"Delivery for Delilah? Ha, that's cool. D for D. Man, nice office."
He was pure surfer stoner and laughed at his own joke as he came over. He handed me the bag and then waved away my trying to tip him.
"Dude already tipped me big time. Enjoy!" He walked back to the elevator and hit the call button.
I opened the top of the bag and the delicious scent of bacon and friend hash brown rose up.
"Do you know who ordered this?"
The elevator opened and he stepped inside.
"Um ... sorry dude."
The doors closed and he was gone.
I reached into the bag and pulled out a container. It held crispy bacon, two eggs, two hash browns and some sliced fried tomato. There was also a note that was going see-through from all the oil.
Bacon bacon bacon,
That'll stop your achin'
MB
I took a bite of a bacon strip and felt my stomach rumble. It was so good I nearly moaned aloud. This day had gone from terrible to strange and now it was both delicious and confusing.
I wolfed my way through the meal, feeling my hangover fading with each bite. Once I had some food inside me, I wiped off my fingers on the napkin provided and relaxed back into my chair.
Maybe I could tell Mr. Stone about the blackmail. Maybe I could just ignore it. Maybe I'd tell Mr. Stone and then he wrap me in his arms and tell me the past didn't matter before tearing my clothes off.
As though my thoughts had summoned him, an email appeared from Mr. Stone. I smiled to myself as I opened it but then was disappointed to find it was just a work email. Then my smile fell away as I saw he was requesting the same contracts as Mr. Black. I picked up Mr. Black's notes and compared, hoping it was a coincidence. It wasn't though. They both wanted the same work sent to them. Mr. Stone had written he wanted the work by 3pm and I was to drop everything else.
Just then another emailed appeared. This was from Mr. Black.
Hope you enjoy the bacon!
Sorry to ask but the meeting has been pulled forward. Can you get that material to me by 2pm?
There was a smiley face at the bottom of his email. It didn't match the expression on my face.
What in the hell was going on?
*
At five minutes to two I sent off the work to Mr. Black and then Mr. Stone. Let them both have it at the same time and sort out whatever was happening. I sent it off and then escaped the office, taking a late lunch which was really just a snack because I was still full from the bacon breakfast Mr. Black had sent up.
I was sitting in the park, half-heartedly eating a sandwich and staring at nothing when I felt my phone buzz. It was a message telling me to go to an address a few blocks away. I stopped eating my sandwich as the small amount of appetite I had vanished.
The address was still out in public so I was fairly sure I wasn't going to be kidnapped and taken away forever. I debated not going even as I stood up and threw my sandwich away.
As I walked down the street I started to get angry. Who the fuck were these people who thought they knew me?
Yeah, they had a photo and yeah, that building did burn down but there was a long way between one thing and the other and it was circumstantial at best.
By the time I reached the address I was fuming, ready to punch, kick, bite or scream at anyone who approached me. All my rage collapsed when a little girl, no more than five, tugged on my sleeve. She handed me a yellow envelope, smiled at me and then ran off. I stood there with my mouth open as she vanished into the crowd and by the time I got my thoughts together enough to realize I should have followed her, she was long gone.
I opened the envelope and took out the single piece of paper within.
You will find and destroy the hardcopy of the following documents
The list ran down the page and continued on the other side. At the bottom was a small clipped image of me holding the Molotov next to the instruction to send "I understand" again. I scanned through the list seeing some contracts I had already looked up.
This was it? They wanted me to destroy hard copies of contracts that already existed in digital form? What was the point?
I put the paper back in the envelope and pulled out my phone to type the message.
*
The rest of the day went by at half-speed. I still had plenty of work from Mr. Stone to get through but even when I lost myself in it, I'd come out a moment later. I finally made it to the end and went home, thinking I'd escaped this day without any more problems about five seconds before I sat on some gum on the bus.
I went up to my apartment and felt my stomach jittering as I walked inside. The violation of my private space made me feel ill. This apartment, as small as it was with its ratty sofa and hey-let's-call-it-antique-even-though-it's-just-old decor, had been my sanctuary.
I shook myself out of that loop of thinking again and considered my new problem. The blackmailers wanted me to destroy hard copies of documents. I'd been to the hard-copy storage area deep in the levels beneath Stone-Black. It took up two entire floors and the truth is that hardly anyone ever went down there. Even Ms. Green, the HR lady who liked to purse her lips, admitted to me in my very short training time with her that no one cared about the archives to the point that there wasn't actually anyone employed to look after them. Access was restricted to certain people but once you were down there, you could do whatever you wanted and no one would be the wiser.
As I started chopping vegetables for dinner, I resolved to go down to the archives tomorrow. Just to have a look I told myself. I wasn't really going to do what the blackmailers wanted. Not even if it was easy and there was almost no chance of being caught.
I was just going to check it out. I wasn't going to destroy anything.
*
I found three of the contracts in the archives with no problem at all and spent a good half-hour reading through them but I couldn't work out why they needed to be destroyed. They were in regard to licensing some chemical process from another company as far as I could tell but written in legalese gibberish. The only thing they really had in common was that they were all signed by Mr. Black. Was that important?
I stuffed the contracts in an empty box I found and hid it in a back corner. Once I managed to connect all the dots then I could decide what to do.
In the elevator on the way up, my thoughts suddenly turned away from my predicament and to Mr. Stone. He'd be back tomorrow and he promised my training would begin. I shivered at the idea. What did he mean by training? Knowing his love of high-tech sex toys I'm sure it would involve some device that could make me orgasm at the press of a button. The elevator was fast but even so, by the time I reached the top floor I was feeling quite hot and bothered. Could I get away with using my red bullet at work? Did Mr. Stone have cameras up here outside his office? The doors opened and I looked straight into Mr. Black's eyes. The devilish grin on my face dropped away to an awkward smile but not before he raised his eyebrow and smiled back at me. He was leaning against my desk again, browsing through another manila folder.