She’d save the heroics for later. For now, she had to blend in. Thinking like a criminal, Jayne consoled herself, doesn’t mean you are one.
Improvise, she remembered.
Improvise.
+++
Pie in the Sky Casino, The Landing, Deep Wen, Headless Hope, Amaros
Van refused to carry Jayne and Chet in his rickshaw any further; all three made what little remained of their journey on foot while he dragged the rickshaw behind him.
As Chet led the way, Jayne slunk back to speak to Van. “Why’d you pay Chet with the money I gave you?”
Van shrugged, the empty rickshaw tilting with the rise of his shoulders. “I believe in your cause, I guess.” He paused, taking a moment before deciding whether or not he should say the next thing. “I know who you are, and I believe in you.”
Jayne knew she had told Van who she was, technically, but it was clear that he had known all along. “Really?”
Van laughed incredulously. “Everyone knows who you are. In fact, if you want to spend the rest of your life avoiding the authorities, Deep Wen is your best bet. I’d say for every honest man you meet in Deep Wen, you’re being tricked by a liar.”
“Why do you believe me?”
Van gave Jayne a serious look. The guy didn’t seem to have a cheerful bone in his body. “When you live here long enough, you get pretty good at smelling corruption. You develop a sixth sense for it. You don’t have it, but those against you… I just know.”
Jayne gave Van a side-eye. “Yeah. Speaking of… So, you roid, huh?”
Van grunted from the back of the throat. A sore point. “You try pulling a rickshaw up and down this fucking city, lugging fat tourists. You try competing with the other drivers. You try making enough money with a job no one respects. I take the roids because I need them to stay alive. That’s the truth. It doesn’t concern you.”
Jayne backed down. “Jeeze. Sorry for asking.”
Van sighed, shut his eyes and shook his head. “It’s fine. It’s just… it’s a hard city to live in. We do what we can.”
The conversation kept Jayne distracted. She was improvising. She had placed her confidence in Chet. She sized him up as too much of an idiot to trick her at this point. Besides, if he turned out to be a weasel, she’d just improvise again.
But he led them right to where he promised, the back entrance of Pie in the Sky Casino.
Chet placed his hands together and bowed mockingly. “This… is where I leave you. It’s been an honor guiding you on this spiritual journey.”
Jayne was more than happy to rid herself of Chet, but she turned to Van. “I need you to stay.”
Van shook his head.
Jayne pulled more cash out. Damn. Jayne reflected on the fact that once you start spending it’s hard to stop. It was kind of like walking down the wrong path and hanging out with the wrong people. Deep Wen has officially cast its spell on me. “I need you to stay. As soon as I’m done in there, I’ll need to get back to Artimus.”
Van frowned down at the money. Then, without a decision registering across his face at all, he snatched the money out of her hand. “Deal.”
Chet entered a secret code on the panel by the door. They could hear the intricate locking mechanism inside the door rotate until Chet could open it. “Alright. It’s a straight shot to Cayetano. At the door you’ll find a guard. He’ll be armed. Don’t be afraid of him, just tell him Grandma Josie sent you.”
Jayne had gotten so deep into the hellish hole of this nightmare, she felt it was necessary to display just the slightest bit of civil graciousness. She shook Chet’s hand. “Thank you, Chet.”
Chet smiled, nodded. “Good luck.”
Jayne stepped into the no-frills industrial hallway. Chet shut the door behind her, and she heard the locking mechanism rotate back into place.
Jayne was half-worried this dark hallway would lead her right into another rave, but there was no thumping bass.
After a moment of grasping her way through the dark, lights buzzed on thanks to the armed guard standing by a switch and the door at the far end.
He held up the blaster in a strictly business, surprisingly unaggressive way. “What’s your purpose here?”
Jayne didn’t miss a beat. “Grandma Josie sent me.”
The armed guard lowered his weapon. Now that his face wasn’t blocked by the sights of a gun, she realized he couldn’t have been more than twenty years-old. He stepped away from the door, and swiped the panel to open it up. “Go on. You have five minutes.”
Five minutes, Jayne repeated to herself. Wasn’t prepared for that. Alright, she told herself, improvise.
