THUGLIT Issue Seven

by Joe Clifford

  Poke got up close to Porky and that SIG wasn't but six inches from the big man's nose.

  "Here's what's gonna go down," Poke said. He was talking real low, trying to disguise his voice. We didn't talk about that and I was pissed off I didn't do it, too. "You're gonna stay real still and keep your eyes on this here gun, right? And my partner here, he's going take a look at that pegleg of yours."

  Porky didn't move and he didn't speak. He just looked right in Poke's eyes like he could read the man's mind. I got to work. I kneeled down on the bossman's right side and lifted up his pant leg. He had on a fancy looking dress shoe with little tassels on top, but it wasn't on a real foot. Sticking straight up from the shoe was a metal rod. I clanged my .45 against it and it rang like a bell. It was a fake leg all right, but there wasn't anything wooden about it.

  "How's it work?" I barked at Porky.

  He didn't do or say anything, so Poke had to tell him, "Show him."

  The fat man turned his bulk to me and reached down with one of those tree trunk arms of his to grab a hold of the cuff. He yanked it up and tore the fabric clear up to the knee. I bet those pants cost him a hundred fifty bucks—but then, he could afford it.

  I lost interest in the pants when I saw the rest of the leg. His natural leg came down a bit under the knee, where there was this gray plastic cap that fit over the stump. Under that the rod was fixed, and that came down right into the shoe. I was expecting a thick hunk of wood with a hidden compartment. This wasn't that.

  "Diabetes is a hell of a thing," Porky said. "One of these days I'll lose the other one, too."

  He knocked at it with his knuckles. There wasn't any compartment. There was no money there at all. Then his knocking hand stuck out one finger, and as he slid the false foot back the finger pointed at the floor under it. There was a small square cut out of the wood there, with hinges on one side and a padlock on the other. A goddamned floor safe.

  I said, "Fuck me."

  Porky said, "Lashawn."

  One of the guys behind me turned with a gun in his hand and the next thing it went off and Poke's head snapped back. The SIG dropped from his hand like a rock and he went down just as if he was KO'd. I saw the blood seeping out before I thought to try shooting my way out of there, but when I came round to aim at Lashawn, Porky pounded his ham-sized fist against the top of my skull and I went out like a goddamn light.

  *****

  The pain that brought me back was worse than anything I ever felt before. It was like my leg was being ripped apart, and I tried to jerk away but I was tied down, so all I could do was open my eyes to see that was exactly what was happening to me. The guy Porky called Lashawn was taking my leg off with a bonesaw.

  At least I figured that's what it was. I never saw a bonesaw before, but it was sure as shit a saw and it was cutting into my leg bone, about six inches below the knee. This was my right leg. Just like Porky.

  I been beat seven ways from Sunday more than anyone I know. My stepdaddy Darryl started in on me when I was six or seven, and then the kids around the trailer park after that. I learned how to scrap all right, but I got my nose broke, a couple fingers. One time one of my ears got ripped half off when we was cruising drunk and the pickup flipped off the highway. I been in all kinds of pain, enough to talk about it all night if I wanted to. But there wasn't never nothing like this.

  A scream ripped out of my gullet that didn't sound like I could've made it. My throat was raw before I was halfway done with it, but I kept screaming anyways because I didn't know what else I could do. My arms and legs was strapped down with leather belts and the two guys who were Lawshawn's partners helped hold me down. My eyes filled up with tears and everything looked like it was underwater but I could tell Porky was standing there, at the foot of the table, smoking and watching. That big bastard wanted to see everything. He wanted to see me scream and he wanted to see my leg come off.

  And Porky Valentine wanted me to live. A hobbling, one-legged example to follow, in case anybody around—anybody like to see my crippled ass trying to make it across town or just up the road to get my fucking mail—had a thought in his head that the Big Man was worth ripping off. He wasn't.

  Blood was all over the place, rivers of it. I guess I passed out before Lashawn got all the way through the bone.

