The Solid-State Shuffle (Sunken City Capers Book 1)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  "You," Colvin orders me, "stay here."

  "I can help deliver Christina to you undisputed."

  Colvin stops in his tracks and looks at me. "How?"

  * * *

  Winn doesn't look anymore physically hurt than when I left him three hours ago. His black curly hair still has the matted look on the back, but other than that he appears fine as he joins me in the lounge area of the library. Well ... mostly fine, except for that kicked puppy dog look he's sporting around.

  There's a sheen of perspiration shining through his black stubble and sweat stains under his arms. God knows what he's been thinking about; the stress of having a loaded gun pointed at you over an extended period of time wears on you.

  He doesn't move immediately to me. Instead he watches me warily, playing the part of the kicked puppy that his face is so adamantly sticking to. I want to run over to him, look him over, kiss him, tell him I'm sorry. But we're in Colvin's den. I don't want Colvin thinking he can use Winn for leverage against me, so I stay put.

  I motion for Winn to come over to the table. Colvin's tablet is still on the tabletop and tapped into Valle's yacht. I hand an extra comm-link to Winn as he steps up.

  As he slips it in, I get a good look at the back of his head. It's bloody, but appears clotted now. Based on the size and deep purple emanating out I'd say a coldcock from the handle of a pistol.

  Winn looks at me questioningly once the comm-link is in.

  "Puo," I say. "You ready?" There's no point in using code names here. Colvin knows we're on the line, setting things up. Using code names here could potentially allow him to descramble things in the past.

  Puo answers, "Yeah. Waiting on you're signal."

  "Roger, that," I answer. To Winn I say, "We're waiting for Colvin to get into position."

  "And then what?" Winn asks.

  "Then he ends this," I say, gesturing toward the tablet showing Valle's yacht.

  Winn's somber face is not quite the reaction I was looking for. There's a sudden sadness there.

  I expected some of that. Death isn't our style. Killing is never on the menu. But they forced us into a corner. Either Colvin kills them or he would've killed us.

  "We had no choice," I whisper.

  "When I first joined," Winn says, his eyes glued to the tablet, "you said no killing. That you and Puo had never killed anyone and had never needed to. That to do so would constitute a failure on your part. Two months later, it's déjà vu. Only this time—" He glances at me. "—the body count will be several times higher than it was on the east coast."

  "What choice did we have?" I ask.

  Winn just shakes his head. "This is not what I signed up for."

  I want to go to him, to wrap my arms around him and whisper that I love him, that there was nothing we could do. But Colvin's goons are nearby, watching us.

  Colvin comes on the comm-link. "I'm in position."

  I turn the audio up on the tablet. "Puo." I give the order to proceed to deliver Christina.

  Puo counts down, "Initiating in three ... two ... one."

  The scene in the tablet flickers, the lights turn on and off.

  Christina looks around shrewdly.

  Valle asks, "What was that?"

  Valle's question echoes inside the yacht on a weak feedback loop.

  Christina's eyes go wide, and she bounces out of her chair. She rushes over to a nearby control display and starts tapping around. "Son of a bitch," she says breathlessly.

  The phrase echoes in the interior of the yacht.

  "Puo," I say, "cut out the feedback."

  "Cutting out the feedback," Puo says.

  "What is it?" Valle has followed closely on Christina's tracks and asks from behind her.

  Christina turns right around and stares at the nearest camera. "They're watching us."

  Valle's face goes white. He drops the tablet he's been holding. "How?"

  Christina looks dazed. "My squeegee. The Amazonian stole it at the marina. They're using it against us—"

  I am not a freaking Amazon! I am five nine, thank you very much. Lithe, small, sexy—!

  Winn puts his hand on my shoulder. His hand is warm, like a furnace through my now crusty dark gray t-shirt. He holds his other hand up to his lips to shush me.

  I hurrumph in response. Amazonian. Grr.