She hustled down the hallway and through the door, which the armed guard slammed behind her.
Five minutes.
She had five minutes to take in the massive warehouse-like space around her, concrete floors with high, exposed ceilings. The entire space extended at least fifty yards in each direction. She had five minutes to realize the entire room only had two people in it. Her, and a guy sitting on a couch in the middle of the massive warehouse playing a video game with a 4D rig.
“Hey!” she shouted at the back of the guy’s head, hoping he’d have the courtesy to turn around and look at her.
He didn’t. “You come here!”
Jayne was shocked by the brattiness. The young, nearly prepubescent whine in the command.
Fuck this dude, Jayne brooded. “No. You turn around.”
“Nuh-uh.”
What the hell? Jayne already hated this guy. Artimus was an eccentric, theatrical weirdo but at least he had an unusual amount of manners. She felt like she was dealing with a child. “Un-link yourself from that 4D rig right now and look me in the eyes!”
“Make me.”
She had four minutes left.
That does it. Jayne marched across the expansive warehouse, each footstep’s echoes cutting the remaining reverberations of their shouts. She walked right up to the couch and knocked the rig off this guy’s face in the sweeping motion of a smack.
As the rig flew off and tugged on his ears, the brat hunched his head forward and winced. “Ow! That really hurt!” He finally turned around and faced Jayne. “Why’d you do that?”
Jayne looked down on the round, hairless face of a fifteen-year-old kid. It had been a weird couple weeks, but she wasn’t quite prepared for this. “Are you… Are you Cayetano?”
Cayetano slumped and answered with the infuriating disrespectful derision that fifteen-year-olds are oh so good at. “Uhh… Yeah?”
Jayne felt herself unwillingly take on the scolding tone of an angry mother. “Artimus sent me. I’m here to talk about your operation, your… drug operation… I’m sorry, are you really Cayetano?”
Cayetano stuck his feet up on the chip covered coffee table littered with soda bottles. “Wait a minute, did my dad send you?”
Jayne couldn’t help it. She guffawed, totally unprepared for something so insane to come out of this kid’s mouth. She was even more surprised when she instantly believed it, when she instantly knew it was true without a doubt her mind. She covered her mouth before startled, nervous laughter got the best of her. “Yeah. Yeah, he did. Your dad sent me.”
Cayetano groaned. “My dad sucks. He’s so pissy. About everything.”
Jayne walked around the sofa. Considering what tidy, pristine neat-freak Artimus was, it made sense why Cayetano was such a messy slob. “Can I…”
Cayetano scooted over to make room for Jayne. “What does he want?”
Jayne sat down on the couch. “Apparently you’re moving in on his operations. He wants you to cut it out.” There was that tone again. Weird, because Jayne had no ambitions to ever be a mother. Especially knowing that she might have a child who would reach kingpin status before they even had to shave.
Cayetano scoffed. “Ugh, that’s so fucking like him. Tell him that if he wants me to cut it out, he shouldn’t have made me so good at my job and treated me like shit for it. He t
aught me everything I know, and now he regrets it. I run the fourth largest casino in Deep Wen, and the third largest hold on our market.”
Improvise, Jayne repeated like a mantra. Improvise, improvise, improvise. “He’s proud of you.”
Cayetano gave Jayne a serious glance. Briefly. “Yeah, right. I bet he told you to say that.”
Improvising, Jayne told herself, is not the same as lying. Well, maybe it is. “No. He actually told me not to tell you that. But he’s proud of you. Look… I’m not supposed to say this either, but Artimus, your dad… I guess, I think he’d work with you.”
Cayetano was listening. He ran a casino, somehow. Family connections, it seemed. That was Jayne’s guess. But he was still fifteen. He was still fragile, still gullible, still fifteen. “What are you saying?”
If this didn’t work, Jayne was digging herself a hole so deep it’d make Deep Wen look like it was above sea level. “He wants to form an alliance with you. He didn’t want me to tell you this either, but… he said he wanted to form the alliance as business partners. Not as family.”
She had less than two minutes left.
