2. Doug

TWO

DOUG

In which Agent Swanson meets his match and doesn't know it.

[email protected]

Per the previous email, the decision remains final. No exception will be made to the requirement that all SPAM agents with roles outside of admin have a partner. As an agent with years of experience, you are in a special position to train a new member of our organization. You are our future.

Nicholas Sedgewick begins Tuesday.

Regards,

April

Final decision, bah. And what was the you are our future crap about? Gag.

Pretending he hadn't read the damn email was better than rage-crushing his desktop, although the second was tempting. But they'd just take the replacement cost out of his paycheck. He didn't need to learn that lesson again.

Tuesday was fucking today . Doug punched the red Close button with his finger and opened SPAM's website instead.

"A new partner," he scoffed quietly, hoping no one sitting close by could hear him talking to himself. "What's management thinking? What is April thinking? I'm done . Finished. Counting the days until I get to walk out of this building and never come back."

The last time he'd put his foot down, they'd assigned the agent to someone else. Why didn't that work this time?

Long Shot was no more. He was just Doug Swanson, a man who was done with the life of a hero, even a subpar one. He wasn't getting any younger either, was he? A two-story log cabin situated on a remote lakeside near the Canadian border beckoned to him.

Sure, he'd intended to share it with Rich. The plan—at least for Doug—had been that he and Rich would spend their twilight years sitting on the big front porch, sipping prosecco from those skinny fucking glasses, reading books, and watching fireflies zip around.

Doug had been saddened to learn fireflies didn't do that well up north. Something about the cold. He'd been even more upset when he'd learned that Rich had decided that he'd rather not live in a cabin with Doug. Or with Doug at all, anywhere. Fucking Rich and his sparkly gigolo. The last thing Doug knew, Rich and Melvin had moved to Palm Springs. Good riddance.

The front page of SPAM's website was peppered with the usual employee reminders:

Are your loved ones taken care of? Legal services available for less.

Cut-rate legal services offered by SPAM seemed like a Very Bad Idea to Doug. Were their lawyers also subpar? Did SPAM get the Feds' dropouts?

It's annual review time, schedule with your supervisor today!

That would be a big fat no from Doug.

Are you up to date on the latest OSHA requirements? Download and print your wall poster.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration could kiss Doug's ass. Maybe that last one was a joke. The team who ran the website had a quirky sense of humor.

"OSHA would crap their fire-retardant pants if they knew what we did," he muttered.

Doug clicked into the Latest News tab and began reading. Buried two pages in—where SPAM hid all the important information—was the headline, "Three Agents Missing."

"Motherfucker," he murmured, scanning the article to see if he recognized any of the names.

He did. Dammit . Agent Mel Schoenhut. Doug had been one of his trainers, the last one. The one that declared Mel ready to go out into the big, bad world.

The other names mentioned could have been aliases. Mel's was, after all. It was possible he knew all of them.

Missing was SPAM's way of saying presumed dead. The same way Southerners used bless your heart when they thought a person was dumber than a dead and rotting stump. Missing SPAM agents usually ended up equaling dead SPAM agents, but that didn't mean SPAM felt their legal names needed to be publicized.

After the poison-gas incident at the regional help center in Atlanta, this couldn't be good. With a sinking feeling, Doug clicked into the article and began to read.

Standing up from his ergonomic office chair, Doug stretched his back before looking out the window next to his desk. As a senior agent—with only one hundred and eighty-three days, six hours, and… forty-seven seconds until retirement—he'd earned a cubicle with a view. A view of a parking lot and an empty street, but it was better than what some of the other agents had.

The higher-ups had been making the cubicles smaller and smaller since budget cuts started after the Suez Canal debacle. But hey, they'd stopped some Very Bad People from importing a drug even more addictive than fentanyl. Soon everyone would be standing up at skinny desks to work regardless of whether they foiled criminals like Aeric Tozer, aka The Darkness. Such a pretentious name.

But at least Doug had a view.

