The Brummie Con (Sunken City Capers Book 4)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  The sewer cover leading up into the wine cellar is kindly already removed. I make some splashing noises to announce my presence before pushing my head slowly up through the water. My helmet lights cut through the darkness to fall on an Italian man in his mid-thirties: Durante Cattaneo. He holds a handgun bearing a mounted flashlight in a two-handed grip.

  He directs me silently out of the sewer with quick twitches of the handgun.

  I pull myself out of the sewer hole, water spilling out onto the cold stone floor. I use the distraction as an opportunity to look around. Durante’s alone in the wine cellar.

  Once I’m free of the sewer, I stare at him, making sure to keep my hands visible and away from my body. Steam rises off my heated anti-gravity suit in the cold air.

  He takes one hand off his gun to tap his head: take the helmet off.

  I oblige. My breath escapes out in bursts of white fog in the empty wine cellar. It smells of must and aged cedar. The helmet lights shine out from my waist onto a wooden wine rack behind Durante filled with red wine bottles covered with dust.

  Durante visibly relaxes and lowers his gun. “Isa, it’s good to see you. You look good.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” I say. “You look terrible.” Gray is starting to peek out of the edges of his disheveled oily black hair. He has a three-day-old scruffy beard and his skin is wrinkled and worn—guess he never did quit smoking. He also looks like he hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours—not that I have much either. Before he can follow up my comment or dredge up the past, I say, “So what do you know?”

  “Not much,” he says. He sits back on a waist-high wine rack, holding the handgun in his lap. The bottles shift as his weight pushes the wine rack back against the stone staircase that leads upstairs. “Boss said he was going to see one of his mistresses, but he never showed up. When we questioned her, she said they never had plans that night.”

  “Do you believe her?” I ask.

  He slowly nods as he thinks about it. “Her story checks out. Not that she can’t still know something.”

  I nod. Message received: start pulling at that thread. It would not go well for Durante when my father returns if Durante had put one of his mistresses under intense questioning to find she was ultimately innocent.

  “What about other mistresses?” I ask.

  “We’re looking into it,” he says, “but it doesn’t appear likely.”

  “Has anyone come forward with anything?”

  He shakes his head. “No.”

  “And you have no other theories?”

  “Well—” He shifts a bit on the wine rack. “—one thought was that he might—” He waves his gun around as if he were trying to pluck the thought out of the air. “—secretly be meeting with, well, you. Kinda like I am, now.”

  I notice his finger is still on the trigger. Suddenly that gun takes on a whole different tone.

  “He wasn’t meeting with me,” I say slowly. “I was in Vancouver. Deona Nix, the Vancouver Boss, can attest to that.”

  “Deona Nix is dead.”

  Oh, shit.

  “You didn’t know?” he asks, obviously reading the shock on my face.

  “No,” I say quietly. “We’ve been focused on getting over the border, gearing up and mobilizing.” Getting over the border was not trivial with our CitID issues.

  “Can anyone else verify your whereabouts?”

  We lock eyes for few seconds, weighing each other. Can he really think I’m involved in this? I finally say, “James Colvin, the Seattle Isles Boss.”

  “I see.” Durante hasn’t taken his finger off the trigger. “And this Colvin, he’s one of the ones that survived, right?”

  “Yeah.” There’s something weird in the way he asks about Colvin. “Durante,” I ask, “what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, Isa.” He suddenly stands up from the wine rack, causing it to smack against the stone staircase behind it as he advances toward me with a half-crazed look in his eyes. “I don’t fucking KNOW! Two days ago your father goes to a secret meeting and just disappears. At the same exact time, half the Bosses around the country are killed in a coordinated strike. About a third of those that survived pledged an allegiance to the Cleaners.”

  “What?” I ask breathlessly.

