More random IS/PIN Scenes
Apr. 21st, 2011 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeA/N: Yeah, more of these suckers. They're like crack to me.
Material Treasures
In the circuit Biff runs in, everyone wants different things.
A lot of them are about cars. The ones strutting upper class with their Bentley and their Rolls Royces, the speeders with their sports cars. But most of them, it's just raw expense and extravagance. Jacked up or ridden low, spoilers in front and back, hubcaps from a Mardi Gras parade. They thump and bump up and down the streets like jazz beasts, gleaming dangerously under the streetlights.
For other rollers, it's the clothes that make the man. Custom, designer, shoes, slacks, and shades. From Paris, Milan, New York, Tokyo. Their wearers strut, shine, and glitter, peacock feathers, fluffed to their gaudiest with diamonds and Day-Glo.
Everyone's got something. Jewelry, piercings, tattoos, weaponry. Women. Fine art. Drugs.
For Biff, it's food.
It's the only practical lust, in his situation. Before 252, he could barely pay his rent; his world ran to the rhythm of frantic moves, climbing out of broken windows with boxes, leaving behind anything he couldn't carry or fit into hastily borrowed cars. But a couple pots and pans, a shoebox of herbs and spices, that can be moved from place to place easily. It's easier to steal a shaker of cinnamon and a sprig of cilantro than about anything else.
But even if he were able to afford to steal other things, it wouldn't matter. It's always been food to him. Turmeric, basil, rosemary, and sage. Slabs of steak, mounds of hamburger, flesh of any creature that walked the earth and can be bought for less than five dollars a pound. He can stew it into thick gravy, bread it and fry it, make it melt in your mouth and fill your stomach. With a battered stove and his little box of supplies, he can cook anything--or close enough.
There's only one problem. He cooks too much. Even after all these years, he still can't adjust to cooking for one. He can't polish off everything he makes, even with the amount of time he spends on his feet and dashing around. The waste is ridiculous, but he doesn't know what else to do with it; it's not like he brings anyone home. In frustration, he tries to feed it to the vermin, but pigeons apparently don't like stroganoff, and no one in his current place keeps pets.
Then M.D. starts showing up, regularly but randomly, like the scrawny little street cat she is. He starts leaving a window cracked for her, because she'll eat anything and he can finally get rid of the leftovers. Before he knows it, it starts becoming routine habit; crack the window when he's home, half-expect a half-grown alien kid to pop in at any moment, especially if he's cooking something that can be smelled from outside.
Her sporadic arrivals begin to cluster at meal-times. They eat together on the floor until he gets some furniture, and that's when he finds out his sense of taste is getting dull--his chili actually makes her cry, and he laughs at her until she snaps that it's the cigarettes that probably wrecked his taste buds. Which can't possibly be true, but might be, and would explain why Biff goes through spices so fast. ("God, no wonder you couldn't feed this to pigeons, Biff, they'd explode.")
He really needs to quit smoking one of these days.
So he feeds her, and they both pretend he doesn't. He starts using her to gauge when he's over-seasoning. He tries to teach her some of the art himself, but she just stares at him like he's crazy and says, see, the Jaunter's League has this thing called a food synthesizer. Y'know, nutrition at the atomic level? She doesn't need to learn how to make stuff to clog her arteries; that thing will make perfectly-balanced meals.
She never mentions how these perfectly-balanced meals taste, but she keeps coming back and eating his food. So he can guess.
It's not until a few months in, when they leave a pot of curry empty and the bowls licked clean that he realizes he cooks perfectly for two.
He never mentions it, and neither does she.
The Heart Is
"I never get used to how huge your house is," M.D. remarks as they go down the hall.
"Hey, the murder house wasn't exactly pint-size either," Raige protests, but it sounds weak.
