Thorazine Beach Read Free

Friday, and Friday is chicken-fried steak. The all-you-can-eat meatloaf extravaganza is Tuesday.”
    “Have a salad next time.” She gestured with the red pen. “Take it as personal advice.” She grabbed a blue, ticked the item to say
okay
.
    “Et tu, Brute?”
    Good Christian woman, Eileen. And she can command a certain gentility on occasion. “As any Southern woman should,” she’d say. But Eileen Leckie’s also an ex-Bartlett cop. Twenty years on the force, she and her husband Les (gone these six years, now), before they started Red Line. The old cop in her can command attention, too, whenever she wants. And thus it came to be that, state-of-the-art intercom notwithstanding, the principal mode of inter-office communication at Red Line Investigations—with no clients present, at any rate—was shouting.
    “JACKIE!”
    “WHAT!”
    “TWO EIGHTY-TWO SIXTY-THREE!”
    “ROGER THAT!”
    Faint giggles in the outer office.
    Not that I minded the amounts of my expense cheques being known to the entire place. It’s an investigations outfit—what
didn’t
they know? I was rarely enough there, anyway—just when Eileen wanted me. And I wasn’t, after all, an employee.

    Red Line was the umptie-third agency I’d applied to, after the Garrison Security affair blew up, five-six years ago. Brilliant: I’d managed to bring down my own employer, second biggest security and investigations outfit in the region—not even so much knowingly, just tripped up in a tangle of goings-on in the vein of mail fraud and money-laundering and (just maybe) a murder mixed in there somewhere. Millions in assets seized. Licences jerked. A string of holding and operating companies ended up folded, spindled, and mutilated. Dozens suspected, eleven people charged, nine convicted. About eighty-five of Garrison’s prize former-FBI agents thrown out of work, most with a measure of taint in the job market, even for those cleared in the investigations by the Memphis police, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and half a dozen lettered federal agencies. And every last one of those guys and a couple of gals, it seemed, harboured a resentment. All of it directed, in greater or lesser degree, at me.
    Among those never indicted, never charged, never found: Isaac Breitzen, my old boss, the lord and master of Garrison’s clutch of companies. A stand-up guy, early on, as Machiavellians go. Been a great place to work, people said, when his dad Buddy ran the company, when it was just the old, original security-guard outfit. Brown pants, yellow stripe, lunchpails. Regular folk. Friendly, and every employee, top to bottom, called him Buddy. Respectfully. But still,
Buddy
. The Breitzen I’d known was Ike, at first. Then
Mister
Breitzen, when Buddy took sick. Then, when Buddy was gone, Breitzen was simply
sir
—to everyone. Same tone as you’d address the queen’s husband. By then, the job application form had grown to fifty-six pages—fifty longer than for my top secret clearance in the army—and even those of us already there had to fill it out. (Thank God the HR guy owed me a favour, let me fudge an answer or two.) Lie detector. Sworn oaths of allegiance—to the company, to
him
. Pat-downs in the front lobby, on a couple of days when Breitzen had felt the mantle of Roman senator especially heavy upon his shoulder.
    Bars on the building, everywhere—even the windows of his eighth-storey office, where he’d had the fire escapes removed. He made all the staff memorize and recite, dead cold, his new, six-page, capital-C Code of Conduct, which he insisted be printed in red italics, a quirky font ripped from the Renaissance. Twenty-year guys, guys who wanted only to serve out their time walking security at strip malls, sitting night-shift desks in empty office buildings, guys who came to work on time and never took a sick day, guys who hadn’t memorized anything since
Jesus loves me
, lost their jobs, no notice, no pay in lieu—Tennessee is a “right to