Cayetano rolled the decision around in the back of his mind. “Let me think.” Then he looked at his watch. Was he timing her?
He reached for a bag of chips, but it was empty. He threw it on the ground and grabbed another one. He squeezed the bottom together until he popped it open at the top, blowing out chip crumbs like a volcano.
He threw handfuls of chips into his crumby maw. Seasoned potato dust rained down on his lap like snow.
With a full mouth, he looked up to Jayne. “Did he talk about terms?”
Jayne was getting good at making things up on the spot. “He wants to negotiate with you, but you can help set them. He seems very… open… to new ideas.”
Cayetano beamed. “Really!?”
Jayne nodded. “Yeah.”
Cayetano grabbed more chips and shoved them in his mouth. “Finally! I have so many good ideas. Like delivering all the frenaline with drones. Wouldn’t that be sick?”
He was definitely a fifteen-year-old, Jayne judged. “Yeah. He loves those ideas.”
Cayetano checked his watch again. She had less than a minute left.
But he just kept thinking.
That’s when Jayne realized she should corner this guy into a full commitment. This arrangement, this lie, could fall apart and blow up in her face too easily. “But you have to meet with him tomorrow. As soon as possible.”
Cayetano reached the end of the chip bag. He crumpled it up and threw it on the ground. He reached across the coffee table for a soda. He chugged about half of it and sloshed it around. He ran it back and forth between his teeth, knocking the chip crumbs out from beneath his teeth.
Jayne did not miss being a teenager at all.
She was approaching the finish line though. As soon as that five minutes finished, the guard would be in here. If she had to fight him, she would, but that might ruin everything.
“Okay.”
Yessss, Jayne celebrated with a mental fist pump. “Good. Artimus will be pleased to hear this.”
Cayetano put his 4D rig back on. “Now go away. I’m playing seventy-eight other people right now and I’ve fallen way behind on my kill count.”
The door opened, and the armed guard appeared ready to demand Jayne’s disappearance.
Jayne nodded toward Cayetano. Better to not risk saying anything else. She turned and left.
Outside, Van was sprawled out in the back of his rickshaw, napping while he waited for Jayne. She knocked his foot off the rest, waking him up. “Hey, wake up!”
Van rubbed his eyes awake and sat up. “Jayne. You’re alive. How’d it go?”
Jayne smiled. “I think… this will somehow work out.”
Van rolled out of the back of the rickshaw and picked up the traces with his muscular arms. “We heading back up?”
Jayne watched Van’s shoulders move through his tight shirt as he lifted up the weight of the rickshaw by the traces. Maybe he relied on ‘roids, but damn did she like to watch. “No, thanks. You’ve done enough.”
Van lowered the rickshaw. He looked relieved, physically, but a little disappointed. “You sure?”
Jayne smiled. “I’ll walk. I need to think… I need to figure out what I’m doing next. I’m kind of making this all up as I go.”
Van reached into his pocket. “If you need me, for anything, here is my card.”
Jayne took the card and zipped it up securely into her hip pocket. “Thank you. For everything.”
Van just threw a dismissive wave. “Eh. It’s a living.” He hoisted his rickshaw back up by the traces. “But if I’m going to be honest with you, I could really go for a nap right now.” He laughed, and Jayne joined in.
He turned and disappeared down one of the many sloping alleys of Deep Wen.
Jayne did an about-face and started cooking up a plan, or improvising a plan if such a thing was possible, as she climbed up the steep street. She didn’t know how it was going to work, but she had no choice. It had to work.
+++
Outside Artimus’ Office, Gilded Gardens Casino, Deep Wen, Amaros
Artimus had given Jayne the position of impromptu guard during the meeting with his son.
She still couldn’t believe that, so far, everything had worked. Cayetano agreed to meet with Artimus under the belief that Artimus wanted to form an alliance. She told Artimus, however, a lie she essentially made up on the spot. “Cayetano’s afraid of you, Artimus. He knows you’ll take him out. He’s not leaning on the safety of being family anymore. In so many words, he’s basically desperate to come to an agreement.”
Those were the lies that led to the, so far, seemingly amicable father-son reunion happening in Artimus’ office.