"Yes, but see, that house was old, creaky, and falling apart. Half the place wasn't fit for inhuman habitation. Besides, it was stuffed with the murder people’s junk, and so it didn't feel big. Your house," she waves her arms as though to demonstrate, "is so big even all the stuff doesn't make it smaller. Everything's clean." She says this accusingly, as though this is a bad thing.
Then again, to someone who sleeps in closets and lives in a tree, maybe it is.
Raige shrugs. "There's a cleaning person who comes in every week or so, I think."
"You think?"
Raige shrugs again.
M.D. rolls her eyes. "See? That's exactly what I mean. This house is so huge, you don't even know. Do you mind if I look around?"
Raige squirms uncomfortably. Even though they've been friends a long time, he tries not to spend much time with her in any part of the house but his room. It makes him feel like he's flaunting something that isn't even his. "I thought you'd seen a lot of it already."
"Well, yeah, but my tour guide was a deranged bearded ancestor of yours. I wasn't exactly taking in the sights."
"If you really want..."
"Sure." M.D. beams, not appearing to notice his lack of enthusiasm. "Show me around, pal."
Raige has given tours of his house before, mostly at dinner parties when his dad wants him and some guests out of the way. He doesn't like doing it, but he can. So he shows her into the entrance hall, with the chandelier and the staircases. He explains how the chandelier is about a hundred and fifty years old, and how his dad bought it at an auction in Paris. He names the paintings on the walls, gives a brief bio of the painters that painted them, and how his dad's art dealer came by them. He explains how the stair railings are each one seamless length of mahogany, taken from the rain forests of--
M.D. stifles a yawn behind her hand.
Raige looks at her. "You don't actually care about this crap, do you?"
She gives him a smile that's somewhere between pity and encouragement and shakes her head. She says nothing.
Raige thinks for a moment. Then it clicks.
He points up at the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old chandelier from Paris. "When I was six, I was playing baseball in the house and I hit it with the ball. I broke a couple of the crystals; you can tell which ones, if you look carefully for the shinier ones. Daddy nearly killed me."
M.D. grins and claps him on the back. "There now," she declares, "isn't that a whole heck of a lot more interesting than some auction in La Paree?"
After that, the tour goes a lot faster. Raige skips the paintings he doesn't like, the furniture he mustn't touch, the knick-knacks worth hundred of thousands of dollars that are actually kinda ugly and that Raige suspects his father only owns to sell to someone else later. Instead, Raige tells M.D. about how he used to slide down the stair rails as a kid, so much that the cleaning person didn't need to polish them, until his dad caught him at it and said only girls did things side-saddle, and he stopped after that. He shows her all the rooms that used to be painted blue, because it was Mom's favorite color (she said it matched Raige's eyes) and how his dad had about all of them painted over after she died, claiming he'd always hated the color.
Then they move to the music room, with the baby grand. And M.D. halts.
"That didn't use to be here," she says, a little perplexed. "Or are we in a different piano room?"
"No," Raige says. "That's the only one."
There's a moment of awkward silence, and then Raige clears his throat and slips back into character, talking about the auction one of his dad's people bought it at while he runs his fingers over the keys. He talks about how perfectly tuned it is, how it's placed just so in the room so that it can be heard in every corner without being intrusive, even though he knows M.D. has all the musical understanding of a common vole.
She leans against the baby grand and watches him, but she doesn't interrupt. He never knew she could be patient.
Finally, Raige stops short in mid-triviality. There's another silence, and then he confesses, "I hate this piano."
M.D. waits. She listens.
"The piano you saw before, it was the beat-up old upright, right? The one that looked like it'd been drop-kicked out of every moving van it'd ever been in?" M.D. nods. Raige swallows and keeps on. "Yeah. That one, the one that used to be here... it was Mom's."
"Your mom played the piano?" M.D. asks.
"Huh? Oh! Yeah, she did. I never told you?" Of course he hadn't. "She was a musician. Played the violin too, but the piano was her favorite."
M.D.'s eyes light up with comprehension. "So that's where you get it from!"
