Prologue
My eyes are locked on the gun that’s pointed at me, at a spot right in the middle of my forehead, I think. Not good, because it’s held by a sicko who I know for sure wants me dead.
And I’m just an accountant.
That’s right, an accountant at a decaying old company that makes shitty plastic products. Not a cop, a CIA operative, a Navy SEAL, not even a ninja. I don’t have any superpowers or a secret identity. And my name isn’t agent triple X or anything like that.
It’s June. My name, I mean. Don’t get confused because my parents named me after a month. I’m just a mom, a wife, and a goddamn accountant, but I think I need to add imbecile to that list for getting myself into this royal mess. On Saturday I was counting out carrot sticks and clementine sections to put into little baggies because I was the snack mom for my son’s soccer game.
And now I’m counting the minutes left in my life. On one hand.
Because I know that the person with the gun is both determined and very pissed off, and I can see an index finger taut against the trigger. I’m worried about the gun going off accidentally, but maybe it’s not accidents I need to fret about because it’s one of those old-fashioned revolver pistols with the wheely thing that holds the bullets, and now I can see the hammer part being pulled back. I know squat about guns, but I’ve watched some Clint Eastwood westerns, and I recall that when the hammer goes back, that’s bad news because pretty soon a bullet comes out the front.
But there’s actually no need to shoot me. I’ll probably croak right here, no assistance required because my ticker is racing from fright like I’m a hummingbird on speed. So I’m sure I’ll blow out an artery any second…then this wacko can just sneak my carcass into my shitty little chicken-coop sized cubicle at Fleener Plastics after hours and plop me in my chair, slump me down so that my head is on the desk, put a pen in one hand and a coffee cup in the other and that’s it, job done. Because who the hell is going to question one more employee being worked to death by that crappy company?
Hot flashes are coming in waves now.
I feel dizzy, faint, peripheral sight shutting down, and…and now, I’m looking out the window and…
I see a vision. A vision of… Death.
Chapter 1
Eight Days Earlier
My name’s June Bloom. It’s Monday morning. The start of another lousy week toiling away at my crummy job at the Fleener Plastics Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I’m the bottom level manager of a business accounting group, working for a moron of a boss who claims to be an accounting genius but doesn’t know enough math to count his own nuts.
And I hit forty a few months ago. And I don’t really care for my first name because it sounds so matronly.
And my whole name, first and last together, makes me sound like some kind of spring flower. Other than all that, everything’s just swell.
Today I start my day in the usual way. I get my two little boys on the school bus, kiss my husband Darryl goodbye, and back my sixteen-year-old junker of a station wagon out of the driveway of my modest raised-ranch home in suburban Norwalk to leave for work.
And even though it’s a beautifully sunny spring day, the air cool and crisp, I begin to feel that dull ache in my temples that I always get when I head to work on Monday morning, the one that morphs into a migraine a few hours later. But otherwise, I feel okay, and this morning I’m wearing my slick navy-blue pantsuit with a white blouse and a paisley bow. It’s the outfit I often wear on Mondays to raise my mood, and it’s working today, at least until I reach the end of our tree-lined street and see Abbey on her morning jog, which takes all the hot gas right out of my balloon.
Abbey Tate is the better than you woman on our block. Every neighborhood has one. You know, she’s single, blond, statuesque, good looking. Okay, let’s say gorgeous, perhaps even ravishing. She has no children, and she’s younger than all of the moms around here like me. Abbey has an incredible figure with super-toned abs, thighs, and calves. An ass so firm and tight she could open champagne bottles with it. She has her own business, some type of bullshit holistic mind and body wellness thing, I think. And I’m sure she sets her own hours and does all her work from home because she has plenty of time to jog around the neighborhood in her little white shorts and semi-transparent sports bra, her ponytail swaying back and forth beneath her hundred- and fifty-dollar designer headband and her eye makeup in perfect condition, and who the hell does their makeup before jogging anyway?
