“Told you,” says Dirt. “I knew he’d lose his shit.”
I’m not losing my shit.
Annie doesn’t say anything. She keeps her eyes trained on the gym bag under the desk.
“Pay up,” says Dirt.
“Fuck off,” says Annie.
Dirt’s desk chair squeals as he leans back, lacing his fingers behind his bald head. The chairs are old and broken, an afterthought. Like everything else here.
I’ve got my jacket halfway off and a glass container with dinner in my hand. I put the container on the desk, then grab it again.
“He can’t get it,” scoffs Dirt. “He’s a raccoon, not Garfield.”
“How do you know it’s a he,” says Annie.
Dirt rolls his eyes. I put the container down again.
“I dunno,” says Annie. “They’ll do anything for food. They get garbage bin lids open, those fancy ones in Toronto. With their little paws.”
I scoop the container again, furious. “I thought you said it was knocked out.”
“It is,” she shrugs. “But if it gets hungry, I’ll feed it.” She taps a granola bar laying in front of her dusty keyboard.
“I’m thinking rabies,” Dirt says, “and this guy’s first thought is but my lasagna.”
“No,” I say, “what if there’s an emergency?”
“This is an emergency,” Annie says.
“Like a real one,” I say.
Annie cuts me a look under her beaten Habs ballcap. She folds her hands across her belly, straining against her camouflage vest. Plants her hikers and rolls her desk chair back and forth, back and forth across the carpet, carpet so worn it’s greasy under the wheels.
The job requires a certain kind of tolerance for mess. Nobody’s here unless they fuck up, or they’re fucked up. You’d think, given the gravity of it—intercepting terrorism, foreign interference, war strikes, cyber attacks, all that shit—they’d give us better digs, but no. Somehow the most important, least important station there is. The gym bag shifts slightly under her desk. Dirt eyeballs it, but Annie stares me down.
“Guess you’ll handle it, bud,” she says evenly.
***
“Annie showed up real early,” Dirt says.
Dirt is always on time. It’s his one redeeming quality and the only thing Annie and Dirt have in common.
“They drilled that shit into us,” he repeats, like I don’t know they’re both former military.
“Hate rush hour,” Annie says. “Leave early, when the roads are—”
Dirt goes, “Jesus Christ, Annie, I’m trying to tell a story here.”
“You’re telling it wrong,” Annie says.
Dirt goes, “I get here and you know what Annie does? She shushes me. I think she’s being a bitch so I go, fuck off Annie, real loud, right? Then she goes, Two things: One, shut your mouth. Two, I called animal control. And I’m about to go off cuz I think she means she’s calling me an animal. But she points to her GoodLife bag under there. Now I’m confused, like, maybe, it’s the first day since basic training Annie decides she wants to grind out some pushups—”
“Holy fuck,” Annie says, “you’re a moron.”
“You tell it then!” Dirt says.
“He didn’t believe me so I unzipped the—”
“—and I go, shit you weren’t kidding—”
“—anyway it was just lying there on the road, and I jammed on my brakes, and poor thing, its foot was at a funny angle and it was breathing funny so I called animal control, and they said they can’t be bothered with roadkill, they’re backed up with a coyote problem in Gloucester and someone reported a black bear in Orleans so I’m standing there arguing, like what kind of person would I be if I just left—”
“—so she grabs the GoodLife and a granola bar, what a fuckin’ hero our Annie —”
Annie holds up a finger.
“Dirt,” she goes, “you’re a sick bastard and you’re a troll, but I know you wouldn’t have left him behind, neither.”
“No,” Dirt says, after a beat.
Annie cuts me an emphatic look.
“—so,” Dirt says, “she rolled this little guy into an old sweatshirt in the GoodLife bag and fired him into the passenger seat and drove to work, still got the operator on Bluetooth in the car, mind you, kept this poor sucker on the phone til she got downtown, parked, marched her ass upstairs holding the bag like a newborn—”
“—trying not to shake him—”
“—him!–”
“—it, whatever—”
“—and she swiped her pass all the way up and into the office and she put the bag under the desk and said to the operator, get this—”
“—now it’s no longer a roadkill problem; there’s a live raccoon in a government building and I am requesting your assistance; here’s the address. See you soon—”
“—and she hangs up.”
***
Dirt follows me into the break room, leans against the counter rattling a protein shaker. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk. Stories followed him from DND. Burpees and jump squats and incline sit ups with his feet hooked on stairwell railings. The grunting, the smell. Dirt’s first computer monitor is for work; his second one is for gambling; his third one is for porn. Sick shit, too. We know because he leaves his computer unlocked when he takes a shit, unlocked when he goes on mid-shift dates, which are frequent. Somebody at DND threatened to report him—the smell, the gambling, the porn, the dates—and legend has it Dirt got his name because he just laughed and said go ahead, make my day.
Dirt’s the one who told the legend, so take it with a grain.
“She’s not supposed to tell them where we are,” I say, watching my lasagna spin in the microwave. “That’s like, rule number one.”
