Leverage

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  “Thanks,” Winn says back. Winn thinks for a second and then says, “My, uh, teeth embarrass me. I really need to hire a dentist to fix and clean them.”

  I smack my hand to my forehead, typical man, no foreplay.

  “Are you new to the city?” the old man asks.

  “No,” Winn says, “I just hate dentists.”

  Head-smack, head-smack, head-smack.

  “Oh,” the old man says thoughtfully. “I was going to offer you my dentist if you were interested. Does great work.”

  “Oh!” Winn says in surprise. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  What? Did Winn forget everything I taught him in the three months since he left? Goober.

  “I can show you where it is now,” the old man says.

  “Uh, okay,” Winn says. “For a cleaning though, right?”

  I shake my head in disbelief at Winn. I can’t see him, but it sounds like Winn just leaned in and winked at the old man.

  Puo whispers, “The car that pulled up is now pulling out front. Falcon’s nailing it so far.”

  “Nailing being a goob,” I say.

  “Exactly,” Puo says. “Laci goob in need of big bad criminal help he doesn’t understand.”

  Oh. Right. Nailing it: yes. On purpose: unlikely.

  “Yes,” the old man says. “Why don’t you follow me? I can take you there now.”

  “Right now?” Winn stupidly asks like a goob.

  “Yes, now,” the old man says with an edge of steel. “Come with me.”

  The hovercar, a black-and-white SUV, pulls in front of the building.

  Winn steps out of the building in front of the old man. Winn continues to act the part, looking around, and to the old man for direction.

  The old man gestures toward the SUV and Winn climbs in. The old man stays on the street, and I hear the car door thunk close.

  The hovercar takes off immediately, and I see the old man walk off the way he came.

  “Punk boy is disengaging,” Puo whispers.

  “All electronics,” a new voice says through Winn’s comm-link. “Out now.” The voice is feminine, imperialistic in tone, but heavy, like there’s some weight behind it.

  “Okay,” Winn says uncertainly.

  “Put them in the bag,” the female voice continues.

  Uh-oh.

  There’s a few seconds pause, and the woman says, “You know who we are right?”

  “Clean—” Winn starts to say.

  “Then don’t lie to us,” she snaps. “All of your electronics.”

  “Can they—?” I start to as Puo.

  “I don’t know,” Puo answers.

  Don’t do it Winn. Don’t do it Winn.

  Scraping and rustling dominate the comm-link as Winn reaches into his jacket pocket then everything cuts out. He’s shut it off.

  Silence on the comm-link.

  “Shit!” I swear. Now Winn’s on his own. “You got a read?” I ask Puo in vain.

  “Yes and no,” he answers.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Shh!”

  “Don’t fucking shh me! What do you mean?”

  “Heart attack, Queen Bee! Heart attack! Stop stressing me out, and hang on.”

  Gah! And coronary spasm, damn it. I want to claw my face off and yell more at Puo, but the goober invoked his stupid coronary spasm as a shield.

  I watch the black-and-white SUV disappear into the skylane above, completely powerless to do anything but watch it happen. I hate feeling powerless.

  I start to pace, and have to stop myself forty times from asking what the hell Puo meant.

  Puo finally says, “I lost the signal on his tablet. They must have put it in a dead-bag.”

  “What else is there?” I say, still pacing.

  “That’s where the ‘yes’ comes in. Falcon may have a small tracker chip sewn into the lining of his coat that he may not be aware of.”

  Oh, thank God. “Chameleon, you’re a genius— Wait. Do I have one—?”

  “But I shut it off.”

  “Wait, Falcon’s or mine?”

  “Falcon’s,” Puo answers. “If they’re monitoring him for signals they may find it.”

  “What good is a tracking chip that’s turned off?” I ask. I don’t necessarily disagree with what Puo did, but the question still stands.

  “I set it to cycle on for short bursts at irregular intervals until he makes contact, to keep a read on him.”