As I putter by her, with my own marshmallow ass gradually compressing and sinking me ever further down into the car seat, she waves to me. It’s just a little waggle of her hand, Queen Elizabeth style, and she also gives me her insincere little smile, which conveys a chummy greeting on the surface, but I know that the real message behind that smile, to all the women on the block, is this: I could take your husband away from you any time I want.
And indeed, the behavior of our husbands, as influenced by Abbey, is as shallow and disgusting as you might expect. Many of the husbands on the block saunter down to the curb every morning at about the same time to put out the trash cans or put a letter in the mailbox or whatever, and they delay their return while they carefully evaluate the health of the lawn or check the driveway for cracks or examine the shrubs for any signs of leaf fungus, hoping and praying that Abbey will bounce on by. And if she happens to stop by the curb to do some stretches, the men tend to congregate around her and chat, and I think on one occasion my next-door neighbor Mona had to go out there and disperse the crowd with a cold-water garden hose.
Thirty-five minutes later, after battling the rush hour traffic on interstate ninety-five while inhaling my daily dose of eighteen-wheeler diesel fumes, I pull my car into the pot-holed parking lot at Fleener Plastics, where a bountiful crop of spring ragweed has already begun to sprout from the numerous cracks in the grimy asphalt. I walk toward the entrance of the building where I work, its crumbling, soot-covered facade framed by the two ancient smokestacks that are constantly belching God knows what horrible toxins into the air and eventually into my lungs. It’s a good thing the company sends out those reports to us every month stating that the thirty-six known airborne carcinogens in my office space are happily all measuring at acceptable levels. And as for the yellowish water in the drinking fountains that the company swears is perfectly safe, I stopped ingesting it months ago, afraid I’d eventually grow a tail from it.
I make it to my cube and plop into my rickety but supposedly ergonomic chair. This is my little hovel, my personal Bob Cratchit workspace, my three by four-foot cell with drab gray walls that were engineered to let through every sound generated by every other person in the entire cube area—every spoken word, every squeak, sniffle, belch, and fart. It’s where I’m supposed to be super productive even as I feel the blood clots growing in my legs because I don’t have room to straighten them when I’m sitting at my second-grader-sized desk. There’s not much space here to personalize, but I have a family picture on the desk. I also have a poster of some serene Caribbean beach mounted on the wall, but it’s not like I can waste time gazing at it while I’m sitting because the cube is too small for me to get my eyes far enough away to focus on it.
I open my laptop, call up my e-mail, and I’m immediately assaulted by the urgent note at the top of my inbox, with the subject in red: Human Resource Initiative.
As I click on it, I gnash my teeth because I know what’s coming. Human Resource Initiative has to be the company’s newest euphemism for another layoff. Last time it was, I think, Strategic Manpower Realignment, and the time before that, Personal Skills Redistribution. There must be some asshole in HR whose sole job it is to sit around and dream up these cutesy phrases.
I skim through the usual two paragraphs of happy horse shit about how today’s challenging business environment requires that we take drastic and sometimes unpleasant measures to remain competitive, and of course the only effective way to do that is to cut the headcount, a painful but necessary step which will adversely affect the lives of a limited number of employees, while ultimately ensuring the long term welfare of the company and therefore the livelihood of a much larger number of employees—blah, blah, blah.
Enough to make you puke, so it’s a good thing I’d skipped breakfast.
The note contains nothing about the number of employees who would be getting the ax, or about the timing. It says that more information will be “forthcoming in a timely manner.” I know that once they announce layoffs are coming, upper management will try to get all the dirty work over and done with as soon as possible to reduce the angst among the employee population. And this isn’t for noble reasons. Worrying simply reduces productivity. The note emphasizes to us managers the importance of keeping this information secret for now. Yeah, right. This will spread like a fire in a match factory. Everyone in the plant will know by the end of the hour.
There is nothing mentioned in the note about managers losing their jobs, so I guess that my own job is safe, at least for now, but I’m not sure if I should be glad about that. Sometimes I think it would be best if they fire me before I have a stroke sitting at my desk, although it’s true that if I die at work, my husband and kids will get a bigger life insurance payout. I’ve told Darryl that if I die at home, he should drive my corpse over to the Fleener Plastics plant at night and toss it in the bushes in front of the building.
