32 Minutes by Andrew Diamond

Author:Andrew Diamond [Diamond, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-20T23:00:00+00:00

21

The meeting went about as expected.

“How hard could it be,” he asked, “to find a guy just a mile and a half from where he disappeared? You could have walked it in half an hour. You’re not very good at your job, are you, Freddy?”

You’d think a guy would be upset to hear that his coworker and old friend had just been found dead. But Leighton Graham wasn’t one to dwell on difficult feelings. He preferred to puff himself by putting me down.

I remembered a clause in our contract. We would bill additional resources, like Claire, Bethany, Leon, or Ed, at double the hourly rate. None of them had worked this case, but I did discuss it with Claire over dinner. So I decided I’d add an hour of her time to the bill.

“What the hell happened to you yesterday that you couldn’t show up for a damn meeting?” Graham was sitting on the edge of his desk. “Were you out getting drunk or something? You look like shit.”

I changed it to two hours of Claire’s time.

But he was right. I did look like shit. I still felt slow from whatever Explorer Guy had poked me with.

I asked Graham if the cops had given him any more information than what I’d heard on the radio. He gave me the lowdown as he paced in front of the window.

Larsson had left the office late Sunday night or early Monday morning; the cops still didn’t have an exact time. He turned right off the office access road, drove a mile or so, and then drifted off the road at low speed. The cops think he may have been trying to pull over at the time. He lost consciousness and rolled through about two hundred feet of brush before his car came to rest against a tree.

What happened? They didn’t know. Maybe he had a heart attack or a stroke. Or maybe he’d just popped a Percocet for his back pain and then got sleepy. The autopsy would tell.

“You talk to Erica?” I asked him.

“Thanks for reminding me.”

The guy hadn’t even thought of it.

“Send me your bill, Freddy. And don’t bother with the final report. I don’t need it. Consider yourself fired.”

And that was it. That was the end.

The anticlimax left me so deflated, I didn’t even feel like smashing Graham’s car as I left the garage. That pretty Mercedes that cost almost as much as a damn condo.

I stopped by Erica’s house to give my condolences. It was a sad scene. Barely lunchtime and she already had the wine box out.

But how was a person supposed to cope at a time like this? She told me the boys were on their way home from college. No one was taking it well.

In my mind, I registered another strike against my job. I’d been through this kind of scene before, more times than most people, and I’d go through it again. The hardest part is seeing another person’s pain and not being able to take it away, not being able to fix it.

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