Raige almost smiles for a second. "Heh. Yeah, she's the one who first taught me. I was never much for the violin, though." He runs his hand back through his hair. "She wasn't famous or anything. She played night-clubs, bar mitzvahs, things like that. Anyway, she owned that beat up old upright for... for forever. I don't even know where she got it, it was before I was born. It was always going out of tune, always sounded kind of honky-tonk. God, Daddy hated the thing, but she loved it, so we kept it."
He goes silent, idly tapping middle C. Then E flat. Perfectly in tune.
"When she died," he says, "I wouldn't let him get rid of it." He chuckles bitterly. "You wouldn't have believed it. We had a huge screaming match in the middle of the ballroom over the stupid thing. I let him paint over the rooms and everything, but I wouldn't give up the piano. For months, we fought over it. I won; I got to keep it."
"So what happened to it?" M.D. asks, even though she must know the answer.
"I left," he said. "And when I came back, we didn't have it anymore."
They're silent for a bit. Raige plucks out a few chords from Amazing Grace.
"Jeez, Raige," M.D. finally says. "Your place sucks."
And Raige bursts out laughing, the kind that sounds worse than crying, and then he starts playing ragtime for her--Easy Winners, one of the first big pieces Mom taught him.
Destruction, Mutually Assured
Destruction, Mutually Assured
Blackmailing a secret government institution, Bob discovers, is a terrible idea.
He expected, if anything, big people with guns. And sure, he gets that white girl, Maureen, with the tranquilizer cannon, but as far as build goes, she's spectacularly ordinary, and she mostly checks her watch, shaking her head. The black guy carrying what looks like an uglier version of Osborne 1 under his arm is the real problem. Maureen calls him Harmonius; he responds to conversation early enough for it to be unsettling, and sometimes without anything being said. He and a troop of other box-carriers—the woman calls them fizzies—have wasted the better part of seven hours trying to hack into Bob's head, searching for a fizzy bilingual in English and Gujarati who can pry the e-mail passwords out of Bob's frontal lobes. Through pure neurological roulette, they haven't succeeded, and while they seem a little relieved about it, they aren't feeling hospitable.
Harmonius has been on the phone with his supervisor for twenty minutes. It's not on speakerphone, but Bob can hear the guy on the other line from across the room, and he doesn't sound happy.
Finally, Harmonius says, "Yes sir, I understand sir, thank you sir," and hangs up.
"What does Andersen say?" Maureen asks. She has been watching the whole thing with a look of increasing boredom.
The fizzy rubs his temples. "No, you can't go home yet."
"Not what I asked, Harm."
He throws his hands down with a sigh of exasperation. "Damn it. We’re going to have to hire him. God. The hell do you do with a computer hacker?"
Maureen shrugs.
"Yeah, sure, comboy works." The words aren't sarcastic. "Don't suppose you know anyone who—"
They both stop dead. They stare at each other. They look at Bob.
They smile.
“I like the way you think,” Harmonius says.
"Me too," Maureen purrs. "Old Ironass is going to love him…"
Harmonius beams at the ceiling. "Match made in heaven."
They give each other looks of unholy glee, Maureen pulls out her phone, and Bob realizes that he isn't going to come out of this rich or dead. He's not sure what a comboy is, but he can make a pretty good guess. He's been programming for eight years, and they're making him tech support.
He considers telling them the e-mail codes, but then Harmonius looks at him with an attentive expression so he thinks about tentacle hentai instead.
Maureen hangs up. She's grinning.
"So?" Harmonius asks.
"Thought you were a fizzy," she says.
"I'm not Andersen."
"Give him fifteen."
Harmonius shakes his head and laughs. "Gotta love that about Specialist Grey," he says. "He's timely…"
As they wait for this Specialist Grey person to show up, they pull up chairs and tell Bob about him. Of course, most of it means jack all to Bob, who hasn't left his computer programming circles since college, but their tone says a lot. Whoever this guy is, they don't seem to like him exactly, but they speak of him with a sort of awed bemusement, like he's some sort of government-issue Sasquatch.
