by Mike Cooper
The car was a Nissan—I could see a logo. I smelled exhaust, and now that I was next to it, I could hear the faint thrum of the car’s engine. They’d left it running after all.
“Who are you?” I said, trying to watch both heads and all four hands.
“You make a mistake.” Strong accent there, something from Eastern Europe.
“That’s my line.”
“Go away.”
“Shit, that’s my line too.”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay, I was holding that one back—”
He stamped the accelerator and the engine roared, wheels suddenly screaming on the pavement. The Nissan surged forward. I jumped out of the way. The open door swung wildly as the vehicle banged over the lot’s curb and into the street. The driver fought the wheel, hand over hand. He kept his foot on the gas, though. The skid was out of control—one eighty, then all the way around. Horns blared as two passing cars veered out of the way, almost hitting each other.
Another slew to the left, then right, and the door finally swung shut. The driver got himself straightened out, the wheels caught, and they shot off down the road about three times the speed limit.
I watched them disappear. The burnt-rubber smell was strong and acrid.
“What was that all about?”
A guy in a ball cap had come up behind me, staring at the tire marks, then at the street. I lowered my hand, ruffling the jacket to make sure the Sig was covered.
“Skipping out on his bill, maybe? I got no idea.”
“Assholes.”
“No kidding.” I shook my head. “I’m leaving.”
“Yeah.” He kept peering down the road. I went back around the restaurant—better that no one saw me go directly back to the motel—reholstering the pistol on the way. The busboy had finished up and lit a cigarette, sitting on a pile of wooden produce crates. I nodded at him, but this time he didn’t say anything.
I waited for a pause in traffic, crossed back over and went straight to my own car, keys in hand. I slid in, shifting around as the Sig jammed into my lower back, and started up.
The first stoplight was a hundred yards down the street, green when I got there. I picked up speed going through.
A hundred bucks blown. I wouldn’t be sleeping there tonight.
CHAPTER THREE
I felt uncomfortable and out of place.
Pittsburgh was better than I expected. A lot better than, say, East St. Louis. People still lived here, went to work, kept the streets clean. The industrial collapse had happened, manufacturing jobs evaporated, then somehow the city picked itself up and moved on. Some of the architecture was beautifully preserved, and the rivers looked like you could swim in them even without a tetanus shot.
But it was . . . empty.
Streets were wide and barely occupied, with parking anywhere. The industrial districts—Lawrenceville, the Strip, areas down the Monongahela—looked like vast metal sheds had been dropped into scraggly open fields, with just enough truck traffic to keep the weeds from completely taking over.
I missed New York, with all its bustle and noise and people in your face. I missed decent food and coffee shops on every corner. I missed the comforting anonymity of the crowds, the squealing rush of the subways, the constant nonstop chatter of the streets.
Which is funny, considering I grew up in rural New Hampshire. I joined the service before high school even ended, a week before graduation, right to Fort Benning. Then I spent several years in remote parts of the world, mostly living in shipping containers and dugouts and bivvy sacks. Pittsburgh was Paris compared to that.
Maybe I’d been too long in the city, gotten too used to life in Manhattan. Maybe I needed to get outside the loop, spend time in real America.
Maybe I needed to finish this damn job and go home.
I pulled into an empty lot a few miles later. A sagging fence at its edge surrounded an abandoned construction site—excavation had started, one curtain wall poured, then nothing. Weeds grew in the piles of dirt, and a pool of black water had accumulated in the bottom of the hole. In the dusk I couldn’t read the fading sign wired to the chain-link.
Parked by the fence, facing the road, I had a nice view in either direction. Plenty of time to see someone coming. I started to switch off the engine, then changed my mind.
My crummy phone was still plugged into the dash. A twenty-dollar disposable, but it worked fine. I pick them up two or three at a time. This one came from a bodega on 108th that still hadn’t installed security cameras. I stretched the power cord, leaning back, and dialed a 917 number.
It rang five times and clicked into silence. No invitation to leave a message.
Not good. Ryan always answered his calls.
See, I wasn’t actually the principal on this Clayco job. When the board of directors—or whoever—decided they needed the swamp drained at Clay Micro, they’d hired a different guy. Ryan had the same sort of line I did, and like all independent contractors he couldn’t say no to any offer of work. But maybe he was busy, or just didn’t feel like leaving New York for a few days. Instead, he asked around and subbed it out to me.
Normally I wouldn’t step a foot from the city either, if I could avoid it. But I had personal business in Pittsburgh, business I’d been avoiding for months, and when Ryan called, it felt like the universe had decided enough was enough. So I said yes, and here I was, dodging eurotrash muscle in the fallen wastelands of western Pennsylvania.
I dialed again, and again got no answer.
In the middle of heavy traffic, all four lanes filled, a city bus appeared. The electronic sign over the driver had a pleasant LED glow, but the lighted interior carried only a few passengers, slumped in the plastic seats. It trundled past, groaning with effort on the incline, doubtless irritating drivers behind it.
I dialed another, more familiar, number. This one picked up after one ring.
“What?”
“It’s Silas.”
“Uh-huh.”
