Leverage

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  I slowly shake my head no. “I can’t think of anything that stood out.” I then talk through getting on the boat and leaving port. The cops let me talk uninterrupted.

  It’s easier to talk to the cops when you’re telling the truth. Well, mostly the truth.

  They ask a few clarifying questions here and there, but then they ask the question I had been preparing for: “Where can we reach you if we have more questions?” the female cop asks.

  The last thing I’m going to do is give them a physical address, so I give them an email address and an excuse about moving around to various parts of the city doing the touristy thing. You don’t want to lie and give them a fake address; as soon as they establish it’s fake, they’re going to come looking for you.

  Both of them regard me silently for a half-second—I just became a notch more interesting. “It’d really be more helpful,” the male cop says, “if we knew where we could get ahold of you. You can leave an itinerary with us.”

  “So long as Mika’s here,” I say, “you can find me here.” Mika Laupepa is Puo’s official name—at least according to our modified citizen chips (mine’s Vikki Gilbert—it’s perfect. How plain Jane is that?). “As for when he gets better, email really is the best way to get ahold of me.”

  The two share a look. “Are you registered with the American Consulate?”

  Fuck no. But I shake my head solemnly and say introspectively, “It’s Canada. We didn’t think anything could happen here.”

  The female cop exhales heavily. “Bad things can happen anywhere. Your American Consulate is sending a representative over now.”

  Shit. But I keep that sentiment off my face. There’s one very good reason besides not tracking our movements not to register with the U.S. State Department. They have the resources to tell if your citizen chip is legit. Ours aren’t.

  We bought three modified ones several months ago when we moved to the west coast. It drained nearly all our capital and forced us to rush the solid-state job that we should’ve taken more time to do research on. Had we done it properly, Winn might still be around.

  A knock at the door interrupts my thoughts of how to blow off the upcoming American representative.

  It’s a doctor wearing light-blue scrubs. Well-muscled arms flow down out of short-sleeves from round, wide shoulders. He’s tall, with short curly black hair and piercing blue eyes. His strong jaw makes the male cop’s seem even weaker.

  I can’t breathe.

  It’s Winn.

  * * *

  The edges of my vision dim. Dark flecks float across my vision.

  I can’t focus properly.

  Winn is talking to the cops. I can’t track what they’re saying.

  The cops leave, shutting the door behind them.

  Winn was a legit surgeon once, before a malpractice suit left him broke with no way to work. So he knows his way around hospitals.

  Then he met me. And then ....

  It all comes into focus for me, all the shit he’s put me through the past few months since he left. How it’s made me weak. How I used to be before I met him. How I’m not going to put up with this shit anymore.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” I ask him. I glance at the IV in my arm, debating the fastest way to remove it so I can start beating the shit out of him.

  “Uh ...” Winn’s taken aback at my tone.

  “Uh?” I mock derisively. “Uh, is all you can say to me?” Adrenaline is crashing through my system. I bet I could just rip out the IV and not even feel it.

  “I saw what happened on the news,” Winn says, “I recognized your brother being airlifted.” He’s still standing at the door, afraid to come in.

  “Aw,” I snark, “how kind of you. And you thought we were in need of rescuing?” I glare at him.

  “N—No. I was just— I wanted to make sure—”

  “Get this IV out of me,” I command him.

  Winn finally walks more fully into the room and comes to the side of the bed and squats down to deal with the IV. He avoids looking directly at me. His badge reads, “Dr. Alan C. Yates.”

  “Old habits die hard, hunh?” I flip his badge on his chest. He doesn’t work here. He’s a lawbreaker—after he left me to go clean. “Hypocrite.”

  Winn removes the bandage holding the IV in place. His hands have a slight tremor—quite the feat for a once-surgeon.

  “Too much coffee?” I mock, not letting up.

  Winn exhales. “What are you doing here anyway?”

  “You owe us money,” I say. He should pay us back. Puo and I have been scrambling to pay off the massive debt from the Citizen Maker, and Winn’s responsible for a third of it.

