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not annoying), and, like my persona, she’s a boot strapper street fighting her way out of middle-class mediocrity. I didn’t think much of her as an asset at the time, but beggars can’t be choosers, and I need to make a move.

7
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THE RABBIT HOLE
    A s I sit in the records morgue, counting the number of massive black mold patches growing on the ceiling, I wait for a fish to bite on the little morsel of bait I sent up to the main office earlier via the mailroom. I paid a guy down there to send the aforementioned Alice a bogus case file request so that she would have to pay me a visit in the morgue. Which reminds me of one of the first rules I learned at HR.
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    Rule #3: Go postal.
    The mailroom of any corporation is the center of the universe when it comes to access. It is the eye of the hurricane and the central nervous system, all rolled up into one dark, stinking, blue-collar slave ship. And the men and women that make up the flora and fauna of its bowels will do just about anything for a few bucks.
    I used the mailroom to complete one of my first assignments. I was sent on what Bob likes to call “a bug fogger.” Of course, you’ll have your share of these as new fish. These are the lower paying, lower profile gigs that Bob likes to take in high volume. Over time, their cumulative pay is bread and butter, and they relieve Bob of the burden of having to think of ways to train you every day.
    The reason they’re called bug foggers is because they’re like tryingto kill a roach with a can of Raid. The targets are usually reclusive, due to their inability or unwillingness to hire proper security. So you can either blast the place to kingdom come (waste of time) or find a way to strategically fire a kill shot right into the thorax. It’s an excellent aptitude test. If you are an impatient blaster, then you are far more likely to get exterminated yourself than if you wait for your prey to come nibble on your salacious piece of bait.
    My assignment, whom I affectionately called “Rosebud,” was the sole heir to a Serbian billionaire. He lived like Howard Hughes in the penthouse of a Midtown office building that looked like it had been built by the legions of hell. It was axle grease black, blazoned with imported Romanian gargoyles, and was rumored to be haunted by the three hundred–odd workers that were crushed and burned when the first fifteen floors collapsed during construction in the early 1920s.
    I am not always privy to the “why” of every target, but Bob did mention in passing that the guy’s family wanted him dead due to his “unsavory lifestyle.” The rumor mill, also known as the Post, had printed a lot of far-fetched things about him being a serial killer, a cannibal, and even a vampire. They weren’t far off. His father was an infamous Serbian war criminal, and Rosebud had been his right-hand man. These fuckers were Serbian military brass in the genocide of 1995 and managed to emigrate to the U.S. with an oil tanker full of cash. Daddy fancied himself a player in New York’s Russian mob scene until they found him floating without a face in a bathtub full of rats. Brothers and sisters, you do not fuck with Russians. But Rosebud was just a coked-out shut-in. The whole thing stunk to me of an old money hostile takeover—most likely being perpetrated by someone else in the family who wanted his turn at the trough, now that Daddy was worm food.
    But that is neither heir nor there. Back to the whole mailroom center-of-the-universe thing. Around the time of this assignment,some jagoff had “gone postal” and shot up a post office in Chelsea. The Post had printed the headline “DEAD LETTER,” and that gave me an idea. The mailroom in this ancient pillar of greed was still employing the gas tube system of mail delivery. Mailroom jocks would stuff letters, and contraband, into the little plastic mail capsules, shove them into the humming, eager mouth of a long acrylic tube, and the capsule would