Page 15 of Serial Killer Games

“The twist is, ghosts don’t know they’re ghosts. But she knowsexactlywhat she’s doing.”

Dolores’s eyes are fixed on me, unblinking. She actually sees me, the dull temp who vanishes into his surroundings. I want her to know I see her, too. Both of us in stark relief on the top of this skyscraper, the city at our feet.

“And what is she doing?”

What is she doing,she asks.

This company is like a great, purring, half-slumbering creature. Unseeing, unfeeling, intent on one thing only: feeding itself, expanding, growing. Increasing profits every year. More.More.Chomping down on its employees, sucking the juices out of them, chewing them to a pulp and spitting them out.

I applaud anyone who gets the better of it, and what Dolores is doing is getting the better of it. Every day she strolls into work, stands in an elevator full of Spencer & Sterns minions,glides past supervisors and HR henchmen, and locks herself in a cushy stolen corner office to dick around all day in peace. All so that every two weeks she can collect her paycheck without having done a lick of work, courtesy of the disastrous, chaotic layoffs, like a cool, collected sociopath. She knows I know. I can see it. And she’s not the least bit concerned. She stares me down.

She’s clever. She’s fearless. She’s irresistible.

But in answer to her question, I say, “She’s haunting the living. Lingering over unfinished business.” I think of the laptop she was so careful to conceal from Cynthia. “Keeping her secrets in plain sight on her desk.”

Dolores’s eyes are strangely glassy. “I’m not so great at elaborate metaphors. You’re a creep.”

“You’rethe creep.”She’sthe one who made a sexual innuendo about strangling when we first met. She’s the one who threw my peace offering in the trash and snooped through my things and fucked with my computer.

She cuts across me. “I found your list, you know.”

This is interesting. She’s most certainly seen the desktop image by now. I changed it after her idle question about the Paper Pusher’s dating status.

“Maybe Cynthia will want to know you spend your days adding your coworkers’ names to a spreadsheet labeled ‘Terminate.’ ”

“Maybe she’ll want to know you’re gray-rocking from paycheck to paycheck hoping nobody notices you weren’t reassigned to a new supervisor after your entire department was laid off.”

Whiplash. Dolores stiffens, and I have to wonder what our conversation about ghosts meant to her if my words surprised her.

“Or maybe we call a truce,” I say.

She watches me with suspicion. We’re a pair of poker players holding our cards tight to our chests. I toss mine down first.

“Because I like you a lot more than I like Cynthia,” I add, “even if you are a creep.”

She holds out for two seconds, and then her sharp edges soften. The quills go down. She takes one half step toward me, and my phone buzzes.

“You going to get that?” she says impatiently on the second buzz.

I fish it out of my pocket and pick up.

“Jacob?” a familiar voice says on the other end of the line. Normally I wouldn’t have answered. Normally, I would have glanced at the screen properly first instead of trying to hold Dolores’s eyes.

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Yes?”

Dolores turns on her heel and is gone in a flash. It’s just me, the amateur geologist caretaker, and my uncle.

It’s the usual. The birthday dinner tonight. He guilt-trips me by invoking my aunt, and I agree, and we both hang up, and that’s that.

I look out at the harbor one last time and debate tossing myself over the edge.

8

Death by Family Dinner

Jake

“Your parents are already here,”the hostess says, gesturing across the trendy restaurant with its uncomfortable chairs and narrow tables.

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