Soul Standard

by Richard Thomas

  Mallory is already driving. She tosses those eyes of hers to the rearview. “Victor, Max. Max, Victor.” I offer my hand, Reiss’s blood. “Max and I had a bit of a run-in with Reiss.”

  “Tell me that’s not Reiss’s blood.” All those loopholes he’ll have to uncover to find a way to distance himself from this, I can practically see the bellows pumping blood and ideas through those throbbing forehead veins.

  “There’s a chance some of it could be mine,” I tell him. I look up to Mallory. “Maybe the surgeon really was good enough to not leave a scar.”

  “Who’s this?” Victor asks again.

  Mallory runs a red light. “He was Reiss’s number two. Not likely anymore.”

  My turn. “What’s the lawyer doing in the car?”

  Mallory talks through another red light. “There’s a reason Reiss thought Victor snitched. And there’s a reason I know he didn’t.”

  “Reiss thought I ratted him out?” Victor burrows deeper into his corner.

  “This is the donor, Victor. Max Phlebalm. One of the donors.”

  I jump immediately on the qualifier. “One of how many?”

  Victor suffocates my attempt. “If Reiss thought I had a part in leaking the news, why am I not already dead?”

  “How many donors?” I’m a child fighting for time between two bickering parents.

  “Why’d you tell him it was me, Mallory?” Victor says over me.

  Mallory slows as she crosses the border between the Financial District and the Red Light. “That’s where Reiss’s blood comes in. We got to him first.”

  “Why couldn’t you have told him the truth?” Victor yells louder.

  Mallory slides into the alley behind Warner’s Bakery, shuts off the ignition, and leans back. Her eyes bounce between Victor and me. She bites the lawyer’s name. “Victor, now is not the—”

  “So my life is expendable, then?”

  “How many?” I repeat.

  “It should be your life, Mallory. You’re the one who told the press.” And before she can smack away the words, they’re out, floating, Reiss’s blood belongs on her hands, not mine.

  “How fucking many,” I yell.

  She exhales, drops her eyes to mine. “Many,” she finally admits. “There were many donors.”

  Victor paces the bakery, dodging floor cracks and renegade bolts jutting from the machinery as though he himself designed these flaws. We’re back in the same concrete room from earlier in the day, only this time my confusion has given way to collective tension. Mallory stuffs files into a duffle bag. The lawyer watches the desktop monitor, studies the security camera image of the loading dock.

  “It wasn’t meant to go this way,” Mallory says for the sixth time, trying once again to offset the lawyer’s brewing anger. She’s moved from the desk drawers to a small petty cash safe bolted to the floor. All bills. The sight reinvigorates my fading suspicions. We’re all still invested in the legacy economy.

  “What the fuck is with you two, anyway? Mal, you knew the drill. Cut ties immediately with anyone who compromises our plans.”

  “We grew up together.”

  “I don’t give a shit if he’s your brother.”

  “I should be just as pissed as you,” I say to Victor. “Just a few hours ago I was sent to get rid of you. Now I’m standing in a bakery, forced to see you as some sort of compatriot.”

  Victor looks to Mallory. “Is he serious?”

  Mallory wrestles with the zipper on her bag. “Max, I’m sorry I brought you in like this. We were meant to have more time. Victor and I have been working together for a while on a business venture that stands to be quite successful as the economy shifts. I wanted you to be a part of it.” She adds, “I wasn’t planning on you stabbing the most powerful man in the city with a candleholder.”

  I swear Victor’s anger turns to glee for a fleeting moment when he hears this. I soften my anger as well. “To be fair, I assumed it was my kidney in there that I was stabbing.”

  “Reiss rules the Financial District, but here in the Red Light we’ve got a sympathetic community.” Mallory zips the bag. “But, still, we should hurry.”

  “That doesn’t explain why the lawyer and you came together in the first place.”

  “Law is about precedents. Victor here was helping to facilitate outcomes in some current high-profile cases that would eventually serve as strong precedents for probable future cases in a Favor economy.”

