Maxed Out by Kim Ross Read Free Book Online Page B

would
be listening.”
    “What?” I say. I run what he said back through my head a few
times – the words are all there, but they don’t make any sense.
    Jeremy looks up, panicked. “That man was here was about what
I told you at lunch, right?” he says. He’s sweating far too much for a man in
an air-conditioned building.
    “No,” I say.
    “Then who was it?” he asks. I don’t think he believes me.
    Might as well lay it all out, then. “My ex,” I say. “He’s
invited me to dinner.”
    “So that had nothing to do with me?” Jeremy says.
    “No?” I say. I’m beginning to get more than a little bit
curious, but he seems to be in a fairly fragile mental state right now so I
don’t want to push it.
    He gets up and starts pacing. “Can we just forget about all
of this?” he says.
    “I think I would be okay with that,” I say, slowly.
    “Just forget I said anything. Please,” Jeremy says. “Please
don’t tell Phil.”
    “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
    I don’t think I would have done anything to fuel Phil’s
obsession in any case, but if Jeremy isn’t angry about me toying with him – and
he seems to not care, for the moment at least – then I’m more than happy to do
whatever favor he might want me to do. Not telling Phil something that I don’t
understand myself is a really light price to pay.

11
     
    Jeremy’s revelation opens up some questions – if he really
did find something to expose at the end of his article series, if he got fired
for it and there are suits coming to check up on him and make sure he stays
quiet, what else might be real? I shake my head. The world is a nasty place
with those in power doing everything they can to stay in control. The kinds of
things that the government has been doing openly since 9/11 would have been the
subject of conspiracies a decade ago. When stories about warrantless wiretaps
or the government requesting a backdoor to Facebook or whatever surface, we
don’t even bat an eyelash anymore. Hell, it’s only been a few months since the
last time a college student found a federal issue GPS tracker under his car and
nobody cares. The only reason that a coverup like the one Jeremy seems to be
involved in is interesting is because it’s relatively new. It’s not morally or
legally worse than anything we’re happy to appease.
    Also if it was the kind of thing I really needed to worry
about he’d have been killed.
    Our trip back to work is a comic antonym of our journey out.
Before we were all giggles and sunshine. Now we travel in silence, Jeremy
undoubtedly caught up in his conspiracy, me praying he didn’t remember what we were
doing before that came up. Luckily it’s a short trip so the constant press of
work soon drags us out of our collective dread.
    Phil’s at my desk, which isn’t a surprise, but it’s a little
weird that we stepped out for twenty minutes and he picks the exact time we get
back to hover over me and micromanage.
    “The K-pop article failed the marketing test,” he says. “A
couple of their big labels just signed giant ad contracts and we’re doing talks
with a third. Tony says we can run the story intact in a few months but in the
meantime you can use a lot of that cultural stuff for a generic piece on
international music. How everyone seems to copy the US scene and sing in
English and stuff. You’ve probably got half an article worth of that stuff that
you can recycle here.”
    “When do you need it?” I ask glumly.
    Phil grins. “Monday,” he says. He slinks back to his lair.
    I crash in my chair and spin around in agony. “That was a
good article, too,” I tell Jeremy.
    Still, this could have ended a lot worse.

12
     
    I spend the rest of the day frantically accumulating sources
for what has to be the worst fluff piece I’ve ever written. There’s maybe a
paragraph worth of content for every page of article, made even worse by Phil’s
sudden e-mail saying he wants four pages of content (which is absurd for