The Graveyard Shift (21 page)

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked himself.

“You didn’t think that was a little cliché?” a voice asked from the back seat. “The pastor’s daughter?”

William didn’t need to glance into the rearview mirror to know who was taunting him. He let his head fall onto the steering wheel, and he grimaced. “She’s not pure. She’s not pure at all. I can’t believe this. I… I don’t even understand what happened.”

“What happened is that a horny teen girl just tried to seduce you,” the demon said, with a raspy laugh. “And frankly, your affairs of the flesh don’t concern me. You can walk right back in there and take her if it’ll make you feel better. Just get me my soul.”

William felt hot tears sliding down cheeks that were still flushed in embarrassment. “Why? Why can’t you just take some random soul? Why can’t I just give you some junkie homeless person on the street that no one’s going to miss? Isn’t that good enough for you?”

The demon chuckled beneath his breath. “So why didn’t you marry that drunk fat girl you slept with your sophomore year in college, that you vehemently denied ever being with? That wasn’t ‘good enough for you’?”

“That…” William sniffled, fired up his car. “How did you know that?”

“Oh, I know so much about you, William. More than you could fathom. And should I have a need to make you suffer, I will use all of it to crush you. There are so many ways to crush a man’s spirit, William. So, so many ways, and
all of those lie within the human mind.”

“Can you read my thoughts?” William asked, hands clenched on the wheel, shaking.

“I have no need for that. I can’t hear your thoughts, or your pathetic prayers. You were praying, weren’t you, in that chapel? Alas, I can’t go in there with you, which is such a shame.” Though he couldn’t see it, though his face was still buried in the wheel, William felt the demon smiling at him. “I would have loved to hear your pathetic prayer. Your weak, rambling plea for a higher being to solve your problems. Well, I’m here, William. Look no further. Your prayer has been answered.”

William said nothing, only continued to sob into his steering wheel.

“You have five days,” the demon said, beneath the sickly yellow parking light of a church parking lot, and then he was gone.

*

When he finally folded into bed at the end of the night, William did not sleep. He stirred restlessly, laying on his back, eyes fixated on the dark crevices of the ceiling. At one point in the night Grace rolled over toward him, wrapped an arm around him, and asked softly, “Everything okay, honey?”

William hadn’t wanted to answer, but he felt compelled. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” he asked. “All of this—all I’ve done—will it make you and Dana and Lynette happy?”

“Your happiness makes
us
happy,” Grace replied. “The money’s a nice perk, but we just want you happy. Aren’t you happy?”

William pondered this. While he knew he wasn’t happy now, he felt like he
could
be happy. As if the past six months were one long walk through a darkened tunnel, and only now was he seeing the faintest of light awaiting him at the end. The only obstacle that stood in his way of happiness was his task.

“I am,” he said.

“And you’re doing a wonderful thing, William. Think how many jobs you saved by replacing Chris. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you’d always told me?”

William ran that phrase through his head a few times and nodded. It was certainly true, now more than ever.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “Thanks, honey.”

With that his wife kissed him, and rolled back over onto her side. Moments later, William slept.

*

William pulled away from Dana’s school and found himself alone with a slew of fresh thoughts that bubbled over the brim of his brain. During his lunch break he had one hour in which to leave and carry out his task. Would he go to the nursing home and find a pure, elderly soul who was ready to go anyway? Would he go to the local hospital and take an infant, not yet developed enough to even understand what was happening to it? There seemed to be no clean way to carry out this task, but that did not deter William. He had figured a way to keep Cityscape afloat for nearly twenty years, and he planned to keep it afloat for many more. Hell, yesterday he’d found a way to bring back over half of the workers they’d had to lay off just a few months prior. There was surely a solution to this other problem, and William was certain he would find it.

As he pulled into his new parking spot, which was a hair closer, and started up to the front doors, he was stopped by a production worker. His face was familiar to William, though he had never spoken to the
man before. He wasn’t sure why, not until the man grabbed William’s hands and opened his mouth.

“Mr. Willem,” the man said, in very, very broken English. “My name
Godofredo, and you save many job. You save my job and you, uh, you save my family.” He squeezed down on William’s hands. “You very, very good man, okay?”

William gave
Godofredo a smile, as he recalled him being one of the men Chris had laid off as a means to cover gambling expenses. He had never imagined, until this moment, just how much it meant to this man to have his job back.

“I’m happy to help you and your family,” William said. “You’re a good man, too,
Godofredo.”

Godofredo
gave William’s hands one more squeeze, and then he hurried forward to pull the door open for William.

“Thanks,
Godofredo, and have a good day, alright?”

“Yes, Mr. Willem,”
Godofredo said, as he made his way toward the assembly line, “today is good day.”

William sighed as he made his way to his office. Now, more than ever, he found himself determined to carry out the demon’s task—not just for his wife and his children, but for the workers that now depended upon him.
For their wives, for their children. More families than his were at stake, he reasoned, and whoever ended up sacrificing themselves for him would be doing it for a great cause.

And yet that did little to settle his stomach as he brought his laptop out of hibernation and scanned over his e-mails. Many of them were ledgers and memos forwarded to him out of obligation. Some were suck-up e-mails from office workers wanting to welcome William to the position, nothing more than a way of reminding him that they existed. One was a tasteless forwarded joke from Steve called ‘The Nun and the Poodle.’ Then he saw an e-mail entitled ‘Follow Up,’ sent from Rebecca Anders, and he felt compelled to open it.

