“And…” I flipped his job listing over. “You’ve been drawing an eighty-thousand-dollar salary to do this?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “Besides Miss Stone and like three others, I’m the longest tenured employee.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since he first moved into this building, sir,” he said. “I used to be in record keeping since I had nice handwriting, but he promoted me to this much easier job a decade in and just asked me to protect my old notebooks.”
The Ponzi scheme fact slapped me in the face, and I made a mental note to find a hitman to handle Mr. Lewis.
“Would you like me to prepare a latte for you, sir?” he asked. “I’m not limited to the things on our menu.”
“No, thank you.” I shook my head. “I’ve heard enough.”
“Well… is this the part when I explain why I shouldn’t be fired?”
“I fired you twenty minutes ago.”
“What?” He sat up.
“I said—” I cleared my throat, not wanting to handle business this way. “I thought we discussed that twenty minutes ago.”
“We didn’t.”
Silence.
“Oh. Well, I’ll email you soon with any questions I have. Then again, wait. What happened to the notebooks you kept from Mr. Lewis?”
“I still have them all.”
“Well, scan them to me by the end of this weekend, and I’ll email you after.”
“There are over two thousand notebooks with two hundred pages each…” he said. “Not to mention the phone records and investor transcripts I had to keep. Well—I mean—he didn’t know I recorded those, but I thought it would make me valuable later.”
“I see.” I smiled for the first time this morning. “You’ll be hearing from Ciara soon about getting all those handled a lot faster… and you might’ve just saved your job.”
“So, youweregoing to fire me?”
“Get out before I change my mind.”
He left my office at the speed of light, and I sent an emergency email to Ciara. Then I noticed that there was no breakfast on my desk.
No fresh coffee.
No notes on my upcoming media interviews.
Are you alive, Miss Stone?
Has something happened to you?
No answer.
I pulled up her calendar and noticed something that wasn’t synced to mine.
Secret Employee Appreciation Day
(Shhh! Two hours max!)
(Do not come if you’re not a week AHEAD in your work)
