I sat in The Sink Hole, waiting for Christine to show up like Pim wrote in the note we left back in her hotel room. I wasn’t why she would bother showing up. If she was what we thought she was, she would be better off just leaving and letting the next guy in line take over the job where she left off. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones ‘Megalomerate’ wanted to see snuffed. There were a few homeless guys I’m sure they’d like to see dead just for the fun of it.
To my surprise, Christine had walked into the bar, looking as perfect and calm as ever. Looking at her you couldn’t tell that two degenerates broke into her hotel room last night, stole her only valuable possession, and then left a somewhat threatening note on the side table. She walked over and sat down in front of me with nothing but a blank stare.
“So, uh, you got our note?”
“Yes, Pete, now what is it you want from me?”
“What do we want from you? I think the more important question is: What is it that you want from us? What’s with that memo from ‘Megalomerate’, whatever that is, and what are all those profiles on us about?”
“Look, Pete, I didn’t come here to set up some hippie circle of trust between Pim’s group and some made up group of crazies in Minnesota.”
“Thanks for the clarification. I never would have been able to piece that together on my own.”
“I was sent here to get the documents that Pim told me about. I wasn’t told anything else.”
“By the way, that wasn’t Pim who gave up all the information about the documents and myself. It was the desperate lover boy Kevin. And how the hell were you planning on getting the documents from us? That memo says ‘by any means necessary.’ Were you going to start waterboarding us or whatever other tactics the CIA taught you?”
“No, I mean, I don’t know. I’m not some sort of shadow agent recruit. I’ve never done something like this before. This is all happening because my father fell into debt with the wrong people. There wasn’t any way he could pay them back, and this was one of his options. He’s not even fit enough to roll out of bed, so I was going to do it for him. I didn’t know what it was I was getting myself into. I thought I was just going to be a glorified courier. I had no idea they wanted me to sneak my way into some underground radical group.”
“You flatter us.”
“Everything escalated so quickly. Once it started there wasn’t any way for me to back out. At least, not without them hurting my father, so I had to go through with it.”
“I figured something similar might be the case. My intuition amazes me sometimes. Anyway, what are you going to do now? I’m sorry to say but I’m not just going to hand everything we have over to you now that you've told me your little sob story. Not because I think what we have is ‘big’ and ‘important’ and can’t fall into the wrong hands – I just simply don’t like you.”
“That’s great, Pete, but now you have a much bigger problem than me. I was just their first plan of action, the cheap one that didn’t really matter if it succeeded or not. When you and Pim stole my laptop, they already knew I failed to do what I was assigned. Every time someone logs into that laptop, it takes a picture of who’s using it, and it audits every action taken. They know you two accessed the memo and are aware of what’s happening. Now, they aren’t going to take any chances.”
“Who is this ‘they’? Megalomerate? I have no idea who or what that is.”
“I’m not sure, either. I just know they’re powerful, rich, and have the means to do whatever they like. You have to trust me, you aren’t safe here anymore. They’ve already sent someone to finish what I’ve started, except they aren’t going to be as nice about it as I have been. You aren’t going to get a chance to ‘uncover’ them like you did with me.”
“What do you suggest we do then? And why are you even telling me all this? What do you have to gain?”
“I have nothing to gain, but since I failed I’m in the same boat as you. Whoever they send after you, I can only assume will be after me next. The worst thing the two of us can do is stay here. We have to start moving, make it harder for them to find us.”
“To do what, delay the inevitable? Maybe when whoever they send gets here they’ll be polite and just ask for the documents. I can hand them over without fuss, and they can be on their merry way.”
“I doubt that, Pete. Whatever you’ve done, it’s pissed these guys off. Before you didn’t know enough to force their hand to violence, but now that you know what you do about me, they’ll be convinced to really go after you.”
“You seem to know a lot about this organization when you claim to have never done this before.”
“It’s not that hard to pick up on some things, Pete, not when they send you an appendage of your father in the mail for failing to do something as simple as not posting enough on an internet message board.”
“Where would we go?”
“Anywhere, just as long as we aren’t still here when their man arrives. We need to leave now.”
“Hold on, I still have a few more questions for you. How did they get so much information about us in those profiles that were on your laptop?”
“I don’t know exactly. I know for the schedules, they’d just pay off some of the locals to keep a watch on you. The bartender here, for instance, is being paid by them. Some of your old coworkers, even people within Pim’s group, but I don’t know who. None of them are aware it’s for anything malicious, all they care about is getting paid to do basically nothing. Take a few notes on people they regularly spend time with, and get some cash for it. Not a hard offer for them to say 'yes' to.”
“So someone Pim and I have been speaking with is informing them?”
“Yes, which is why it’s important you leave now. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Just leave town, now.”
