Aftermath of an Industrial Accident by Mike Allen

Author:Mike Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

Nolens Volens

Sonja could notabide the man’s bloodshot stare any longer. “Mr. Reynolds,” she said, pointing, “who is that at your window? Do you know him?”

Reynolds stopped his spiel and swiveled his massive head toward his office’s luxuriant bay window. “Mrs. Delgado,” the attorney said in his deep plantation drawl—stretching out the MIZZ-zuhzz—“I don’t see a single body out there.”

Sonja followed his gaze. No one stood at the window. The lushly seeded lawn gleamed green. Even though she had just watched a man in faded camo, dark brown skin offsetting hair white as fleece, limp from the street to the window across that very same lawn, his cane spearing the soil, fierce eyes fixed on her the entire time. In the instant she had spoken to Reynolds, the man had vanished.

“He must have … have ducked below the windowsill,” she said, knowing how silly she sounded as soon as the words left her mouth. “He was standing right there, staring at me.”

Reynolds glanced over Sonja’s head at Ferguson, the PI in his employ: a short, wiry man with a face like leather stretched over a wooden mask. Sonja turned in time to see Ferguson shrug. “I’ll go check it out,” he said in a voice rough as pitted pavement.

Reynolds offered a non-smile and, as the office door shut, rumbled, “You all right with talking business while we wait?” From a desk drawer, he withdrew a sheaf of papers, dense with small-print paragraphs. Feverish sapphires in his wide pink face, his tiny blue eyes scanned her expression. Every bit of the wealth the man had amassed seemed manifest in his swollen girth, the bulge of his jowls. “I think you’ll find it’s an extremely generous contract.”

“You’ve not even said what you want me to do. I’m not signing one thing until you tell me.”

“Now, obviously, Mrs. Delgado, I’m requesting your services as an interpreter for someone whose spoken English isn’t so good. I know what I’m offering you triples your usual compensation.”

“Which makes me suspicious.”

“Of the job or the person offering it?” His smile bared large teeth between the cotton of mustache and beard.

She ignored the thrown gauntlet. “What case is this connected to?”

“One we’re gonna get tossed out tout de suite with your help.”

He awaited her next question, but she chose to let the silence stretch. The man at the window had tipped her out of equilibrium. She needed to regain her balance.

She regarded the attorney’s face, beady-eyed to the point of cartoonish villainy. ¡Que feo! Behind the moon of his head, the shelves of alphabetized law books spoke to a fussbudget nature at odds with his rumpled suit.

To her knowledge, Reynolds’s heart held nothing but loathing for her gender or her race. His crony Mickey Burkhart had won election to council yammering garbage about secret Muslims sneaking across the Mexican border. The fact that Sonja’s father was a Cuban refugee would make no difference to his ilk. Yet he wanted to offer her a lot of money based on professional reputation alone, so he claimed.

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