by D L Young
But the biggest downside was you had to get to your hiding spot in the first place, which meant you were going to be seen by someone. Usually a lot of someones. And in the cramped, crowded environs of a hiverise, gossip traveled fast. Tommy hadn’t been sure Blayze would come to New Fulton to hide out. That much had been a guess, and he’d told Maddox as much. Under pressure, people often fled to places they knew, places where they felt safe. Bail jumpers were almost always recaptured at obvious sanctuaries like their girlfriend’s or mom’s home. And while Blayze was far smarter than some bail-jumping thug, you never knew what someone might do in a panic. He figured he had a one-in-ten chance of finding her here. And if she had run for shelter at NF, his turfies would likely know about it.
She had and they did, as it turned out.
“Let me guess,” Tommy said. “She’s in that new tower on the west end?”
“You got it,” Z Dog said, adding that he’d seen Blayze and a small entourage arrive the previous morning. “She had it put up a few months ago. Guess she’s rolling in the cash these days. Not that I give a shit.”
“Not that anybody gives a shit,” Girlie added. “Not about that bitch.”
“What, you got bad blood with her or something?” Tommy asked.
“Who doesn’t have bad blood with her?” Z answered. “Whenever she’s around, this whole place gets turned upside down. She has her thugs shake down every stand in the food court. Never pays for a single meal. Then she has them shut down every hallway anywhere near her precious little tower, tossing people out of their digs like they were stray dogs or squatters or something. Whole families, bruh, kicked out of their digs just because they live nearby. That’s not right.” He shook his head in disgust, then spat on the ground. “Every time she comes around, it’s like some fucking plague hits this place. They even broke Jaybird’s hand, saying he was revving his motor too loud. Can you believe that shit?”
Tommy looked over at Jaybird, who raised up his hand and nodded. He had a big wrap around his wrist and a couple of his fingers bent at unnatural angles. “Crushed it in a shop vise, bruh,” Jaybird said. “I can still use it, but it don’t work like before.”
Tommy turned back to Z. “Can you get me to that tower?”
“Of course I can,” Z said without hesitation. “You think I can’t find my way around their lame-ass blocked hallways? But why would you want to go there?”
“Biz,” Tommy said. “Heavy biz.”
“You sure, bruh?” Z Dog asked.
“Yeah.”
Z shrugged. “All right, Tommy Thai. If that’s where you got to be, I can get you there. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Leaving his ride with his turfies, Z led Tommy inside the hiverise. The pair made their way down a dimly lit windowless corridor. Tommy hadn’t been down this winding hallway in years, but the path came back to him quickly. He knew every corner of NF’s insides, every dead-end path, every corrugated aluminum sheet of its ramshackle roof. Even with the time away, the map in his head hadn’t faded at all.
“Who’s the best climber on the crew?” Tommy asked.
“You are,” Z answered.
“Besides me.”
Z Dog thought about it. “Girlie, I suppose, why?”
Tommy told him why, asking for a favor.
“Sure,” Z said, nodding. “I think she can do that for you.” He donned his specs, a cheap pair of knockoff Venturellis. “Let me call her.”
***
“Here we go,” Z Dog said minutes later, keeping his voice low. “Two more lefts and we’re there. They’ve been hiding out up there since they showed up yesterday. Got a couple hard types watching the door.”
“Thanks, Z,” Tommy said. “I got it from here.”
“What?”
“I said I got it from here.” Z started to protest, but Tommy cut him off. “This is really hot water, bruh.”
Z shrugged. “So what’s a little hot water to an Anarchy Boy?”
“I mean it,” Tommy insisted. He hadn’t forgotten how his friends had suffered on his account. Months ago when the police had a manhunt operation hunting Maddox, they’d picked up the Anarchy Boyz, interrogated them with fists and shocksticks, then thrown them in jail. His turfies hadn’t cracked under the beatings and threats, hadn’t given the cops a single word that might help them find Tommy and his datajacker boss.