  “What?” He looks up from my IV with his bright blue, discerning eyes. It’s the same tone he used to use when talking about his existentialist crap that eventually led him to leave me.

  “The IV, Alan!” I snap.

  He slides the IV out. It’s a sharp stinging pain—glad I didn’t rip it out myself after all. He presses a bandage over the hole the IV left in my hand, and stays squatting down by the side of my bed.

  He’s so close I can smell the woody scent of his cologne. That smell lingered in my bedroom for days. Like a powerful memory trap, it would sneak up on me when passing through the room, throwing me into the past when I least wished it.

  The memory of that morning he left is seared into my memory. Early morning rays of late summer sunlight cut through our once-shared bedroom. The wood floors are cold on my bare feet as I look for him. Silence presses down on me as if the air had grown a thousand times heavier when I realize the truth. He’s gone. I felt like a ghost walking through the house that day, divorced from my body. It took Puo’s steady presence to start putting me back together again.

  Never again.

  I ball up my other fist and deck him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I LEAP OUT of the bed, my hospital gown flapping open in the back. I’m aware from the cold air whooshing up my backside that my ass is perfectly visible to Winn, who’s picking himself up from the floor, but I don’t give a shit.

  Clothes. Puo. Then we’re getting the fuck out of town.

  I grab my pocket tablet from the side table, and surreptitiously slide my digi-scrambler pearl necklace off the table—a gift from Winn that I still carry around. Because it’s useful, not because he gave it to me. Where are my clothes? Wet. Right. Shit.

  “Where are my clothes?” I whirl around on Winn. I cup the necklace in my hand so he can’t see it.

  He eyes me warily, rubbing the red spot blooming on his cheek. “I don’t know.”

  I take a step toward him, noticing a necklace chain around his neck that looks suspiciously like the chain of the digi-scrambler I gave him—except the bastard left his behind to drive a stake through my heart and make it clear he left to go live a Leave it to Beaver life in the suburbs.

  Did he get a new one? After all this, he bought another one? Rage seethes through me.

  “You need to go get me some clothes,” I say through clenched teeth. “Now, asshole.”

  “Vikki,” he says, “you can’t just run out of here.”

  “Go get me clothes! You left, dickwad!” I take another step toward him. I have so much energy coursing through my body—I just want to leap on him and start punching. “You owe me!” The jackass left to get away from our life together, and now he’s using a fake ID while digi-scrambling his face from the recorders with a new digi-scrambler. Ugh! The hypocrisy makes me want to claw his face off!

  His ass is lucky this is a Canadian hospital and not an American one—digi-scrambling doesn’t fly in hospitals in the States.

  “Owe you!” Winn shouts back and forces himself up from where I decked him. “You said ‘no dead bodies.’ You lied to me. How many—” He cuts off before asking more quietly, but no less vehemently, “How many?”

  I just stare at him, my chest rising and falling. “That wasn’t our fault,” I eventually say. “They made th
eir own bed.”

  “Which ones?” Winn shoots back.

  “All of them.” Paranoid Pete back on the east coast was embezzling from my father, the Boss of Atlanta. And Eli Hayes and Christina Chavez were planning a coup of the Seattle Boss. Both are behaviors that generally lead to dead bodies.

  “Then we tucked them in,” Winn says. “We may not have held the gun, but we—”

  “Survived,” I finish for him. “We fucking survived, Alan. In both of those cases they would’ve killed us.”

  “Pete would’ve killed us?” Winn asks like he doesn’t believe it.

  “Yes!” I work to lower my voice. “He betrayed us. He was a snitch. He would’ve killed us to keep that quiet.”

  Winn stares at me, like he’s never considered this. He then rubs at his face, and exhales heavily. “I’ve missed you—”

  I pick up the box of tissues nearest me and throw it at him as hard as I can. “What the fuck is that!” Then I pick up the food tray and toss that. Anything I can find. “Clothes, asshole! Clothes!” What the fuck!

