“Someone amended them?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It didn’t escape Lloyd’s attention and Kathleen told me he went to Mr. Bierman about it. Mr. Bierman explained it, but, Frankie, it’s fishy. Everyone thinks so.”

I did too.

What I also thought was that perhaps the assistants were sticking their noses a bit too far into something that might not be real healthy.

So I advised, “You need to be careful, honey.”

She looked to her knees.

“Tandy,” I called and she looked back to me. “You need to be careful. I get he’s a dick, he’s being more than his usual dick, office politics are getting nasty, he’s acting weird, and you guys are curious. But I’m not thinking any of this is good, so whatever you do, you gotta do in a way I can protect you. Lloyd or Bierman or anyone finds out you guys are nosing around this, bottom line, it isn’t any of your business and this information is probably confidential. Because of that, what you’re doing will be hard to explain and might be grounds for, at best, a written warning, at worst, dismissal. It also means, if you’re found out, those are serious transgressions and I can’t protect you.”

What I didn’t tell her was that Dr. Gartner, whose files had been amended, was dead, something she knew, but she might not know what that could mean.

And what it meant was that if one had to do with the other, I really couldn’t protect her.

“Let it play out,” I said to finish it. “I’m lookin’ after you when I tell you to do your job, stay safe, and let whatever’s gonna happen, happen. Lloyd isn’t stupid. He’s been with this company for six years. He’s invested. He’s not Bierman’s biggest fan. Let the big fish prove who has the sharpest teeth.”

She rubbed her lips together in a way that didn’t give me warm fuzzies. These feelings turned downright prickly when she avoided my eyes for several seconds. But I felt better when she looked back to me and nodded.

“Okay, honey, share that wisdom with Sandy and Jennie and whoever and be smart, okay?”

“Okay, Frankie.”

I smiled at her.

She gave me a small, weird smile back that also didn’t give me the warm fuzzies and left my office.

I looked back at my computer and saw I had seventeen minutes until my meeting.

This meant I snatched up my cell, found Benny’s number, and connected.

He answered with, “Yo, cara, I thought your meeting wasn’t until four?”

“Ben, Bierman is targeting me and my colleague Heath in an effort to make my boss look bad, and the way he’s targeting me is by trying to get information on my trips to Chicago and my personal days.”

Ben was silent a minute before he muttered, “Fuck.”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed.

“You covered on that?” he asked.

“Time off isn’t accrued very quickly in your first year, but you do get some. I have three sick days and another personal day accrued so that’s kosher. My reps are producing so that’s kosher. And there isn’t a trail to find where I was incommunicado while I was in Chicago because I was never incommunicado when I was in Chicago. That said, Bierman is moving from dick to total ass**le. I don’t know how total ass**les act and office politics can get ugly. It’s not unusual for team members to get targeted in order to take down a higher up, and those team members are the first to fall.”

“So you think it’s not a good idea when he’s lookin’ at your time in Chicago to ask to work from Chicago,” Ben surmised.

“No. I think that you and I both need to be prepared for this to get ugly. And the you part of that is, if this gets ugly, you’re gonna have to listen to me rant and put up with me regularly freaking out. Because I work my ass off for this company, and if they say no to me workin’ from Chicago, so be it. But if I get targeted by an ass**le with a vendetta against my boss, I am not the kind of girl who goes down without a fight.”

There was a smile in his voice when he said, “That’s my Frankie.”

Yeah. That was what I was.

Benny’s Frankie.

Suddenly, I wasn’t nervous anymore.

“There’s more,” I told him.

“The way you say that doesn’t sound like you wanna tell me you’re in the mood to call me tonight after I get home from the restaurant so we can have phone sex.”

At this, I made a mental note to set my alarm so I could wake up and call Benny when he got home from the restaurant so we could have phone sex.

Then I said, “No, babe, that’s not the more. The more is, my assistant, in cahoots with several of the other assistants, found out there’s more weird shit goin’ down to add to the seriously weird shit already goin’ down with Bierman.”

“Stay out of it, Frankie,” Ben ordered, and my back went straight.

“I am,” I hissed. “But my assistant isn’t and I like her. I told her to drop it, but she assured me she would in a way that didn’t give me warm fuzzies.”

“She puts her neck out there, that’s her problem, not yours.”

“Ben—” I started.

“It’s not yours, Francesca,” he interrupted me. “You told her to stand down. She doesn’t, her decision, her consequences.”

When he said the word “consequences,” my stomach started to turn.

“Babe?” Benny called.

“What?” I asked.

“You with me on that?”

“She’s a good gal, Benny. I like her. And what’s she’s uncovered is not good.”

“So report it to your boss,” Benny advised.

“If I do, he’ll know she and her crew have been snooping around.”

“Her consequences,” Benny repeated. “If it’s not good, you report it to him and let him deal with it.”

“He already knows it, I think,” I muttered.

“Right. Then that’s good. Let it lie.”

I drew in breath and looked down at the clock on my computer.

Fourteen minutes until go time.

“I gotta go,” I said to Ben. “I need to mentally prepare for the possibility I’ll be instigating a job search tonight, something that’s on my list of favorite things to do just above having all my hair pulled out by the roots.”

There was laughter in his voice when he advised, “Eyes to the prize, babe.”

Yeah.

Eyes to the prize.