No Accident by Dan Webb

to hire associates. You didn’t know how to do a merger. You didn’t know how to do a stock offering. I made you. And I can un-make you.”
    Alan looked impassively at Luke. Luke stared back without blinking. Only the young associate showed frenzy in his eyes. It was Luke who finally rendered the verdict.
    “All I’m asking yo u to do is your job. You give the advice. I’ll make the decisions.”
    * * *
    Brad was trapped. His office door was closed, and between him and the door stood Sheila. Brad had never seen Sheila this way. She had started out calm like always, serious but calm, until she delivered the news.
    “He fired me.”
    She repeated the phrase every minute or so in between creatively profane bursts of vitriol that made the veins in her forehead stand out. Each time the vitriol ran out, she said the phrase again, and saying it stoked her anger anew.
    “The son of a bitch fired me!”
    Her pale skin reddened as her rant wore on. The color came in blotches that grew larger till her entire face, from neck to scalp, was an unnatural shade of red, beyond a sunburn, beyond heat stroke. The contrast with her golden blonde hair was unsettling. She looked like a figure from a lurid Andy Warhol portrait.
    “He would be nowhere without me! Nowhere!”
    Cindy, her eyes wide with concern, cracked opened the office door to see what the commotion was about. As Sheila cast a glance toward the ceiling to implore unnamed gods for aid, Brad discreetly shook his head at Cindy, and she vamoosed.
    “His ingratitude is astounding. I should be the one firing him. I put my career in the back seat to help him get to the top. But who does he pull up with him? That cheap whore of his, that mail-order bitch!”
    As she carried on, Brad stopped being frightened and even began to feel calm. He knew how to handle clients like this. Many of Brad’s criminal defendants succumbed to fits of anger when they finally realized they were going to prison. For Sheila, being fired came with the same shock and disappointment. And for once she had reacted like anybody would react, not like the inscrutable blonde cyborg who first walked into his office.
    “Sheila, we can deal with this,” Brad said gently. “You’ve let Luke get you maybe a little overexcited about this? That’s what he wants.”
    “Overexcited” didn’t begin to describe his client’s tantrum, but “hysterical” was a word Brad didn’t feel bold enough to utter. Brad got the sense that all her yelling and cursing kept her from crying. From his perspective, crying would be even worse. Anger was always unpleasant, but it was never awkward.
    “Oh yeah?” Sheila said. “What’s your plan to deal with this? Read some cases? Scratch your ass?”
    Brad kept his poise. Clients often lashed out at their lawyers. And when they did, their lawyers calmed them down. It was what lawyers got paid for. He kept telling himself that.
    “Sheila, this will only harm him in the long run. It’ll only harm him in front of the judge.”
    “Oh, thanks for the tip. Well, right now it’s harming me . He wants to take everything away from me, Brad. And the only reason he has any power is because I helped him get it.”
    Sheila leaned over the desk and jabbed a finger toward Brad’s chest with each sentence, and Brad leaned back in his chair to avoid contact. His words hadn’t calmed her down. If anything, she was getting angrier.
    “He couldn’t have built Liberty Industries on his own. We were supposed to be a team.” She rose to her full height, pushing back the hair on her forehand in one firm sweep. “Oh, the times I covered for him, the times I had his back. The stories I could tell you.”
    “Why don’t you sit down and tell me?” Brad’s chair was tilted as far back as it would go. His voice didn’t reveal the alarm he felt, but his face couldn’t hide it.
    “Why don’t you find a way to fix this?” Sheila said.
    “Fix this?”
    “Yes, you idiot. Fix this. Find a way