  “Good.” So then the real question is, how long do we wait? Is this business as usual for the Cleaners to an unknown contact? Or is this something else?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AS THE MINUTES since Winn left with the Cleaners turn into hours and the day turns from early to late afternoon, it becomes clearer and clearer this is not business as usual.

  After about twenty minutes treading a path in the office carpet, I bugged out of there and got back to the floating house. Now I’m pacing in Puo’s blacked-out room while he’s on his computer system.

  “He’s definitely stopped?” I ask Puo.

  “Yeah,” Puo responds. He jams his finger against the retro-monitor, pointing to the last known location of Winn on a map of Vancouver. That’s exactly why Puo prefers the older, more solid monitors to the projected ones—he likes something to push back when he rests his finger on the monitor to point at something.

  Puo continues, “He hasn’t moved in the last two hours.”

  “Is that their headquarters?” I ask.

  “We have no way of knowing. It’d be way more practical to take him to a safe house.”

  Puo’s room is warm from the computers. We’ve only been in the place for almost twenty-fours hours and already there are clothes strewn about, but the heat vents are strategically free of clutter. And it’s stuffy in here, with a light, unpleasant musky odor hanging around.

  I stretch my arms out above me, working out nervous energy.

  “What are you thinking?” Puo asks.

  “We have no choice,” I say. He already knows what needs to happen. Rescue mission. It’s why on his two other monitors he’s already begun researching the area around Winn’s dot.

  “We have no equipment,” Puo says, “and no way to retrieve it. Not to mention this kills the idea of swapping the cards for the Mountie install.”

  Shit. I hadn’t exactly forgotten about that. But damn, now we’re really screwed there. At best, we’re delayed on retrieving the Mounties’ files on Nix; at worst, we blew that avenue entirely. And all for nothing, except for more cost and the risk of Winn’s life and exposing ourselves.

  After some heavy silence with me in thought about how to get the equipment necessary to spring Winn, Puo says, “You know what we need?”

  “What?”

  “A thieves guild,” Puo says.

  “Seriously, Puo?” I ask irritated with his attempt at humor.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Think about it. If there was such a thing, we could roll in and ask to borrow some equipment. Use their safe houses to hide. It could be an enormous asset. The Cleaners have a guild, why not us?”

  “Because we’re not hot-pink colostomy-bags,” I explain. “And I don’t take orders, or accept limitations, on what jobs we can pull.” Although borrowing equipment and using a safe house would in theory would be nice. “If it was anybody but Nix, I’d call Colvin and have him contact Nix and tell her to support us as a favor. He probably owes us at least that much.”

  Puo turns toward me in his cushy office chair on wheels with no armrests. “Could you call Colvin?”

  Colvin is the Boss of the Seattle Isles. Thanks to us, and some convoluted events a couple months ago, he’s still the Boss of the Seattle Isles.

  “And ask him what?” I ask. “You don’t just call up a Boss to chat. ‘Hey-ya, Boss, whatcha you doin’?’ You need an actionable item for him to follow through on.”

  Puo opens his mouth and then closes it. “And we can’t have him bring our equipment.”

 
; “And we can’t have him bring our equipment,” I repeat. There’s more than one item in our standard complement that we’re not supposed to have, like anti-gravity suits that are only supposed to exist for one American Special Forces unit, and Cleaners’ squeegees with their code.

  My tablet suddenly buzzes. Did you know mothballs can be dangerous?

  My heart sinks in my chest. That’s not Winn. Winn would never toy with me that way. “Puo, they’re using Winn’s tablet.”

  Puo’s face goes white.

  My fingers shake as I type back, hoping against hope it’s Winn anyway, Can you also pick up bacon on the way home?

  “They can’t track us here, can they?” I ask, already thinking about how to bug out of here.

  “Hell, no,” Puo says. “I definitely took care of that. I’m not sure I’m up for another mad dash for our lives in the near future.”

  This is not Falcon. Falcon is in a cage, and unless you do as we say, we’re going to turn him into bacon.