  Well at least that ties Christina to the marina, which matches our version of the truth. And now Colvin, armed with that version of the truth and possession of Christina's squeegee, can prove she was moving against him and was justified in removing her. If the Cleaners decide to retaliate, it would be a declaration of war, and they would be the ones that started it (which actually means something to those initially on the sidelines).

  In the yacht, it looks like Hayes had tried to make a break for it, but now he's being backed up slowly into the camera view by Fin holding a gun on him.

  More goons pour into the yacht. They're all armed.

  Colvin strides to the edge of the goons closing the treacherous trio in the center of the yacht. Squeeze is there, huddling close to Hayes. Her eyes are wide, rapidly looking around.

  Colvin doesn't say anything, letting the tension build.

  That's enough for me. I don't need to see the rest. "Puo," I say, "sign off."

  "Gladly," Puo answers.

  As I reach out to shut off the tablet, Colvin raises his gun smoothly and fires a single shot. The back of Squeeze's head sprays outward, lightly mists Valle's pinstriped suit in red and purple droplets.

  Her body droops against Hayes like a sack of lifeless meat.

  Hayes drops all façades. Horror, revulsion, abject grief consume him. He tries to hold her up, sinking down to his knees to support her. Tears already streaming.

  I fumble for the off switch on the tablet, my hands shaking badly.

  The tablet screen goes black. Colvin's lounge area is silent. Eight miles away to the east, people's worlds are coming to a premature end.

  All I can think is that Hayes loved her. That was her purpose.

  I look back at Winn. His face is white. He's moved away to sit in one of the lounge chairs. He sits forward, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands.

  My legs shake as I walk over and pull the matching ottoman close to him. I huddle up as close to him as I can—I suddenly no longer give a damn about Colvin knowing what Winn means to me.

  We sit there, our bodies close together for several minutes in silence. I don't know what to say to him.

  To say it would've been us, feels like trying to diminish what we just witnessed.

  To tell him that I love him, feels macabre.

  So we just sit there, and huddle close.

  * * *

  The ride home isn't celebratory. There are no jokes. No plans for pie.

  The strained silence from before has followed Winn and I into the borrowed family sedan that we're now returning to the parking lot on Mercer Island. Puo is already waiting for us.

  It's over. But it doesn't feel that way.

  Winn hasn't said anything to me, continues to avoid eye contact.

  The silence continues to build in my mind.

  Maybe it's what we just saw; maybe it's that if it weren't for Puo's fluttering magic fingers that would've been us, but I feel an overwhelming sense to tell Winn how I feel. The moment is now or never.

  My heart beats ferociously in my chest, slams against my ribcage, blood presses up against my ears in a rhythmic roaring of a raging river.

  "Winn," I say, "I love you."

  He barely stirs at first. Then he asks without looking at me, studiously studying whatever lay beneath us out the window, "Do you?"

  There's something in the way he asks that makes me think of when I chose Puo over him in the dead room.

  "Yes," I say. "I had to choose Puo. He had the real drive on him—"

  "It's not that, I get that. Although your vehemence when forced to choose was ... revealing."

  "Then what?" I ask breath
lessly, terrified of what he might say.

  "It's just ...." But he never finishes the thought.

  We suddenly come upon the parking lot where Puo is waiting for us, and we start to touch down.

  Winn sits there in silence, staring out into his own thoughts that he won't share with me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE NEXT MORNING Winn is gone.

  His silver necklace with the caduceus is coiled up silently on the plastic storage container nightstand so it's the first thing I see when I wake.

  I guess nothing really does clear up existentialist crap like having a gun pointed at your head.

  The silence in the bedroom is deafening, pressing upon my ears as I slide out of bed. The sounds of my bare feet on the floor are swallowed into the vacuum where Winn once resided.

  His black roller bag is missing. His clothes are haphazardly tossed around with several items missing.

  The woody scent of his cologne lingers on the clothes. The slice of morning sun falling across his shirts reminds me strongly of better times at The Owl Hive, reminds me of his dimpled smile, the sound of his laughter.