  *****

  Poke just disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to him except me and Porky's crew, but everybody wondered. Folks asked me, time to time, whatever happened to your partner? I'd just shrug and tell them I don't know. Reckon he got sick of this shitbird town and moved on. You know how he is. Most likely he's at the bottom of the Arkansas River to this day.

  Soon as I could, I put Arkansas in my own rearview mirror. There was a couple months I had to mess around with rehab and all that first, learning how to walk on my new leg and how to manage the pain. That's what they said in the hospital: manage the pain. Maybe Porky was hurting all the time, too. Maybe that's how come he was such a mean sonofabitch. I just poured whiskey on the hurt.

  You probably know all about that thing where you lose a limb but it's like you can still feel it tingling. That's true. Thing like that makes a grown man want to cry some nights.

  Before I was done, before I drove my ass out of town and straight up to St. Louis to work with Freddie Alvarez's crew, I saw Porky Valentine just one more time. I was coming out of the liquor store with my bottom-shelf bottle in my armpit, hobbling up the sidewalk with the walking cane they gave me. He was standing on the corner with the paper in his hand. When I saw him I stopped cold. I wondered how come I had to walk with a damn cane and this gigantic dude didn't need one at all.

  Porky saw me too, and even though he didn't have none of his boys with him I got sort of scared and didn't know what to do. It wasn't like I was going to run. So we just looked at each other for a good two minutes before he started to laugh. A great big shaking laugh. He shook all over. And when most of the shaking stopped he pulled up the leg of his pants and bent over and he knocked twice on that metal shaft he had for a right leg. It rang like a bell.

  Mine didn't ring at all. It was made of wood.

  The Last Job

  by Justin Ordoñez

  I

  I'm going to tell you something.

  In my right-hand pocket is one billion dollars. All billion of it fits in there because I didn't steal dollars and cents, nor did I have the AgroLife accounting database issue me a check. I simply slid a flash drive into the desktop of a vice-president and the virus it left there gave me access to the secure servers where I copied an unencrypted version of AgroLife's "AniMate" software package.

  After the transfer, the workstation locked down, telephones in neighboring cubicles rang, and in the moments since I escaped to this nearby office, security guards started sweeping the perimeter. I'm in a suit and tie, so I look the part, and I've got a doctored-up identification badge, but can I simply walk the hallway, get on the elevator and stroll out the front door? Or maybe take the stairs to the parking garage? Or the freight elevator to the loading dock?

  Either way, I've got to go—now.

  II

  Espionage is 99% relationships, 1% stealing.

  For three weeks, I hung around the local joints by the global headquarters. I did the high-class restaurants for corporate dinners, I did the burger joints for midday lunches, I did the bars for the alcoholics and social butterflies. I met Linda, who worked as an agricultural geneticist. I met Joseph, who worked as a corporate attorney. I met Sarah, who worked as a front-end web developer. It was meticulous work, but it all paid off in the dive bar so cheesy the floor was lined in strip lighting when I met Dale.

  Dale was a programmer for AniMate's user-interface. I smiled, and I said, "Whoa, sounds complicated." Dale insisted the job was easy. The problem was his boss. I smiled, and I said, "Come on, everyone has boss problems." Dale laid his out. Recently, AgroLife had experienced a corporate shake-up that led to some hasty resignations. According to Dale, several middl
e-management responsibilities had been temporarily given to the vice-presidents. I smiled, and I said, "Those guys, they don't know what you need." Dale agreed, explaining that this jerk-off Jeremy Wagner, vice-president of client relations, didn't know programming.

  I wanted to know about Jeremy, not Dale.

  This was how I worked it:

  "You must have something in common with Jeremy. Does he like football?"

  "No!"

  "Does he like fishing or hunting?"

  "No!"

  "Is he an art guy?"

  "No!"

  "Think about his office, what's in it?"

  "I think… They're pictures of his wife and him on cycling trips."

  "That's good, anything else?"

  "Yeah, he told me his wife didn't go on the last one. He mentioned… It sounded like they were having problems."

  It was time to meet Mrs. Wagner.