"—only survivors of the big jurisdiction infarction of '83, it was amazing—"
"I hear he's driven off three comboys in the past six months, just by being himself."
"Some people say he was part of MKULTRA. The receiving end."
Bob’s day has gotten so surreal that he can’t even tell what might be horseshit. He’s all set to meet Frankenstein Rambo when Grey arrives.
Ah. Now that is the kind of person he expected to meet: a big white guy in a suit with a radio plug in his ear. Older than expected, though; he looks older than Bob, and Bob is significantly older than anyone else in the room.
It's not the man's size or age that really gets Bob's attention, though. It's the stare. Bob has only seen a stare like that in mugshots, or in photos of predatory birds. Yes, with a nose like that, the effect is decidedly hawk-like. Or maybe vulture, since Grey looks like he’s measuring Bob for a coffin.
The fizzy and the woman explain, with barely concealed schadenfreude, who Bob is and what he's doing there. Specialist Grey doesn't speak. He just stares. Bob tries to hold Grey’s gaze and figure out how many people he’s buried in his backyard. Hell, if the PIN's hiring Bob, God only knows what else they've employed over the years…
Then the others say, nigh-squirming with delight, "So. What do you think?"
Grey has not said a word this entire time, and as the silences takes a turn for the awkward, Bob wonders if maybe Grey's deaf, or mute. That, at least, might explain what the others find so damned funny. Harmonius in particular is grinning so broadly that something must be going on.
But then the jaws crank open, and Grey says, in a voice like Microsoft Sam, "Nice to meet you."
The others snigger in a way that's almost as sadistic as it is nervous, and Bob feels his jaw go slack. Oh God. Grey's not a serial killer. He's not deaf or mute at all.
He's stupid.
Maureen and Harmonius shove a stack of papers and a pen at him, Bob signs them, and they induct him into the ranks. Specialist Grey only stands there, staring.
Bob hates him already.
Material Treasures
In the circuit Biff runs in, everyone wants different things.
A lot of them are about cars. The ones strutting upper class with their Bentley and their Rolls Royces, the speeders with their sports cars. But most of them, it's just raw expense and extravagance. Jacked up or ridden low, spoilers in front and back, hubcaps from a Mardi Gras parade. They thump and bump up and down the streets like jazz beasts, gleaming dangerously under the streetlights.
For other rollers, it's the clothes that make the man. Custom, designer, shoes, slacks, and shades. From Paris, Milan, New York, Tokyo. Their wearers strut, shine, and glitter, peacock feathers, fluffed to their gaudiest with diamonds and Day-Glo.
Everyone's got something. Jewelry, piercings, tattoos, weaponry. Women. Fine art. Drugs.
For Biff, it's food.
It's the only practical lust, in his situation. Before 252, he could barely pay his rent; his world ran to the rhythm of frantic moves, climbing out of broken windows with boxes, leaving behind anything he couldn't carry or fit into hastily borrowed cars. But a couple pots and pans, a shoebox of herbs and spices, that can be moved from place to place easily. It's easier to steal a shaker of cinnamon and a sprig of cilantro than about anything else.
But even if he were able to afford to steal other things, it wouldn't matter. It's always been food to him. Turmeric, basil, rosemary, and sage. Slabs of steak, mounds of hamburger, flesh of any creature that walked the earth and can be bought for less than five dollars a pound. He can stew it into thick gravy, bread it and fry it, make it melt in your mouth and fill your stomach. With a battered stove and his little box of supplies, he can cook anything--or close enough.
There's only one problem. He cooks too much. Even after all these years, he still can't adjust to cooking for one. He can't polish off everything he makes, even with the amount of time he spends on his feet and dashing around. The waste is ridiculous, but he doesn't know what else to do with it; it's not like he brings anyone home. In frustration, he tries to feed it to the vermin, but pigeons apparently don't like stroganoff, and no one in his current place keeps pets.
