The Multitude, стр. 23
“Yeah. He doesn’t understand why he owes thirty-two thousand for a truck he supposedly bought for thirty. I asked why he signed a contract without reading it.”
She took another drag. “You’re assuming our customers can read.”
“I’m guessing his wife or girlfriend can. She probably gave him hell when he brought the contract home. Anyway, I explained that a finance charge is no different than points on a mortgage, but he didn’t grasp the concept.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“You need to think outside the box, Heather.” The time for feeling guilty over Crestview’s fees had long since passed. The company barely covered its overhead anymore, let alone turn a profit, despite its hefty fees.
Long, smoky minutes passed. Chatter and occasional laughter about sports, movies, dinners, and maniacal office intruders grew louder, probably noisy enough to alert Igor Tesfaye to their hiding place—if he truly did have a gun and wanted to take them all out. Brewster peeked around the corner of the building and motioned them to keep it down.
A few employees edged toward the door. The undusted, drooping-plant work area waiting inside still had some appeal. Those not tasked with harassing deadbeat customers for payments could sit and relax, working at three-quarters speed in the undemanding business environment—not many truckers had been buying rigs lately—or jump online and surf any interesting websites that had survived the company’s relentless, fun-blocking software.
Brewster stole another look beyond the double row of cars in the company parking lot into a street still lacking any squad car cavalry. More than likely, the cops had been reluctant to leave their lucrative speed traps up the road. He decided to call them again if they didn’t arrive by the time Heather’s second cigarette burned out.
The sound of a lawnmower wafted from the distance and hustled his wanderlust down a winding path of associations. Mowing equaled grass equaled nature, hills, countryside, distant mountains, shining seas…escape. The job wasn’t fun anymore. Maybe it never had been.
“You’ve had a dreamy look on your face all day,” Heather said.
He flinched. The distraction of a workplace emergency had served as a temporary but welcome barrier, holding an impossible memory of Carla’s vanishing act at bay. Heather’s comment created a hint of turbulence, threatening to collapse the wall, but he manned up, turned to her, and managed a noncommittal shrug.
“I don’t think it’s the job,” she added. “Things aren’t any worse than they were a year ago, right?”
“Right.”
“Crash and burn is our normal now.”
“Guess so.”
“Then what is it? Did your dog die?”
“I don’t have a dog.”
“A kid got sick?”
“I’m single, remember?”
Her eyes lit up. “Maybe you met someone!”
The wall collapsed, tumbling its bricks through his stomach. Brewster couldn’t go it alone. He needed someone who could share a similar experience and team up with him to solve the mystery of shadows. “Heather, have you ever seen a ghost?”
“No, but I saw a UFO once.”
“Yeah?” He leaned toward her.
She flicked some ashes to the ground and grinned. “Well, maybe not. After I switched from beer to wine, the hallucinations went away.”
“Very funny.”
“Are you saying you saw a ghost?”
He regretted having said anything. The Carla incident would have seemed surreal enough if brought up after a couple drinks at a bar. In a completely out-of-context work setting, he doubted Heather could even register the words he might speak. He pictured a bubble of language attached to his cartoon head and watched as it mixed with her smoke rings and drifted away.
A squad car barreled down the street and bailed him out before she could press him further.
* * *
The cop arriving on the scene seemed the hard-nosed, no-nonsense type capable of handling any insanely angry trucker who happened by. Brewster and Heather fell in step behind the man. He led them back into the office building with an aura of authority, but the nemesis they found inside didn’t seem much of a threat.
Igor Tesfaye rose from the lobby couch to stand no more than about five foot eight, slump-shouldered and rumpled, from his wavy, unkempt hair to a faded shirt, worn jeans, and dusty shoes. Nevertheless, he carried the sharp-eyed, pressed-lips look of a determined man. The recession had been tough on truckers. Many now stood only a fuel-price hike away from bankruptcy, an engine failure from homelessness. A two-thousand-dollar finance charge was a big deal to a guy like Tesfaye. The extra fifty bucks per month took food off his table.
The trucker opened his mouth to speak, but Brewster cut him off before he could spit out a word. “Why are you here?”
“I called, but you wouldn’t answer my questions. Last night a girl comes to my door and—”
“We don’t want you coming back.”
The trucker plowed on. “You’ll take care of me, she says.”
“What?” Heather had slipped off to the side in an apparent attempt to blend into the wallpaper, no doubt embarrassed the cops had been summoned to ward off a harmless-looking deadbeat, but this revelation drew her back into the thick of things. “Are you saying someone from this office came to your home?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then what are you saying?”
The cop didn’t wait for an answer. He folded his beefy arms and stepped between Brewster and the trucker. “Mr. Tesfaye, these people don’t want you in their office. If you come back, I’ll arrest you.”
The driver took a backward step toward the door but paused and fixed his gaze on Brewster. “You overcharged two thousand dollars. Who needs the money more?”
Rather than try to explain a standard, if somewhat high, finance charge, Brewster went for the sympathy vote. “We haven’t made a profit here in three years.”
They stared each other down until Tesfaye gave up the fight and turned to Heather. “A girl comes along at midnight and shows me a problem with the paperwork. She tells me to go see Brewster DeLay at Crestview. I