by Grant Pies
“Well my stomach feels like it’s being torn open.” Sam lifted his hospital gown to show a small incision.
“It’s tiny, barely a scratch.”
“Fuck off. It feels a lot bigger than it looks. You ever have a hole in your stomach, you’ll know what I mean. At least I got some pain meds to help me.” He nodded his head at the IV bag hanging over his head.
“Yeah, at least there’s that,” Carter said.
“Hey, you think I got a shot with the nurse?” Sam whispered.
“What? Sam—"
“Well she came in to check on my incision,” Sam pointed at this stomach, “and she kind of lingered a little bit. And I swear she felt a little lower down than she needed to.”
“Sam.” Carter stood and kept stretching. His body was sore from sleeping in the chair all night. “Can you just keep it in your pants. Just chill out and let’s get out of here. Hopefully before the cops talk to you.”
“Oh, they’ve been,” Sam said, drinking the last of his smoothie.
“They what?” Carter said, walking to the door and making sure no one was coming. “What did you say?”
“The truth.”
“What truth? I talked to you. Do you remember?”
“I don’t know. I said that it was an accident. You stabbed me, but you know, you didn’t mean to.”
“Shit Sam.” Carter paced the tiny room. “I told them it was the other guy! I told you to say that too! Shit!”
“Relax.”
“Relax? That’s easy for you to say. We gotta get out of here, buy some time to get our story straight. We could say it was the medicine. That you forgot what happened.”
“It was an accident. We ran into each other.”
“Yeah, but I panicked and told them it was the other guy. Now I’ve lied to the police on top of stabbing you. It doesn’t look good.”
“C’mon.” Sam carefully pivoted his feet off the side of the bed. “I’m not stupid. I told them it was the other guy.” He pointed at a plastic bag on the floor. “Can you hand me my clothes.”
“Wait, what?”
“I’m fucking with you, Carter. Now hand me my clothes.”
“So, what—"
“I told them we were chasing down a lead, the guy ran, we followed, and he ambushed me in the warehouse. Simple.”
Letting out a deep sigh, Carter said, “Oh my God, you asshole! You should feel my heart pounding right now!”
“Payback for stabbing me. Now give me my damn clothes!” Carter tossed the plastic bag to Sam, who untied his hospital gown and stood next to his bed, naked.
“Jesus!” Carter turned around quickly. “How about some warning.”
Sam stepped into his jeans and slipped his shoes on.
“I’m gonna give it a shot,” he said as he finished dressing.
“What a shot?”
He sucked his stomach in and buckled his jeans. “The nurse. Going to get her number.”
Carter smiled and shook his head. “Alright George Clooney, let’s get going.”
“Where’re we going? I need a drink.”
“To a hardware store. Then back to the office. I need to check on the contents of my safe.”
Book Smart Anarchists
Carter scanned the area in front of his destroyed office. “I don’t see anyone.”
The windows were all broken out, and the roof overhang was black with soot. Debris and charred office chairs sat on top of shattered glass on the sidewalk out front. Yellow caution tape was wrapped around the entire strip mall and stretched across each shattered window in the shape of a yellow X.
“No van,” Sam said. “That’s a good sign.”
“Well, I’m going to make sure this is over. Let’s go.” Carter opened the car door and stepped out onto the street, gripping a tool bag in one hand. The street was still soaked through with a week’s worth of rain. The thick humid air floated around Carter and Sam, wafting off the asphalt.
Carter jogged across the street and walked through the parking lot, always shifting his eyes and looking over his shoulder. He made it to the front of the office and took a high step through one of the large windows.
His feet crunched down on shards of glass. The smell of smoke and burnt plastic filled his nostrils. He tried to take shallow breaths to avoid sucking in too much of whatever was in the air. Sam followed behind Carter and held a handkerchief over his mouth.
