For a moment he’s back in Waynesville, trying to hide contraband before a rumored cell inspection, maybe nothing more dangerous than a snack-pack of Keebler cookies but enough to get him marked down if the screw is in a pissy mood. He looks at his finger, hovering less than an eighth of an inch over that damned delete button, and pulls his hand back to his chest, where he can feel his heart thumping fast and hard. What in God’s name was he thinking?
His fat fuck of a boss chooses that moment to poke his head into Morris’s closet-sized workspace. The cubicles where the other office drones spend their days are papered with pictures of boyfriends, girlfriends, families, even the fucking family dog, but Morris has put up nothing but a postcard of Paris, which he has always wanted to visit. Like that’s ever going to happen.
‘Everything all right, Morris?’ the fat fuck asks.
‘Fine,’ Morris says, praying that his boss won’t come in and look at his screen. Although he probably wouldn’t know what he was looking at. The obese bastard can send emails, he even seems to have a vague grasp of what Google is for, but beyond that he’s lost. Yet he’s living out in the suburbs with the wife and kiddies instead of in Bugshit Manor, where the crazies yell at invisible enemies in the middle of the night.
‘Good to hear. Carry on.’
Morris thinks, Carry your fat ass on out of here.
The fat fuck does, probably headed down to the canteen to feed his fat fuck face. When he’s gone, Morris clicks on the trash icon, grabs what he almost deleted, and moves it back into the master file. This isn’t much of an operation, but when it’s finished he blows out his breath like a man who has just defused a bomb.
Where was your head? he scolds himself. What were you thinking?
Rhetorical questions. He was thinking about the Rothstein notebooks, now so close. Also about the little panel truck, and how scary it’s going to feel, driving again after all those years inside. All he needs is one fender-bender … one cop who thinks he looks suspicious …
I have to keep it together a little longer, Morris thinks. I have to.
But his brain feels overloaded, running in the red zone. He thinks he’ll be all right once the notebooks are actually in his possession (also the money, although that’s far less important). Get those puppies hidden away at the back of the closet in his room on the ninth floor of Bugshit Manor and he can relax, but right now the stress is killing him. It’s also being in a changed world and working an actual job and having a boss who doesn’t wear a gray uniform but still has to be kowtowed to. On top of all that, there’s the stress of having to drive an unregistered vehicle without a license tonight.
He thinks, By ten P.M. things will be better. In the meantime, strap down and tighten up. Shit don’t mean shit.
‘Right,’ Morris whispers, and wipes a prickle of sweat from the skin between his mouth and nose.
24
At four o’clock he saves his work, closes out the apps he’s been running, and shuts down. He walks into the MAC’s plush lobby and standing there like a bad dream made real, feet apart and hands clasped behind his back, is Ellis McFarland. His PO is studying an Edward Hopper painting like the art aficionado he surely isn’t.
Without turning (Morris realizes the man must have seen his reflection in the glass covering the painting, but it’s still eerie), McFarland says, ‘Yo, Morrie. How you doin, homie?’
He knows, Morris thinks. Not just about the panel truck, either. About everything.
Not true, and he knows it isn’t, but the part that’s still in jail and always will be assures him it is true. To McFarland, Morris Bellamy’s forehead is a pane of glass. Everything inside, every turning wheel and overheated whirling cog, is visible to him.
‘I’m all right, Mr McFarland.’
Today McFarland is wearing a plaid sportcoat approximately the size of a living room rug. He looks Morris up and down, and when his eyes return to Morris’s face, it’s all Morris can do to hold them.
‘You don’t look all right. You’re pale, and you got those dark whack-off circles under your eyes. Been using something you hadn’t oughtta been using, Morrie?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Doing something you hadn’t oughtta be doing?’
‘No.’ Thinking of the panel truck with JONES FLOWERS still visible on the side, waiting for him on the South Side. The keys probably already under the tire.
‘No what?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Uh-huh. Maybe it’s the flu. Because, frankly speaking, you look like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.’
‘I almost made a mistake,’ Morris says. ‘It could have been rectified – probably – but it would have meant bringing in an outside I-T guy, maybe even shutting down the main server. I would have been in trouble.’
‘Welcome to the workaday world,’ McFarland says, with zero sympathy.
‘Well, it’s different for me!’ Morris bursts out, and oh God, it’s such a relief to burst out, and to do it about something safe. ‘If anyone should know that, it’s you! Someone else who did that would just get a reprimand, but not me. And if they fired me – for a lapse in attention, not anything I did on purpose – I’d end up back inside.’