Then M.D. starts showing up, regularly but randomly, like the scrawny little street cat she is. He starts leaving a window cracked for her, because she'll eat anything and he can finally get rid of the leftovers. Before he knows it, it starts becoming routine habit; crack the window when he's home, half-expect a half-grown alien kid to pop in at any moment, especially if he's cooking something that can be smelled from outside.
Her sporadic arrivals begin to cluster at meal-times. They eat together on the floor until he gets some furniture, and that's when he finds out his sense of taste is getting dull--his chili actually makes her cry, and he laughs at her until she snaps that it's the cigarettes that probably wrecked his taste buds. Which can't possibly be true, but might be, and would explain why Biff goes through spices so fast. ("God, no wonder you couldn't feed this to pigeons, Biff, they'd explode.")
He really needs to quit smoking one of these days.
So he feeds her, and they both pretend he doesn't. He starts using her to gauge when he's over-seasoning. He tries to teach her some of the art himself, but she just stares at him like he's crazy and says, see, the Jaunter's League has this thing called a food synthesizer. Y'know, nutrition at the atomic level? She doesn't need to learn how to make stuff to clog her arteries; that thing will make perfectly-balanced meals.
She never mentions how these perfectly-balanced meals taste, but she keeps coming back and eating his food. So he can guess.
It's not until a few months in, when they leave a pot of curry empty and the bowls licked clean that he realizes he cooks perfectly for two.
He never mentions it, and neither does she.
The Heart Is
"I never get used to how huge your house is," M.D. remarks as they go down the hall.
"Hey, the murder house wasn't exactly pint-size either," Raige protests, but it sounds weak.
"Yes, but see, that house was old, creaky, and falling apart. Half the place wasn't fit for inhuman habitation. Besides, it was stuffed with the murder people’s junk, and so it didn't feel big. Your house," she waves her arms as though to demonstrate, "is so big even all the stuff doesn't make it smaller. Everything's clean." She says this accusingly, as though this is a bad thing.
Then again, to someone who sleeps in closets and lives in a tree, maybe it is.
Raige shrugs. "There's a cleaning person who comes in every week or so, I think."
"You think?"
Raige shrugs again.
M.D. rolls her eyes. "See? That's exactly what I mean. This house is so huge, you don't even know. Do you mind if I look around?"
Raige squirms uncomfortably. Even though they've been friends a long time, he tries not to spend much time with her in any part of the house but his room. It makes him feel like he's flaunting something that isn't even his. "I thought you'd seen a lot of it already."
"Well, yeah, but my tour guide was a deranged bearded ancestor of yours. I wasn't exactly taking in the sights."
"If you really want..."
"Sure." M.D. beams, not appearing to notice his lack of enthusiasm. "Show me around, pal."
Raige has given tours of his house before, mostly at dinner parties when his dad wants him and some guests out of the way. He doesn't like doing it, but he can. So he shows her into the entrance hall, with the chandelier and the staircases. He explains how the chandelier is about a hundred and fifty years old, and how his dad bought it at an auction in Paris. He names the paintings on the walls, gives a brief bio of the painters that painted them, and how his dad's art dealer came by them. He explains how the stair railings are each one seamless length of mahogany, taken from the rain forests of--
M.D. stifles a yawn behind her hand.
Raige looks at her. "You don't actually care about this crap, do you?"
She gives him a smile that's somewhere between pity and encouragement and shakes her head. She says nothing.
Raige thinks for a moment. Then it clicks.
He points up at the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old chandelier from Paris. "When I was six, I was playing baseball in the house and I hit it with the ball. I broke a couple of the crystals; you can tell which ones, if you look carefully for the shinier ones. Daddy nearly killed me."
M.D. grins and claps him on the back. "There now," she declares, "isn't that a whole heck of a lot more interesting than some auction in La Paree?"
