The Brummie Con (Sunken City Capers Book 4)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  Puo whispers to me, “Stay here.” He pushes his fingertips onto my neck through the suit and swears. “Stupid gloves.”

  Then he’s gone.

  It hurts to breathe. I’d like to throw up more but can’t. Feeling slowly spreads out from my shoulders, down into my arms. My arms are real, connected to my body. They obey my commands. They move.

  I’m still in my helmet, trapped in my vomit, lying on the side of the road. The bridge is detailed in bright blue pixels. Landcars zip by uncaring. I can’t decide if that’s a good or bad thing. Probably good. Can always count on the indifference of strangers.

  I push myself up to the sitting position. My legs are real too. I can breathe without pain, albeit shallowly.

  There’s Puo on the other side of the road, bent over a crumpled form. “Oh, God,” I whisper.

  “Queen Bee,” Puo rushes over the comm-link, “please tell me you’re okay.”

  “Yeah,” I say a little groggily, “yeah, I think so.” I speak shallowly, trying to ignore the stench and taste in my helmet. “What about Falcon?” I try to push myself up to stand, but end up hunching over instead.

  “I don’t know,” Puo says wretchedly. Puo picks Winn up and cradles him in his arms like Michelangelo’s Pietà. “Can you get the access door open?”

  The access door—the whole reason we chanced this stupidity. We needed to get to a lower one—now we’ll have a long climb down. More time for unpleasant things to potentially find us while we’re trapped in the stairwell.

  The access door leads down to the undercity, to the sewers, through the concrete piling holding the bridge up. Once we’re under, no one will be able to find us.

  I hobble over to the heavy metal access door that’s painted a rough beige color to match the surrounding concrete. It’s locked, but I still have the electronic tumbler on me from when we broke into Hank and June’s house. Was that only a little while ago? I unzip the front of my suit and dig out the electronic tumbler.

  The door opens as easily as I remember. I start dragging the two equipment bags into the stairwell. I can’t wait to get this helmet off, but it’s imperative to stay hidden until we’re under.

  Puo runs across traffic with Winn cradled in his arms and sets him down inside the stairwell. Puo turns to leave.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “To get the equipment bag.” Puo ducks back out into the street.

  “Need some help?” I offer. We need to get into the undercity quick. Even though no upstanding citizen has stopped to help, we can’t count on them not calling the cops for someone else to come deal with it.

  “No,” Puo says quietly. “There’s only one bag left.”

  Shit. We lost a bag. There isn’t time to try and find it. Someone is going to find a bag full of fun, suspicious goodies.

  Oh, God. Fear sparks in my already-emptied queasy stomach. Did the lost bag have Winn’s caduceus necklace? It’s the pendant digi-scrambler he abandoned the morning he left, to make sure the stake driven through my heart was thorough. I’ve carried it with us ever since, not sure what to do with it.

  I kneel down next to Winn, feel him over, searching for signs of life. I rest my hand on his chest. After an alarming second it rises and falls. “He’s breathing,” I tell Puo.

  “Good,” Puo says. “Almost there.”

  A second later Puo ducks into the stairwell and I shut the access door behind him that locks automatically. I kneel back down to unhook Winn’s helmet.

  “I wouldn’t,” Puo says.

  “Why?” I ask. I want to check on him, feel his pulse, feel the warmth of his skin, his life.

  “We don’t know what we’re going to find. Removing it, or even shimmying it, might hurt him more. And we’re not safe here. We need to get underground.” Puo picks up an equipment bag and throws it over his back like a backpack. He then bends down at the knees and scoops up Winn. “C’mon,” he says. “We need to move.”

  I keep my gross helmet on for now and hurry, pulling the same backpack-bearing move with one equipment bag, albeit far more gingerly, and then thread the other over my shoulder. “Lead the way.”

  Down the rabbit hole we go.

  ***

  Two hours later, my shoulders still burn from where the equipment bag straps dug into them on the several-hundred-foot descent into the underground. My upper left back throbs from where I landed on the concrete, and that’s on top of the half-healed back injuries from being blown up last week. Not to mention every muscle in my body aching as if I had been whiplashed in a car crash. At least I don’t have vomit smeared in front of my face anymore.

