“Genghis, you have the oven set at 530 degrees!” She turned the oven off. “The box said 350!”
“Really! Are you sure about that?”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure.” She grabbed another box of brownie mix from the cupboard. “Mister Khan, let me show you how we do things down here on Earth. Go get me the eggs and milk outta the fridge. Mister Trent!” She turned toward Jeff. “We’re gonna need coffee.”
Jennifer was in her bedroom changing into an oversized t-shirt, gray flannel sweatpants, and thick wool socks. Jeff was filling the coffee mugs, relating to Genghis what Jennifer told him about her day. “Well, that’s not a fair assumption,” Genghis said when he heard the story. “Not fair at all!”
“I know, but . . .” Jeff started to say, but stopped when he heard Jennifer come out of her room and enter the bathroom. Then, Genghis continued in a lower voice.
“It’s not like she’s a hardened criminal, a bank robber, or anything like that! It was a solicitation charge, a misdemeanor on this planet!”
“I know, but I don’t think the applications asked for such particulars.” Jeff said as the oven timer started to beep. “I think all they saw was the check in the 'arrested box' and didn’t bother taking it any further.” Jeff walked to the oven and pushed the timer button off.
Genghis walked out of the kitchen in a huff. “Not if I can help it!”
“Twinkie!” Jeff called out to her. “The timer went off! What do you want me to do?”
“Go ahead and turn the oven off,” Jennifer called back.
Jeff looked at the oven like he was about to defuse a bomb. He quickly spun the oven knob to the off position. “What now? Twinkie?” He peered through the oven window. “What should I do now?” He didn't want to repeat Genghis’s mistake with the first batch. “Do you want me to take them out?”
He could hear the toilet flush. “Just leave them for a second.”
“But aren’t they going to burn?”
“They’ll be fine for a second.” He heard the faucet running.
“You sure? You sure I shouldn’t take them out? Won’t they burn?”
She came out of the bathroom. “They’ll be fine, believe me, we won’t have to call the burn unit! It won’t be another Genghis fiasco.”
“Hey!” Genghis fired back from the living room. “I'm sitting right here!”
Jennifer grabbed the dish towel and removed the brownies. She let them cool for a couple of minutes while getting a knife from a drawer then cut the perfectly baked brownies into nice cubes. She placed them on a plate while Jeff brought their coffee mugs into the living room.
Jennifer sat next to Genghis, who was sitting on the couch, haunches on the seat cushion, front legs planted on the ground. Jeff sat next to Jennifer, eating a brownie. “Mmm, excellent, Miss Winkles!”
“Thank you, Mister Trent. It’s a little something I’ve perfected over the . . .” She paused in mid sentence, staring at the computer on the coffee table.
Genghis looked at her with a smirk and said, “Nice picture, Twink.”
Jennifer was staring at her own mugshot from four years earlier on the computer screen. “That’s not funny, Genghis!” She leaned in. “Come on! That’s not funny at all! Get that off.” She looked closer. “Is that . . . that’s my arrest record too!”
Genghis slipped off the couch and sat on the floor. “Yes, it is. And look at this.” He made a tisk-tisk sound. “You’ve been a very bad girl!”
“It was entrapment!” she said, turning toward Jeff. “Jeff, make him stop . . . please!”
“Oh! I don’t think so.” Trent knew exactly what Genghis was up too. “Mister Khan?”
“Yes, Mister Trent?”
“Proceed.”
“Miss Winkles, watch what I can do.” He then made a couple of keystrokes and a small window popped up in the middle of the screen over her mugshot and arrest record. It had three words within it, “Delete” then under that “Yes” - “No”.
Genghis playfully manipulated the cursor so it went from yes to no, then back again while singing La, La, Laaa in a high-pitched Curly Howard voice. Finally, he settled the cursor on yes and hit execute. A small green horizontal bar graph started to move across the delete box displaying numbers as it went. 58%, 88%, 99%, then disappeared along with Jennifer’s mugshot and arrest record.
“Genghis,” she whispered, “what did you do?”
“I permanently deleted your record from their hard drive. You now have a clean slate.”
“Now, Twinkie,” Jeff added, “this doesn’t mean for you to go and start up a Walter White styled meth lab or anything like that.” They'd just started watching episodes of Breaking Bad in between Three Stooges binges.
“Jeff,” she said, “I wouldn’t, and I have no interest ever going back to . . .”
“Twinkie, Twinkie,” he interrupted her. “I’m kidding!” He reached down and picked up two brownies from the plate Jennifer had brought in. He handed one to Genghis. “Now, the next time you go to town to look for a job, you don’t have to worry about that section on the application anymore.”
Jennifer felt as if she had a new lease on life and also felt like crying. She looked at the both of them and said, “Mister Khan, Mister Trent. Thank you!” She then put her arm around Trent’s shoulder and the other around Genghis’s and pulled them close to her.
“I love you guys.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The following morning Jeff and Genghis decided that it was best to tell Jennifer about Trisha before she heard it on the news. They sat her down and told her that they intercepted the call the other morning and didn’t want to tell her until they were absolutely sure it was Trisha. They left out the brutality of her death. Jennifer cried for her friend, but wasn’t surprised by the outcome. She told Jeff and Genghis that she always thought Trisha took unnecessary risks when it came to her clients. Climbing into cars with more than one occupant. Not letting