After that, the tour goes a lot faster. Raige skips the paintings he doesn't like, the furniture he mustn't touch, the knick-knacks worth hundred of thousands of dollars that are actually kinda ugly and that Raige suspects his father only owns to sell to someone else later. Instead, Raige tells M.D. about how he used to slide down the stair rails as a kid, so much that the cleaning person didn't need to polish them, until his dad caught him at it and said only girls did things side-saddle, and he stopped after that. He shows her all the rooms that used to be painted blue, because it was Mom's favorite color (she said it matched Raige's eyes) and how his dad had about all of them painted over after she died, claiming he'd always hated the color.
Then they move to the music room, with the baby grand. And M.D. halts.
"That didn't use to be here," she says, a little perplexed. "Or are we in a different piano room?"
"No," Raige says. "That's the only one."
There's a moment of awkward silence, and then Raige clears his throat and slips back into character, talking about the auction one of his dad's people bought it at while he runs his fingers over the keys. He talks about how perfectly tuned it is, how it's placed just so in the room so that it can be heard in every corner without being intrusive, even though he knows M.D. has all the musical understanding of a common vole.
She leans against the baby grand and watches him, but she doesn't interrupt. He never knew she could be patient.
Finally, Raige stops short in mid-triviality. There's another silence, and then he confesses, "I hate this piano."
M.D. waits. She listens.
"The piano you saw before, it was the beat-up old upright, right? The one that looked like it'd been drop-kicked out of every moving van it'd ever been in?" M.D. nods. Raige swallows and keeps on. "Yeah. That one, the one that used to be here... it was Mom's."
"Your mom played the piano?" M.D. asks.
"Huh? Oh! Yeah, she did. I never told you?" Of course he hadn't. "She was a musician. Played the violin too, but the piano was her favorite."
M.D.'s eyes light up with comprehension. "So that's where you get it from!"
Raige almost smiles for a second. "Heh. Yeah, she's the one who first taught me. I was never much for the violin, though." He runs his hand back through his hair. "She wasn't famous or anything. She played night-clubs, bar mitzvahs, things like that. Anyway, she owned that beat up old upright for... for forever. I don't even know where she got it, it was before I was born. It was always going out of tune, always sounded kind of honky-tonk. God, Daddy hated the thing, but she loved it, so we kept it."
He goes silent, idly tapping middle C. Then E flat. Perfectly in tune.
"When she died," he says, "I wouldn't let him get rid of it." He chuckles bitterly. "You wouldn't have believed it. We had a huge screaming match in the middle of the ballroom over the stupid thing. I let him paint over the rooms and everything, but I wouldn't give up the piano. For months, we fought over it. I won; I got to keep it."
"So what happened to it?" M.D. asks, even though she must know the answer.
"I left," he said. "And when I came back, we didn't have it anymore."
They're silent for a bit. Raige plucks out a few chords from Amazing Grace.
"Jeez, Raige," M.D. finally says. "Your place sucks."
And Raige bursts out laughing, the kind that sounds worse than crying, and then he starts playing ragtime for her--Easy Winners, one of the first big pieces Mom taught him.
Destruction, Mutually Assured
Destruction, Mutually Assured
Blackmailing a secret government institution, Bob discovers, is a terrible idea.
He expected, if anything, big people with guns. And sure, he gets that white girl, Maureen, with the tranquilizer cannon, but as far as build goes, she's spectacularly ordinary, and she mostly checks her watch, shaking her head. The black guy carrying what looks like an uglier version of Osborne 1 under his arm is the real problem. Maureen calls him Harmonius; he responds to conversation early enough for it to be unsettling, and sometimes without anything being said. He and a troop of other box-carriers—the woman calls them fizzies—have wasted the better part of seven hours trying to hack into Bob's head, searching for a fizzy bilingual in English and Gujarati who can pry the e-mail passwords out of Bob's frontal lobes. Through pure neurological roulette, they haven't succeeded, and while they seem a little relieved about it, they aren't feeling hospitable.
