“I’ll take sick leave. Two days, three at the outside, plus the nights. I can get it done.”
“Do you have any left?”
Mace shook his head. He’d used up this year’s quota of sick leave already on various stages of the program, so he’d lose pay and he’d have Nolan on his back about it. “I’ll need Dr Dark.”
Dr Dark’s alter ego, Dillon Lightman, punted his empty cup into the bin. “The good doctor will forge a sterling certificate to your erstwhile employer telling them you have a bad case of... Wait a minute, who was the chick? Wasn’t that redhead from HR who had the hots for you? Get her to fudge it for you.”
“Wasn’t the redhead.”
“But it was someone from work.”
No way Mace was getting into this. “Now who’s distracted?”
“Not me, dude. This is on point. Can’t remember the last time you spent all weekend with a woman.”
Mace groaned and stifled another desire to look towards the tower. “I didn’t exactly have a choice.”
“You’re complaining?”
“No.”
“Dude, I need details.”
“Get me a certificate. Make it for three days. Say I’ve got...” He looked to the top of Tower A; the sun glinted off the executive floor. “Tick paralysis, foot and mouth disease. I don’t care.”
“Not those kind of details.” Dillon loosened his tie. “If I made it out for foot and mouth would that dweeb Nolan even look at it?”
Mace raised a hand, making as if to slap Dillon’s head.
Dillon took a step backwards. “I’ll make it out for mad cow disease.”
Last time Mace needed Dr Dark, Dillon made the certificate out for blepharitis
and when Nolan googled it and discovered it was a severe case of dry eye, he’d issued a warning and docked Mace’s pay.
They couldn’t keep doing this, the sneaking out, the moonlighting. But until they got alternate funding it was the only way. Neither of them had assets or the kind of connections to allow them to do a family and friends round of fund raising, so occasionally cheating their employers was the only way around it.
“Mace, we’ve got this. There is absolutely no reason we won’t get the funding. We get the funding, we both quit, work full-time on this. Inside twelve months we’ll be in Silicon Valley. We’ll both be billionaires before we’re thirty-five.”
Mace rubbed the back of his neck. There was a headache building there. That was the dream. They’d hatched it years ago, a vague plan to be rich and famous. Now there was nothing vague about it. It was candy coated. He looked up at the top of Tower A again. This was their shot, but this part of it relied almost entirely on his work. He had to get it right. There was no room for a do-over.
Dillon had pushed his shades to the top of his head. He stopped a call on his phone and sent it to message bank. “Dude?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Shit, what a time for you to get all dick-whipped. If you’re thinking about the chick, she can wait. This won’t.”
“I’m not thinking about that.” And there was no reason to. Jacinta made it crystal she didn’t have time for him and she’d be the one to call the shots on if, and when, they got together again. He didn’t like it this morning after beating her door up to get back to her but Dillon had a point, and she wasn’t the only one who was busy building a career.
“You’re thinking about it.” Dillon’s phone rang again, the Mission Impossible soundtrack.
“I’ll stop, okay. It was a weekend.”
“Exactly, dude. This is the rest of our lives.” He answered and started a complicated conversation about ad rates and click throughs.
Mace left him and went back to his desk. He kept his head down and stayed out of Nolan’s sightline for the rest of the day, and he was first to log off and hit the lift well at five. That’d be noticed too. Fuck it. He needed to get to Buster. An hour and a half later he was unpacking her shopping: seedless mandarins, tissues, Woman’s Day, stocking socks, jelly snakes, elderflower cordial.
“You look nice today.” Many of the residents of St Ags never bothered to ditch a dressing gown. Buster always managed to, always made an effort to dress nicely, wear a scarf around her neck or a piece of jewellery. She always wore shoes, not slippers, and every week the travelling hairdresser visited to do her hair. Today she wore caramel pants and a white blouse with a freshwater pearl necklace and matching earrings Mace had bought her with his first decent pay cheque. She had to have had help with the earrings.