My first command decision of the day is to get a significant amount of caffeine into my bloodstream before trying to deal with any of this crap.
I close my laptop, get up and walk to the employee snack area. I eye the coffee dispensers, looking for the flavor of the day when I see Faith walking towards me. Faith works for me. She’s a sweet and petite little single southern gal from Tennessee in her mid-twenties, with big puppy dog brown eyes and a cute little button of a nose. Her pretty face is framed by shoulder-length brown hair in a sixties wave. But upstairs she’s six donuts short of a dozen.
There’s always something going on with her. She’s a self-proclaimed clairvoyant. Faith gets visions and I guess she sees dead people too, because I heard through the local gossip network that she saw Elvis last week when she was back home visiting her family, and this wasn’t her first encounter with the King. I try not to talk about any of this with her because it always makes me a bit uncomfortable. I don’t care for having to pretend that I believe her.
As she came up to me, I hoped that she wouldn’t bring it up.
“June, did you hear?” she squeals in her precious Tennessee accent, waggling both her hands with excitement. “My word, ah saw Elvis again!”
“Oh, wow, is that right?” I give her a grin as sincere as I can make it.
“Yes, at a Piggly Wiggly store in Nashville! This is the second time, although ah don’t like to make a big thing about it. This time ah saw the fortyish Elvis in his sequined white jumpsuit, whereas last time ah saw the younger Elvis in his Army uniform. A double sighting by one person is quite unusual you know, and seeing him at two different ages is even more unusual!”
“Oh yes, very unusual. Really something,” I reply. I grin again and nod my head like an idiot, as I scramble for something relevant to ask. “Uhhhhh, well, when you see these…Elvises…or Elvi, I guess is the correct plural form…what are they shopping for?”
Faith’s eyes are wide and bright as she answers with complete sincerity in a sweet southern drawl. “Well now, you know those little round felt buttons that you stick on the bottom of table or chair legs, so they don’t scratch the floor? This Elvis was gettin’ a pack of those.”
I give her a thoughtful nod and say, “Hmmm, of all the things you think you might need in the afterlife, who would have thought felt floor protectors would be at the top of the list? Go figure.”
Faith smiles and nods in agreement. “Right! Oh, gotta go, June. There’s Mary, I want to tell her about it. She’s a big Elvis fan!”
“Okay, see ya.”
I pay for my coffee and then head back to the cube area, taking a different route, one that will take me a few minutes longer. I always tell myself that I do this because I want a little extra exercise, but I know it’s because I can delay starting my workday for another two minutes.
On the way, I pick up the sounds of my boss Larry and his entourage of brown-nosers, in one of the conference rooms off the hallway. Several times a week I see him practicing his stand-up comic routine, telling his crude jokes to his lackeys.
“Aaahh, my wife,” says Larry. “She’s a country girl, and I thought when I got engaged to her, that her father would give me a dowry, you know? But all she came with was a car loan, a student loan, and a couple of personal loans. I blame my friend Vinnie who fixed us up on a blind date. He thought I said that I wanted a farm girl with big debts! Yaghhh, Yagghh, Yaggghhhh!”
“You PIG!” I utter out loud, but not quite loud enough for Larry or the others to hear me. I despise Larry’s laugh as much as his stupid sexist jokes. Up until a few years ago, I can honestly say that I never really hated anyone enough to wish them harm. Now it scares me that I have daydreams about smashing this guy’s face in, even though I’d never actually try it.
It’s amazing, he’s a second-level manager, but he’s not bright enough to even close the door to the conference room. I don’t think he realizes that if someone hears that kind of talk at work and takes offense, he could get his ass shipped off to corporate diversity training class for two solid weeks, and he’d get a big black mark on his company personnel record. Believe me, I’ve thought about turning him in many times. The problem is, I know they wouldn’t fire him, and being my boss, he has the power to make my work life absolutely miserable. I mean, more miserable than it currently is, assuming that’s possible.
