And she couldn’t afford that.
She smiled when she laid eyes on the pipe wrench. Picking it up, she hefted it, then swung it the same way she had when going for Marco’s balls.
Fore!
From across the way, Chuck Daring, another tech on her shift, let out a laugh. “Just keep that thing away from me, will ya?” he teased.
She grinned. “Don’t worry, Chuck. Your balls are safe. I like you.”
“Good. Because I’ve seen what you do to assholes.”
With a chuckle, she hung the pipe wrench back on its hook and finished her inventory.
Chapter Nine
The next morning when Stacia walked into the apartment, she found a note on the table from her aunt.
Have you seen Marvin? I don’t think he’s been home in a couple of days. I hope he’s okay.
In the usual course of a week, Stacia and her aunt rarely saw each other on weekdays except sometimes in the evenings. Her aunt would be careful not to wake Stacia up when she came home from work. And with her pain, her aunt had usually gone to bed by the time Stacia got up and started getting ready for work. In the mornings, her aunt had usually already left for work before Stacia got home. They shared the bedroom, in separate beds, the way her aunt and Stacia’s mom had before their mom died.
Stacia stared at the note, the uneven, spidery script. It wasn’t difficult for her to envision her aunt’s cramped and twisted hand as she held the pen. Fortunately, in her job at the call center, all she had to do was a bare minimum of typing. No writing by hand at all.
She would consider how to respond after she’d taken a shower and had eaten something. Leaving her tote bag on the table, she opened the fridge and realized they were low on food again.
Okay, groceries first, then sleep.
She didn’t like her aunt doing any shopping. It was stressful on the woman and only added to her already high daily pain levels.
She took a chicken out of the freezer and stuck it in the fridge to thaw. When she returned from her shopping trip, she’d put it in a large stock pot to simmer all day so her aunt would have a warm meal to come home to. Her aunt would refrigerate the remnants so Stacia could do the actual carcass-picking the next morning, and put the bones on again to simmer all day for stock.
Her aunt worked Mondays through Fridays, usually. Sometimes, she would work part of the day on a Saturday or Sunday to fill in if someone was sick or needed time off. Stacia’s days off varied, especially if she took extra shifts for the overtime. She’d once gone twelve days straight before human resources told Billy to make her take a day off.
Marvin…
Well, Marvin was Marvin. He would sometimes help cook, sometimes help shop, but Stacia had found she couldn’t afford to send him out by himself unless it was for one specific item and she gave him exact change. He would always come back missing stuff from the list, would buy stuff not on the list, and would sometimes splurge on things they couldn’t afford. He also wouldn’t remember to get the cheapest option if more than one was available, and he wouldn’t take the time to do the math to see if a lower price didn’t actually cost more when compared to another item.
He occasionally made halfhearted attempts to help clean, would sometimes dust, especially the stuff on top of the bookshelf where her aunt couldn’t reach. About the only chore Stacia could count on him to do was the dishes. He never left dirty ones in the sink, and always washed up the rare times they ate a meal together.
Despite repeated attempts to teach him, even the basics, he couldn’t cook to save his life. It was like he didn’t retain the info.
He was…just Marvin.
Standing under the shower, Stacia felt a little guilty about how she hadn’t returned his “I love you.”
Wait, why should I feel guilty? He’s the one who decided to sign up for this cockamamie thing without bothering to ask us or share the details with us first.
The truth was, she suspected he didn’t know the details, other than he saw the dollar signs being flashed in front of him. And that scared her. He was as trusting and oblivious as she was wary and cautious.
Which fit into the same theme of him being as incapable, clueless, and aimless as she was skilled, determined, and ruthless when it came to flat-out getting. Shit. Done.
Maybe I should stop by the church again and see if I can find him. Talk to him. Talk him out of this plan.
Because the more she thought about it, the less everything added up. It didn’t make any sense, not in a good way. People earned a hundred grand for being lawyers or bankers or athletes.
Well, they used to earn that for being athletes, until the threat of Kite shut down public sports venues and teams had to put their players on hiatus. Now a lot of those same players were as broke as the people who watched their games on TV.
After her shower, she dressed and grabbed one of the homemade protein bars she kept in the fridge. She’d learned the recipe from one of her teachers in high school several years earlier, mixing beans and raisins and other things to create an inexpensive and relatively nutritious food bar.
At one point, she’d even earned extra money during high school making them and selling them to fellow students who couldn’t afford school lunches. She’d carefully calculated her expenses and usually made a fifty percent profit on every batch, which she’d then turn around and invest in more supplies. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it had paid for a new pair of comfortable sneakers for her, the first brand-new pair of shoes she’d ever remembered owning.
And the first truly comfortable pair of shoes she’d ever owned up until that point in her life.
She remembered going to the shoe store and watching people who didn’t have money worries, people who could afford cars, browsing and trying on pair after pair of frivolous dress shoes.
