Confessions of a Tax Collector by Richard Yancey Read Free Book Online Page B

the hall, and standing on the street.”
    We returned to the conference room. Gina clapped her hands and said, “Okay, it’s eleven-thirty. Lunch!” She reminded us of the breaks allowed under the contract: thirty minutes for lunch, plus a fifteen-minute break in the morning and one in the afternoon. Dee asked if the two short breaks could be combined and taken with the lunch. Gina answered no, of course not. She left the room.
    “I’m taking this up with Toby,” Rachel said.
    “There’s no place to eat downtown,” Allison said. “Where are we supposed to go for lunch?”
    “I brought my lunch,” Caroline said.
    “I’m not hungry,” Dee said.
    “Well, I could eat a horse,” Rachel said.
    “I think we should all go to lunch together,” Allison announced. “We need to bond.” She clearly saw herself as the natural leader of our little group. She asked our opinion on the bonding issue. Caroline repeated that she had brought her lunch and intended to eat in the break room. Rachel suggested the restaurant located in the Burdines department store two blocks to the south. Dee said nothing. I had the impression she had a definite opinion about bonding but chose not to express it. I said I didn’t know anything about bonding, but I was hungry and now we had only twenty-five minutes. Rachel asked what would happen if we took more than thirty minutes—would they shoot us at the door? Caroline left. We were floundering already; after just three and a half hours of someone telling us what to do, we had lost the ability to make the simplest of decisions. I jammed my hands in my pockets, rocked back on my heels, and studied the ceiling tiles. Somewhere, perhaps, a squirrelly little man was wearing earphones in a windowless bunker, listening, the reel-to-reel humming at his elbow.
    · · ·
    We were gone forty minutes. The Burdines restaurant was not crowded at that hour, but our waitress did not share our sense of urgency. We would discover that few people outside the Service did: revenue officers are not known for their patience. At lunch we learned Rachel’s husband had once played drums for the band that would become AC/DC. Allison’s husband worked for the local grocery store chain. Dee was single, between boyfriends. I offered that I was single, too, but between the ring and the altar. Then I spilled mustard on my new tie.
    We walked back to the office. “I’ll take up the rear,” Rachel said. “In case they do shoot us.” No one laughed.
    Dee said, “Anyone ever have one of those anxiety dreams, where you go to school in your underwear?”
    “Why would you go to school in your underwear?” Allison asked.
    Melissa was waiting for us in the conference room. Caroline was with her. Allison’s attitude toward her turned icy—she had betrayed us, broken ranks on the very first day.
    “We’re late,” Rachel announced. “We had an-eighty-year-old waitress who didn’t split the check right.”
    Melissa ignored her. “Follow me,” she said. She was carrying a stack of blue file folders. We followed her into the common room, to a little nook behind my cubicle wall. Melissa slapped the file folders on a small table beside a computer terminal. Her thin fingers flew over the keys. Mustard-colored letters shimmered on the black screen, reminding me of the stain on my tie; I placed my hand awkwardly over the spot. Even while seated, Melissa seemed to be in motion, a dervish of nervous energy. She had that air of someone who is perpetually running behind with no time to finish everything on her plate. “Melissa even
sleeps
in a hurry,” Gina would later tell me.
    “What are you doing?” Allison asked.
    “Pulling these accounts,” Melissa said, jerking her head toward the folders by her right elbow. “This is IDRS, the Integrated Data Retrieval System. It’s linked to the mainframe in Martinsburg.”
    She hit the ENTER key. A message appeared on the screen:
    INTEGRATED DATA RETRIEVAL SYSTEM
    WILLFUL