  Victor, clearly unable to hide his pride, says to me, “The FDA is investigating Juice pretty aggressively right now. Should the FDA lose a bit of power, transporting basic needs—water, rice,” he gestures broadly, “bread—becomes much, much easier for people like us.”

  “Isn’t Juice illegal?” I ask, knowing that it is. Just months ago, Juice—a dishrag sweat concoction of alcohol, powered uppers, downers, and everything in between blended to a liquid drug the color of eggplant—began leaking its way onto the gilded streets of the Financial District, having saturated the surrounding districts months earlier. Reiss, with no knowledge of the drug, apparently found insult in his ignorance. He claimed to own the streets and therefore should know of everything taking place on them. When he learned how pervasive the drink was, opportunity replaced anger. He’s been toying with regulation and distribution, working solely with an Outskirts rave shack called Club X, but I thought of it only as a pet project, nothing he was taking seriously.

  “That term—illegal—doesn’t apply when Arthur Reiss is involved.” He grins again with pride. “Hell, I’m good enough that I could argue Reiss simply being alive is breaking six or seven laws. The truth is, I don’t know why he is involved in Juice or why he’s floating anywhere near the FDA cases. But he is. And as long as he’s busy pulling strings for his own gain, we might as well be there to suck up some fringe benefits.”

  “Reiss said you weren’t working for him.”

  “I’m not, technically. I’m working a minor case tangentially related to the big, headline cases. Legally, Arthur and I have absolutely no connections.”

  “Let’s keep it that way,” Mallory interrupts, gesturing for both of us to follow her to the car.

  Victor directs Mallory to an upscale steakhouse not far from his own law office building. He claims to own the restaurant, and though I have no reason not to believe him, I feel compelled to strip this man of any power he might have. He’s already surpassed me in terms of wealth, stature, importance, and closeness to Mallory. I fight back, call my childhood friend by her childhood name, “Mal,” and I ask her to wait up.

  We burst through the front door. Mallory freezes in front of the maître d’ podium, lets Victor continue on without her. Candle flames fight against the rush of outside air.

  “Why’d you leak the transplant?” Day job summaries between wives and husbands cushion the polite tap of silver against china all around us. Mallory and I, we are an unintentional couple amid celebrations of domesticity. Ten years ago, I would have killed for this moment.

  “Business.” She tries to turn away, but I have her by the arm. The skin is even softer than I imagined. “Victor and I—and you—needed to weaken him. I hoped that the media would take over soon after the story leaked, do their fucking job and dig into Reiss deep and hard enough that he’d buckle, but they’ve been slow to dig.”

  “Reiss is walking red tape. If he’s involved, justice takes eons.”

  “Could have used your wisdom a few weeks ago, huh?”

  “Then why did he send us out to kill the lead?” Patrons are shifting their gaze to us.

  “He must have known that eventually someone would dig deep enough. People can only be paralyzed by fear for so long before they snap. Killing the lead was meant to be a warning.”

  “But you’re the lead,” I tell her, finally dropping her arm. “Should I kill you?”

  “Should you?”

  “You coming?” Victor yells from the kitchen. He’s backdropped by a wall of knives and cleavers. The imag
e chills me.

  Mallory drags me through the kitchen, down a narrow flight of greasy stairs, to a bunkered office not too aesthetically dissimilar from Mallory’s own Warner Bakery office. “Am I the only one without a secret cave?” I ask as Victor motions for Mallory and me to take a seat.

  Victor pulls a chain on a squat desk lamp, lending a conspiratorial ambiance to the basement room. He offers a drink pulled from his desk drawer—Mallory accepts, I decline—then mutters, “The attack on Reiss isn’t going to look good.”

  “Self-defense,” Mallory suggests.

  “Where are your cuts?” he asks.

  I show him my swollen palm, a pressure wound from the candle holder.

  Victor dismisses the degree of the injury.

  “What about the kidney, or lack thereof?” I say. “There’s something bigger than a wounded financial big shot going on.”

