Hard Landing by Lynne Heitman Read Free Book Online

will ruin my entire day because I'm going to have to spend it trying to figure out how to deal with you." He stood with the trash in one hand, his cup in the other, staring down the concourse toward the gates. "I don't want to
deal
with you." I said, backing off a little, "I want to
work
with you."
    He tapped his chair a few times with his free hand. He didn't sit down, but neither did he walk away.
    "Losing a friend in the way that you did has got to be tough. If there is anything I can do to make it easier for you, I will do it."
    "I'll deal with it."
    "Fine. While you're dealing with it, think about this. Do you want to work with me? If you don't, we'll discuss alternatives."
    His hand grew still on the back of the chair. "I'm not leaving here."
    "That's not what I asked you to think about. Do you want to work next to me? That's the question and I want a definitive answer."
    "I'm not leaving Boston," he said flatly, then stalked over to toss his garbage. He came back and said it again, just in case it wasn't clear. "There's no way I'm leaving Boston. And if you and this fucking company try to get rid of me the way you did Ellen, I'm going to blow the whistle on what's going on around here, so help me God."
    He turned quickly and he was gone. He must have spotted the confused elderly woman as we were talking because he went straight for her. He read her boarding pass, offered his arm, and helped her to her gate. Then without looking back, he melted into the river of passengers, gliding smoothly through the crowd, weaving in and out until I couldn't see him anymore.
    He'd disappeared on me again, leaving me to sort through a whole bunch of responses I never had a chance to give, and one big question. What exactly
was
going on around here?

CHAPTER SIX
    Molly was long gone by the time I made it back to my office, and Dan had been cagey enough to get through the rest of the day yesterday and all day today without bumping into me once. There had been Dan-sightings all over the airport, but I never managed to catch up with him. I sat down at my desk to try to find the bottom of my in-box.
    I dispensed with the mail from headquarters-the usual warnings, threats, and recriminations disguised as reports, memos, and statistics-putting it aside to ignore later. I reviewed the station performance report from Dan, which said we were over budget and under-performing. No kidding. And I drafted a perfunctory response to a perfunctory question from Lenny asking why that was. Most of what was left was from the suspense file, things that Ellen Shepard had reviewed and filed for later handling. Many of the documents had her handwritten notes in the margins. Her handwriting was careful, neat, and very controlled. You could have used it to teach cursive writing to schoolchildren. Halfway through the stack, I began to get a sense of her, to hear her voice. She spoke a language we shared, the language of work.
    You could tell by her questions that she was new to an operation. She had lots of them-questions about the equipment, manning, about why we do things the way we do, about people who worked for her and how much things cost and why. Her inexperience showed, but so did her doggedness. When she hadn't gotten a thorough answer, she'd simply asked again. And judging from her correspondence with the union, she didn't back down. She may have been a staff person and she may have taken a good field assignment away from someone more qualified-say, for instance, me. But I had to admit that she had worked hard. She had tried.
    When I finally hit the bottom of the stack, I had one item left that I didn't know what to do with. It was an invoice from a company called Crescent Security. It had no notes, no questions, nothing to indicate why it was there and what I should do with it. So I did what I usually did in those situations-suspense it for a few days and deal with it later. With that taken care of, I sat back in my chair and stared straight ahead. It