“Smells like burnt hair,” Sam said, voice muffled. Everything inside looked burnt, but it felt damp. Puddles of water sat on the floor, collecting soot and dirt. “Fucking what’s his name,” Sam said, still covering his mouth and nose.
“George Kingsley,” Carter said.
“You still haven’t given me any credit, you know, for being right.”
“Not really where my mind’s at right now.” Carter scanned the destruction. Nothing remained but the tall safe.
“I doubt admitting you were wrong is ever where your mind’s at…” Sam grumbled and kicked a chunk of charred debris.
Carter stepped methodically through the destroyed office until he made it to the safe. It was scalded black. He tapped it with his foot, not sure what he expected to hear. A thud echoed inside the safe, telling him only that the thing wasn’t filled with water.
“They’ve been here.” He ran his hands over marks on the safe door. “Pry marks. That was never gonna work.”
He dropped the tool bag and zipped it open. Inside was a drill with a diamond tipped bit, a grinder, and an extension cord. He handed one end of the extension cord to Sam.
“Go out back, down the alley. There’s a power outlet there. Then go back to the car and grab as many of the empty beer cans in your back seat as you can.”
“Wha – you know what, I’m not gonna ask.” Sam took off towards the back door.
Carter plugged the drill into the extension cord and tightened the large diamond tipped bit into position. Waiting for power, he looked around the office and sighed.
It was only a matter of time until someone did this, he thought. Until he pissed off one too many cheating spouses or embezzling business partners. Just a matter of time until one of the low lives he watched for a living had the right amount of anger, money, opportunity, and depravity to come after him.
Sure, some people had taken a swing, maybe even chased him with a baseball bat. But that’s where it had always stopped. It never got to this, to arson, or attempted murder, depending on how one looked at it.
“Got it!” Sam yelled as he walked back into the burnt-out office, five crushed beer cans in his hands. He dropped them down on the floor next to Carter.
Snapping out of his daydream, Carter pulled on the trigger of the drill and it whirred to life. He placed the spinning tip against the black burnt metal near the dial and leaned his entire body into it.
Sparks flew out in a spiral. After a minute the drill bit was glowing red, but it was making progress, slowly burrowing into the metal. Carter clenched his jaw and gripped until his knuckles were white and his hands grew numb from the vibrations.
After some time, the drill stopped advancing. He dropped it on the floor and used the grinder to grind the aluminum cans into a fine powder. Sam wandered the office and smoked cigarettes. There was something in the way he tossed the butts that made Carter think Sam had always wanted to throw his cigarettes wherever he wanted to in this office. At this point, it didn’t matter.
Looking up from his work, Carter said, “Go find some rust.”
“Okay.” Sam rolled his eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Rust, you know, the orange shit on metal exposed to water or humidity. Rust.”
“What kind of request is that?”
“A real request. I need rust.” Carter reached in his tool bag and handed Sam a hammer. “The dumpster out back, the side of it is completely rusted out. Break off as much of the rusted metal as you can and bring it here.”
Gripping the hammer, Sam mumbled to himself,
“Go get the beer cans. Go hammer the side of a dumpster,” then wandered off to the back alley. While Sam was gone, Carter scooped the aluminum dust into a jar. He returned fifteen minutes later with a few thin sheets of rusted metal. “Here,” he tossed them on the ground.
Carter turned the grinder back on and ground the rusted metal into an orange dust, then mixed it with the aluminum in the jar.
“So, you going to tell me what you’re doing?” Sam lit another cigarette.
Carter rolled up a half-burned piece of paper into an improvised funnel. “Making thermite.”
“C’mon, what’re you really doing? And why’d you stop drilling? That seemed to be working.” Sam puffed smoke into the air.
“I drilled as far as I could. Hit a layer of tungsten carbide that the drill couldn’t get through.” Carter poured the aluminum and rust mixture into the hole he’d just drilled. “And it’s thermite. Like I said.”
“Like a bomb?”
“Not really, but if that explanation works for you, okay.” Carter pushed his hands on his knees and stood, brushing soot off his pants.
