. The embarrassment would be great, but he could handle it. Balling his tingling fingers into a fist, Mitchell knocked, not having any idea what to expect. He heard a delayed silence and then the scuffle of a chair. The voice that finally invited him to enter didn't sound much like Chris's, but it was.

Mitchell stepped inside and immediately caught his partner's glare. Chris stood behind his desk. His fair skin had a reddened appearance, but not like the look it had had when he battled the flu. This one came across far more like raw anger.

“Hey,” Mitchell said. He tried to keep his voice steady, but it wasn't easy. “Barbara said you wanted to see me. What's up?”

At first his words got no reply, but when they finally did, it wasn't a return greeting.

“Close the door.”

Mitchell was full of questions, but he obeyed and then walked toward the empty chair where Chris's clients sat when they came in to meet him.

“Don't even bother,” Chris said, stopping Mitchell before he sat. From behind his desk, Chris kicked a box that slid out into the middle of the floor and came to a stop not
far from where Mitchell stood. “I took the liberty of packing all of your personal belongings from your office. I want you to get the box and get out.”

Chris's tone was uncharacteristically low, and his words were slow and threatening. Not knowing what to think about what he'd seen or heard, Mitchell stood silent, looking from the box on the floor to the man who looked like his best friend, but couldn't be.

“Wha . . . ?”

“Get out!” Chris ordered in a raised voice.

His anger was seething, and Mitchell could see it well. With every heated word he spoke, Chris's voice trembled with fury. But Mitchell couldn't just conform to the orders he'd been given. He needed answers as to why he was being treated so badly.

“What . . . what . . . what do you mean, get out?” he stammered. “What's going on, Chris? What are you doing?”

“I'm trying to save you from what's gonna happen if you don't get out; that's what I'm doing,” Chris growled. “Now get your junk and get out of my place of business. Do you understand me?”

The lines in Mitchell's face deepened. “No, I don't understand you,” he replied, getting more irritated with each passing moment.

“Well, let me put it like this. You're fired!” Chris screamed. “Did that break it down far enough for you?”

“Fired? Why? Man, we've been through too much. You can't do this.” Mitchell felt his body trembling, but anger had little to do with it. He felt desperate, like a man who had just been evicted from his home and had nowhere else to go.

“Don't tell me what I can't do,” Chris barked. “I can, and I just did.”

“But I own a third of the company. You can't just . . .”

“Read the fine print,” Chris interjected. “I can buy you out at any time if I deem it necessary. I do, and I'll have a
check in the mail to you by the end of the week. The paperwork outlining the reasons for termination of partnership is in the box with the rest of your belongings.”

“You're not making sense, Chris. Don't I at least deserve some kind of explanation?” Mitchell's body tensed, and he instinctively took two steps back as Chris rounded his desk. Every movement that his now-former partner made mirrored the hostility of his voice.

“
Deserve?
If I gave you what you deserved, you'd need a coroner to take you out of here. And how do you come off asking
me
for an explanation?”

All of a sudden, Mitchell wasn't sure whether he wanted one or not. But it was too late. And for what he was about to hear, he had in no way prepared himself.

“How about you give me one,” Chris proposed. “How about you explain to me what happened with you and Lisa on Thursday?”

Mitchell's heart plummeted. He stared at Chris in silence and then said the only word that came to his mind. “What?”

It sounded foolish, even to him, but he honestly didn't know what else to say. Even so, Mitchell didn't think that his dumbfounded one-word reply warranted Chris's fist across the side of his face. For a brief time, Mitchell knew what it was like to be one of the cartoon characters he'd grown up watching on television. The world around him spun, and he saw stars and heard the chirping of birds. The next thing he knew, he had toppled over the chair that he was standing near and was on his back, looking up at three blurred images of Chris looking down on him.

Lying there for a while until he got his clear vision back seemed like a good decision, but Mitchell soon found that the choice wasn't his to make. Chris reached down, grabbed him by his shirt and tie, and pulled him to his feet before slamming Mitchell's back against the wall. Still
dizzy from the first blow, all Mitchell could do was grunt from the force that now had him pinned against the wall.

“So you like hurting women, do you?” Chris said through clenched teeth.

“What?” Mitchell managed the one word again.

“My fiancée has a bruise on her wrist where you grabbed her when she tried to fight you off of her.”

“What? No,” Mitchell panted. He needed to explain himself. He needed to get it through to his friend that Lisa had lied to him.

“No?” Chris said in an almost-taunting manner. “Are you telling me that that bruise I saw was a figment of my imagination? That it didn't come from you? That you didn't grab her?”