“Christine, I’m not doing anything until I have some idea of a plan of action. What’s the point in just running? I’m not that smart or crafty, and if these people are everything you say they are it won’t be that long before they find me. I don’t have any friends or associates outside of this town that could help me hide out and lay low. I have no cash, nothing of value to my name. Being a man on the run doesn’t seem like it will be a cheap lifestyle.”
“Don’t worry about that, Pete. I have a decent amount of cash on me. Megalomerate gave me a significant amount of money for expenses to complete this mission of theirs. It won’t last forever, but it will be enough to get away for a while. Enough to allow us to come up with a better plan while on the run.”
“You know, we’ve been talking about how this is a ‘we’ thing, how we’re now in this together or something. Why should I do anything with you? Why should I trust anything you’re telling me? The only thing I know about you, is that you were sent here to try and con me, to steal from me, and if necessary, ‘take me out’, or whatever.”
“You don’t have many other options at the moment, Pete. You either don’t believe anything I’m saying to you, stay here and risk all this coming true, or believe me and try and be proactive for once in your life.”
“Well, Christine, I can’t say I have much going on here to be of any reason for me to stay. I’ll go with you, but don’t take this as a sign of trust. I’ve been meaning to get out of this place since my friend died, and if you’re going to bankroll it and drive me out, I’ll take it. First, I have to take care of some things. Make sure my affairs are in order and all that.”
“We need to hurry, Pete. There’s no telling how much time we have left.”
“I know, I know, someone’s coming for us and blah blah blah. You’ve mentioned that a few times already. I just need to take care of some things on my own, and then we can head out, ok? I’ll meet you at the rundown 7-11 at dusk.”
I didn’t like of the shit Christine was throwing on me, I didn’t like this one bit. What the hell was going on? Shit had completely hit the fan, and I was standing right in front of it taking the shit shower in the face. God dammit C
hristine, why couldn’t you have met me at The Sink Hole and confirmed that all of my suspicions were the result of a lifetime of too many drinks and seeing too many bad action movies when I was younger? Now I was about to became a man on the run. Could I call myself a fugitive? Did I need to be on the run from the law to be a fugitive? Maybe this ‘Megalomerate’ organization was a law unit, a special law unit meant to find and eliminate pathetic sacks of crap like myself.
Now, I had to ‘get my affairs in order’. Not sure what I meant when I said that to Christine, but it seemed to have worked in buying myself a little bit of time before I headed off into the great unknown with someone I knew nothing about. This was all a result of her father’s bad debts? Who was he doing business with? For some reason I didn’t think this was the kind of debt collection most banks utilized. Was there some sort of connection between myself and her father? I didn’t know anyone from Minnesota, though for all I knew Christine wasn’t actually from Minnesota. I never bothered to ask. Not that I could trust her answer if I did. For all I knew, she didn’t even have a father. Well, everyone has to have a father to some extent, even if it’s just some guy who donated his sperm looking for some easy cash, but whatever that’s beside the point. I guess it didn’t really matter if I trusted her or not. I had already made up my mind to hit the road and get the hell out of there with her. At the very least I could use her for the car and the cash to put some distance between this crap town and myself. When my bowels finally settled from taking in all the shit I could then decide if I should ditch her or not.
Back to my ‘affairs.’ I thought of two things I should take care of before I left. First, even though Christine told me not to tell anyone about the bombshells she just dropped on me, I couldn’t just leave Pim completely out of the loop. I hated that little guy, but he was in this as much as I was, and I would hate to let him face the grisly fate Christine was predicting for us without any sort of warning. I decided to write a brief note and leave it on my door. He would come around eventually after I was gone and find it. It wouldn’t need to say much, or anything specific about what I was doing. It just said ‘leave town’, or something to that effect. He may not have been the smartest kid in the world but he should be able to pick up on that, or God help him. God help us all if Christine was right.
Next, I had to take care of Paul’s documents. That was what really started the whole mess. Whoever Megalomerate was, they were after what Paul, and his brother before him, discovered. They didn’t really care about me or Pim or anyone else involved, they just wanted to make sure Paul’s discovery didn’t see the light of day. Sure, Pim had already posted some of it online, but if it ever made it to anywhere that mattered, then the mining companies were going to have a real problem on their hands. Megalomerate must have been associated with the mining companies in some way. Maybe it was some sort of umbrella organization? A union of corporations to protect their interests. That made sense, somewhat. As long as Paul’s documents were still around, they were still at risk of this thing blowing up in their face. But what to do with them? Taking them with me just put the documents in Christine’s possession, which is exactly what she was after to begin with. Her whole escape plan might just be a con to get me to bring the documents to her. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t bring them to Pim, either. Someone in his group was informing on us, and I couldn’t imagine it would take much more for Megalomerate to get them to turn even further against us to try and steal the documents or find out where they were hidden from Pim. No, I would have to take care of it all on my own. What if I buried it somewhere? Like some sort of pirate’s secret treasure – but where? It couldn’t be obvious enough for someone else to stitch together the location, but still had to be easy enough for me to remember so I could still use it as a viable threat. I also didn’t have much time to take care of it before I needed to meet Christine. There were only a few hours of daylight left. Where to then? I decided, the area Paul brought me to when he was training me. It was only a three mile hike from town. I would be able to make it there and back in time to meet up with Christine. There was nothing remarkable about it, nothing to distinguish it from any other random stretch of forest that surrounded this town to anyone but myself. It was as good a place to hid the documents as any.