I walk past the conference room, anxious to get back to my cube where I’ll take the first sips of my coffee. I hope that the extra dark roast I chose will cool my throbbing migraine a bit.
“June! June!” wails Larry at my back.
Crap. Larry caught me. Ignoring him is futile, I know he’d come running after me. He has a six-legged, four-winged bug up his ass almost every day. Usually, it has to do with some hare-brained business scheme that he has to bounce off me. I turn to face his pudgy frame. He barrels up to me like a rolling, sweaty shitstorm, half running like he always does because of the perceived urgency of whatever stupid idea he’s about to bellow at me.
“Meat diapers, June, MEAT DIAPERS!” Larry barks, as if he were revealing to me the secret of eternal life. He sticks his finger in my face, about to make his important point. Larry is in his fifties, with a face as round as a cantaloupe and his skin has a cantaloupe texture too. The imbecile always wears white shirts that are two sizes too small, so that the buttons are holding on for dear life. He always sports a pair of greasy yellow stains under the armpits because he’s continuously sweating buckets, even at nine in the morning. His cheesy striped polyester neckties are always pulled so tight that they appear to be choking off his air, the apparent reason for his bulging eyeballs.
“Meat diapers?” I ask with feigned interest. One of his bug eyes stares right at me, the other is off doing its own thing. I hold back a gag as I catch the putrid odor of his breakfast wafting from his mouth—unmistakably a garlic bagel with salmon cream cheese spread that was sitting unrefrigerated in the company snack bar for way too long.
“Yeah, that’s right, meat diapers! You know, those pieces of plastic that they put under the meat in the supermarket, so it doesn’t touch the Styrofoam tray? It looks kind of like a baby diaper. C’mon, you’re a woman, you’re supposed to know something about diapers, right? You got two kids, right? Sure, you do. You’ve got that kind of matronly look about you, you know, the child-bearing hips and all, and don’t get me wrong, I mean that in a good way. You remind me of my mother, God bless her dead soul and her hairy upper lip. That woman was a saint. Changed a hell of a lot of diapers, you know?”
I nod my head, gritting my teeth, and give my boss a shit-eating grin while I size up the distance between us, wondering how many steps it would take for me to reach his fat head so that I could drive the heel of my palm into his face.
He continues with his usual egotistical bluster: “I’ve come up with something that’s going to blow the lid off the meat diaper business, June. If we can tighten the size tolerance of the diaper, we can cut a full millimeter off the top and bottom edges and that will save a full fiftieth of a cent off the production cost of each and every meat diaper, and do you know what that will translate to in increased profits? This is big, June, really big!”
I take a step back from Larry, then I nod my head and give him a slight smile as if to acknowledge the depth of his genius. I wait for some asinine marching order. Maybe he’ll send me into the manufacturing line to watch the meat diaper production process and collect all the pieces of waste plastic that are cut away and weigh them, or some such bullshit. But luckily his wandering eye spots another hapless victim, someone else to blather to about his genius idea. He grunts and runs off after them. I’m safe for the moment from having to do another one of his pointless, hamster wheel tasks.
When I get back to my cube, I open my laptop and check to see if there are any new e-mails, sent in the past ten minutes, about the workforce reduction.
Nothing.
Okay, so they’re going to keep us in suspense for a while longer.
I try to put it out of my mind because I have work to do. Today I have to churn through the brain-frying experience of doing the quarterly consumables forecast. I guess that it will take maybe three hours of concentrated work. That means that with all the interruptions that come with sitting in a cube area, it will take me about six.
I settle in and get started.
****
True to my prediction, I finish the report at about three in the afternoon. And also as predicted, my mind is now mush.
I skipped lunch, which is fine because I need to lose a few pounds. Even though I don’t consider myself obese, it’s a constant struggle. And I have two sets of clothes—one for when I’m at my ideal weight and one for when I’m not. Today I’m wearing the “not” wardrobe. And the other set has been sitting in the dresser drawers for too damn long.
I’m ready for a break, but as soon as I stand up to go over to the snack bar for a coffee, Faith is in my cube, her face a foot from mine. Her skin is pale, and she’s clearly agitated about something.