  I sit on a soiled mattress shoved up against the wall in a mostly bare ten-by-twenty concrete room that sits tucked above one of the tributary sewers. Believe me, a soiled mattress is better to sit on than concrete when your ass already hurts. The inhospitable space glows orange from two of our glow sticks.

  Winn lays next to me on the soiled mattress; he’s out of the anti-gravity suit, breathing evenly. Sleeping. He woke shortly after we arrived and, by the grace of God, was not any worse for wear than I am—well maybe a little bit, but not enough to warrant finding (and paying) a doctor who doesn’t ask questions.

  “Home sweet home, hunh?” Puo asks as he finishes taking stock of the equipment we have left and then walks over to come sit down next to me.

  “Home sweet home,” I agree, distracted by memories. I hate this place; I hated it even then. It smells of dust and mold just like it used to, but only on the good days. The bad days, like after a storm, it smelled of drowned rat or something bigger. All our stuff we left behind in this room as kids has long since been raided. Only the soiled mattress and some boxes filled with someone else’s bric-a-brac fill the space. The single light bulb overhead is broken and jammed in the socket—probably why the space has been abandoned.

  The sound of water trickling by underneath us reminds me of nights lying here listening to that sound, trying to hear anything above the background that may be a threat. Puo and I used to take turns on watch, one person on guard duty while the other person slept. Puo wasn’t able to sleep without it when we first linked up. And me? Initially, at least, I think I secretly wanted someone to come, someone to care.

  “Hey,” Puo says quietly, his face lit up by the orange glow, “want me to tell you a story?” He reaches out and gently squeezes my knee in a reassuring way and smiles with kindness in his eyes.

  I smile to myself without mirth. This room, this is where his storytelling first started. We’d tell each other stories to pass the time. Not all bad memories, I suppose.

  “No,” I say to Puo’s offer. I’m not in the mood to be cheered up. Sometimes it’s okay to be sad, or at least not be ... normal. Happy isn’t the right word, but not normal.

  My father is still missing. The Cleaners are pursuing us relentlessly, willing to go after innocent civilians, willing to expose themselves by popping off gunfire in a crowded city where the police can acoustically echolocate them. We can’t go home to the Seattle Isles. We can’t go to my father’s compound. We can’t go anywhere that the Cleaners might know about. So instead we’re back here. I had promised myself when we left we wouldn’t be coming back. We had leveled up. It had been such a great day. And now we’re back in this concrete cell that glows orange and stinks of dust, bereft of any of the improvements we made. Right back to where we started.

  I hate this place.

  Then there’s Winn. He looks as terrible as I feel. Pallid. Covered in bruises, groaning as he moves. He was able to assess himself with some help from us and decided what we all needed was rest. He said we were in the equivalent of a low-speed car wreck. Low speed my bruised ass—but I kept that comment to myself.

  And good luck on my getting any rest. I can’t shut my brain off. Winn nearly died. How many times has that happened with us? He was held for questioning in Atlanta seven months ago, his life used as collateral by Colvin four months ago, the Cleaners kidnapped and
tortured him last week. And now this. Puo and I were nearly blown up last week. Puo had a serious heart event as a result. Is this what Winn meant back in the Seattle Isles by the track we’re on? That it’s going to end in us getting arrested or killed?

  “Hey,” Puo says quietly, “we’re still here.”

  I glance at him, and wonder how it is that he can read me so well. His face looks calm in the orange glow, reassuring. I scoot over and rest my head on his shoulder.

  “How’s your heart?” I ask.

  “Still ticking,” Puo answers at first. He’s quiet as he thinks about it for a few seconds. “Good, I guess.”

  “So,” I say with a bit of a smile, “I guess then it was a coronary spasm—”

  “Heart attack,” Puo immediately maintains.

  “You couldn’t recover this quickly from a heart attack,” I say. “Coronary spasm.”