At the beginning of his career, Doug had had an office all to himself. Now he was going to be sharing a desk with the new guy. It was hard to wrap his head around that, but it was his reality.

Shoving his hands in his pockets to keep himself from cracking his knuckles, Doug glared out the window. Usually it was fairly boring out there in normal-land. This suboffice was located in the most boring business park in the state. Nothing to see here, we are innocuous was the vibe SPAM was going for. They were mostly successful.

Doug's attention was snagged by one of the ugliest cars he'd ever seen in real life moving slowly on the street below. Scratch that. It was the single ugliest car he had ever seen. Painted an odd bronze-yellow color, the vehicle looked like a cross between an angry bee and a constipated bear.

"What the hell is that?" Doug leaned forward, banging his forehead against the windowpane.

As he stood there, fascinated by the sheer hideousness of the vehicle, it came to a stop in the middle of the street. The driver's side door opened up and a younger-than-Doug man emerged. Even from where Doug was standing—and because he had 20/10 eyesight—he noted that the driver was flustered and appeared to be talking to someone or something in the street.

If Doug himself had been in the market for a boy toy, he wouldn't have minded taking the driver for a spin around the block. But he wasn't in the market for anything, especially not for men fifteen or more years younger than he was.

He eyed the guy's black suit with the stove-pipe legs, the skinny tie, the crisp white shirt, and the shiny oxfords. Far too hip for Doug's taste. He preferred down-to-earth men who wore jeans and polo shirts, much like what Doug was wearing at the moment. Was it dress code? No, but obviously SPAM wasn't planning on letting him go because of it.

Much to his disgust.

Doug returned to cataloguing everything that was wrong with the man on the street. The guy's dark, wavy hair looked like it was due for a trim, and he could have used a little more muscle underneath that suit. Minutes had passed since Doug first spotted him, but he was still at least fifteen years younger than Doug's forty-two. Doug had been at the top of his superhero game when the driver had still been learning to walk. Or fly, depending.

There was no love in Doug's future. He was adopting a cat and it could sit out on the cabin's porch with him. Maybe he'd let it drink prosecco too.

Bending down— don't go there , Doug warned his libido—the driver hefted something large up off the pavement and lugged it over to his car where he placed it in the back seat. A suitcase? A small boulder? Then he climbed back behind the wheel and drove off.

The day's entertainment over, Doug sat back down and began formulating a reply to April's email.

PER MY PREVIOUS EMAIL

"Hmm." Maybe all caps was a bad idea. Doug selected the words and changed to a less scream-like font size.

As a senior member of the subpar team, I prefer working alone. And, as negotiated, I will not be taking any further assignments as Long Shot. Thus, there is no point in assigning a new agent as my partner.

A muffled explosion from outside told Doug the Innovation Unit's newest test car had ignited, so it must be close to noon. If this Nicholas Sedgewick kid was reporting for duty, where the hell was he?

Didn't matter. Doug wasn't working with him.

He refocused on the email he was attempting to compose. Ten minutes later, he hadn't added anything new because what he really wanted to say was fuck you but he also wanted his retirement benefits. He was about to click Send when the elevator and his email pinged at the same time.

Subject: Nicholas Sedgewick

Nicholas Sedgewick has arrived. Proceed to the elevator bay and escort Mr. Sedgewick to your shared workstation.

Proceed. He'd fucking proceed , alright. The countdown calendar pinned to the wall of his cubicle caught his eye. November eighteenth was circled in red. Dragging in a lungful of oxygen through his nose, Doug held it for thirty seconds before blowing it back out.

Even before he finished weaving through the maze of cubicles, Doug had a bad feeling, one reminiscent of the beginning of a bad case of heartburn, that this "new partnership" was going to be much more complicated than the uppers made it seem. It always was.

Swinging around the last corner, Doug spotted him waiting at the elevator. The hot younger man who drove the angry bee slash constipated bear hybrid.

The kid was nervous. Good.