“Faith, what’s up?”
“Oh June, he’s dead!” she wails, grabbing my forearm.
“You mean Elvis? Yes, he is, but I thought you took solace in the fact that he still walks among us, and…”
“No, no, I mean Melvin!”
“Melvin? Melvin Hamm?”
She nods and gives me a look of despair. Melvin also works for me. I haven’t seen him yet today.
“Faith, calm down. Let’s go to a break room.”
I don’t know what this is about, but there’s no point in agitating anyone else, and in the cube area nothing spoken remains private for long. Fortunately, it appears that no one was within earshot of Faith’s alarming claim. I take her by the arm and lead her toward a small room adjoining the cubes. I intentionally take a short detour so that we walk past Melvin’s cube, and I see no indication that he’s in. There’s no briefcase or coat, or anything else that he might have brought to work.
After we enter the break room, I shut the door and we sit down. The place is just a glorified closet with two chairs and a ridiculously small table which holds only a telephone. Our chairs are backed up against opposing walls to prevent our noses from touching as we converse.
“Faith, take a deep breath and tell me slowly what’s going on. Why do you think he’s dead?” I ask.
Her eyes grow wide, and she gestures with both hands, using them to roughly frame a rectangular field of view about a foot in front of her eyes. “Ah had a vision, June, a vision, just a few minutes ago! As plain as if ah saw it on a TV screen!”
Uh, oh. A vision. Should I ask her if Melvin was in a white sequined jumpsuit, like Elvis? No. I need to show some respect for her beliefs. She thinks she saw something.
“Faith, what exactly do you mean by a vision?” I ask in a relaxed tone. I hope that my sense of calm will spread to Faith, but she remains panicky and agitated, like a squirrel on uppers.
Faith leans toward me as she tries to explain. “Ah mean, you know, ah didn’t see his ghost walkin’ around in a store or anything like that. Ah just had a vision. You know, ah just saw a still scene. Ah can’t control these things, they just pop into my head sometimes when ah touch somethin’ belonging to a person that ah have some connection with. Well, ah touched Melvin’s chair just a minute ago when ah stopped at his cube so ah could ask him somethin’ about the monthly reports. That’s when ah got the vision.”
I’m not sure what to say to her. I mean, I have scenes pop into my head all the time. My last one was on the way to work this morning, when I pictured my boss hanging upside down over a huge bonfire, by strings tied around his balls.
I take my usual methodical approach: First, get all the facts.
“Okay, can you describe this vision?” I ask.
Faith shakes her head and says, “Oh, June, ah saw his dead body. It’s in the trunk of a car, and his eyes are open and he’s dead. That’s all ah saw. It was awful!”
“Okay, okay, just try to relax. Faith, when you see these things…uh, I know you’re clairvoyant, but these things that you see, are they in the past, the present, or the future?”
“Sometimes the past. Could be the present. Might be the future, too. Definitely one of those three.”
Hmmm, that helps a lot.
Melvin is a bit of an odd duck, for sure. I’ve known him only since he transferred into my group about eight months ago. He’s okay at his job, but he’s rather withdrawn, and he never struck me as being very likable or even sociable, so I’m a bit puzzled as to why Faith would psychically connect with him. And even though I don’t like to speak ill of anyone (there are exceptions for sure, like Larry), I’d have to say that Melvin definitely got hit by the ugly truck. He’s about twenty-five years old, short, and as skinny as a fishing rod, with a pointy and prematurely balding pate. He has a rather large, hooked nose, almost no chin at all, and oily skin scarred and cratered by severe acne that’s still raging. The thing that most people seem to remember about him is that he’s constantly getting nosebleeds, and at least once a day you can find him sitting in his cube with his head tilted back and a tissue shoved up one or both nostrils.
“Uhhh…so, why are you getting a vision of Melvin? I mean, he’s no Elvis. I’m pretty sure Melvin can’t even sing.”
