Lightning Rods (16 page)

Ed was back in his office on the phone, she could see. He’d probably want the fax back immediately. Well, too bad.

She hurried into the disabled. Sure enough, the light was on; the guy was already in the other cubicle. No time for the skirt today. He wouldn’t be seeing anything he hadn’t seen plenty of times already.

She undressed from the waist down, got on the transporter and went backwards through the wall.

Nothing happened.

She glanced at her watch. She wished the guy would just get on with the show so she could get back to work. Ed was going to want that fax back.

Time passed. She pictured the guy on the other side, desperately trying to get it up. If only Joe had installed some kind of way of communicating from one side to the other. She’d tried suggesting it, heck, they’d all tried suggesting it, but Joe just kept saying he’d get on to it as soon as he had the time. They all knew what that meant. Someone had once had an idea for improving the original notification, but getting Joe to do even the simplest little programming was like pulling teeth.

Ed, meanwhile, was getting irritated. He had finished his phone call and hurried over to the Men’s, only to find that someone was in the disabled stall. All the other stalls were free, and the company didn’t
have
any disabled employees, which could only mean one thing: Someone was helping himself to Ed’s disability. Or rather, they were really helping themselves to Mike’s dis, which Ed had snapped up for the going rate (a bottle of Johnnie Walker) because he might as well get it over with. So now Ed was a bottle of Scotch down and someone else was helping himself to the proceeds.

Ed rattled the door.

Inside the stall, Roy had suddenly asked himself a question.
Why
was somebody trying to get in? There were five other stalls. You couldn’t tell him all five were now occupied. And the company didn’t
have
any disabled employees, which could only mean one thing: Someone had turned up
expecting
to find this, this obscenity within the disabled stall and in all probability make use of it.

What this meant was that Roy found himself in a quandary. If he opened the door, he could put a name to a face. He could identify a member of the workforce and challenge him and the whole sordid business would come out. That was obviously the responsible course of action. But there was just one problem.

If Roy opened the door,
he
would be the one who was actually
in
the
stall
with a naked half-woman. All the
evidence
would point to it being
Roy
who had turned up for this little rendezvous. It would be Roy’s word against whoever. There would be no actual
proof
that it was, in fact, the other man who had intended to use company time for R&R, and that Roy was just an innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire.

Someone was pounding on the door with a fist.

Elaine, meanwhile, was wishing she had had time to pick up something to read.

The lightning rods had gradually accumulated a stash of magazines, but Elaine had read all the issues of
People
and
Us
Weekly
and
Mademoiselle
and
Elle
and
Marie
Claire
and
Better Homes and Gardens
at least once.
People
has never claimed to be
War and Peace
. It’s not really the kind of thing you keep reading and rereading, discovering new layers of meaning each time. It doesn’t pretend to be. Nor, for that matter, does
Us Weekly
. People don’t go back to the February 1999 issue of
Mademoiselle
and suddenly realize how much they missed the first time around because they were too young to understand. This is not a criticism—that’s what people
like
about them. But what this means is that if you’re stuck in a waiting room with back issues of
People
which you’ve already read you’re going to have a long wait. A wider range of preread magazines is not going to significantly improve the situation.

What this meant was that Elaine had time on her hands. She had a million things to do, the screen message had come at the worst possible time but then that’s men for you, if they have a choice between sex at a time when it’s convenient and sex when you have a million things to do they’ll go for the bad time every time. In this case, to be fair, the client hadn’t specifically picked her and she didn’t
have
to accept—she could have let someone else pick up the assignment. But then she’d just have had it hanging over her head for the rest of the day. If she’d waited she’d have ended up having to accept later in the day, probably at an even
less
convenient time. So when it had come up on her screen she’d thought Might as well get it over with. And now here she was, stuck, waiting for Rambo to get off the dime.

She found herself wondering, as she sometimes did, whether it was all worth it. Sure, the money was good, but who needs this kind of aggro?

The fact is, there’s no perfect job. You’re going to run into aggro whatever you do, so you might as well get paid for it. Most places just pretend the aggro doesn’t exist, why would they compensate you for working in an environment that’s just one big happy family, you’re lucky just to be working with such great people it’s not the money that counts it’s the people I don’t
think
so.

The important thing is just to be clear about your goals. If you go through a lot of extra aggro on a daily basis, and at the end of the year all you’ve got to show for it is a lot of clothes in your closet, don’t go looking for someone to blame if you spend what would have been your retirement selling secondhand clothes. Elaine had opened a separate account for her lightning rod earnings, and she put everything she earned on that side straight into that account. That money was going to put Hayley through college, and Elaine wasn’t going to touch a penny of it. She hadn’t had a lot of choices in her life, but Hayley was going to go wherever she wanted, no matter how much it cost. Money was just not going to be a consideration. In just six months she’d put $15,000 in the account. For $15,000 you can put up with a lot of back issues of
People
.

Elaine had reached this realistic conclusion, and now she’d been waiting fifteen minutes.
What
was the
problem
with the guy? Many women who provide sexual release for male clients in more orthodox settings have had this reaction to an unanticipated delay, but at least they can see that the client is trying. Elaine had no idea
what
the client was doing. If, in fact, he was doing anything at all. If, in fact, he was even there.