  Yeah, threatening me is about the fastest way to piss me off. I start typing my response.

  “Isa,” Puo says watching me, “what are you typing?”

  “That bacon comes from pigs and that they’re mixing up their imagery and that pigs are likely smarter than them and with bigger penises—”

  “You can’t send that!” Puo says.

  I bite my tongue as I get ready to hit send.

  “Play the original role!” Puo rushes. “Winn is probably lying to them about who he is. If you directly engage them then they’ll know he’s lying.”

  Fine. I hate it when Puo’s right. I scrunch up my face in frustration and delete every brilliant word of the verbal riposte. Instead I type, Cute. Mothballs and bacon please. Rachel and Bob are waiting.

  You don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation.

  I type back, I understand my mother is bitching at me about needing mothballs and needing bacon for the asparagus tonight. What’s with you?

  Puo has come to stand behind me, reading the screen. “Good,” he says. Then he lists off, “All they have is Winn’s tablet. We don’t know if they know it’s Winn. We don’t know if they know it’s us they’re communicating with.”

  I once heard a story about a beloved daughter moving to the west coast ...

  “Shit,” I swear. So much for them not knowing it’s us on the other end. “And isn’t that your job to tell stories?” I ask Puo. He likes to tell stories with weird little morals to them. Or maybe the stories are weird and the morals are normal. Hard to tell at this point.

  “Shh,” Puo says, staring intently at the screen.

  “Shh, what?” I snark. “They can’t hear us.”

  The text continues, ... and coming to the supposed rescue of a corrupt man who managed to avoid the justice that was coming to him. Do you know this story?

  “Cut it off,” Puo says. “Tell them you’re blocking them and don’t respond anymore.”

  No, I type back. And I’ve had enough, I don’t know how you got my husband’s phone. But I’m blocking this number and reporting it stolen. Good Bye.

  I set the phone screen down.

  Puo rubs his hands over his face, groaning in panic.

  The device buzzes on the table as more texts roll in.

  “We’ve got to think of something.” I start pacing again.

  Puo stands frozen there, his face slack.

  “Every minute we delay,” I say, “things get worse.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know.” Puo shakes his head.

  The phone buzzes again twice in rapid succession.

  Damn it. “Start thinking out loud,” I order him.

  “We need equipment,” Puo says. “We need to be able to get in and out of where they’re holding him with minimal effort and prep time.”

  “We need our equipment,” I say.

  “Yeah, but that’s not possible right now.”

  “How long would it take to get from our house in the Seattle Isles to here?”

  “In the fast skylanes? An hour. You thinking of trying it?”

  I shake my head no. “Delivery.”

  “Who?”

  “Kathy.” She’s the only person I can think of, and I already feel awful about it.

  “Kathy?” Puo asks incredulously. “Our sixty-four-year-old, sweet and innocent neighbor?”

  “Yeah,” I say, squirming a little. Kathy and I actually hit it off at that awful neighborhood party right before Winn left. We’ve become friends—sort of. And she’s not as innocent as Puo thinks. She’s not a criminal. But not as innocent.

  Puo exhales heavily and sits down.

  “They’re going to turn him over to Nix,” I say, “if they haven’t already alerted her. And then Nix is going to use him to flush us out. They’re going torture and kill him.” My voice chokes. “We have to do something, and I don’t know what else there is.”

  Puo looks positively wretched and asks barely above a whisper, “Do we?”

  My stomach grows cold. I can’t seem to breathe.

  “We cut and run,” Puo continues in heartlessness, “When they come here looking, we’re gone.”

  “They will kill Winn,” I say.

  “And we survive.” Puo rests his forehead on the table the monitors are resting on, looking sideways at me.

  I can’t believe he’s suggesting this.

  The horror must show on my face, because Puo then says, “I’m just doing my job—”

  “Pointing out the obvious?” I ask, starting to get angry. How the fuck is letting Winn die obvious?

  “Bringing all the options to the table,” Puo rebuts.