  “Trust me,” Victor says. “Right now there is nothing bigger than this wounded financial big shot.”

  Police sirens crescendo outside.

  “Already?”

  “Do you even know Reiss?” Victor says. Red and blue lights strobe the walls at the top of the stairs. Candlelight flickers again. A herd of cops clatter down the stairway and into the basement office, catching all three of us confused and scared. I have my hands in the air, unsure what else to do, as Mallory and Victor dash through a back door. I follow.

  The door leads to a stairway and a back alley, the night having shined the pavement to a dewy gloss. Red and blue bounce off of slick brick walls. Victor leads, dancing around dumpsters, through even darker alleys, past upscale storefronts devolving into boarded and barred windows, until the red and blue lights have faded along with the sirens. We’re miles it seems before we stop for breath. Victor and I split a quick study of our trail, relieved by the unexpected comfort of silence. But relief quickly fades to horror. “Mallory’s gone.”

  Victor darts into another alley, passing through shadows with concerning confidence. He’s run these alleys before. He’s paid these shadows to keep quiet. I follow close, gasping for breath. We’re finally walking, casual, our midnight stroll façade broken by Victor’s attempt to open the door of every parked car we pass. We end our escape in the backseat of a late model Oldsmobile. “A friend’s car,” Victor says, never starting the engine. Instead, he removes the rear-view mirror and slides down into the seat below the window.

  “Is it?”

  “I could tell you the truth, but you’d be giving up plausible deniability.”

  “Does that really work?”

  “It does if you’ve got the right jury.” Victor shifts the mirror in his hand, catches a bum limping down the sidewalk.

  “What about Mallory?”

  Victor ignores me. One minute, she’s there. The next, not. Am I a shithead for leaving her alone? Or am I a bigger shithead for assuming I could have helped anyway? “Call someone.”

  “I’m not getting anyone else involved in this. Get comfortable,” Victor says. “The hounds won’t rest, so we might as well spend the night here.”

  “In a parked car? But I just met you,” I say, trying for humor to salve the nerves.

  He opens the glove compartment, scribbles a note on the back of a scrap of paper and positions it on the dashboard, says it’s in case the owner finds us squatting during the night. I grab the note and read it, despite his insistence otherwise: PLEASE LEAVE US ALONE. CONSIDER US INDEBTED TO YOU, then Victor’s name and phone number.

  “So much for plausible deniability.”

  “This won’t work.”

  “A Favor from a lawyer is better than gold, Max.”

  Victor is snoring before my own nervous chuckle dies.

  I wait until the sun overrides the streetlights before waking Victor. I muss my hair and rub my eyes to feign a long night of healthy sleep. I don’t think my lids met even once. Every time I tried to drift off, visions of Mallory forced me to full attention. One second there. The next second gone.

  And why not sneak out during the night? Because I’d be just one more empty body in the street by sunrise. I know my limits.

  Victor took to the night like one accustomed to forced sleep cycles. Such is the life of an in-demand lawyer, I suppose. I don’t know what to think of him yet. Though I was never sure of my thoughts for Mallory either, at least with her there’s a history. We navigated childhood together. With Victor, only alleyways.

  As we reorient ourselves to the new daylight I ask Victor, “Where should we start looking for Mallory?”

  He takes the question with pause, runs his fingers through his hair, and shakes the sleep away. “She’ll find us. We’ve got to get back to the bakery. I have to assume there’ll be some damage.”

  “You’re not concerned?”

  “Not even a little.” He pecks around the steering column, says old cars without steering locks can be hotwired pretty easily, but he quickly gives up. “Hold tight,” he says and leaves me alone in the backseat. He straightens his suit and approaches a house, the owner’s house I assume. I duck into the backseat, paranoia still guiding my reflexes. Victor returns just moments later with a key in his hand. “A Favor from a lawyer, Max. I told you, it’s better than gold.”

  “I thought you weren’t bringing anyone else into this.”

  “You want to walk to the bakery?”

  “I don’t ever want to walk these streets again.”