“Oh, June this is so different than seein’ the King’s ghost!” she admonishes. “My visions like this are usually about important things happenin’ to some person, you know? As far as why ah got a vision of Melvin, well ah just don’t know. Guess it’s cause ah see him at work almost every day. It’s not like he and ah are close, or anything like that. Ah’ve worked with him on a few projects, and he and Verne and ah went to that production accounting conference two months ago and well, he’s shy and awkward, but he’s all right, you know? He’s kinda like the odd little pig in the litter, as my Momma would say, and as such, you can’t but feel a little sorry for him. And bein’ murdered an’ all is an important thing that’s happened in his life, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Uh, yes, in my book getting murdered ranks up there as an important life event.”
“Ah had better tell the police about the vision, June. Right now!”
Before or after the part about Elvis in the Piggly Wiggly?
“Listen, not that I doubt your…er, powers, but let’s take this one step at a time. Let’s go ask his cube neighbors if they’ve seen him today.”
“Well, ah already did that. Ah asked Pog, Mary, and Gary, and they all said he never came in today.”
Undaunted, I say, “Okay, then we’ll call his cell.”
She shakes her head and says, “Oh, June, ah already tried, it just goes straight to voicemail.”
“Let’s try again,” I say, as I take out my cell and find his name in my contact list. I punch the call button and sure enough, it goes immediately to voicemail. I disconnect without leaving a message.
“Okay, same result. No answer,” I calmly concede.
“That’s ’cause he’s been murdered, and the killer took his phone!” cries Faith, dropping her face into her cupped hands.
“Probably his cell battery is dead, or he turned the phone off for some reason. Let’s not panic. Let me do some checking.”
I open my laptop and quickly find that I have no new e-mails from Melvin. I also log onto the company website and see he hasn’t put his employee ID badge into any of the badge readers at the plant today.
“Nothing,” I simply tell Faith. She raises her eyebrows and gives me the I told you so look. “But we’ll call his wife next.”
I peck at the keys of my laptop again and find that Melvin’s wife is named Annuska, and her cell number is listed as his emergency contact. I’ve never met her or even talked to her, but the time is right to introduce myself. I tap her number into my phone, and then I put my finger to my lips and give Faith a warning look. I don’t want her blurting out any comments, questions, or lamentations that Annuska might hear.
Someone picks up on the third ring.
“Yes?” It’s a female voice.
“Hi, this is June Bloom. I’m Melvin’s manager at Fleener Plastics. Am I speaking to Annuska?” Another, “Yes?”
“Melvin didn’t come to work today. I was just calling to make sure that everything is okay?” A few seconds of dead air ensue as Annuska apparently ponders her response.
An answer finally comes in a deep voice with a very thick eastern European accent, possibly Hungarian or Romanian. It reminds me of Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle. “My Melvin did not come to work today? He leaves at regular time this morning. I do not understand where he could be.” I can detect traces of concern in her voice, despite the thick accent.
“Ummm…well, we just tried calling him and it went right to voicemail.”
After a few seconds of silence, she says, “Perhaps cellphone is not working, for it is old and battery is not excellent. But…why is Melvin not at work?” The inflections of concern are morphing into worry.
“Is there anywhere he might have gone?” I ask. “Like…well, I don’t know…anywhere?”
No response. “Okay, well, then you should call the police,” I say in a calm and commanding voice, even though I know they will probably wait at least twenty-four hours to start any kind of an active search. No point in telling Annuska that. And there is no point at all in scaring the shit out of her by telling her about Faith’s so-called paranormal vision.
Annuska quickly agrees and we end the call after she says that she’ll call me later. I tell Faith we can’t do anything more until tomorrow and that she should go home.
An hour later, Annuska calls back and says that after trying Melvin’s cell a few times herself with no success, she called the police. All they did so far is a check on traffic accidents in the area, and they quickly ruled out the possibility that Melvin was in an accident on the way to work. They told Annuska to call back tomorrow if Melvin is still missing.
I give Annuska a few lame assurances and tell her we’ll talk again in the morning. Now she sounds a lot more worried than on our previous call.
If Melvin doesn’t show up soon, she is going to have one very long night.