“So, you’re going to blow the safe up?” Sam smiled, clearly looking forward to whatever was about to happen. The kid inside him shining through, like he was about to toss firecrackers into a toilet.
“Not blow up, blow open,” Carter said. “Not even that really. It’s kind of like sticking an acetylene torch into the safe. It should burn through the tungsten and destroy the locking mechanism inside.”
“This some redneck shit you learned back in Virginia or wherever you grew up?”
“Kentucky. And I read it. In a book. When I was in college.”
Sam laughed. “Was this a course on the Unabomber by any chance?”
“Economics…”
“Eco—"
“I said I learned it when I was in college, not at college.” Carter held his hand out. “Give me your cigarette. And stand over there.” Sam complied and walked to the far front corner of the office.
“There was a girl.” Carter ripped the cigarette in half and threw the unlit half on the ground. “Only reason I took the damn Economics course. She loaned me a book, Diary of a Revolutionary.”
“Geez, what kind of girls were you into?”
Carter shrugged. “The kind I could learn something from.” He shoved the cigarette into the hole in the safe, the lit portion facing out. He moved quickly and stood next to Sam in the corner.
“Now what?” Sam said.
“We wait.”
“How long?”
“Dunno. I’ve never done this.”
“Perfect.”
After a minute of silence, a hissing noise came from the safe, and a bright orange flame shot out. The flame burned for thirty seconds, turning from orange to blue then back to orange again. The flame faded away, the smell of burning chemicals filled the room, and a small string of smoke drifted into the air.
“That it?” Sam asked. Carter walked cautiously to the safe and stared at it from a distance. Waving his hand in the air, pushing the smoke around until it dissipated.
“I think so,” Carter said.
“Did it work?”
Carter reached slowly towards the large wheel on the door of the safe and tugged. It swung open, revealing the unharmed contents inside.
“Holy shit!” Sam laughed. “That worked?” He clapped his hands together. “What was the name of this girl? The revolutionary?”
“Amber … uh, Amber Riley.” Carter knelt and fumbled through the contents of the safe. He grabbed the envelope with George Kingsley’s name on it.
“You should look her up and thank her. Damn, that’s impressive.” He looked at the hole in the safe door, with a look in his eyes like he wanted to try it again, see what else they could burn through.
Carter stood and made his way to the front of the office. “Let’s go.”
Sam followed. “Kingsley isn’t going to let us back up to his apartment. How you planning on getting to him?”
“I’ll get someone else to get to him for me.”
Calling All Skeletons
“This is uncharted territory, Carter,” Sam said as the two men left the car and marched across the street to Maxim Computer Repair. It was a large warehouse with a small storefront. “What about the girl?” he asked, trying to keep up with Carter.
“She knew what she was getting into,” he said without looking back at Sam, his eyes fixed on the computer repair store. “You don’t date a guy like Maxim Muratov and not know who he is, what he does. And you sure as shit don’t cheat on him.” He walked, almost marched, towards the store, like nothing could break his stride.
“Okay, then what about us?” Sam jogged onto the sidewalk just before a car swiped him. The driver laid on his horn as he sped down the road. “You ever heard the expression shoot the messenger?”
“Yeah, as in don’t shoot the messenger.” Carter stopped just outside Maxim Computer Repair and turned towards Sam. “Look, you can stay out here. Wait in the car. He doesn’t need to know we work together. But this is the only way I can think of to get Kingsley off our backs for good. He burned our fucking office down, tried to kidnap me. We could’ve died in that fire for God’s sake!”
“You scared that guy off,” Sam said.
“As long as Kingsley’s got money to spend, he’ll find another goon to come after us.”
“Well, I’m not letting you go in there alone.”
“You’re not letting me do anything.”
“You know what I mean. I’m going in with you, but you need to think about this.”