“They have to get that thing out of here,” Dirt shrugs. “They don’t need to know what we do. She’ll just meet them in the lobby.”
“Why haven’t they come yet?”
Dirt gestures broadly with his shaker. “Coyote problem. Black bears.”
I pull my lasagna before the microwave beeps. Burn my tongue on the edges but the middle is still cold. Another thirty seconds to get it right.
“What if it gets loose?” I ask.
“Yes,” Dirt says. “Gimme rabies. Time off. Big fat workers comp settlement.”
“She could get fired,” I say.
“Not Annie,” says Dirt.
I chew my lasagna slow, shaking my head.
“Annie’s name isn’t Annie,” he says. “You should ask how she wound up in this shithole.”
Stories didn’t follow Annie the way they did Dirt. All anyone ever says is that she’s a tough broad. Good soldier. Best kind. Everyone here has some kind of story: they buried the wrong document or threatened a director or brushed their teeth with a fifth of something high proof before the 9 a.m. priorities call. Not Annie, though. This is the first I’ve heard anything of Annie’s story.
“Still,” I say.
“Nobody here gets fired, man,” Dirt laughs, spraying chocolate shake. “You know that better than anybody, after what you did.”
***
“Dare you to look,” says Annie.
I grimace and shake my head, staring at my phone.
“Tim’s run says it’s hentai this week,” she says. “Thought I heard squeaking earlier.”
Dirt left for his midshift date. We have five minutes after he leaves. On my first shift, Annie asked me to lock Dirt’s computer and laughed and laughed when I found the gambling, the porn. Said everyone who stays here long enough winds up a bit of a sicko, so don’t judge.
Annie looks like some kind of back-camping, born-again Christian bush mom so I thought she’d be shocked, but she just bets me double-doubles on what kind of kick he’s been on, or whether he’s losing money on the Oilers again.
“Squeaking,” I mutter. “That’s probably your new pet.”
“Jesus,” she says with some degree of awe. “You’ve really got a stick up your ass about this.”
“You brought a fucking raccoon into the office—”
“What would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Leave it?”
Annie snaps her fingers into a gun, fires it at me. Cold expression settling into her weathered face. “You sure about that?”
“Look,” I say, “Something bad happens in the country, anywhere in the world, we’re the first to know about it. We’re supposed to focus—”
“Don’t need you explaining the job, bud.”
“—so doesn’t it seem like if a raccoon gets loose in an office—this specific office—it’d draw a lot of attention? Nobody takes us seriously. Now you drag a raccoon in here? If that thing gets loose it’s not only a cliche—it’s a legit national security risk—like, total shitshow—”
“Yeah, no, for sure,” she says. “Don’t want another one of those, do you.”
I suck my cheeks in. Bite down hard. Not gonna take the bait.
Annie dons a pair of leather driving gloves, takes the granola bar from her keyboard and breaks the wrapper. She reaches under the desk and I hear the zipper peel back slowly. Slowly. Faster now, all the way to the end. There’s no squeaking, or rustling, or munching sounds.
“Shit,” she mutters.
“Dead,” I scoff.
“Nope,” she says. “Shit. Shit.”
***
Annie gave me the sweatshirt and gym bag as defense. I didn’t want to touch them at first, and she called me a pussy. Sometimes Dirt takes naps under his desk with this ratty old quilt and she asked if I’d rather have that. It looks and smells like PigPen’s blanket. I put my jacket back on and took the sweatshirt and bag.
“He couldn’t have gone far on that foot,” Annie reassures me. “He was pretty out of it.”
“Probably juiced on adrenaline,” I say, like I know what the fuck I’m talking about.
We creep around the office. Annie takes the lead because, logically, she was the one to pick him–it, whatever–up in the first place. Maybe she has some kind of bond with it. Maybe it’ll recognize her smell, or something.
“Any word from Dirt?”
I check my phone.
Dirt’s got a system for the mid-shift dates. Takes ‘em to a movie theatre around the corner, mostly to hook up. He has Annie text 9-1-1 half an hour into the date. If they’re ugly or boring, he checks his phone and uses the text as an excuse to bail. Tells ‘em it’s a matter of national security. But today the text came from me, and the response I got was nice try, fucko so either his date’s really hot or he doesn’t take my 9-1-1 for real seriously because national security events never happen that often.
Well, almost never.
“I don’t wanna mention about the raccoon because he’s on his work phone,” I say.
“Like texting 9-1-1 every single shift isn’t heatbag enough?” gripes Annie. “Nobody’s monitoring our texts.”
“What if it gets in the news?” I protest. “What if some animal control person spills that there’s a fuckin’ raccoon in the national security comms centre?”
“Right,” she sighs. “I forgot they sent you from narc city.”
We creep around cubicles, checking all the corners, and under the desks. We have the whole floor to ourselves but only a corner of it gets used. Most of the office looks like what I imagine a crypt might. Everything covered in a thin layer of dust from the ancient central air system. Even the cleaners know we only use part of the floor; they’ve given up on the offices that line the outside of the building. I move to open one but Annie sighs.