  “I am not done being mad at him,” I say vehemently. “If we have to go rescue him so I can yell at him more, then that’s what we’re going to do. Got it!”

  “Got it.” Puo sits up. There’s more color to his face than there was a moment before. “And for the record, it was not something I was advocating.” Puo wipes his brow. “You should go call Kathy.”

  My tablet buzzes again on the desk.

  “Can I use your tablet?” I ask. I don’t want to see how they’re trying to escalate the conversation to get me to respond.

  “Yeah.” Puo hands me his pocket tablet.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AN HOUR AND HALF later I’m unloading all our equipment by myself from Kathy’s four-door silver hovercar, mentally ticking off the laundry list of items we had sent her. Puo is under orders not to lift heavy things (or so he says), and Kathy packed the car for us so it seems unfair to ask her to unpack it. That leaves me trudging up and down the stairs to and from the second floor living space to dump off load after load and running back down to the hovercar.

  The time spent waiting for Kathy to arrive has not been wasted. Puo and I poured over the area, records, everything we could to prepare. We even have a halfway decent plan—I think.

  The bastards finally stopped texting an hour ago—I had to have Puo scan through the texts to make sure there wasn’t anything significant and then delete everything. Sometimes, it’s just better not to know.

  Puo is now sorting through the equipment I’m trudging up, setting things up where needed and cataloging them. Kathy, a diminutive woman in body only, looks on from the nearby brown leather Chesterfield couch. Her eyes are surrounded by well-earned wrinkles, but her eyes themselves are sharp and miss nothing.

  After I bring up the last of the equipment, she asks in a no-nonsense voice, “Are you ever going to tell me what all this is that I just brought to you over an international border?”

  I feel like a rat caught in a trap. She took a substantial risk based on my pleading alone. But to tell her any more would put her in a potentially dangerous position.

  Puo glances back at me while he continues to work, giving me the lead on this one.

  Thanks, Puo.

  My discomfort must show, because Kathy says, “I’m a big girl
, and I think I’ve earned a bit of the truth here.”

  “Yes,” I start, and stop to nod a couple of times, to try and get my thoughts together. “There’s a potential risk to you to know the truth—”

  Kathy stands up and clasps her hands in front of her. “Out with it.”

  “I— Uh, We—”

  “You’re thieves,” she says with disdain.

  “Underwater reclamation specialists,” I clarify.

  “What?” she asks.

  “We recover and restore—”

  “Used to restore,” Puo cuts in.

  I continue as if I hadn’t heard Puo, “—art and artifacts that were lost in the mega-quake’s flooding. In the federally protected sunken cities.”

  Puo mimes a smile and helpfully holds up the anti-gravity helmet which at least looks kinda like a scuba helmet.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Kathy says in relief and sits back down. “That’s not so bad. I never understood the government’s insistence in leaving those tombs alone.”

  “Right!” I say, immensely relieved that Kathy doesn’t hate me.

  “And that’s how you make your living?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “So the British Museum business that’s been in the news ... ?”

  “Is of professional interest to us,” I say smoothly, while squirming and twisting horribly inside. “But wasn’t us,” I lie.

  I feel awful. I lie all the time. But not to sweet old ladies who are doing us a huge favor. Or to the closest person I might call a friend that’s not also a criminal.

  She knows we were in Europe. After Winn left, I spent some time at her house talking with her about it. I walked over there one afternoon like a zombie, just wanting to get out of the house Winn and I had shared from the beginning. It was her idea for me to get away for a while.

  Kathy looks between Puo and I. “Well ...” she draws the word out, packing a lot into one syllable. She then gestures to all the equipment on the floor. “And all this is to rescue your friend that’s in mortal danger?”

  I fidget. Anxiousness creeps in. My chest starts rising and falling. Now that the equipment’s here, we need to move now. I love Kathy; I’m in her debt. But it’s time to move.

  “It’s Winn,” Puo says from on his knees inspecting my anti-gravity suit.