Harmonius has been on the phone with his supervisor for twenty minutes. It's not on speakerphone, but Bob can hear the guy on the other line from across the room, and he doesn't sound happy.
Finally, Harmonius says, "Yes sir, I understand sir, thank you sir," and hangs up.
"What does Andersen say?" Maureen asks. She has been watching the whole thing with a look of increasing boredom.
The fizzy rubs his temples. "No, you can't go home yet."
"Not what I asked, Harm."
He throws his hands down with a sigh of exasperation. "Damn it. We’re going to have to hire him. God. The hell do you do with a computer hacker?"
Maureen shrugs.
"Yeah, sure, comboy works." The words aren't sarcastic. "Don't suppose you know anyone who—"
They both stop dead. They stare at each other. They look at Bob.
They smile.
“I like the way you think,” Harmonius says.
"Me too," Maureen purrs. "Old Ironass is going to love him…"
Harmonius beams at the ceiling. "Match made in heaven."
They give each other looks of unholy glee, Maureen pulls out her phone, and Bob realizes that he isn't going to come out of this rich or dead. He's not sure what a comboy is, but he can make a pretty good guess. He's been programming for eight years, and they're making him tech support.
He considers telling them the e-mail codes, but then Harmonius looks at him with an attentive expression so he thinks about tentacle hentai instead.
Maureen hangs up. She's grinning.
"So?" Harmonius asks.
"Thought you were a fizzy," she says.
"I'm not Andersen."
"Give him fifteen."
Harmonius shakes his head and laughs. "Gotta love that about Specialist Grey," he says. "He's timely…"
As they wait for this Specialist Grey person to show up, they pull up chairs and tell Bob about him. Of course, most of it means jack all to Bob, who hasn't left his computer programming circles since college, but their tone says a lot. Whoever this guy is, they don't seem to like him exactly, but they speak of him with a sort of awed bemusement, like he's some sort of government-issue Sasquatch.
"—only survivors of the big jurisdiction infarction of '83, it was amazing—"
"I hear he's driven off three comboys in the past six months, just by being himself."
"Some people say he was part of MKULTRA. The receiving end."
Bob’s day has gotten so surreal that he can’t even tell what might be horseshit. He’s all set to meet Frankenstein Rambo when Grey arrives.
Ah. Now that is the kind of person he expected to meet: a big white guy in a suit with a radio plug in his ear. Older than expected, though; he looks older than Bob, and Bob is significantly older than anyone else in the room.
It's not the man's size or age that really gets Bob's attention, though. It's the stare. Bob has only seen a stare like that in mugshots, or in photos of predatory birds. Yes, with a nose like that, the effect is decidedly hawk-like. Or maybe vulture, since Grey looks like he’s measuring Bob for a coffin.
The fizzy and the woman explain, with barely concealed schadenfreude, who Bob is and what he's doing there. Specialist Grey doesn't speak. He just stares. Bob tries to hold Grey’s gaze and figure out how many people he’s buried in his backyard. Hell, if the PIN's hiring Bob, God only knows what else they've employed over the years…
Then the others say, nigh-squirming with delight, "So. What do you think?"
Grey has not said a word this entire time, and as the silences takes a turn for the awkward, Bob wonders if maybe Grey's deaf, or mute. That, at least, might explain what the others find so damned funny. Harmonius in particular is grinning so broadly that something must be going on.
But then the jaws crank open, and Grey says, in a voice like Microsoft Sam, "Nice to meet you."
The others snigger in a way that's almost as sadistic as it is nervous, and Bob feels his jaw go slack. Oh God. Grey's not a serial killer. He's not deaf or mute at all.
He's stupid.
Maureen and Harmonius shove a stack of papers and a pen at him, Bob signs them, and they induct him into the ranks. Specialist Grey only stands there, staring.
Bob hates him already.