Zeke’s an actual friend, and another specialty contractor. “You in the clear there?”
“Call you back.” Click.
He wasn’t necessarily in a bad mood, though it could be hard to tell. Zeke tends to be economical with his words. The army calls what he did for them MOUT—“military operations in urban terrain”—or even better, “kinetic response.” He never talks about it. Clients basically hire him when fucking-around time is over.
We knew each other back when we were both in uniform. Well, Zeke never wore a uniform, but you know what I mean—running into each other on the sort of ad hoc, deep-black missions that policy makers love.
Zeke has some issues, but so do we all.
The phone in my hand buzzed. Zeke hadn’t dialed it direct, of course—I couldn’t be updating my entire contact list every week or two when I switched to a new disposable. Instead he called my permanent number. I use an electronic forwarding service to switch incoming calls to Canada, where an anonymizing server scrubs the metadata and forwards it again, to whatever phone I happen to be using. Canada, because for now they have real, enforceable data-privacy laws.
Zeke would have switched to a more secure line, perhaps his own prepaid disposable. Kind of a pain in the ass, like most op-sec procedures, but neither of us wanted someone listening in, however remote the possibility. I suppose the NSA wouldn’t have any trouble, but local law enforcement is generally stymied by cross-border wiretapping.
Or so the theory goes. So far it’s worked.
“What’s going on?”
“Not much. Seen Ryan lately?”
“No.”
“He’s not answering his phone,” I said.
“Uh-oh.”
Like I said, abnormal behavior. It’s a small world, our little corner of the informal economy, and we all know one another.
“Don’t suppose you’ve heard anything,” I said.
“Nope. Why do you need to reach him?”
I gave a brief and ellip
tical explanation. “And now someone’s following me.”
“They a problem?”
“Nah.”
“I’ll ask around.”
“Thanks.”
“What do you want me to do if I find him?”
“Tell him to answer his damn calls.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Sure you’re good?”
“Yeah.”
“Pittsburgh.” Like it was Ulan Bator. “Didn’t know people still lived there.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“I’ll get back to you.” He hung up.
I sat another five minutes, studying a paper map I’d picked up at the AAA office on 62nd Street in Manhattan before coming on this bumfuck jaunt. The rental car had GPS, but I’d turned it off the moment I got in—as bad as a telephone, for privacy.
I had a half-dozen other maps, too, including Ohio, Buffalo and Washington, D.C. If some suspicious meddler found them, I didn’t want to give the center of my interest away.
The route looked easy enough. I folded the map, checked the road once more and eased the Malibu back into traffic.
—
Clabbton was a three-block downtown, surrounded by houses that looked like they’d been built from Sears Roebuck kits in 1925. Beyond them, the usual sprawl of gas stations, fast-food and big-box stores outside town limits. It lay in Fayette County, an hour southeast of Pittsburgh and halfway to the West Virginia border, where the hills began to rise gradually into mountains. I arrived with the last of the daylight, shadows falling, streetlights coming on. I drove through town at twenty miles an hour, careful to follow local speed limits.
The only attractive section was a row of old stores on Main Street, built of quarry stone and granite, and the town hall facing them across a small green. A war monument—man on a horse, so it must have been the Civil War—was floodlit from a single lamp below. I crossed a railroad bridge, catching a glimpse of a darkened mainline stretching into the woods on either side, then drove down the commercial strip. Rite Aid, convenience stores, a Super Duper supermarket—the usual.
I turned around and went back, taking one of the side streets, then another. Fifteen minutes was enough to cover most of the town—really, it wasn’t much more than the intersection of two state roads, plus a square mile of settlement.
Finally, back out on the strip, I stopped at a motor court with a VACANCY sign. It was old-fashioned, the tiny bungalows in a neat row. The Scotch pines overhanging them had probably been planted when the place was built, fifty or sixty years ago.
Half the cabins had lit windows, and the white-gravel circle drive held seven or eight pickup trucks. Workingmen’s vehicles: older, dented, most with metal tool cases mounted behind the cab or along the bed walls.
In the office I tapped a counter bell, and a woman came from the back of the house. I could hear television behind her.
“You’re in luck,” she said, putting on a pair of reading glasses from around her neck. “Had a man leave just this morning, so one unit’s open.”
“You’re that busy?”
“Folks are always coming and going, of course, so you’d probably get something somewhere. But I had someone tell me just last week they drove all the way from Erlenton before they found a room.” She pushed over a registration card and a pen. “You’re with the drillers, aren’t you?”
I had to think about what I was writing, so as not to repeat the made-up information I’d used at the last place. “Um, no, just some family business.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. So many big men have come in lately, I assume they’re all working on the rigs.”
I realized what she was talking about. “The fracking, is it?”
“Yes.” She nodded, waiting while I finished the card. “Wells and test bores and people selling their land leases like they won the lottery—I tell you, life sure is different around here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not that I’m complaining. Some folks, they don’t like all the commotion and new faces and crowds. But Clabbton needs the business, and that’s good, no matter where they’re coming from.”
I returned the card, along with a night’s payment in cash.
“If they all go to work at five A.M.,” I said, “they’re probably in bed and quiet at nine.”
