Severance Package Read Free Page B

young women like Roxanne Kurtwood.

Her name was Amy Felton …
     
    … and she wished she didn’t need this job so bad.
    But she did, and would continue to do so, especially if she kept making stupid moves like last night—grabbing the check at the Continental, saying it was no problem, she had it covered. Nice one, Felton. Another $119 on the AmEx that didn’t need to be there. Wasn’t even as if she drank very much. Two Cosmos, nursed over a four-hour stretch.
    But Nichole and Roxanne and Ethan … oh God, Ethan. He’d knocked back enough booze to curl a human liver.
    Damn it, why did she pick up the check? Was she
that
eager to please people she didn’t particularly like?
    Ethan not included.
    Thing was, Amy knew she was screwed, because this was part of her job.
    David had once told her: “You’ve got to be my public face. It’s not good for the boss to be palling around with his employees. But
you
can. You’re their upper management confidante. The one who has access to me, yet remains their friend. So keep them happy. Take them out for drinks.”
    Sure, take them out for drinks. Pick up the check while you’re at it.
    She wanted to ask: Why doesn’t
the government
pick up the check every now and again?
    And this stuff about Amy being the “upper management confidante” was just an easy out for David. He didn’t like socializing with anyone below his rank. Amy was his second in command, and
she
hardly had any face time with him. It didn’t help that he’d been gone for sixteen days straight and didn’t tell her where. Covert government stuff.
Blah, blah, blah.
What David didn’t realize was that his impromptu vacations dealt serious blows to office morale. He’d returned this week, but the wisecracks and bitterness hadn’t gone away. Nobody liked the boss being away that long.
    Especially in an office like this. Considering what they did.
    And now this morning’s “managers’ meeting.” People were going to freak. Especially the people who hadn’t been invited.
    David wouldn’t even tell her what it was about, other than it was a “new operation.”
    As if what they did on a daily basis wasn’t important enough?
    Just get through it, Felton.
    On weekends—on scorching summer weekends, it seemed—the Market–Frankford El only ran every fifteen minutes. She made it to the platform to watch the air-conditioned cars of the 8:21 train pull away from the station. The sun was like a photographer’s flashbulb set on “stun.” No breeze to cool her down. Not even up here. Philadelphia was in the clutches of still another heat wave—seven straight days of hundred-plus temperatures.Such temperature spikes used to be unusual in the mid-Atlantic, but for the past four years, they’d become the norm.
    At least she wasn’t hungover, which would have been intolerable in this heat.
    She’d been afraid to drink too much.
    Run the tab up too high.

His name was Ethan Goins …
     
    … and his hangover wasn’t just a condition; it was a living creature, nestled within the meat of his brain, gnawing at the fat gray noodles, savoring them, and, as a cocktail, absorbing all available moisture from the rest of his body. The skin on his hands was so dry, you could fling him against a concrete wall, and—if Ethan’s palms happened to be facing out—he’d stick. His eyes needed to be plucked out of his sockets, dropped into a glass pitcher of ice water. Might hurt some, but he’d enjoy the soothing
hissssss
of hot versus cold.
    Oh, Ethan knew better. Knew he had to report to David Murphy’s Big Bad Saturday-Morning Managers’ Meeting.
    It was why he’d stayed up way too late last night, drinking those orange martinis with Amy.
    Rebel Ethan Goins.
    Stickin’ it to the Man, one French martini at a time.
    They’d tasted like Tang. That was the problem. Sweet as a child’s breakfast drink. Now, as Ethan stuffed his throbbing, desiccated, burning, aching body inside an aluminum coffin manufactured by