  Puo scowls, but is careful not to jostle me on his shoulder.

  “You seem like you’ve lost weight,” I observe. Puo’s weight has always fluctuated a bit around three hundred pounds since we were teenagers. But I noticed earlier that his anti-gravity suit looked loose on him for the first time ever.

  “Yeah, well,” Puo says, “all that health food Winn has me eating coupled with your high-stress-we’re-all-gonna-die exercise regime over the past week does wonders for weight loss. Y’all should think of packaging that up and selling it. We’d make a killing.”

  I smile at the thought—weight loss, a legal con game. At least until the class action lawsuit, but that’d be more than enough time to launder the money away.

  Winn stirs on the bed briefly, but quickly falls back asleep. A snotty whistle now accompanies his inhalations.

  “Charming,” I say.

  Puo laughs to himself.

  “What?” I ask, starting to get annoyed.

  “You,” Puo says. “You wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here.”

  “Actually, I want to be anywhere but here.” I gesture around this concrete shit hole.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Puo says.

  I know what you meant, but I don’t want to discuss it with Winn right here. “What equipment did we lose?” Winn’s caduceus digi-scrambler was in another bag—I located it after we got Winn settled.

  Puo exhales as he gathers his thoughts. “Riders, magnetic disrupters, some tracker chips, snuffers and some loose silicon.”

  Of that list the riders are the only homegrown specialized tech. “Damn.”

  “Yeah,” Puo says. “But they’re not that complicated and it’ll be pretty easy to make new ones.”

  “I hate repeating work,” I say.

  “Well, since I’m the one repeating the work, it shouldn’t impact you very much.”

  I lift my head up to stick my tongue out at him. Still costs us money.

  “And,” Puo continues, “given how much in the last seven months we’ve had to hide, move, and reboot, I’m used to it at this point.”

  We fall into silence for several heartbeats, no doubt both thinking over the events of the last seven months.

  Very large sums of money have passed through our hands in these last seven months. More than we’ve ever had previously by a large margin. And now we’re right back into the donkey-fucking red hole. To get over the Canadian border and back into the US the Citizen Maker had to travel to us, which she only did at Colvin’s insistence and our agreeing to immediately pay off the original debt. Once paid, she then proceeded to gouge us on three new CitIDs. So now, after that payment, the hospital bill, and the six-week rental in Vancouver, there isn’t much left from the British Museum job, so financing the gouging was the only option. Capitalist scumbags.

  “Where do we go from here?” Puo asks.

  How should I know? I take a deep breath and force myself to go back slowly through the meeting with Durante step by step.

  “The Cleaners,” I say to Puo, “are going to have my father’s mistresses under surveillance.” Which is going to make looking into them very dangerous and high risk. But it was the only thread Durante dangled for us to investigate.

  “Yup,” Puo concurs. “Did you learn anything else?”

  I shake my head as I think. “Only that Durante’s sufficiently confused and he’s sufficiently paranoid enough to suspect me.”

  Puo inhales, holds it and then exhales with, “Blah. That means we can’t trust him.”

  “Duh,” I say. Durante might be paranoid and desperate enough to try and cut a deal with the Cleaners: me for my father, on the condition, of course, that the Cleaners kill me so my father never finds out. Plus, there’s that pesky mole business—which means: “We need to warn Durante about the mole,” I say.

  “How?” Puo asks. “They’re obviously watching your father’s place. They have a mole somewhere inside, so clandestinely coordinating is too high risk. And, bum-bum-bum, they’d be stupid not to be watching all the municipal feeds for both our faces or the presence of digi-scramblers. Which makes even moving about risky.”

  Good thing we have new CitIDs—which only put us right back into crushing debt. But at least now the Cleaners can’t zero in on us that way. As for moving about the city while avoiding the municipal cameras, we’re already sitting in the best position to do that. The entire underground that Puo and I spent our youth memorizing is the perfect launching point up into the city above.

  “We know how to move,” I say to Puo and gesture to the empty concrete room around me.