“I don’t want the A Boyz mixed up in this, Z,” he said.
Z Dog laughed, shaking his head. “You don’t get it. The Anarchy Boyz are already mixed up in this.” He punched Tommy lightly on the shoulder. “If you’re in it, we’re in it, bruh. Simple as that.”
Tommy stood there without speaking, overcome with emotion.
“Jesus,” Z said, “you’re not going to kiss me or something, are you?”
The tension broken, Tommy made an up-and-down motion with his fist. “Quick hand job, maybe?”
Z pushed him playfully. “Get out, you perv.” He then turned his attention down the corridor. “All right, now,” he whispered, stepping forward. “Just follow my lead, okay?”
At the next corner, Z Dog paused, holding his hand up for Tommy to stop, and cautiously peered around the wall. He then padded over to Tommy and whispered, “You stay right here, bruh.”
Tommy did as he was told, knowing anything could happen in the next few moments. Z Dog was a brilliant street con, but he was as unpredictable as he was clever. Tommy had seen him pull off some incredible scams, but he’d also seen more than a few incredible fails, ending with Z getting punched out or arrested.
Z gave Tommy a wink and began whistling casually as he ambled around the corner with a notable spring in his step. Tommy held his breath and listened.
“Gentlemen,” Z Dog said with all the sincerity of a street vendor greeting a clueless tourist. “Can I interest you in some of New Fulton’s finest locally sourced pharmaceuticals?”
“Get lost, kid,” a voice said. “We look like pharma freaks to you?”
“I’ll give you the new customer discount,” Z said. “Half price for a six-pack of deliriums. Send you straight to Mars and keep your prick hard for three hours straight, no lie.”
“Fuck off,” a second voice said.
“Come on, guys,” Z pleaded. “Half price. You can’t beat that anywhere in the City.”
Tommy peeked around the corner. Twenty meters away, Z stood in front of the two guards. He looked tiny, like a monkey standing in front of two gorillas. And both gorillas had pistols in hip holsters. To Tommy’s relief, they hadn’t drawn them yet.
“Kid, I’m telling you, get the fu—”
“Come on, guys,” Z cried out, “don’t tell me your ladies wouldn’t like a nice hard HARD PREEEECK!”
On the last word, to both the guards’ and Tommy’s utter shock, Z grabbed both men by the crotch and squeezed. The guards gasped and flailed, taken completely by surprise, and floundered backward. In the next moment, Z released them and tore down the corridor, disappearing around a corner and screaming, “HARD PREEEECK, HARD PREEEECK!”
“You little fuck!” one guard shouted, and then both ran after him, fumbling for their guns and leaving the stairwell to the tower unguarded.
Z fucking Dog, Tommy thought. What a piece of work. It hadn’t been the most sophisticated distraction, but hell if it hadn’t worked like a charm. Tommy rushed to the stairs and began the long climb up.
From the outside, the new tower had appeared to reach about fifteen stories high. The structure was narrow, making the stairs steep by architectural necessity, and every four meters or so there was a landing. No two landings were alike in material. Plank wood one level. Brushed aluminum the next. Like much of the rest of NF’s expansions, the tower and its internal stairway appeared cobbled together and, to the naked eye, structurally unsound. But somehow everything held together, even solidly so. Tommy climbed up another set of stairs.
He put on his specs, blinked up the mic’s sensitivity to max. Pausing for a
moment, he listened as he watched the audio monitor superimposed on the lens. No sounds of footsteps on the stairs. No one coming after him. Z was probably still running them in circles, the nutjob.
Finally, he reached the top, catching his breath on a wide landing of grated steel. Daylight poked through gaps in the patchwork walls of corrugated aluminum and fiberboard. At the far end of the landing stood a door.
Tommy removed his specs and hung them on his shirt collar. Taking a deep breath to gather himself, he stepped forward and knocked on the door. After what felt like a very long wait, a voice from behind the door snapped, “Who the fuck are you?”