“I’ve been thinking about it the whole time you were in surgery, while I waited for you to wake up, and as I broke into my own fucking safe, which I had to do by the way because the fucking fire melted the dial. This was all I thought about.” Carter talked through gritted teeth and a clenched jaw. He couldn’t tell if he was operating out of fear or anger, but he needed Kingsley out of the picture.
“You know what this means? What’s going to happen to Kingsley?”
“I don’t know anything for sure, except that Kingsley is gonna be too busy dealing with his own shit to keep chasing us around Chicago.” Carter reached to open the door to the computer repair shop.
Grabbing Carter’s hand and stopping him, Sam said, “No, no, no. You do this with full knowledge of what you’re doing. Don’t play dumb. You tell Muratov that his girl is sleeping with his personal attorney, and they’re both dead. End of story. George Kingsley—dead. The girl in those photos—dead. You may as well kill them yourself. And it won’t be a pretty death, a good death, if there even is such a thing.” Sam let go of Carter’s hand.
“You coming?” Carter jerked the door open.
A bell dinged, alerting the muscular man at the front desk dressed in all black. His left hand rested on the counter, and his right hand hung down out of sight, most likely gripping a gun underneath. He shouted something in Russian towards the room in the back.
“Hey there,” Carter said, gripping the manila envelope in his hand and keeping his other hand in the open. “Uh, is Mr. Muratov here?”
“Who?” the Russian man said in a thick accent.
“Maxim Muratov,” Carter repeated. “You know, his name is on the sign out front.” He pointed, but still made his movements slow and fluid so as to not provoke the man. His hand stayed behind the counter.
“No.”
Carter wondered if he even spoke English, or if he only said ‘no.’
“Can you tell him that I have information for him. Information he would want to have … about his attorney.”
After a long pause, the man said, “Wait,” and turned to walk into the back room, stuffing a black pistol in his waistband. He shouted some words in Russian and another man came out of the same door, a pistol shoved in the front of his waistband. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.
“This is a bad idea,” Sam whispered.
“Well it’s happening,”
Carter whispered back but a little louder than Sam. “You made your decision when you came in the store with me.”
“You made it for me.”
“Just keep telling yourself that.”
The man returned from the back. “Okay,” he said. “You come.” He waved and motioned for Sam and Carter to come around the counter. Carter gripped his envelope and followed the Russian store attendant until the small stock room behind the storefront opened up to a large warehouse.
Air conditioning units cranked and hummed, puffing chilled air all around. In one far corner, a bank of computers blinked and lines of code flickered across the screens. In another corner, tall servers lit up the dark warehouse.
“Twenty-first century mobsters,” Sam whispered. “Online gambling? Stealing identities?”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Carter whispered back. His heart thumped in his chest and his body shivered.
The man turned to look at Carter and snapped a string of Russian words. Carter didn’t know what it meant, but he nodded and stopped talking anyway. They weaved through different stations in the warehouse. Alternating computer banks, servers, and air conditioning units.
Beyond the computer servers were two dozen makeshift rooms. Twelve on each side, arranged to make a hallway down the middle. The rooms were just four walls propped up, no ceilings or doors. They were all decorated to look like bedrooms, each one themed differently. One had high school cheerleading banners hung on the walls, with a topless girl inside wearing a short cheerleading skirt. The next bedroom looked like a dungeon with a sex swing and stockade. The woman inside was completely nude except for a pair of stiletto heels that laced up her thighs. There was another room with pink bedsheets and posters of cartoon ponies on the walls. The girl inside was naked and rolling on the bed with a pair of stuffed animals.
Each room they passed had a camera set up on a tripod and a woman was laying on the bed or sitting in a desk chair. All of them mostly naked, posing in front of the camera and talking to whoever was on the other end. Bending over, puckering their lips, spreading their legs, blowing kisses to some stranger, or strangers.
“It’s not just gambling,” Sam said, lingering at each door and peering in. He watched a woman in one of the rooms kneel on all fours on the bed, then arch her back and slowly crawl towards the camera.