  Being a vice-president at AgroLife ensured an affluent lifestyle. There's a thing about money, though. It either A) makes one paranoid or B) makes one aloof. In my week of spying on the Wagners via computer hacking, mail theft, and straight-up surveillance, I discovered that Mr. Wagner was type A. He only visited higher-class establishments, insulating himself within a tight circle. Mrs. Wagner was type B. She had a busy social calendar, a thriving Internet side-business and she'd been apart from need so long that she'd lost all concept of scarcity.

  I'd met her type before. She trusts too much on the front-end and she feels too much on the back-end. One small miscalculation with a person like Judith Wagner and it'd be over.

  I purposely crashed a bike along her daily bike route. The location was far enough from her home that we had time to talk. And close enough that she felt it necessary to offer me first aid for my elbow and knee.

  The house was too big to examine from the kitchen. I did manage to catch some bedsheets on a pullout sofa in a side room.

  I said, "Uh-oh, got the relatives over, huh?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Oh, I didn't mean to bring up anything personal."

  Judith was nervous. "Don't worry about it. It's my husband…" She fanned her face with her hand. "Wow, is it hot in here? I mean, that's his office. He's staying in his office."

  "Real workaholic, I take it?"

  "You have no idea."

  I noticed a Spanish wine in the butler's panty.

  "I haven't had this in a long time."

  "Would you like a glass?"

  Judith produced two wine glasses. I opened the bottle and decantered the wine. While Judith put away the first-aid materials, I hurried to her husband's office. I turned on the terminal, then attached a USB mini-hard drive that I had kept in a waist sack. The drive began creating a ghost—or an exact copy—of Jeremy's terminal. I needed an hour, maybe two, for the ghost to complete. This was when I had to channel my inner-Morgan Freeman. I had to act my way through the next two hours as if I'd known Judith for her entire life.

  Back in the kitchen, I poured the wine and was sipping from it as Judith returned. "Sorry, I couldn't wait."

  "No, I don't blame you."

  I drank the wine quickly, sensing that she wanted an afternoon distraction, and she followed suit. The first two glasses went quickly, then we mellowed for the second bottle—telling each other many things. We had a natural chemistry. She kept standing closer to me, and I stood closer to her, or we'd sit at the table and her shoe would rub my shin. Somewhere in there, half-drunk myself, I went in for a kiss—forgetting that Judith was a type B.

  She pulled away. "I think you should go now."

  I had not retrieved the USB hard drive.

  "I'm sorry about that. That won't—"

  Judith interrupted. "No, I… Don't take it personally, I just think you should go."

  "Okay, I'll go to the bathroom and—"

  "No, I want you to leave now."

  I debated grabbing the hard drive and running. Of course, that could potentially expose my plan. Judith might leave before Jeremy came home. Maybe I could break into the house. Either way, I had to go, and I apologized again before heading to the doorway. Judith stood up as I turned my back, and in the kitchen, she stumbled onto the floor. She was dizzy from the wine.

  I hurried to her side. "Should I call an ambulance?"

  "No, no… I…"

  She grabbed my bicep to help herself up. I took her hand and I put it on my chest. When she didn't pull away, I put her other hand on my chest. Moments later, the parts that needed to be naked were, and we rolled around the kitchen floor, stopping when we reached carpet, comfortable enough for our five—six—thirty minutes of action. That's the problem with good sex. You lose track of time. So while we had finished, I had no idea if the ghost was complete.

  Judith put her clothes back on, and in a serious manner, with immense pain in her eyes, said, "You really need to go now."

  When I agreed, she walked into her bedroom, and I heard the shower running as I entered the office and disconnected the USB drive.

  III

  "Wayne" was my technology guy.

  I had never known his true identity and I didn't want to know it. I ran the human angle of a con and he ran the computer angle. Things like the USB hard drive, ghost software, none of it made sense to me. Wayne loved the stuff and I had never met the computer system he couldn't beat until he met AgroLife's security.

  Wayne said, "It's not here."

  "That's bull. It has to be there."