Dear Mr. Bellows,
it read,
I just wanted to ensure that you had received my resume yesterday, and I also wanted to let you know just how enthusiastic I am about speaking to you regarding this position. Thank you in advance for your time.

Rebecca Anders. William remembered her. She was the one who did volunteer work at the hospital. She seemed like a nice young woman, and her credentials fit the bill for his old job. But more than that, maybe—just maybe—she was also of pure heart.

“Marissa,” William called out to the front desk, over intercom. “Would you bring in Ms. Rebecca Anders for an interview?”

*

The girl that walked into William’s office an hour later looked as if she’d just walked out of her second period math class and gotten lost. She was a bright-eyed, fresh faced young girl who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one, and the anxiety and the anticipation showed in her eyes. Her hand was sweaty as William shook it.

“Thank you for seeing me so quickly, Mr. Bellows,” she said, clasping her hands together eagerly. Her dark hair was up in a bun, and she was wearing a floral print blouse and a white skirt that dipped just below her knees. William noticed then that she was beautiful, but not in a sexual way. She radiated happiness, and honesty, and optimism that bordered on naivety. It felt as if he was standing in the presence of an angel.

“Have a seat,” he said. She did.

William cleared his throat. “So your resume says here you volunteer at the hospital?”

No sense in beating around the bush, William figured.

This caught Rebecca off guard. “Oh… uh, yes, I do. Two to three times a week. But it’s at night, so if I were considered for the position, there wouldn’t be any conflict of schedu—”

“And what do you do there?” William asked.

“I…” Rebecca shifted in her seat and gave a nervous laugh; she had not been expecting this line of questioning. “I just keep an eye on a certain wing of the hospital. Keep supplies stocked for doctors, keep the patients company, get them a nurse if they need help.”

William leaned back in his chair and nodded. “That’s wonderful, Rebecca. And who do you typically interact with?”

Rebecca cleared her throat, and this time when she spoke, she looked away from William. “I… uh, I don’t understand, Mr. Bellows. No disrespect intended, but we haven’t talked about accounting at all. I thought this was for an accounting job.”

“It is,” William said. “And you can count, and you can do math, and you know how numbers work, yes?”

“Well… yes.”

“Great.” William smiled. “So then who do you interact with at the hospital? Tell me about the patients.”

Rebecca shifted again in her seat, though this time she seemed to be losing her apprehension. “Well, there are some regulars, and there are always new people, too. I try to talk to all of them. To understand them. To… to I don’t know, make them feel like they’re cared for.”

“Do you care for them?” William asked.

Rebecca nodded, and as she said it, William could tell that what she was saying was truth. “I do.”

“Okay, so then—” But before he could ask another question, William was interrupted by his office door popping open. Steve Lopez bounded inside, wearing a toothy grin, but it sank quickly back into his goatee as he saw Rebecca squirming in her seat.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry Bill,” Steve said, offering a consolatory wave. “I didn’t know you were busy. I’ll come back later.”

William brushed it off with a wave of his own hand. “It’s fine. I’m glad you’re here, Steve. I want you to meet our new accountant, Rebecca. My replacement.”

Rebecca’s eyes flared inside of her skull, and her eyebrows arched so high across her forehead that William thought they might get swallowed up into her hair. She said nothing, only turned to Steve as he approached her.

“Hey, welcome aboard!” Steve said, and gave her limp hand a strong shake. “You came to the right place! This guy here, he’s gonna take good care of you! He’s taking good care of all of us!”

“That’s… great,” Rebecca said, in a voice that was so low Steve could barely hear it. “It’s really… uh, nice to meet you, Steve.”

Steve offered another wave and closed the door behind him. No sooner had he gone than Rebecca clenched the sides of her chair and started scanning the corners of William’s gargantuan office with wide eyes.

“Okay, Mr. Bellows, this isn’t some kind of ‘you’re on hidden camera’ gag, is it? Because I
really
want this job. A lot. And I just—”

“No, no cameras,” William assured her. “The job is yours.”

Rebecca put a hand on the breast of her blouse. “Wait… really? Just like that? I… I really don’t understand.”

William smirked. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’ve been CEO of this company for one day. One whole day. Prior to that, this business was being run into the ground by a man that was treating this company—and all of its employees, including me—like garbage. Like we were disposable. I’m cleaning this company up, and I want good people with me. You seem like good people. Look, Rebecca, I can teach you how to do our accounting. That’s easy. But I can’t teach you how to be a good person. You still want the job, right?”

“Yes, and I really appreciate this,” Rebecca squeaked, as she straightened up in her chair. “You won’t regret this, Mr. Bellows. I’m going to do everything I can to ensure the quality and the integrity of our finances, and—”

“This comes with a condition, though.”

Rebecca’s smile dropped from her face. “Oh. What is it?”

“I want you to take me to your hospital. Show me where you volunteer. What you do.”

“Oh.” Rebecca blinked her eyes and looked away. “I can do that, I guess.”

“And I want to do that right now. I’ll drive us.”

Rebecca was taken aback by this. “Like
right
now?” The slightest bit of discomfort trickled onto her face, though she tried her best to hide it.

“Yes,” William said, wearing a crooked smile. “And don’t look at me like that, please. I promise you this isn’t some elaborate scheme to flirt with you or get you alone in some uncomfortable situation. I… pardon the expression, but I’ve been through some real
shit
lately, you know? I just need to see some good being done in the world.”

And though his motive went far beyond that, what he said was still true.

“Then let’s go,” she said. “This time of day, we can be there in ten minutes.”