There she’d been with her store coupon, taking her time and carefully trying on different sneakers until she settled on a good-quality pair that was both comfortable and within her budget, the best she could afford to buy with her coupon.
They had lasted her over a year of daily walking, including repairing them until she could no longer keep them together and she had to go buy a pair of used sneakers from a thrift shop.
It’d taken her another year to have the heart to finally throw them away, every time she looked at them a clear reminder why she had to be careful with her money, why she couldn’t ever jump at what she thought was a “deal.”
Not Marvin.
Marvin had charm, wit, and a fun personality. What he lacked in skills and brains, he made up for in charisma.
She’d always been the quiet, watchful one, slow to smile, quick to anger.
As she passed the table again, she stopped at her aunt’s note. Finally, as she chewed her bar, she picked up the pen.
He’s been spending a lot of time at the new church. They have some sort of volunteer program he said might be hiring. I’m not worried about him.
It wasn’t technically a lie, any of it. It wasn’t her brother she was worried about so much as it was the church and any ulterior motives they might have.
Chapter Ten
The next morning, Lima found a plastic garment bag hanging from the knob of their room’s door. Inside was a suit jacket, matching slacks, a dress shirt and tie, belt, and even shoes and dress socks. Omega had also left a small basic disguise kit by the door.
He grinned.
Perfect.
After sending Quack down to eat, Lima spent a little time with a couple of his own special toys and the disguise kit before heading to the common room. When he walked in, everyone sat up, confused for a moment.
“Well?” He turned around. “What do you think?”
Omega nodded his approval. “Glad it fit right,” he said.
Lima now looked like a blond-haired, blue-eyed banker or other professional, rich guy, not military. The blue contacts he’d put in had infrared sensors and sat-link feed sensors built in. They’d both disguise his appearance
and help him quickly locate any computer terminal with sat-link access. He also wore wire-rimmed glasses that had plain lenses, but held a video recorder in the frame.
Before leaving the compound to head back to the church building, and after the other three men were disguised, Lima sat down with Quack, Omega, Echo, Papa, and Alpha and detailed his plan. In front of Lima was a tablet displaying recon photos and maps he could swipe through.
Echo would settle in and do his harmless crazy-guy routine, circling the building and parking lot several times throughout the morning. The day before, fifteen people, mostly women, had left the building around noon and headed down the street toward a sandwich shop.
At one point, when Echo stopped at the front door and stood there as if talking to his reflection in the windows, he spotted two women still seated at desks inside a room that opened to the right off the building’s main hallway. The other side of the hallway had a door that looked like it opened into the sanctuary. At one point, he’d stepped just inside the doorway and swept his gaze around enough to give Lima a pretty good view of the office area.
So now Lima knew his target computers.
He sketched out a plan for the men based on the video feed he pulled from Echo’s glasses the day before.
“We don’t know exactly how far out their security camera coverage goes, so I’m going to loop way around to the sandwich shop up the street and make my approach from there. Echo, I want you to walk into the church building today after you get there. Make something up, tell them you’re looking for your baby or some crazy bullshit like that. I don’t know what, but make them feel sorry for you, not afraid of you. Okay? You don’t want them afraid of you. I want you pulling on their heartstrings.”
Echo grinned, looking completely out of character in his mismatched rags. “Got it.”
“I mean, get them to the point of tears, okay? I want them talking about you when they see you doing your crazy act in the parking lot later when the large batch of them leaves for lunch.”
Echo gave him a thumbs-up.
He focused on Omega, who wore civvie clothes, jeans and a T-shirt. “Omega, you’re going to be backup. Drive the truck and park it down the block from where we were yesterday, in the opposite direction of the sandwich shop after you drop us all off in different places. Once you see me leave the church building again, swoop in and get Echo the hell out of there and meet us at the pickup point.”
Quack held up a finger. “What about me?” He was also dressed in civvie clothes.
“I need you hanging out on the same corner where we were yesterday. You see anyone giving us trouble or it looks like there’s a problem, or you get a long ping from me, fire a few rounds high into the glass on the front window of the building, here and here, and then take off and meet us at the original drop-off point.”
He’d given all the men what he called “pingers.” Considering it looked like the church might have sophisticated security devices monitoring the outside of the building, he didn’t want to risk the signal from their radios being picked up or even jammed. The low-frequency buttons were of his own design, on a frequency rarely monitored by modern surveillance equipment, and an easy way to signal to someone. All four of them had the earpiece devices. All they had to do was reach up and touch the button on their earpiece, and it would send the signal out one hundred yards in all directions.
Time for Papa to hold up a finger. “Um, far be it for me to second-guess your plan, but why shoot at the place? Won’t that bring you guys more attention?”