I did my best to cover my tracks on the way out there, however good that would be in the end. I got lucky and found a waterproof container in the storage unit to bury it in. Let’s hope I could find my way back there when I needed it. I like to think the memory of Paul and me bonding out here in the woods would be something I’d remember forever, but God knows what my leaky sieve of a brain would be able to retain. The damage I had already caused through alcohol abuse was only likely to get worse with the way things in my life were going. I was pretty sure I had found the two trees we hung our hammocks between after I had built my first fire. I buried it right between them.
With that taken care of, it was time to head off to Christine. The only things I brought with me were a single pair of underwear, socks, and a shirt. I hoped Christine enjoyed the smell of my filth. I didn’t foresee us having many opportunities to bathe. It was all her idea, though, so she only had herself to blame if she didn’t like it. I saw her car now at the 7-11 as I approached. This was it, the beginning of my time as man on the run with nothing to lose.
“You ready to go, Pete?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be. Know where we’re heading?”
“No. Let’s go.”
Chapter 9
It was midday on a quiet afternoon. Only a few patrons sat around the bar, typical for that time of day. The patrons minded their own business, no one spoke to one another. Most were spread out throughout the bar, sitting alone, nursing the drinks that sat in front of them. Two sat at a table next to each other, yet still they were in complete silence as they stared down at their drinks. The one employee stood behind the bar. He slowly and calmly wiped glasses clean and his bided his time, waiting for the next order.
In walked a man, tall, muscular, with long scraggly hair. His combat boots hit the floor with a dull thud that echoed through the quiet bar with each step. His leather jacket screeched as it stretched as his shoulders rocked back in worth with a menacing swagger. He scanned across the bar, his face a blank slate until he ejected brown saliva out of his mouth onto the floor. He approached the bar, and took a seat on a stool between two other patrons. The stool wobbled beneath his weight, uneven on its four legs. The man let out a displeased grunt, looked around him, pulled the hat off the patron to his right, and placed it under the uneven stool leg. The patron opened his mouth to protest, but when he was met with the man’s scowl, he thought it better to pretend he never had a hat. With the stool now balanced, and the patron demoralized, the man turned away, the scowl melting away to an expressionless stare. He tapped his thick, heavy fingers on the bar to get the attention of the bartender, who cautiously made his way toward the man.
“Would you like to order something, sir?” the bartender asked.
“Whiskey,” the man replied.
The bartender poured a whiskey into a tumbler, and placed it in front of the man. The man stared at the glass, and did not move. He turned his gaze back to the bartender and said, “In a pint glass, please.”
“Uh, ok,” the bartender said, initially not quite sure what to make of the request. The bartender then poured the contents of the tumbler into a pint glass, and placed it in front of the man.
“No, fill the pint glass with whiskey,” the man growled back at the bartender.
With a confused and concerned look on his face, the bartender did as requested. He filled the pint glass to the brim with whiskey. The man grabbed the glass, looked at the bartender without a single sign of appreciation, and gulped down the drink. Within a second the whiskey was gone. Not a single drop escaped the man’s mouth. The man set the glass back down, completely empty, without flinching from the searing burn of the cheap alcohol that flowed down his throat into his stomach
. After a minute, the man looked to the bartender and said, “Another.”
The other patrons of the bar had taken notice. They all stared at the man with their jaws agape. An older patron with white hair stood up from his stool, and said, “Just who the hell are you, mister?”
The man turned toward to the older patron. “What’s it to you?”
“N-nothing mister. I’ve just never seen a main drink liquor like that. What you just did would kill an ordinary man.”
“I’m looking for a man named Pete. Do you know him?”
“N-no, I don’t think I do, mister.”
“Then you’re useless to me.” The man turned back to his drink, finishing it in much the same manner as the previous one. Once finished, he stood up from his stool, and re-scanned the bar area to take in any changes from when he first sat down. He took it all in at a sloth’s pace, and moved toward the two patrons sitting together at a table in the corner. As he approached them, their gazes moved from him to their drinks, hoping desperately that he intended to head to the bathroom behind them, and not to their table. The man stopped, standing perpendicular to their table. The grinding of his teeth was the only sound audible in the bar.
Set Me Alight Page 9
