We walk together toward the crow’s nest, and I can see that Viv’s curtains are open. I know Viv’s watching. I fight the urge to wave at her window as we pass under it. Kendra would find it odd for sure.
Kendra pushes the door open, and we step outside into the summer sun. The sun’s rays feel good as they shine down on my shoulders; shoulder that have been tensed up for far too long. I take in a deep breath and can smell the sweet summer breeze. There’s nothing quite like the smell of summer.
We get to Kendra’s compact car, and she unlocks the doors. I open mine and am pleasantly surprised to see that there’s not a pile of fast-food wrappers on the passenger side floor. “Oh, clean recently?”
Kendra slides her key into the ignition and then smiles at me. “As a matter of fact, I did! Yesterday.” She grabs the seatbelt and pulls it around her waist. “You wouldn’t have fit in here yesterday. Viv vetoed our rental vehicle, so we’ll be taking this little beast.” She lightly taps her hand on the dashboard and the retro Hawaiian dancer wiggles in the sunlight.
I adjust my seat with the manual lever on the side and then put my seatbelt on. I kind of want to approach Viv about needing a rental car, that it’s not fair for Kendra to have to put miles on her own personal vehicle, but I decide that I should probably pick my battles. At the end of the day, Viv can still turn me in.
As we pull up to the red stoplight at the end of our road, Kendra looks left and then looks right. “Where do you want to go? Starbucks, Biggby, Tim Horton’s…I think there’s a Five Lakes or something like that down there. Oh, and, depending on how long we want to be gone, there’s Water Street Coffee all the way downtown.”
“Oh! Let’s do Water Street! They have some good food there too. Although…Five Lakes has great coffee. No, let’s do Water Street. The one on the little peninsula downtown.”
Kendra flips on her turning signal to go to the right just as the light turns green. “Sooo, do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
She definitely didn’t wait very long, but she did wait longer than I expected her to. Now what do I tell her? Kendra is my best friend. I want to tell her the truth, but I don’t honestly thing that she could handle it, or it might make being friends kind of awkward. Unfortunately, Viv is right on this one.
“Viv called me up there because she has a new job opportunity for me.”
“Wait!” Kendra turns her head, eyes wide with panic. “She’s not taking you from me, is she??”
“Watch the road!” I put my hand on the steering wheel as we barely miss a curb. “No, nothing like that. I’ll still be your assistant, but I won’t be your full time assistant anymore. I don’t know exactly how that’s going to work out. She’s going to take some of my hours that's allotted for you and put them toward being a Talent Acquisition Specialist.”
Kendra squinches her face up and says, “What’s that? And how many hours are we talking? I rely on you a lot.”
I reach over and pat her shoulder. “I know. I know. I’ll just have some meetings from time to time where I’ll be going to meet a prospective author and do a final interview with them. So, I might have to travel some. I was wondering, on those times that I do have to travel, would you watch Squeaker? I wouldn’t feel comfortable with anyone else doing it and I can’t take her with me.”
“Um, yeah, sure. I can do that.” Kendra runs her hand down her face as we hit the next stoplight red. “This sounds like a big deal for you. I thought you wanted to be an editor?”
Internally, I’m dying to tell her the real deal. That I do want to be an editor, but Viv’s got me backed into a corner because I killed Mike and she’s cleaning up the mess instead of turning me in. “Yeah, it is a big deal. I do still want to be an editor. Viv said that this would be a great way to get some experience.”
The light turns green, and Kendra presses the gas a little too hard, making my head hit the back of the headrest. “Oops! Sorry. Did you see that guy next to us though? He was going to cut me off. Anyway, I never had to do anything like that, but I also went to school for this so maybe she’s right. Maybe this is a good way for you to get some experience. Although, you might end up having to talk to some authors that you don’t want to talk to. Like Blake Randolf!”
“Ewwww! Well now we can just turn back around because I’ve lost my appetite!”
We both laugh as she pulls into the parking lot of the Water Street Coffee Shop. When we get out of the car, Kendra points at the line. “I guess we’ll have some time to figure out what we want huh?”
“I already know what I want. I’m getting the potato, bacon, and egg burrito. There’s so many good things on their menu. If I had a ton of money, I would try them all.” My stomach rumbles at the smell wafting out of the coffee shop.
Kendra is looking at the menu on her phone. “They do seem to put Starbucks to shame, don’t they?”
I nod my head and say, “Yeah, and their coffee doesn’t taste burnt like Starbucks.”
We get up to the window and Kendra orders the spicy sausage and egg burrito and I go with the potato, bacon, and egg burrito. We also both get a cappuccino because who goes to a coffee joint and doesn’t get coffee?
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Let’s sit at that cute table with the umbrella,” I say, pointing off to the left when we turn around with our food. We set our food and drinks down and sit down at the table. I can tell that Kendra is wanting to ask me more questions, but I shove the burrito in my mouth before she has a chance.
“We’ve never had to have a, what did you call it? A specialist of something?” Kendra unwraps her burrito and then takes a big bite.
After a few seconds, I’m able to finish chewing. The time it takes for me chew does help me regroup so that when I do lie to her, she’ll believe me. What a terrible friend I am. “It’s a Talent Acquisition Specialist.” I quickly take another bite. If I weren’t so worried about screwing up this lie to her, I would be enjoying this burrito a whole lot more.