Tommy stared into the round glass of the old-fashioned peephole. “Tell Dezmund and Blayze Tommy Park is here.”
A short silence followed by an unintelligible exchange in hushed voices.
“How’d you get past security?” the voice demanded.
“What security?” Tommy said. “I didn’t see any security. Just came right up the stairs.”
“Get your hands where I can see them.”
Tommy obliged, showing his hands. A moment later the door opened and a burly man with a shaved head popped out onto the landing. He began frisking Tommy, running his big hands roughly over arms and legs. When he finished, the bald man hustled Tommy through the doorway. “He’s clean,” the man called out.
Inside was a narrow-walled anteroom with a high ceiling and a single pendant light hanging a meter over Tommy’s head. The man shoved Tommy into the next room. The small sitting area wasn’t as nice as Beatrice’s hotel suite, but it was close. Plush furniture, granite tile floors, and the walls looked like a regular building’s walls, smooth and white. The sudden contrast to the poor, shanty-like conditions found throughout New Fulton threw him for a moment, until he noticed Dezmund and Blayze standing at the far end of the room.
Blayze approached him, removed the specs from his shirt collar, and tossed them to Dezmund. She waved the bald man away, and he left the three of them alone.
“Who told you we were here?” Dezmund asked.
“Nobody,” Tommy said. “I just had a hunch.”
“Where’s Maddox?” Blayze demanded.
“I don’t know. We got separated.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Separated how?”
“Just separated, you know.” Tommy shrugged. “He ran down one street, I ran down another.”
“Have you talked to him?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t.” From their skeptical looks, it was clear they weren’t buying his story. “I swear, I haven’t,” he insisted.
Blayze and Dezmund exchanged a look. “Why are you here, kid?” Dezmund asked.
Tommy took a breath. “Listen, I know you tried to take him out, and I know why you did it. I came here to tell you I didn’t have anything to do with those deals he stole. I even told him not to do it, but you think he listened to me?”
“Kid,” Dezmund said, “do you think we’re stu—”
Blayze gripped his arm, cutting him off. “Hang on a second, Dez.” She stepped forward, looking Tommy up and down in a way that somehow managed to both unnerve and excite him.
Her face close to his, he felt her breath warm on his cheek. It was dizzying, intoxicating.
“If we did try to take him out,” she said, “and I’m not saying we did, wouldn’t this be the last place in the world you’d want to be? Wouldn’t we be the last two people you’d want to be standing in front of, unarmed and helpless?”
Tommy swallowed. “I’m here on biz, Blayze.”
Blayze lifted her eyebrows. “Are you now? And what kind of business would that be?”
“Remember when you asked me if I was interested in moving up? I told you I’d let you know if anything changed.”
“I remember.”
“Well,” Tommy said, shrugging, “I guess things have changed.”
15 - Pushing Tommy
“It’s bullshit,” Dezmund said. “Maddox has to be setting a trap for us.”
Blayze sat across from Dez in the small room. The kid was outside, handcuffed to the landing, watched by their body man, Kres. Unlike the two meatheaded locals they’d hired to watch the ground-level entryway, Kres was an actual professional.
Like Dez, Blayze hadn’t bought the kid’s story about how he wanted to change teams, how he’d had enough of being on a two-man crew. The kid was a good liar, though. She had to give him that. The performance he’d given had been a convincing one. Inwardly, she wondered if that was because there was an element of truth in it. If there was some part of the kid that really wanted to come over. Maybe the whole charade hadn’t entirely been an act.
“I say we let Kres have a little chat with him,” Dez suggested.
Kres could certainly beat it out of the kid. Their body man was a particularly gifted interrogator. That was the easiest play, and maybe the best one, given the circumstances. But if they went that way, it meant giving up her own sway over the kid. Tommy obviously had a thing for her. She’d seen it right away, from the first moment they’d locked stares at Maddox’s bar. It was like that sometimes. A kind of sixth sense she had. She knew at a glance, with absolute certainty, that she had power over someone, that she could bend them to her will. It had been the same way with Dez. If they unleashed Kres on the kid, the spell she had Tommy under would break. He’d hate her, fear her, resent her.
