Sign Here(74)

“Does no one work here?”

“Bro, chill,” said some sleeveless stranger, and I had to fight the urge not to clap him on the back. Jack might’ve been the only person anyone knew how to treat with respect.

Then the basement door knocked open, and, like a savior, he appeared.

“I got something special for you today,” he said, not quite in a whisper but quietly enough for it to feel conspiratorial. I didn’t care what beer it was; his tone was just what I needed.

“Thank you,” I said. “Seriously.”

“Are you ready to do your job now?” Trey barked, and if I could bottle the look Jack gave him before turning his back, I would spray it on myself every morning and every night.

“It’s like he hates money.”

“I think he just hates you.”

“You wish.”

I, too, turned my back to Trey and focused on the beer Jack had given me. It was Pabst, and I was thrilled.

“So,” Trey said, drumming his fingers in a distressing off-rhythm. “You must be feeling pretty shitty tonight.”

I clasped my cup with my whole fist as I took a sip.

“Not really.”

“Bullshit. After what we pulled in the meeting?”

“So you admit it was a hoax?”

Trey laughed and cracked his neck. “I admit nothing.”

“Then why are you still sitting here? Jack’s over there.”

I nodded at the other side of the bar, where the rest of the clamoring crowd had migrated. Trey was silent for a moment, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to stay that way.

“She’s a firecracker, huh?” he asked.

I didn’t respond.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong—I love a woman who knows what she wants.”

I took another sip and checked the TV. Hell has a lot to offer, if you know where to look!

Trey peered over both of my shoulders and leaned in closer.

“Did she ever say she wanted to—” He swallowed. “Like, in the bedroom—”

“We didn’t have that kind of a relationship.”

“Sure,” Trey said, nodding. “That makes sense. But we totally do, just so you know. Totally. And it’s awesome.”

There was another moment of silence—or as much silence as one could get in a crowded dive bar—before he leaned in again.

“Trey, if you want a drink, just go down there.”

He looked down the bar and back again, fidgeting with the one coaster Jack had put out in the past millennium.

“It’s just—do you know what her relationship was with that whole football team? Was she . . . fucking them?”

I almost choked on my beer, which was precious and not made to be hard going down.

“What are you saying?”

“It’s just—”

Jack turned back then, done with his freeze, and when Trey caught his eye, he waved wildly.

“What?” I asked. “It’s just what?”

“J?ger, please, for the love of everything dark and horrible.”

Jack nodded and primed the pump.

“Trey, what? What about the team?”

If he had learned something from his memory dive in Jason’s mind, I deserved to know it too. And maybe it could explain Cal’s sudden . . .

No, I thought. Hell was all the explanation I needed.

“I just don’t see what she could’ve seen in them. From what I saw, Jason didn’t practice football—like, ever. They couldn’t have been any good before the steroids. Freaky kid, not exactly championship material. And that coach—I mean, I’ve had some hard workouts in my life, let me tell you. And in my afterlife,” he added, slapping his abs. “But I swear, the shit that coach had them doing, they were like soldiers. No way parents signed off on that.”

Jack sloshed down two shots of J?ger in front of us, and Trey wrapped a hand around each.

“Not to mention”—he threw back one shot and then the next—“I don’t know how the steroids could’ve gotten into them. They never drank any damn water.”



* * *



—

I BARELY FINISHED MY beer before I was out of there. I tore down the street, leaping over anything that looked even remotely like a puddle, and through my front door as soon as my rusted key would let me. I needed to look at Cal’s file again. To dig deeper.

I found it way in the back:

The story of the General himself.


HUMAN’S RESOURCE FILE

Name: “THE GENERAL”

Current Location: SURFACE


At nine years old, the General, given name irrelevant, grew the largest sugar beet the Minnesota State Fair had ever seen. He got a purple ribbon and his photo in the newspaper, beet hoisted above his head with both hands like the severed head of an enemy clansman.

Saint Anthony’s Home for Boys wouldn’t let him keep the ribbon. The head priest, Father Michael, hung it in the sparse trophy case on display behind the school’s front windows. They said it would inspire envy in the other boys, and they were right. In a place where nobody had anything, envy was as verdant as the home’s hearty crops. An older kid tried to uproot the General’s prized beet before it was ready, but he couldn’t get his grubby fingers deep enough to pull it out. When the General saw the evidence the next day, he started sneaking back out to the fields at night—risking a beating or, worse, the loss of the ability to enter the fair in the first place—to watch the vegetable. As he lay on his stomach between the rows of crops, a weaponless sniper, he would dig a nail into the beet’s skin until it pierced the meat, and then he would put his nail in his mouth. There has never been a better taste. There is no candy in the world like that dirty, stolen sweetness.