  Puo cedes the point with a head bob. “But we still don’t know what’s going on,” Puo says. “Where to go, what to look into it, who to talk to.”

  The last preposition shakes loose some memories, mostly good ones at that. “What’d we used to do,” I ask Puo, “when we were kids and we didn’t know what to do next?”

  Puo leans his head back and his face relaxes at the thought of us being kids again. “Go talk to Charlie.”

  “Go talk to Charlie,” I repeat with a relaxed smile. I pick myself up and stretch out a bit. “I’ll go leave her a signal that we want to talk.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EVEN THE SEWER underneath Oak Street Auction House is majestic, or at least it was to a ten-year-old waif of a girl (and still kinda is to the twenty-six-year-old beautiful woman that girl grew into). The sewer is made of red and brown brick meticulously hand laid with graceful arches undulating down the sides. The whole space has the feel that it was crafted by a master hand that took even the hue of individual bricks into account.

  And the space is warm, almost humid on the skin. I cannot tell you how luxurious that felt the first several times I was here. It was more than just a warmth to chase away the winter chill in your bones, it was the feeling that this warmth wouldn’t fade, that the cold wasn’t welcome here. I’m still not sure how that is, if it’s a natural trick of the sewers or if Charlie pipes heat down here for the orphans she took on and trained.

  I’m sitting below the sewer entrance up to the Oak Street Auction House with my back gingerly leaning up against the brick wall, waiting for Charlie to see my mark and come unlock it from above. I’ve been here for an hour and half already, and my stomach is starting to rumble—the quick breakfast of a latte and almond croissant not nearly enough after our adventures last night.

  But the warmth is penetrating, comforting, seducing me into a lull of safety. The low light that permeates the sewer from individual electric lights spaced down the wall flicker like cozy fires. My eyelids grow heavy with fatigue, with memories of this place.

  It was the first place I thought of as home, a real place where I felt safe. A place run by a person in control, someone who was strong and positively predisposed toward Puo and I. Although, that was not true the first time I was here.

  I smile at the memory at the same time I decide to drowsily rest my eyes. Puo and I had just fenced our first stolen item of any real value, a pencil sketch by Luc Tuymans, to that bastard Lying Lyle (I added the adjective “Lying” after the
se events) who had given us pennies on the dollar. Determined to get even with him, we shadowed him here, to the legitimate street entrance to the Oak Street Auction House.

  Heh. Even then Puo told me I was being stupid and followed begrudgingly, taking every opportunity he could to berate me. You’d think that the majestic turn-of-the-nineteenth-century building would shut him up, but nah, it just encouraged him more to try and pull us away. The four-story brick and stone building with a crowning cupola was built in American Renaissance splendor and looks like an imposing stately courthouse. But courthouse it is definitely not.

  This became apparent as we watched the building. First Lying Lyle went in and came out shortly after, then as Puo and I were deciding what to do, Shani, another fence ducked in and out. No, the Oak Street Auction House wasn’t a courthouse, it was a business run by a master fence.

  Ka-clunk. The sewer entrance above my head unlocks and scrapes open pulling me back into the present.

  Charlie calls down, “You’re lucky that I decided to come in at all today, girlie.”

  “It’s Saturday,” I say trying to wipe away the drowsiness that was taking root. “It’s when the nine-to-fivers report their take for the week.”

  “Oh, shut up and get up here.”

  I stretch and crack my back—ow—before standing to climb up the metal ladder. I emerge into a hidden basement below the auction house proper: The Thief’s Ballroom. Although now the wide space is mostly empty, what teaching equipment is left is covered in dust and cobwebs. Several of the individual lights on the chandeliers scattered across the ceiling are dead.

  “Where’s Puo?” Charlie asks. She stands there, her thick arms crossed across her ample chest, piercing, parsing me with her sharp hazel eyes.

  “You’re graying!” I say when I see her properly, and can’t help but grin at her. It looks good on her. She has tufts of gray poking out at the edges of her Afro at her temples. She’s wearing a tasteful ginger-colored cardigan sweater over a long black dress. She looks quite homely, almost like a grandmother.