Chris's grip around the collar of Mitchell's shirt got tighter with every question he posed. He felt his supply of air diminishing.

“No,” Mitchell said, and then quickly changed his answer to, “Yes. I mean, I did grab her arm, but I didn't mean to bruise her.”

“Just like you didn't mean to hit your ex-wife hard enough to bust a gap in her head?” Chris said as he pulled Mitchell from the wall and slammed him against it again, this time with more fury that drew a louder groan from his opponent. “How dare you try and make a move on my girl? I will
kill
you; do you understand that? I will kill you if you ever come near her again!”

Finally able to get his focus back, Mitchell looked Chris in the face. “Man, you know I wouldn't do that. You know me better than that. As God is my witness, I didn't try to force myself on Lisa. I grabbed her arm to keep
her
away when she tried to come on to
me
.”

“Liar!”

This time Chris's fist found a home directly in Mitchell's rib cage. The impact sent him sliding down the wall and sinking onto the floor, doubled with pain. Mitchell tasted
blood in his mouth, and he had an urge to vomit, but nothing came up, only pain.

“I believe this came with the job,” Chris said as he reached down and stripped Mitchell's cell phone from the clip on his belt. “And since you don't work here, you won't be needing it,” he added before stepping back from Mitchell's crumpled body.

From his fetal position, Mitchell saw the office door open. Barbara rushed in and immediately knelt beside the spot where he lay.

“Christopher!” she yelled as she looked up at her boss. “Stop it right now! Look what you've done. Your daddy would turn over in his grave if he could see how you've turned his office into a battleground.” As she spoke, she pointed at the portrait of Willie James Jackson that was mounted on Chris's wall.

“No. What would make Daddy turn over would be for him to know what kind of maggot I hired to work in his office.”

“Whatever this boy did to you, it can't be no worse than what you're doing to him,” Barbara said. “Now stop it! Whatever it is, if y'all can't talk it out man-to-man, leave it alone.”

“Man-to-man?” Chris said, curling his lips as if the idea of Barbara's words was absurd. “If we talk man-to-man, who's gonna speak for
him
? That ain't no man. A real man wouldn't try and mess with his boy's girl. That's about as low-down as you can get.”

“I didn't do it, man; I didn't do it,” Mitchell mumbled.

“You
did
do it!” Chris shouted. “Just like you beat up your wife and only God knows how many other women in your lifetime. You ain't nothing but a sick piece of trash that likes to beat on defenseless women who won't let you have your way. What? You need to beat on women to prove to yourself that you're a man? Is that it?”

Mitchell heard the hurtful, harsh words, but he could
say nothing in his own defense. The excruciating pains that shot through his entire body wouldn't allow him to speak. All of the energies that he could muster went toward breathing.

“You as much as admitted to doing it,” Chris added.

Mitchell couldn't see him, but he heard Chris's footsteps. He must have gone to get his cell phone, because the next thing Mitchell heard was his own voice over the phone's speaker.

Hey, Chris, it's Mitch again. I had something on my mind and just needed to talk to you about it. All I'll say right now is that guilt ain't nothing to play with. I'm in Houston right now, and something happened that has guilt lying right here in my hotel bed, taking up more space than another human would.

Chris stopped the message there, and Mitchell could hear him slam his cell phone on his desk. “You gonna tell me that wasn't you? What were you going to do? Come clean with me over the phone like the coward that you are? Lisa had told me about it Friday night, so I already knew what was up. Did you really expect me to call you back so you could try to clear your guilty conscience over the phone? It don't work like that, fool. If it was the last thing you did, you were gonna face me. For once in your life, you know what it's like to pick on somebody your own size. This is what it's like to fight a man, punk.”

Mitchell heard quick footsteps again, and he braced himself for the next round of punishment. Barbara rushed to her feet and stopped Chris from getting any closer. Feeling a bit of his strength returning, Mitchell pulled himself up to his hands and knees and crawled through the pain of his movements. If he could make it to the wall for support, he felt that he could bring himself to stand.

“There ain't gonna be no more fighting in here,” Barbara said. Her voice was sterner than Mitchell had ever heard it. “Now, you touch that boy again and I'm going to call the police, Chris. I mean it. I'll call the police.”

“I'm the one who should be calling the police on
him
,” Chris said. “That's what I should do. I should have you locked up for assault and attempted rape for what you did to Lisa. Maybe being locked up in jail and getting raped a time or two yourself would be just the punishment you need. Or I don't know, punk, maybe you'd
like
that.”