She laughed. “Oh, yes, every one of them. Like an empty church here at night.”
“Excellent.”
“If there’s any problem with the cabin, you let me know.” She handed over my key—also old-fashioned, with a brass chain connecting it to a small painted diamond of hardboard. “I had my girl redd it up after lunch, but she was in a hurry to see her boyfriend . . . you know how it goes.”
The cabin’s walls were about as well soundproofed as a sheet of newspaper. Someone was playing a video game in the bungalow to my left, and I could hear every burst of weapon fire, every explosion, every grunt. To the right, someone had talk radio on, sports and politics, the entire discussion irritating. A minute later gravel crunched in front as a vehicle drove in, tinny music blasting.
I looked at my phone. Even in the din, if I could hear all my neighbors, there was a chance they could hear me. I was dog tired, but I put my boots back on and went back to the Malibu.
I turned left, away from Clabbton center. The road narrowed to two lanes, then climbed some hills into deep forest. Houses thinned. Every now and then there’d be a farmstead or a liquor store or a gas station, each with a gravel parking lot and a few pickups, none closer than a quarter mile to the next. Twice I drove under massive sets of power lines, draped from huge pylons marching across the hills, a clear-cut track like a ski run following underneath.
It was dark, and I couldn’t see anyone behind me. I suppose they could have turned off their headlights, but that would be awfully dumb on this road. I accelerated, swung through a series of curves, and pulled into the first dirt turnoff I saw. I slowed but not much, bumping and scraping and banging on the rough path, then slammed to a halt and killed the engine as soon as I was out of sight of the road.
Silence.
I considered the dome light above my head—I couldn’t tell which way the switch turned it off, so I rammed my elbow up into the plastic cover instead. It cracked. I felt around to make sure the bulb was broken, then quietly opened my door and slipped out.
No cars passed. I waited a few minutes. Someone approached from the other direction, but it was a jacked-up Mustang, and from my hiding spot near the verge, I saw a teenager behind the wheel. An SUV drove by towing a horse trailer. A few more cars, none likely.
It was impossible I’d had a surveillance team on me all the way from Pittsburgh. But if by some scant chance there had been, they were long gone now. A small weight lifted.
The woods were cool, the night air smelling of fern and dirt and berries. I discovered I still had phone service.
This time, Ryan answered on the first ring.
“Silas!”
“Ryan?” I was relieved. “Where’ve you been?”
“What?”
“I called twice already, you didn’t answer.”
“Shit, yeah, sorry.” There was a pause, as he apparently took the phone away from his ear long enough to check the display. “Oops, fuck, looks like I missed like five calls. It’s the job, man—they keep calling me. What’re you doing? They’re so pissed, they’re hinting around they want me to take a contract on you.”
Great. “You hired me, I did what you said.”
“Dude, you were supposed to do a fucking audit. What the hell happened out there?”
New Yorkers. That was what I’d been missing.
“I fast-tracked it,” I said.
“Is anyone still alive?”
“What?”
“Because, what I’m hearing—and when I say ‘hearing,’ that’s like I’m getting calls every fucking ten minutes—is you showed up with, fuck, a chainsaw and a machete or shit like that.”
“They were all still standing when I left.�
� Those that I saw, anyway. Brinker had probably gone to get his finger sewn up, and everyone else had disappeared.
“Seriously, the man’s not happy.”
“Come on, Ryan.” I closed my eyes, leaning against a tree. The cellphone’s lousy voice quality hurt my head as much as Ryan’s complaining. “They came to you first, didn’t they? What did they expect?”
“I dunno, maybe not the cutting-off-thumbs part. Did you really do that?”
“Of course not.”
“Or blow up some VP’s sports car?”
“Not that either. Jesus.”
“Good. Okay.”
I frowned. “You told them I wouldn’t have done shit like that, didn’t you?”
“Well, fuck, I’m not there. I’ve been on jobs—um, never mind.”
“Remind me not to use you as a reference.”
Ryan laughed. “You know, they probably would have paid a per diem. You didn’t have to, like, superexpedite the discovery phase.”
“Right. Think they’re unhappy now?—all I can say is, good thing you didn’t handle it yourself.” Ryan tended to be more physical than me, believe it or not. “The building’s still there, and nothing’s on fire.”
“Whatever. Anyway, it’s been ten minutes, I’m about due for another fucking call. Give me the executive summary.”
So I explained Clay Micro’s little comedy of errors, starting with Timmy the Slacker’s careless infrastructure maintenance, proceeding through opportunistic skimming and fraud at every level, and finishing with Brinker, the depantsed CEO. When I was done, Ryan didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Dude.” He started laughing again. “That’s an awesome story. Like, I mean, truly awesome. Only what the fuck am I going to tell them? Send everyone to jail and shut the place down? Didn’t you ever study client management?”
Ryan had gone to business school. “How about, I dunno, the truth?” I said.
“That’s the last thing they want to hear.” His chuckling died away. “Jesus, this is fucked up. Let me get some details, okay?”
We ran over it again, Ryan taking notes this time. He stopped messing around, too—asked brief, relevant questions, listened, didn’t crack any more jokes.