  “They’re puppets, Isa!” He stops several steps away from me, leaning toward me aggressively. “They’re taking orders! And now you wouldn’t know anything about that would you, Isa? About the Cleaners that is, Isa?” he asks sarcastically. “You wouldn’t have had any dealings with them, would you? There wouldn’t be any special reason that your father, the only Boss unaccounted for, went missing at the exact same time that all this shit went down, is there, Isa? Because that wouldn’t be inconsistent at all with your get-along-with-everyone attitude.”

  Blood pounds through my neck. Of course, we connected the dots. Of course the Cleaners are going to try and use my father against us. But Durante’s finger is still on the trigger and the half-crazed look hasn’t left his eyes.

  “Durante,” I say slowly, raising my hands up slowly to try and calm him down, “my father trusts me. If he were here—”

  “He’s not here, Isa!” His voice echoes weakly in the stone wine cellar, swallowed up by the shadows dancing from our flashlights.

  “Stop saying my fucking name, Durante!” My I-don’t-give-a-fuck-o-meter just clicked on. What does he think? That I suddenly had aspirations to be a Boss and would take out my own father to do it? I never wanted to get on that bloody ship whose passages are only paid in the souls of other human beings. “My father trusts me, and I’m here to figure out what the fuck is going on.”

  “Why?” Durante asks dangerously.

  “Why?” I ask back, dropping my hands and getting ready to deck the bastard. “What the fuck do you mean why?”

  “Why come back, Isa?” he taunts. “Why help now? You continually deny knowing him or being connected to him. You very publicly refused his offer.”

  I refused an offer to become a murderer, to be groomed into a Boss. Specifically, I refused Durante’s position. Is that what his crazed look is about? Jealousy? Fear of being replaced when this is over?

  Durante continues, “He wasn’t there for you growing up. What loyalty do you owe him?”

  My father wasn’t there for me in any obvious way, in any way that could tie him to me or that I could notice at the time. But he was there, acting behind the scenes without my knowing it: the time the cop let me off with a warning without entering my information into the digital database despite my lack of a citizen chip; how fast and easily I was accepted into Atlanta’s top professional bar; my first loan for a job after no one else would take a chance on a team composed of a twelve- and thirteen-year-old; how he kept the darker aspects of the streets from finding me. So, yeah, he wasn’t taking me to father-daughter dances and getting misty-eyed while taking prom photos. But I’m here, in better shape than I would be without him. He’s still a dick, still a murderer, still a pain in my ass, still not someone I like being around. But people are complicated. Life’s like that.

  “Why are you here,” Durante continues his asinine questions, “that is, unless ... you have something to gain?”

  Yup. There it is—my I-don’t-give-a-fuck-o-meter just spiked. “Fuck you, Durante! I don’t want your sycophantic, boot-licking, lackey job. I’m here for my father. That’s it. So pull your head out of your sweaty unwashed ass, take a shower, and start being fucking helpful! And stop pointing that fucking gun at me!”

  Durante’s half-crazed eyes dilate to full-crazed. A snarl stretches across his face. His hand tenses on the gun.

  “Durante—!”

  He steps forward and raises his gun.

  I launch myself at him, but I can’t close the distance before a single crack rings out in the wine cellar.

  Time slows.

  I feel no pain. I only have two distant thoughts: I’m still alive. Get the gun.

  I grab his wrist and s
hove it to the side out of the way. His wrist is meaty with well-used muscle. The arm doesn’t give. I use my momentum to slam my body against his chest and we tumble to the ground.

  “Assassin!” Durante screams.

  “I’m not an assassin!” I scream back, struggling with the gun.

  “Behind you!” Durante manages to say as I force my weight onto his chest.

  What? I glance back toward the sewer hole. Oh, shit. There’s a body halfway out and draped over the floor, thick red blood spilling out of a bullet hole through the faceplate of their scuba helmet. Steam billows off the body, like the soul bleeding out.

  I scramble off Durante, keeping my eyes glued to the sewer cover for movement.

  Durante pushes himself up and keeps his gun pointed at the dead body.

  “One of yours?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “Falcon, Chameleon, check in,” I say over the comm-link.