  In the bathroom, there are none of his remnants left—only an empty half of a bathroom, a clean uncluttered sink, a marble mausoleum; the other marble sink is littered with my stuff as if the stuff dared not cross an invisible line, crowded in on itself.

  I rinse off quickly and change, fleeing the overwhelming silence.

  Puo is waiting for me in the kitchen, sitting at the table reading something on his computer screen. "'ello, Gov'na," he says without looking up. The voice makes it clear that he's trying to put on a good face. He knows we should be flying high on surviving, but the manner in which we had done so is upsetting. "I figured out how Christina duped me on copying the real drive—"

  Puo's bruised face goes slack upon properly seeing me. "What's wrong?" He immediately gets up from the table.

  I find I can't look him in the eye. And I certainly don't have the strength to say it.

  Puo and I have been together a long time. Thicker than blood we are.

  Puo just wraps me up in a soft embrace more tender than he would for a beloved sister.

  Sometimes we don't need words. Or our own damn vernacular.

  * * *

  The Yellow Coffee House is busy for late morning. There's a line four people deep, but thankfully only one of them looks like a doe-eyed neophyte.

  The espresso machine back at the house is still broken. But, thankfully, the ever-cheery Yellow Coffee House owner is missing, and it's cloudy out, so the yellow interior doesn't sparkle and assault the eyes as it normally does. And the balding older man ordering at the register who looks as if he doesn't know toothbrushes and dental care have been invented is ordering for the entire office. Lovely. Freaking lovely. My lack of coffee is turning into a murderous rage.

  "And you think," Colvin says from behind me, “that I have an anger problem."

  "You got here quick," I say to cover up my surprise. I had asked him to meet me here to settle this business and give him back the original drive.

  "Can I buy you a cup of coffee?" Colvin's wearing another Oxxford-line suit, but a navy blue one with a white and black checkered shirt. No tie.

  "That's the least you can do," I say.

  "Yeah," he says. "We can talk about that." There are bags under his eyes, and black stubble on his normally clean-shaven face.

  "Do you always make it a point to out-dress everyone?" I ask.

  "Yes," he says simply.

  Soon it's our turn to order. I get a double latte, and Colvin gets a Peruvian drip coffee out of a French press.

  We walk to the nearby Blaine Field Park and sit alone on a faded wooden bench. The paper cup is warm against my hands. I lean back into the bench and cross my legs, resting the latte in my lap.

  Colvin sits leaning forward, his eyes continuously scanning in front of him and glancing behind occasionally.

  "Where's the goon squad?" I ask him.

  "They're out there." He nods toward the trees. "But we need to speak with some measure of privacy." He does another visual once over of the area and then launches into it. "The coup has been crushed. The two heads have been cut off and most of the body has been dealt with, including Rodrigo who, you were right about, was acting as an informant. So ..." he turns and looks directly at me "... thank you for that."

  Somehow 'you're welcome' just feels ... wrong. Instead, I reach into my jeans pocket and extract the real solid-state drive. "Here." Puo should be nuking the copy the treacherous trio created. Between this copy and the contents on Valle's tablet that should be all of it.

  "Thank you," Colvin says and takes the drive. "So they were successful in planting it back on you?"

  "No. It's what the job with Hayes was really about," I lie. "While I had him tied up at one job, we swapped the real drive they were planning on planting on us with the fake so when they tried to frame us it'd backfire."

  "What about that Sunday business?"

  "They moved faster than I thought they would," I answer truthfully.

  Colvin takes that explanation at face value. "Generally," Colvin switches subjects, "in these situations, a lavish reward would be bestowed upon you—"

  "But it's not going to be?" I ask. I had forgotten about that part. Every area does it a little differently, but the general principles are the same, reward those who showed loyalty in a time of crisis.

  We could honestly really use the cash. A payment to the Citizen Maker is looming and I'm not sure what we're going to do.

  "No," Colvin says. "But I'm going to offer you a couple things instead."