“I don’t know if that’s the way to go,” she said.
Dez furrowed his brow. “Look, if Blackburn’s lackey knows we’re here, then he knows we’re here too. That gives him the upper hand. We can’t just sit here and wait for him to make a move. We have to squeeze the kid, get him to spill what his boss is up to.”
“I know, I know,” she conceded, blowing out a frustrated breath.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come here,” Dezmund said.
Blayze looked at him crossly but said nothing. Because for once the little bitch was right. It had been a dumb idea to hide out here, if she was being honest with herself. A rash decision she now wished he would have talked her out of. But she couldn’t change it now, and there was no point in looking backward.
She tried to step outside of herself, tried to see things from the old jacker’s point of view. Why would he send the kid here? Unarmed and pretending he wanted to change teams? What leverage did that get him? Why would he think they’d buy it?
“Maybe it’s not a trap at all,” she speculated. “Maybe he’s just buying himself time. He knows sending the kid here would throw us off-balance. So maybe he doesn’t care if we can see through it, as long as it gives him enough time to get himself out of the City.”
Dezmund looked skeptical. “Throwing the kid under the bus? I don’t know.”
“Why not? He did the same thing in his bar the other night without a second thought.”
“Yeah, but that was just a game.”
Again, the little bitch had a point.
Was the kid a distraction? Some kind of fake-out?
Maddox might have been past his datajacking prime, but there was no doubting he was still clever, and deviously so. The kind who laid traps within traps. The more she turned things over, the less certain she was about anything.
“I’ve got to call this in,” she said, finally coming around to the topic they’d both been avoiding.
“No,” Dezmund said abruptly. “Don’t do that. We can handle this on our own. Let Kres go to work on the kid. He can get us what we need in five minutes.”
“He told me,” she reminded him. “Told us both, if you remember. If anything else went sideways, we had to reach out to him before we made any decisions.” She shrugged helplessly. “I have to tell him, Dez.”
As if on cue, her specs lying on the sofa arm began to blink. A call coming in. The pair exchanged a look, then Blayze picked up the lenses, put them on, and took a deep breath.
She opened the connection and said, “I was just going to call you.”
***
The call had gone well. Better than expected, in fact.
Dezmund had hoped they’d get instructions lined up with his way of thinking: letting Kres beat the crap out of the kid, in other words. Thankfully, Blayze had been given the green light to go the direction she preferred instead. So it would be no iron fist for Tommy Park. Well, not the Kres kind of iron fist, anyway. And if she failed, they’d have to use Kres as Plan B.
But she wasn’t going to fail.
Alone with Tommy in her private suite, Blayze sat in a soft leather chair, staring at the kid. He stood two meters in front of her, with his arms held tight at his sides by wrist clamps embedded in the wall. Two more clamps bound his ankles, holding his feet shoulder-length apart. He was still fully clothed, for now.
“I like you, Tommy,” Blayze said, crossing her legs. “Do you know that?”
The kid was nervous. They were always nervous the first time she restrained them. Her little bitches. How many had she had over the years? Dez was the latest, but before him it had been Isabel, then before Isa was Josh. She smiled inwardly at the memory of Josh, who always came in two minutes. He’d been so easy to break. And before Josh it had been Milody. And so now it was Tommy Park’s turn. Her newest little bitch. Few things excited her more than breaking in a new one.
“What are you going to do to me?” the kid asked.
She ignored the question. “Of course you know I like you. You feel it, don’t you? The same way I feel it from you. A kind of heat between us, a connection.”
Rising from the chair, she opened a black case on top of a table. Removing a shock wand from it, she took a step toward Tommy. When she activated the device, the kid flinched, his wide eyes fixed on the glowing tip.