  Puo and Winn indicate they’re still alive and where they’re supposed to be.

  “No,” I answer Durante.

  “Well, good,” Durante says. The crazed look from before has vanished. “That would’ve been awkward.” He keeps the gun at the ready as he walks over to the body and then pulls it the rest of the way out of the water to start examining it.

  It’s definitely an assassin. The scuba diver had an underwater gun in his hand when Durante shot him.

  Durante starts to remove the bloody scuba helmet and I look away to avoid having that lodged in my memory. The helmet squelches as it peels off.

  My face flushes from the sound, burns as I fight off a bout of nausea.

  “Your father does trust you,” he says. “But I had to ask my own questions, to figure out if I could trust you.”

  I spit out some excess saliva and then take some deep breaths. “That’s what that crazed look was and pointing the gun at me?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Durante says simply.

  “And?” I ask, still looking away from the dead body.

  “I haven’t decided. But given the circumstances, I don’t have a choice. And don’t tell me you’re not involved with the Cleaners somehow—”

  The door down to the wine cellar bangs open saving me from having to reply. “Durante!” a frantic male voice calls out as steps crash down the stone steps.

  “Stay where you are!” Durante calls out. He unnecessarily looks pointedly at me as the footsteps halt on the stairs.

  I’m already moving deeper into the shadows of the wine cellar to hide while making sure not to let my gaze slide over the mess of a dead body in the center of cleared out area.

  “We’re under attack!” the voice calls out. “Part of the defense grid is down!”

  The assassin. The Cleaners are coming. And then almost as if to underscore the point, the anti-aircraft EMPs start releasing in the distance. At least I think that’s what those are.

  The voice rushes on, “We’re bringing it back up—!”

  Durante looks at me.

  I quickly gesture that I need at least ten minutes to get out of here—assuming there’s no more assassins or surprises in the water waiting for me.

  “Wait!” Durante calls out. He kicks the underwater gun away from the body toward me, his intent clear. “I’m coming with you,” he yells to the guy on the stairs. Durante runs over to the stairs and gestures toward me, five minutes.

  Five minutes when all hell has just broken loose. When I need ten minutes in normal conditions. Five minutes until the entire defense grid, including the river defenses, are back to operational.

  Durante slams the wine cellar door behind him.

  Lovely.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “YOU CATCH THAT?” I call to both Puo and Winn over the comm-link as I descend into the maze-like sewer tunnels.

  “Yeah, five minutes,” Puo says heatedly.

  “Plan?” Winn asks.

  I don’t know. I jitter with nervous energy, but there’s nothing to do with it. I can’t sprint down here in the tunnels. I can’t beat the crap out of anyone.

  “Pipe in the music, keep it low,” I say. With the Cleaners so close and attacking we need to know immediately if we’re jammed.

  Puo obliges and low classical music, a symphony of someone famous (probably—I don’t really know) pipes in. It’s a slow number that features the wind section prominently.

  “And I need a new extraction point,” I say. That much is clear. The original plan was to swim back upstream and leave the same way I entered. But now there’s not enough time.

  “Working on it,” Puo says.

  Work faster, but I keep the thought to myself. I lower my helmet lights to two percent and turn on my nightvision. The tunnel becomes painted in blue pixels. I also start a digital timer for five minutes which snaps to the stone sewer wall out in front of me.

  The curves and corners in the sewer take on a heart thumping quality as I swim as fast as I can in the near total darkness, wondering if the shadows hide more assassins. There’s no time to take it slow. No time to peek around corners. Just burst around corners with the underwater gun in front of me and hope there’s nothing waiting for me.

  Four minutes and nine seconds. Once that count reaches zero all the river defenses that so helpfully ignored me on ingress are going to flip on and not be so kind.

  “Chameleeoonn...” I say unable to restrain myself. I’m getting near the sewer exit back out into the river.

  “It’s the Cleaners” Puo says.

  “Duh,” I say. “I’m more concerned right now with: how do I get out of here?”