  "And what's that?" I ask, becoming guarded. If he's going to break with tradition like that, he's got to have a damn good reason to. It's not totally about rewarding loyalists; it's also about enticing greed in others to turn on their friends and acquaintances.

  "First, I'm going to publicly apologize that you got wrapped up in this. That Valle tried to pin the theft on you and get you killed. That's the official story that will percolate. And—" He takes a sip of his coffee. "—I'm going to leave it at that and not ask any more questions, like how you knew the location of Pacific View Bank when I know for a fact Valle's boat didn't log any such latitudes/longitudes."

  My stomach does a flip. If he determined we took the drive originally, and if it was public knowledge that he knew, it would demand some kind of response.

  "Thank you," I say. So long as that bit of information stays buried and Colvin retains plausible deniability, we're safe. "Are you going to move your mistresses?"

  "Mistresses?" Colvin looks confused, and then he chuckles. "You read the drive."

  Shit. "I needed to know what we were dealing with," I say.

  Colvin nods a little at that. "I said I wouldn't ask any more questions. No, I'm not going to move them. And those are my sisters."

  "That's really, really, gross," I say. Given how frothy he looked last night, he's taking the fact that I read the drive a little too well.

  "No—" He snorts. "—it's not like that. That would be gross."

  "Sisters?" I ask.

  Colvin leans back a bit and studies me, turning serious.

  There's a slight chill in the air, a promise of autumn to come. I hold my warm cup tighter. "I think," I say carefully, "after all this, I'd like to know."

  "Only on one condition," he says.

  "What?" I ask.

  "The events of the past few days have revealed how vulnerable I can become. How quickly they can be exposed. I need a silent third party safety net in place. And you're the best option." That's why he hasn't threatened me about keeping quiet about them yet. He needs me. Colvin really is one smart, dangerous bastard.

  He's asking me to be the last line of defense. To act in an emergency to get them to safety. As for being the best option, there's lots of reasons that pop into mind for that. We already know about the sisters' existence, we've proven competent under pressure, and between wha
t happened on the east coast and here, we've proven loyal and reliable (from his point of view).

  Birds chirp nearby as I think over my response. "That's a risky condition," I eventually say. "To be blunt, we don't have the resources in place to do something like that. These adventures the past few days have bled our coffers dry." Which is true. So give us money please, preferably a lot.

  Colvin nods once to himself. "I'll have a fund set up with more than you should ever need in an end-game scenario. And—" he talks over me quickly, "—I will not look askance if ten percent of it is withdrawn shortly after the account is created. A fee as it were, along with initial set up costs."

  I hope ten percent is enough to cover the payment to the Citizen Maker—but I kinda doubt it. Maybe we can pay the Citizen Maker what we can and agree to more interest on the stupid loan to stave off aggressive collection efforts.

  "However," Colvin continues, "if more than ten percent is withdrawn, or there are more withdrawals in the future that I'm not made aware of in advance, I'm going to assume a threat is imminent, and I'm going to respond accordingly. Understood?"

  I nod.

  "So you agree to the role."

  "Yes," I say. I can't really say why I'm agreeing to it. We need whatever cash we can get, but getting mixed up with Bosses is a terrible idea. But this feels different, redemptive almost. I can't stop myself from thinking maybe Winn would've approved, and I suddenly I hate myself for the thought. "So what happened?"

  "Do you know of Isadora Valencia?"

  Violent Valencia? "Yeah," I say. Isadora Valencia is still infamous ten years after her death. Brutal would be kind to describe her. "But I thought she was based out of Albany?"

  "She got her start here—"

  "It was you wasn't it?" I shoot the question out before I can stop myself. Isadora was gruesomely found one morning crucified in her own apartment in the main living room. No one knows who did it; nobody ever came forward.

  Colvin doesn't answer at first. Anger flits over his face. "Do you really want to know?"

  "No," I say quickly. I really don't want to know that part of it. "Go on," I prod him.