Kendra picks up a napkin and wipes her mouth. “Right, that. We’ve never had to have that before. Why now? And why you? Not to be rude, but I need you. You help me a ton!”
“Yeah, I know. I mentioned that to Viv, but she didn’t think it would be an issue. Maybe she’s going to adjust your workload? I have no clue. I don’t even know how to interview an author. Do you? Have you ever done anything like this?” I quickly take another bite and hope that this is working.
Kendra chews and swallows, and then takes a sip of her cappuccino. “Yeah, I’ve interviewed some authors. Really, that’s not a normal part of being an editor. That’s a different person’s job. There are people who talk to the author and find out what they’re end goals are, like, are they doing this as a hobby or do they really want to commit to the process. If they’re just doing this as a hobby, then they probably won’t even finish the first book. And if they did finish the first book, then they for sure won’t finish a second. Some of them only want to do one book! So then why would we want to sign them on? We want to have the ones that are going to keep producing and do it well, with little or no help. Those are the money horses.”
I wrinkle up my face. “Money horses?”
Kendra covers her mouth as she laughs with her mouth full. She keeps her hand by her mouth as she mumbles, “Yeah, the ones that win the race.”
I laugh, “Oooh, okay.” I shake my head and shove the last bite into my mouth. I hate to say it, but lying comes easy if you believe the story you’re telling. I’m pretty sure that’s not a normal thing to be okay with but normal went out the window the moment my pen went into Mike’s neck.
Kendra looks at her watch and grimaces. “Are you sure Viv isn’t going to be mad that we left?”
“Well, we probably should talk about our trip. What do you have planned so far? What are we even doing? I’ve never done one of these.” I take a napkin and wipe off the spot I was eating and wad up my wrapper.
“When we have to do one of these little ‘hunts’, we actually go to their town or city and see if we can track them down. Mr. Randolf lives in Niantic, Connecticut. It’s a cute little town so we will be staying in the Harbor Hill Marina Inn until we can find him. And then we have to find out how far he is on his latest book, ‘Mary Go Round’, get an updated way to contact him, and threaten to take back the money we gave him. He’s not going to like that. The authors usually don’t.”
We toss our garbage in the trash can and make our way back to Kendra’s car. I’m a little surprised that the publishing house is sending two women to do this. Wouldn’t they want to send two big burly men? “You can do that? You can threaten them?”
Kendra looks at me once she gets the car unlocked. “What? Threaten to take back the money we fronted them to ensure that they would give us the publishing rights? Yepper! You betcha!” We both get inside the car, and she continues, “That money that we give them at the beginning is called an advance for a reason. We want them to focus on writing the book and not worry about working a different job. Mr. Randolf has been with us for a while so he gets a sizeable advance, but he’s been slacking a little lately. And now, I can’t even get a hold of him. So, we have to go find him and remind him of his contract with us."
The stoplights on the way back to work are all surprisingly green. I keep waiting for a light to be red. I really don’t want to have to go back to work so soon, even though we probably shouldn’t have left in the first place.
I look over at Kendra. Her face is relaxed, and she doesn’t seem to have the weight of the world on her shoulders, like how I feel. “Have you ever done one of these ‘hunts’ before?”
“Oh yeah, a couple of times. It’s not bad. It ends up being like a little vacation. We leave tomorrow morning. You may want to do a little research when we get back, so you know what to pack. I’ve found a couple of fun things we can do while we’re there too.”
“Wait, aren’t we hunting for him the entire time we’re there?”
Kendra smiles and says, “Yes, but sometimes the hunt means that we have to go into other places of business, restaurants, even the beach. Who knows where he’s hiding or what he’s doing? Maybe he got a job somewhere and he’s busy focusing on his new work. Some authors get a little freaked out when their advance doesn’t last as long as it takes them to write the book. But if they would treat writing the book like they treat an actual job, then there wouldn’t be an issue.”
“What about writer’s block? That’s a thing, isn’t it? Maybe he’s had writer’s block.”
We turn into the parking lot of the publishing house and Viv’s car is gone. I breathe a sign of relief. I know what I was going to tell her if she asked why we left but I also didn’t want to have to deal with her again today. An hour and a half with Viv is more than enough for me.
“Oh, writer’s block is a thing, but Mr. Randolf has missed his last three due dates and his phone is disconnected. I’ve sent him numerous emails and the last one came back saying that there was no such email address, and it was undeliverable. Either something happened to him, or he’s run off.”
I think about all that Kendra said as we get out of the car and head back inside. Why couldn’t the author we had to go hunt for be someone like Stephen King? Or Nora Roberts? No. it had to be this weird fruitcake who likes to write erotica.
I look at the clock when we get in and get to our desks. It’s 11:30am. A lot of people will start going to lunch soon but not us. It’s going to be weird to still be here when people leave, and come back, but I’m very full and we do have to get some work done. Although I don’t really want to start my next project a day before we head out. I decide to look up some things to do in Niantic.
I’m not sure how long I was hunched over my computer but when I straighten my back, I hear several snaps and pops. I turn my head to crack my neck. First to the right, pop! And then to the left…
“Oh, hi Frank.”