“Last-resort distraction. It doesn’t appear like they have any security personnel. Just women, office workers. They’ll probably get scared and duck or run. It doesn’t look like they replaced the original glass from when it was a grocery store, so if he hits high, the whole window should fall out and shatter and scatter people. If I’m inside and need more time, I’ll ping, and the gunshots will make logical sense why I’m hiding in their office near the front door should anyone catch me in there. And it might not be necessary if Echo’s as good an actor as he thinks he is.”
“I’m better,” Echo said with a grin.
“Alrighty,” Lima said. “Then let’s go find out.”
Chapter Eleven
When Stacia left the apartment to go to the store, she had started out with the intent of stopping by the church again and demanding to see Marvin before she went shopping.
As she approached the building, her nerve flagged. She remembered the way she felt the last time she’d been there, like maybe she’d barely escaped even though no one had made any attempt to stop her from leaving.
Ignoring instincts like that was rarely a wise move.
Switching the empty cloth shopping bags, several of them stuffed inside one, to her other shoulder, she thought about it some more. By the time she passed the sandwich shop she’d changed her mind again.
She should go have it out with him. Again. As his little sister, it was her right to see her brother.
Right?
Nearing the church building, the small parking lot in front of it was less than a quarter full. That wasn’t unusual, considering many people in this part of town couldn’t afford anything besides public transportation.
What caught her attention was the homeless guy wandering around the parking lot. He seemed to be talking to himself and not harassing anyone.
Homeless people weren’t an unusual sight in this part of the city, either. They’d been run out of the rich enclaves decades ago, and it was usually safer here than in some other neighborhoods that were riddled with gang violence.
But as she glanced around and spotted another guy across the street, who was standing in a doorway and apparently watching the homeless guy, she decided to go straight to the grocery store and kept on her course. She didn’t know why, but something felt…off.
Something she suspected she didn’t want to have any part of.
An hour later, as Stacia trudged back from the store, sweating in the heat with her four bags full of groceries weighing her down, she stopped when she reached the church’s parking lot. It was a few minutes past noon and she needed to get home and get to bed if she was going to get any sleep before her shift.
But now she felt royally pissed off. Marvin should at least be helping her schlep the groceries home.
Fired up, she stormed past the homeless guy holding court with a lamppost in the parking lot and paused in the building’s foyer.
A wall of blessedly cool air hit her. It felt so good she almost forgot herself and pulled her surgical mask down to inhale the cool air. But she stopped short of doing that.
Okay, maybe that was the other reason Marvin had started out coming here, just to cool the fark off. They couldn’t run their AC when they weren’t home, and even when they were they had to keep it turned up as warm as they could stand it to keep the electric bill down.
She turned to the right, walked through the office door, and stepped up to the first desk. Apparently she’d hit them at lunchtime, because there were only two women in there now and the other day she’d seen several. Out in the foyer, she heard the front door open again.
“Hi, I’m looking for my brother. His name’s Marvin Rooney. He said he’s volunteering for a project here, or something like that. I’m not sure exactly what he’s doing. But I need to speak with him. It’s important, a family matter.”
“What’s your name?”
“Stacia.”
The women both looked younger than Stacia, maybe eighteen or nineteen. Neither wore surgical masks, Stacia noted. The one she was speaking to had long brown hair down her back. “What’s his name again?” the girl asked.
“Marvin. Marvin—”
A gorgeous blond guy in an expensive suit rushed through the door. “Hi, um, there’s a man who appears to be having a seizure in your parking lot out there.”
The two women jumped up and ran out the door. The man ducked around the first desk, pulled something from his pocket, and stuck it int
o one of the ports on the computer. Then his fingers flew across the keyboard.
At first, Stacia didn’t think the guy had seen her when he rushed in, maybe because of where she was standing next to the doorway.
Then he looked up at her with eyes so blue they didn’t look natural. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, too, over the surgical mask covering the lower half of his face. There was something about him, about the look in his eyes, the way he walked, that contradicted the expensive suit he was wearing and screamed cop. Or maybe military.
“Get down,” he ordered.
“What?”
He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her, groceries and all, around the desk with him and down to the floor while he reached up and touched his ear.
Seconds later, gunfire shattered the front window. Stacia yanked her hands free of her grocery bags to cover her ears as she cowered against the guy.
He didn’t seem to mind. In fact, it was like he’d been expecting it because he didn’t so much as flinch. He stared at the computer screen and tapped on the keyboard a few more times before he yanked whatever the thing was from the computer port and jammed it in his pocket.
Then he looked at her. “You want to get your brother out of this joint, don’t you, Stacia?”
She nodded, terrified, wondering what the hell was going on.
“Then I suggest you do it ASAP. And you didn’t see anything. I dragged you back here with me when the gunfire started, right?”
She nodded again, not stupid enough to disagree with him. The last thing she wanted or needed was to be hauled in to testify in some court case and lose work days having to sit there.
And if this was some sort of gang activity, she damn sure didn’t want to be mixed up in it as a witness.
He jumped up and ran out the office door.
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