  He starts the car, pulls away from the curb. We remain silent even as we coast into the Warner Bakery back alley.

  The prep floor has been dismantled to bolts with the lack of delicacy and care afforded by a herd of sledgehammers. Flour and sugar coats the walls and floor in fine dust, boot and finger prints dragged through everything, mapping the destruction. The dayshift crew works around the mess, adjusting to the new version of life as best they can. After all, the sledgehammers haven’t broken them. Though the factory line still churns like days past, the air feels almost wet with residual intrusion, like the stink of Reiss’s foot soldiers still billows in sweaty clouds above us.

  “It’s just a business,” I try. “It’s not personal.”

  “For me, business is personal.” He turns back to the alleyway door. “And Reiss knows that. Bring a man’s business down, you bring the man down.”

  “But the business isn’t down.” I gesture to the workers, them wearing hairnets and white coats like any other day.

  “Which seems strange to me,” Victor says. He continues to pan the room, on the ready for a surprise attack. “Honestly, I wonder why this place is even still standing at all. Why not burn the whole fucking thing down?” He turns toward the back office.

  And that’s when I realize we’re far from finished with Reiss. I know Reiss. He leaves his targets with just enough hope to keep them going. The mark of a good executioner is the ability to maintain peak pain as long as possible. But I dodge the impulse to play hated messenger and follow Victor through the wrecked prep room into the back office.

  The back wall is intact, an observation he attacks, literally, opening to wall studs packed tight with bound papers, a few bills, and even a row of untapped liquor bottles. He grabs the papers and turns to see me silent and confused. “What’s wrong? Are you sad I knew this about your lifelong, childhood friend and you didn’t?”

  “Are we going back for Mallory now?”

  Victor turns back to me, flour from the floor agitated by his quick feet. He handles the question like he might one from a child, with visible disdain and stretched patience. “She knows how to handle herself, Max.”

  “Then what? We assume she’s fine and just sit back waiting for her to show?”

  “No. We proceed with her investigation. We go organ hunting.”

  Victor thumbs through files at a stoplight. A folder, one taken from within the beaten wall back at the bakery, projects so clearly to me as a crime story trope that it makes me laugh. “As long as we don’t call it a satchel I think I can stomach it,” I say.
He then hands me a document with medical information fine-printed to the margins about a man whose name means nothing to me. Someone has stamped CONFIDENTIAL in the top right corner. Victor ignores my struggle for composure as I fight back another laugh.

  “That guy, he’s one of Reiss’s donors.” This shuts me up. He hands me the rest of the papers. “All of these, too.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Mallory has been tracking Reiss for a long time, even before you got her a job. She’s been compiling medical histories not only for him, but for his donors as well. Every single one of these people donated organs to Reiss. According to what Mallory’s discovered, Reiss has two hundred eleven kidneys stuffed into that body of his.”

  Mallory said it; I was just one of the donors. “I didn’t hit a single one when I stabbed him. What’s that say for my marksmanship?” I take two Vicodin from my pocket and dry swallow until my throat seizes.

  “She’s got recipient records, too. Hundreds of them.”

  He holds this second stack against the first, letting tit-for-tat implication speak for the stacks’ even measure. They line up quite evenly. For every donor, a recipient. “I can’t imagine Reiss organizing philanthropic transplants.”

  “Neither can I. We find out what happened to the organs, we may have enough to bring down Reiss.”

  “And bring back Mal?”

  “Yes, and Mallory.”

  The light turns green. We coast across Pale Street into the Financial District, our thieved vehicle rumbling in stark contrast to the precision silence of sleek four-wheel status symbols around us. Victor shifts in his seat, fighting the discomfort of being a lawyer with a commoner’s car. Despite his Red Light business dreams, he’s all Financial District.

  “Why’d she sniff out the records in the first place?”

  “Keep your enemies close. You really think she got a job in that fucking building working for Reiss just to cross her fingers for a corner office of her own someday?”

  He’s prodding me. I can sense his grin. “That building has built a lot of careers for a lot of people.”

  “Evil people.”