Page 100 of Serial Killer Games

Dodi looks at me expectantly.

“It’s literally just a list of people to be terminated,” I admit. “I do this everywhere I work. I calculate how much money the worst employees are costing the company.”

She blinks.

“And?” she prompts.

“That’s it. I compare their value to their cost—their salary and everything else—and I put them on my list.”

She leans back. “What?” She frowns. “How do you know their salaries?”

Well, this is the less boring, slightly more illegal part. “I look at payroll.” I have the urge to brag. “I also look at emails and HR records.”

She stares at me.

“I can usually get into a company’s systems pretty quick. People are idiots.”

It’s not just getting into the systems. It’s eavesdropping on watercooler gossip while colleagues complain about one another. It’s keeping my head down in the elevator at the end of the day while the C-suite assistants vent to each other about top floor perverts. It’s taking advantage of my ability to blend into the gray corporate decor to stalk the people on my list as they go about their day. It was fun, in its own way.

“You’re a recreational bean counter,” she says after a long pause. “Cool beans.” She stacks a present under the tree. “So it’s a list of unprofitable employees. Cynthia saw all that in the spreadsheet and got a massive hard-on.”

It’s the first time I’ve shared my list with someone who could implement it.

“But what’s the point?” Dodi says irritably. “Why do you care about making Spencer & Sterns more profitable?”

“I don’t.”

“Last I checked, Doug and I are on there. But maybe he and I are living the dream, pulling a salary for doing dick all, sticking it to the man—”

“It’s not a list of freeloaders and incompetents.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “So what is it?”

“It’s the bullies.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“The perverts. The predators. They’re impossible to fire in these big companies. Instead, their victims get fired, or resign.”

I hate bullies.Igrew up with a bully.

“But companies care about the bottom line,” I continue. “It’s all they care about. So I make these spreadsheets to show how expensive they are to the company. Assholes areveryexpensive.” If they seem valuable and essential on the surface, it’s an illusion. They waste people’s time. They terrorize their colleagues. They cause turnover and intensive HR investigations and lawsuits. They steal. I add it all up: HR salaries, the cost of losing a client, the cost of training a new secretary, the cost of sick days when a colleague is too stressed to come in. The cost of stolen paper clips.

She stares at me.

I always fantasized about handing in my list when I left each office. Although sometimes the bullies took care of themselves. Three of the worst offenders on my lists were suicides. Jumpers. Usually after a failed HR investigation. They weren’t fired, but the stress from the investigation must have gotten tothem. Alleged Paper Pusher victims—fuel for the urban legend, I suppose.

“I was at the top of your list,” she says, her voice low and menacing.

“Yes.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Why?”

Why, she asks. I take her in, her aggressive red lips, her sharp claws, the tension in her body even now, curled up on the floor beneath a Christmas tree I procured for her.

“Because you were being a nasty little bully to me.”

Her cheeks turn dark.

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