  A small brunette nurse trots in, “Is everything all right?”

  “No,” I say. No, it most certainly is not. “I miss you.” Where the fuck did that even come from?

  Winn says to the nurse quickly, “The patient is agitated. Please find some clothes for her. There’s no physical reason she can’t walk around to go see her brother.”

  “And you are—?” the nurse asks Winn and catches my eye to make sure I’m okay.

  I nod at her, and keep my mouth shut hoping this works.

  “Dr. Yates. I’m the primary care physician assigned to her from the American Consulate.” Winn straightens up, smiles at her uncertainly and puts his hand out to shake hers.

  The nurse flicks her gaze between us. I nod again.

  She shakes his hand and blushes, a slight tinge of red on her cheeks. Ugh. “I’ll go see what I can find,” the nurse says. She turns around and leaves. Whore. Apparently, Winn’s so pretty she failed to notice the red fist-sized blotch on the side of his face.

  “Listen to me,” Winn says, lowering his voice, “you can’t just leave. They have your CitIDs on record, attached to a bill.”

  “So?” I ask. Every citizen chip has a unique ID—the CitID. It’s pretty much used for everything.

  “So, if you skip out, they’ll forward the CitID—”

  “Mika can take care of it,” I say, confident in Puo’s prodigious digital skills.

  Winn’s slowly shakes his head. “Not in connection with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Even Mika can’t hack an air-gapped network. How long do you think it will take them to connect the CitIDs to their interviews to working with the U.S. to figuring out the origins of our chips.”

  Fuck! These stupid things already put us under enormous debt, and only just recently with the British Museum job do we have the ability to pay them off—although we’re still making the payments to avoid suspicion. And we absolutely need them. I can’t go back to living in the shadows all the time, constantly looking over my shoulder, hanging out only in professional or low-life bars that don’t require citizen chips.

  And “our chips”? Is that really why Winn came to the hospital? To cover his own round, taut ass?

  “All right then,” I say. “We’ll just pay the hospital bill off.” We’re flush at the moment, and it shouldn’t cut into paying off the Citizen Maker too much. If the chips become known by the authorities they become worthless. So, it’d definitely be cheaper to pay off the hospital legitimately than have to pay for two new CitIDs.

  Winn stares at me in disbelief. “Vikki, you don’t just pay off a hospital bill like that. Not like Mika’s racking up—”

  “Whadda ya mean?” I ask alarmed. What’s going on with Puo?

  “They know you don’t have insurance. People without insurance don’t pay off large hospital bills on their way out the door. Talk about raising questions.”

  “No,” I say. “What’s going on with Mika?”

  The nurse comes back in with some clothes folded in her arms, a pair of tan loafers on top. “These should fit you. Several of the nurses were able to scrounge some stuff up that you could have.” She hands me the folded clothes.

  “Thank you,” I say, and smile at her. The smile might be my best acting yet considering the clothes look to be a pair of broken-in mom’s jeans, and a seafoam-green sweater with plaid, checkered front. Ew.

  A couple of tampons are hidden under the sweater. Oh, that’s right. On top of everything else, I get to enjoy my period now. Isn’t that nice? Thanks, universe. That’s just swell.

  I set the stuff on the bed and look expectantly at Winn and the nurse.

  “Oh, right,” Winn says and blushes. He turns around and leaves with the nurse to give me some privacy.

  Why did he blush?

  * * *

  By the time I’m done dressing as a forty-year-old mom with four kids and no time or money to care about my clothes, the question has moved from Why was he blushing? to Why the fuck was he blushing?

  I slip my tablet into the jeans’ ample front pocket along with my digi-scrambler and tighten the thin brown leather belt on the mom jeans even tighter. I stop for a second, collecting myself. My back aches in a dull medicated way, and pressure is building up against my bandages around my right leg when I put my full weight on it—standing for too long is making me nauseous.