  Wayne was sitting at his computer terminal. His hand moved the computer mouse, then pressed some commands into the keyboard. Some windows popped up on his screen, then disappeared. Nothing eventful happened.

  Wayne said, "Nothing called AniMate, man. What is it?"

  I sat down on the couch across from him. A beer was on the table. I had drank half of it, not ready to stop being drunk, not until I had forgotten Judith's face. "I can't tell you that, Wayne."

  "Dude, it could help me find it."

  I told Wayne that AniMate was the industry standard software for directing automated assembly lines. It had started out as a purely agricultural tool but had been ported to other industrial applications, and it was estimated that 83% of the world's factories contained at least one device requiring AniMate. For those who could afford the software licenses, like trans-national corporations, AniMate was the key tool driving aggressive profit margins. For those who could not afford it, small business owners and less-developed countries, its existence had annihilated their economic core industries, leaving them uncompetitive and sinking.

  "Dude, where did you learn all that?"

  I looked offended. "I can read, asshole."

  Wayne held up his hands, crusty orange on them from the snacks he was periodically stuffing in his mouth. "Who's the buyer?"

  I knew this deal had gone south when I had to trust Wayne twice in the same day. "There's a guy in Latin America, I won't say his name…"

  His name was Edgar Mendez.

  Edgar and his business associates owned major stakes in several corporations involving heavy manufacturing, each experiencing revenue distortions due to AniMate related costs. Or as Edgar put it, "Those AgroLife clowns are fucking us in the ass." As if it mattered to me, Edgar explained that AgroLife sells the licenses on a tiered basis, with increased quantities issued in conjunction to reduced per-license costs. Or as Edgar put it, "We only need 500 damn licenses, so this is how these putas force us to buy 1,000."

  Wayne was impressed. "Not exactly conning housewives into crap franchise purchases."

  Wayne was right. I was in over my head. "Can you find the software on there or not?"

  Wayne went back to typing on his computer. I went outside where I finished my beer and felt the dire need to smoke. I had no cigarette so I just sat there feeling agitated. I hate doing the things I did to Judith. I hate the way they make me feel. But lying was the only thing I was ever good at. That was why I needed this job. If I got this software, I'd be set in cash for the rest of
my life, out of this racket and retired to some beach.

  Wayne called me back in. "I got bad news for you. There's no way your Latin American friend wants this for his factories. If he used it only himself, it'd be obvious who stole it, but if an unencrypted version of AniMate got out, independent programmers would be able to program third party machines. Thousands of pieces of machinery that AgroLife is coercing companies to replace—by no longer supporting them with their software—would be functional again."

  Pulling up articles on the Internet, Wayne explained that AniMate was a billion dollar juggernaut and it would never be on an individual computer, even a vice-president's computer. It'd be in a central server, in a remote location segregated from frequented servers. Basically, Wayne was saying that the only way to obtain the software was to walk into AgroLife, find a terminal that could access the secure server, then hopefully crack the security.

  "It's impossible, dude," Wayne said. "Just tell your customer they don't understand how hard it is to get it."

  I hadn't fully trusted Wayne.

  I hadn't told him that Edgar was not only a businessman. He was a high-ranking member in the Politicos Nacionalidades, the secret hand of the bureaucratic authoritarian regime in Edgar's country. When one spoke to Edgar, one was actually speaking to a conglomerate of elitist psychopaths. And thanks to the efforts of paranoid wackos who petition the US government using the Freedom of Information Act, I had discovered CIA estimates that, in the last twenty-five years, the Politicos Nacionalidades had killed over twenty-thousand dissenting citizens—and they were currently jailing and torturing untold thousands more.

  If these guys didn't so happen to be the police, they'd be some of the nastiest fuckers alive. And these nasty fucks were losing billions in currency that was needed to fund their suppressive military force. To add insult to injury, they were losing it to a foreign corporation in cahoots with the US intelligence networks. The CIA would love to replace the Politicos Nacionalidades with a "democratic" government, and AgroLife would love to bring "free enterprise" to the oppressed nation.