“Don’t bother with the closed doors,” she says. “Raccoons can’t open doors. This isn’t Jurassic Park.”
Feeling like an idiot, I take my hand from the knob. I lean against the office door, scanning the hallway. Dull fluorescents hum overhead. Red EXIT/SORTIE sign glaring at the end of the hallway. It’s the exit Dirt uses for his incline sit-ups, for his dates. Only one with a broken security camera. Straight shot from our desks. “What if he—it, whatever—tailed Dirt out of the office?”
“Maybe that’s his date today,” snorts Annie. “Better than his Tinder. He swipes right on some real uggos.”
“Look, Annie,” I say, “Dirt says your name isn’t—”
But Annie’s neck snaps to the left, toward our cubicles. Something grey and black streaks across the hallway toward the break room. Surprisingly fast for something fat and furry and limping. Annie takes off after it and I take off after Annie and when we round the corner we see it scramble up the break room cupboards, clamoring for my dirty lasagna container on the counter.
It looks at us with big, panicked eyes and for the first time I can see why Annie couldn’t leave the stupid thing behind. Annie gives me a shove.
“Get it into the sink and get the bag over it!” she yells.
Her cellphone starts ringing.
And goddamn her, she answers.
I lunge toward the counter, but between me and the cellphone the raccoon shrieks and lunges at me so I shriek and feint with the bag covering my face and it bolts off the counter, shrieking even more as it lands on its busted foot and skitters under the table between metal chair legs and I drop to a crouch and hold the bag open muttering it’s okay you know her smell now and all the while Annie’s hollering the address and directions and can’t you get here any faster for fuckssake it’s been hours and just as she hangs up I lunge again and the raccoon shrieks and blazes past me and I shriek and bump my head on the break table, hard, swearing, as it tears past Annie and back into the hallway.
She hangs up, shaking her head.
“They’re on their way,” she says, adjusting her ballcap.
“Lost it again,” I huff, rubbing my head.
“I think I know where we’re gonna find him,” she says.
***
We crouched first. Came down slowly, so we wouldn’t scare him. It, whatever. He watches us with sad eyes while his paws work the granola. It’s one of those Nature Valley bars, the ones that crumble the second you touch them.
He scoops little bits out of the green wrapper and shoves them in his mouth. We’re blocking his exit from the cubicle, bag and sweatshirt ready to grab him if he makes a move.
Annie peels her gloves off.
“Think that’s wise?” I ask.
“He’s too tired to bolt,” she says. “Guy told me he’d be here in twenty minutes anyway.”
We sit silent and watch him. He finishes the granola bar but paws at the cellophane, looking for more. He’s dextrous enough that I think he probably could have opened a door, if he wanted to. Like if he’d been on the shoulders of another raccoon. Or little stilts.
“Get your gun,” she says.
“What? I don’t—”
“My name isn’t Annie,” she says. “They named me Annie Get Your Gun a while back. When I was still serving.”
I can’t take my eyes off the raccoon, but I glance at her.
“You know that day on the Hill?”
“The shooter?”
“Yep.”
I whistle. The raccoon’s ears prickle, and he crouches defensively.
“Some shit went down that day that you don’t hear about,” she says. “I know about the shit.”
“That’s why—?”
She nods.
I swallow hard. “I know I said sorry before, but I just wanna say again—or like, thank you—I don’t know, sorry and thank you, I guess—”
She waves me off, then points to the raccoon. He’s still crouched, watching us with sad, wet eyes.
“When I walked into that shift you looked exactly like that,” she says. “Scared shitless. And you know what, yeah. You fucked up real bad. Three nations? False alarm? Holy shit did you fuck up.”
I wince. Tears prickle the back of my eyes.
“But they’re never gonna fire me,” she says. “Union says so, for one thing. But more importantly—”
“You know about the shit.”
She nods.
“That’s why you—? For me—?”
“Yep,” she says.
“Dirt says you’re nuts,” I say, staring at the raccoon. His eyes are drooping and I pray to fuck he’s just tired and not dying. “Says he would have thrown me under the bus in a heartbeat.”
“Well, they’ve got enough to can him,” she says. “The porn, the sports betting. Don’t think they don’t know about the movie hookups, either.”
“But they can’t touch you,” I whisper.
“Nope.”
I study the stitching on the GoodLife bag, trying not to cry.
“So you fucked up,” she says. “So what.”
“Twice.”
“That just means you won’t fuck up again.” She snorts, shaking her head. Rough smoker’s laugh rattles her chest. “China and Iran, fuck. You really know how to pick ‘em. Mister International Incident.”
Somewhere down the hall, the door opens. All three of us turn our heads toward the noise.
“Animal control?”
“No,” she says. “I have to meet them in the lobby.”
“We should tell him,” I say.
“Nah,” she says, pointing at the monitor above the raccoon. Dirt’s ragged stressball and protein shaker are next to the set up. It’s his cubicle. She slaps my shoulder and rises, creeping around the partition, motioning for me to follow her. “Not yet. Tim’s run says he screams like a girl.”