But not even the heartfelt bonding between dad and offspring could let Jayne ignore the guilt she felt encouraging the expansion of two major drug operations. She had improvised around that little hiccup as well. That element of her plan made her more nervous than anything that might happen between Artimus and Cayetano behind the closed doors behind her.
All Jayne wanted was that information. Who was the woman in black? Who did she work for? And why? And finally, she wanted to get the hell out of Deep Wen and never look back. She wanted to sleep. She had spent the previous night running up and down the length of Deep Wen simply to ensure that the next major step in her plan would pull off without a hitch.
She unzipped her pocket and reached in to run her hand along the ultra-thin panel of Van’s business card. She wouldn’t have made it this far without him. Literally. If she hadn’t hopped into his rickshaw, she’d still be walking around Deep Wen blindly asking sneaky questions, hoping to find a lead.
Jayne looked at the massive hologram clock hovering over the casino below the balcony outside Artimus’ office. He’d been in there with his son for two hours. She walked to the edge of the balcony, which ran around the length of the entire casino, and looked down on the hundreds of gamblers who traveled across Amaros, some across the galaxy, to take a risk on getting what they wanted.
Jayne realized she was no different. Except the stakes, for her, were a little higher. She had lost plenty of money, however.
Jayne heard the huge door to Artimus’ office swing open. She turned around and saw Artimus smiling at her. “Please, Jayne, come in.”
Jayne followed Artimus into his office. He walked over to his desk, which Cayetno lazily sat on the corner of.
Artimus sat behind the desk. The two made quite a pair. “Jayne. Thank you.”
What the hell? Jayne mused. Was Artimus about to get mushy?
Artimus fought back a tear.
Oh god, just as she feared.
Artimus wiped the tear away. “Ordinarily, when someone goes against my wishes, I’m furious. You should be dead. And I’ll be honest, no one bet on this happening. No one is winning any money today. But I am winning a new chapter in my life with my son.”
Jayne nodded. “Yeah. My… pleasure.”
“I don’t know how you did it, but I owe my… happiness to you. A newfound calm. Together, my son and I will control over two-thirds of the drug trafficking in Deep Wen.” Artimus offered Cayetano a fatherly high-five, which Cayetano returned with only a hint of removed irony.
Jayne casually walked over to the aquarium to admire Artimus’ exotic fish. She stealthily removed the paper-thin surveillance mic she had acquired the night before. When she arrived at Artimus’ to deliver the good news, she managed to place it by the aquarium without him noticing.
It was all part of her plan. Of her improvisation. But she did not want the rest of her conversation with Artimus overheard by anyone.
She tucked the surveillance bug into her pocket by Van’s business card. “Deal’s a deal, Artimus. Tell me what I want to know.”
Artimus pointed to a seat before his desk. “Sit down.”
Once Jayne sat down, Artimus nestled in behind his desk, leaning forward to look Jayne right in the eye.
“The woman in black, Nova, that you followed, that led you here? She works for me. But she’s gone now. She disappeared after you first arrived. She, however, was running some operation, some business, on the side.”
Jayne felt her face grow red with frustration. More rabbit holes. More conspiracies. More questions and fewer answers.
Artimus methodically cracked his knuckles. “The young man who was killed? The young man Nova shot, and whose murder has been pinned on you? I hired him to infiltrate the hand-off. I caught wind of Nova on some for-hire mission. Some information hand-off. I didn’t know who the information was for. I had every reason to fear the information was about me. She had plenty of access to it. Fortunately, for my sake, it had nothing to do with me. But I guess, somehow, we’re all connected. Interesting how these things work.”
Jayne clenched her fist under her chin. “Yeah.”
Artimus looked down at his desk, tracing the lines of marble with his fingers. “Amaros is three-hundred million square miles and, yet… so small.” He looked up at his son. He smiled, and then turned to Jayne. “I’m truly sorry, Jayne. I wish I could help you more, especially after you’ve helped me so much. I owe you so much more than to disappoint you. I’m sorry.”
Exposed (Interplanetary Spy for Hire Book 2) Page 19