  I fill a plastic cup from the faucet and take a sip. The water is cool, but hollow. As soon as one sip is down, my mouth is right back to parched. It tastes like city water, with a chemical, metallic undertone.

  I fill it up again and walk out of the room carrying the cup to meet Winn.

  He cocks an eyebrow at my clothes. He keeps his mouth shut, but the corners of his mouth quirk in a trying-not-to-smile way.

  “Try to keep your hands off me,” I say, my frustration boiling over. “I know that suburban housewife, good-school-district, prudently-save-for-the-future shit really turns you on.”

  Winn clenches his jaw and exhales audibly through his nose.

  There are other nurses and doctors running around the hallway, but their presence is so fleeting that we might as well be alone.

  “What’s going on with Mika?” I ask. “What’s this bill he’s racking up?”

  “He had a coronary artery spasm,” Winn says. “It’s not as serious as a heart attack, but testing and cardiologists aren’t cheap.”

  “And paying them would be suspicious?” I ask, shaking my head at the stupidity that the one time I’m willing to pay something off legitimately, it would actually be a bad thing.

  “Yeah,” Winn says seriously. “Canada has public healthcare for their citizens so they avoid all this, while most foreign-visitors have private insurance. The insurance company negotiates the bill down for them. Foreigners that don’t have insurance either shrug their shoulders at the bill and a reduced amount and payment plan is worked out for them, or they hire a medical negotiator to reduce the bill and then pay that.”

  We walk to the center of the building toward the elevators. “Let’s take the stairs,” I say. There looks to be some heavy traffic going on and off the elevators, and I want to be able to talk without eavesdroppers.

  Winn nods. “I can act as the medical negotiator for you.”

  “And to what would I owe such generosity?” I ask, making it clear I don’t want his help. Now that I know about one of these medical negotiators, I’ll just use one of them.

  “I’m—” He exhales heavily following behind me into the stairwell. “I’m sorry. I just feel—”

  Feelings, feelings, fucking feelings is all he ever wants to talk about. That didn’t work out for me so well last time. “Adjust your man panties, maybe you’ll feel less.”

  Winn’s silent for half a step and then inhales deeply before saying, “Look, when I saw Mika on the news feed, I knew it was you. And then I was out the door and clipping on the Alan Yates badge before I knew it.” He p
auses. “I just want to help.” He pushes open the white, windowless door to the concrete stairwell.

  “Up or down?” I ask without looking back at him.

  “Down two flights.”

  I head down the stairs. “You could’ve helped by sticking around. You could’ve helped by at least talking to me before you left.”

  “I know. I’m sorry—”

  I glance back as we turn the corner on the stairwell landing on the third floor. He’s face is red from blushing, with four knuckle marks gracing his left cheek, and he’s clean-shaven. I always liked him with a stubble look. Is he seeing anyone? Does his new girlfriend like him clean-shaven?

  “Your fly is down,” I say to shut him up.

  Winn looks down at his crotch—scrub pants don’t have a fly. “I’ve missed the more charming aspects of your personality.”

  I turn around and stick my tongue out at him before I catch myself. Ugh. Did I just flirt with him?

  He smiles back at me.

  I ball up my fist again and get ready to punch him (on the shoulder this time, for the record).

  He scrambles backwards, his eyes wide. “What?”

  I extend my forefinger from my raised fist and silently point at him. None of this flirting shit, I say with my eyes. I turn around and pull out my tablet to start looking up medical negotiators. “How long does Mika have to stay in the hospital?” I ask Winn over my shoulder.

  “Two to three days,” Winn answers, keeping his distance behind me. “Mostly for observation.”

  “Can he leave earlier?” I ask. I don’t want to wait around here that long. The cops will be back. So will the American Consulate representative.

  “Physically, probably,” Winn answers. “But most patients are pretty shaken up after their first threatening heart event. They generally cling to the doctors, and don’t want to leave against medical advice. It’ll stand out.”

  We come down to the second floor, and I push the door open to the fluorescent light of the hallway beyond. This hallway is quieter, less trafficked.