  “No,” Puo says. “I mean, it’s the Cleaners—”

  “Chameleon!”

  “I’m blind, Queen Bee! First of all, the paranoid owner of that fine estate made sure there’s no municipal surveillance systems or drone patrols pointed at it.”

  Yeah, I already knew that. All our plans were based on my memories and a really old real estate survey before my father moved in.

  Puo continues in a huff, “Second, everything looks exactly like it should on the closest municipal systems—the Cleaners are inside the system. They’re making the area look like everything’s A-okay.”

  I come up to the sewer exit. The puffs of the anti-aircraft EMPs are louder than I expected and I think I can make out the whiz of the anti-personnel guns which must have silencers on them.

  I exit the sewer. Which way should I go? Time for a command decision. “I’m going downstream.”

  “Duh,” Puo helpfully adds. “Downstream leads past the gatehouse. You should be able to lasercut your way through the underwater grates and then Winn can pick you up on the other side.”

  “Should?” I ask. The gatehouse serves as the main entrance—it’s going to be heavily guarded.

  “Yes, should!” Puo snaps. “I’m blind, Queen Bee! Blind! And you know what else this means?”

  “What?” Winn breaks in to ask.

  “The cops,” I say. “The cops are blind too. They’ll be way too slow to respond.” It’ll likely be over before they even get here. All their digital intelligence in the area will not corroborate the calls they’re getting. How does a neighbor even report what’s happening? Can they even tell what’s happening? Uh, 9-1-1 my neighbor who I know better than to call the cops on, appears to be firing military grade weaponry into the air and I can’t sleep through it all. Durante and his goons, assuming they survive, will have everything picked up and put away by the time morning comes. Oh, that noise? That was just some overzealous fireworks.

  I shove the underwater gun into my belt and start breast-stroking at the bottom of the river where the current is strongest.

  Three minutes and thirteen seconds.

  “Falcon, where are you?” I ask.

  “I’m close,” Winn says. “I’ll pick you up on the other side of the bridge.”

  “Roger that,” I say. There’s a bridge about a quarter mile outside my father’s compound. There shouldn’t be any river defenses once I’m past the gateh
ouse. Although the difference between shouldn’t and aren’t is of intense interest to me right now.

  The river is gradually getting shallower. Sweat slicks down my neck from my rapid swimming.

  Two minutes and forty seconds.

  The popping sound of gunfire is growing distant but more rapid. The riverbed continues to rise, though. You’ve got to be kidding. “I have a problem,” I say. “The river is getting too shallow.” When did Father do this?

  “Neptune’s balls!” Puo swears on top of Winn’s more explicit response.

  “How much farther to the gatehouse?” I ask Puo. It’s not much longer until I’ll have to stand up and make a run for it—which, I’m sure, is by design.

  Puo answers, “Forty, maybe fifty feet.”

  “Maybe?” I ask. The water is only four feet deep now.

  “Yeah, maybe. The last geological survey of the area was done before the current owner moved in—”

  “Shut up!” I order. I think I hear voices. “Cut the music!” The symphony cuts off.

  Two minutes and eight seconds.

  Yeah, yeah those are definitely muffled voices. “I’ve got a patrol near me,” I whisper. “I can’t move.” The riverbed has risen to the point that I dare not go forward, but I hold myself in position.

  “Gah!” Puo wails. “I can’t see anything!”

  “Puo,” I whisper again, “either say something helpful or shut up.”

  Puo blessedly keeps his mouth shut. Although I think I’d prefer he say something helpful instead.

  The voices continue their muffled conversation. They have to be close for me to be able to hear them under the water.

  One minute fifty-four seconds.

  “Ideas,” I order Winn and Puo. “Anything, everything.” There’s absolutely no time. Even if the voices walk away, they’ll still be too close not to see me if I suddenly stand up and start running—which is about the only option left.

  Nothing. Silence on the comm-link.

  “Chameleon—!” I say.

  “Nothing!” Puo yells in a panic. “I got nothing! I can’t do anything!”