She’d been here sixteen minutes, and in all probability Ed Wilson was wearing a hole in the floor waiting for his fax. Right. You had your chance, Jack, and you blew it.

Roy was still mulling over his quandary when it was solved for him. There was a low whirring noise. The lower portion of the woman began to disappear through the wall. Soon there was nothing to be seen but her feet. Then her feet were gone, and the panel closed, and he was alone in the stall.

Someone was still pounding on the door.

Roy lifted the bolt and opened the door.

I shoulda known, he thought.

He was looking into the irate face of Ed Wilson.

It took two seconds for Ed to realize he’d made a mistake. It was only too obvious why Roy had chosen this particular cubicle when five where free. Ed wouldn’t have liked to have to lift 320 pounds of human flesh from a sitting position using nothing but his knees; in all probability Roy didn’t like it either.

“Sorry, Roy,” said Ed, thinking on his feet. “I thought I left my gym bag in here earlier. I coulda sworn this was the last place I had it, but I don’t see it. Guess I musta left it at the gym. Hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

Roy had never really cared much for Ed’s sense of humor at the best of times. For some reason he could never think of a better come-back than “Ha, ha, ha. Very funny.” He was about to say “Ha, ha, ha. Very funny,” for want of a better idea, but Ed was already on his way out the door.

And now Roy was in a
real
quandary. Ed Wilson was one of the top performers in the company. Roy knew, none better, just what outrageous demands Ed had made and gotten away with in the past. Ed was always being headhunted, and every time Ed was headhunted he used it as an opportunity to demand some new and more outrageous level of compensation. Every time Ed made some new demand Roy would think This time he’s gone too far, this time he’s
really
done it—next thing he knew Ed would be driving around in the Lamborghini he’d demanded as a company car.

Well, it was only too obvious that Ed hadn’t personally knocked a hole in the wall. Something like this couldn’t happen without somebody approving it somewhere. What had obviously happened, incredible though it might seem to an outsider who didn’t understand the weird dynamic that operated between Ed and Steve Jackson, was that Ed had made yet another demand and Steve had just given in.

Well, if that was the case, just
who
was Roy supposed to report this
to
? If he took it to Steve, it wasn’t going to be Ed Wilson who was sitting at home with the Want Ads.

On the other hand, did Steve really know what he’d gotten himself into? Was something like this even
legal
?

It was a real quandary.

Elaine dressed, returned to the fax machine, picked up fax and transmission sheet, and went over to Ed’s office to drop them off. She got there just as Ed came striding up from the Men’s Room.

“It took you twenty minutes to send a
fax
?” said Ed, who was in no very good mood. “If I’da known it was gonna take twenty minutes I’da told you to
walk
it over.”

“It took five minutes,” said Elaine, in no very good mood herself. “The other fifteen I was doing something for Bob that I had to interrupt because you said this was urgent. Bob, just in case you’ve forgotten, is my boss. I presumed that the urgency of the fax pertained to transmitting the material to the recipient rather than transmitting the transmission sheet to you. I
do
apologize for this unfortunate misunderstanding.”

In the old days Ed would probably have said something direct and to the point. But the lightning rods had brought him to a new level of self-awareness which he had not had before; he knew the reason he was ready to strike out at anybody within range had nothing to do with the fax. Besides, he was suddenly conscious of things he would have been less conscious of in the old days. He had always been interested in breasts, obviously, but now he felt an appreciation for a full frontal view, even clothed, which he would once have taken for granted. Besides, he wasn’t one to hold a grudge. He liked a girl who could hold her own instead of letting you walk all over her.

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful when you’re angry?” he asked grinning.

“Let’s put it this way,” said Elaine, “it’s not exactly an original line.”

Ed laughed. He’d had four separate sessions today already, he could live with an isolated disappointment. Besides, Elaine was really attractive. She had dark red hair, and dark brown eyes, and a long, full, sexy mouth. He’d been working hard, no time to play, it had been a long time since he’d connected with someone from this direction.

“OK, I overreacted,” he said magnanimously. “I admit it. I overreacted. What can I say? Excess is my middle name. So I’ll make it up to you. Can I buy you a drink after work?”

“Much as I’d love to,” said Elaine, “I have to pick up Hayley from her homework center after work, and I have other plans for the evening.”

“Tell you what,” said Ed, who had not gotten where he was by taking polite or not-so-polite negatives for an answer, “I’ll take you to pick her up. How does that grab you? We’ll surprise her. Turn up in the Lamborghini, make her day. And then I’ll just drop you off, unless of course I can persuade you to cancel your plans.”

“Why,
thank
you,” said Elaine. “What a wonderful idea! Usually I have to use my
own
car to pick her up and drive home in, which means I have to give up my parking space. I then run the risk of not finding one in the morning after I drop her off at school on the way to work, especially if the traffic’s bad.
This
way I can just leave the car there overnight and take the bus in, and no matter
what
time I get in I’ll know I’ve got a parking space, because the car will have been there ahead of all the other people who took theirs home and then had to drive in again the next day. If only I’d thought of that before!”

Ed grinned. “No problem,” he said. “Gimme your keys, I’ll get one of the guys on security to drop it off for you. They owe me a coupla favors, and besides, they got nothing better to do, long as I pick up the cab fare, which I’m happy to do, Elaine, just to show you my heart’s in the right place.”