“Seems like a strange place to hire freelancers,” Grace whispered as they stepped past the opening.
“Maybe. Matthew said that Mr. Luna has hired him before, though.” He pulled the main door open and stepped back to allow Grace entrance.
“Such a gentleman,” she said with a faux curtsey.
The interior had all the drab appeal of ten thousand other waiting rooms. A screen in the corner turned to the news with the latest on the invasion of Kyoto, old car magazines scattered on a small table between the chairs, and even a vending machine that offered an unhealthy variety of overpriced sweet and salty snacks. A pair of customers looked at them as they entered and then immediately lost interest.
“Can I help you?” asked a short man in oil-stained coveralls from behind the counter.
“Yeah, we’re looking for Mr. Luna,” Davey said.
The man pointed at the name sewn onto his breast pocket. Vicente Luna. “That’s me, amigo. What can I do for you?”
Davey took a breath and extended his hand. “Davey Long. Crew member on the Sparrow, Matthew Cole’s ship.”
Vicente’s eyes lit up and a smile filled his face. “It’s good to meet you. Señor Cole didn’t have a crew the last time we met. I’m glad he’s not alone on his ship anymore. He seemed kind of sad and lonely.”
Davey thought it was best to ignore that part and gestured toward Grace. “My sister and I have been working on the Sparrow for about two years. Unfortunately, the Arizonan government requested Matthew’s presence today, so he couldn’t catch the train to Warszawa with us. He sent us in his stead to see if we could help you.”
Vicente was obviously a little taken aback, but he recovered quickly. “He must have a lot of faith in you kids,” he said, in an obvious attempt at being polite.
“Hey,” Grace said. “Davey’s nineteen. And I’m fourteen. We’re not kids.”
“What my sister is trying to say,” Davey said, putting a firm hand on her arm, “is that we’re capable members of Matthew’s crew, and we’re good at what we do.” He put on his best confident face and desperately hoped he bought it.
The mechanic didn’t quite seem to be on board yet, but he shrugged. “If it can’t be helped. I had hoped to get a chance to see Señor Cole again. He smuggled me off of Europa for my daughter’s wedding and I owe him my life.”
Well, that sounded like Matthew. He must not have been an entirely crusty old codger before everyone showed up. “Maybe he’ll be free in a few days,” Davey said. He realized his mistake and hastily added, “After we’ve finished the job, of course.”
To Vicente’s credit, he seemed to be relaxing. “Come back to my office. We’ll talk about why you’re here.”
He led them through a door into a dingy room badly in need of a secretary. Beneath a dead clock, a half-open filing cabinet stood against the wall with paperwork spilling out. The desk wasn’t any better, and Vicente rushed to tidy it up before nodding his head at the pair of chairs. “I don’t normally have guests,” he explained.
Davey wasn’t going to judge. If he had an office, it might not be any better. “So let’s go over the details. I know we’re supposed to help with an investigation into a carjacking ring.”
Vicente nodded. He gestured at a bowl of mints and then took one for himself. Grace obliged, but Davey politely declined. “Big carjacking ring,” Vicente corrected. “Well organized. It’s been going for months. Police have caught jackers, but never traced them back to their shop.”
“What’s this got to do with you?” Grace asked. “If you’re willing to hire freelancers, you’ve gotta have a stake.”
He looked nervous. “When a car is stolen, it’s rarely left in one piece.”
“Too easy to identify?” Davey asked.
Vicente nodded. “It’s broken down and sold for parts. Well, most of it. If it’s a grav car, the grav plate most likely ends up on Ceres and is used to make black market thumpers.” He scratched his head. “Either way, some of my competitors have been offering steep discounts lately, and I’m losing customers.”
“I see,” Davey said. “The carjackers are messing up the parts market and running you out of business.” Talk about collateral damage.
“Sí, amigo. I just got this place up and running with an investment from my son-in-law’s family. I can’t let it fail. Not after starting over.”
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to take down an entire gang,” Davey said. “Maybe with Abigail we could, but not with just the two of us.”
Vicente shook his head. “I just need evidence. I’m willing to donate an old car to be stolen. You’ll leave it out in the jacker’s favorite part of town, and then you’ll track it back to their chop shop to get hard evidence for the police.”
“Sounds too easy,” Grace said, narrowing her eyes. “Why haven’t the police used bait already?”
“Maybe they didn’t have a car,” Davey said. “Doesn’t matter really, does it?”
“What if it does?” she challenged.
“Then we’ll do what they couldn’t.” He turned back to Vicente.
The man had that nervous smile again. “Are you sure you can handle this? Maybe I should just wait on Señor Cole.”
Davey felt the blood rushing to his face in embarrassment. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Matthew trusted him with this one and he was acting like a child. Aloud he said, “We’re professionals. Grace, do you have the trackers? Let’s go rig up the car Mr. Luna is donating to the cause.” She was already digging one out of her backpack. He put as much confidence into his smile as he could manage. This was his first solo job if you ignored the fact that Grace was along. He was going to complete this one way or the other or go down trying.
GRACE STIFLED A YAWN. It was nearly three in the morning and they’d been watching the car from a nearby rooftop since sunset. “And now I know why Abigail says that stakeout’s suck,” she said. She grabbed a package of pretzels from her pack and tore it open. A steady stream of snacks was just about the only thing keeping her awake.
Davey hadn’t moved from his post with the binoculars at the edge of the roof in at least an hour. “Tell me about it,” he muttered. But he still didn’t budge.
“Want me to take a watch?” she asked, hoping he would turn her down on the offer.
“I’m good.”
Success. “You know,” she said carefully. “You don’t have to kill yourself over there. The car has a tracker. If they pick it up tonight, which I’m starting to doubt, we can just follow it. We don’t even have to be here.”
“But then we would miss out on valuable information. What kind of vehicle are they driving? How many of them are there?”
Grace shrugged and popped another pretzel into her mouth and pulled her blanket up around her neck. “Is it alright if I take a snooze then? You can wake me if something exciting happens or when you get over yourself and let me take a shift.”
“Whatever.”
Grace fluttered her eyes with exaggerated sleepiness and made a big show of stretching as she leaned back against the air-recycling unit. Above, the stars shone with pale light in the Martian sky. She yawned again, this time not fighting it and let her eyes drift shut.
“Grace. I’ve got something.”
Not even ten seconds. She pried her eyelids open. They felt like steel bulkheads. She threw the blanket off and crawled over to the edge of the roof. Half a block away in front of a boarded-up coffee shop sat the car Vicente had donated. Grace had questioned whether the thieves would be interested in an old piece of junk like that, but the mechanic had scoffed at her skepticism and insisted it was a sought after classic. She didn’t quite see the point in getting sentimental about a rusted-out hulk, but then the males she knew consistently chose weird things to get emotional about.
A large truck with a flatbed trailer had pulled up beside said classic, and a team of black-dressed men jumped out to work on the car. Grace and Davey kept their heads low in case someone happened to look i
n their direction. “Tracker still working?” he asked, voice barely a whisper.
She waved a small device at him. “I’ve got a good signal.” She looked back at where the car was already being winched up onto the flatbed. “Dang. They’re good.”
“Just one left working on the car.” He squinted and leaned forward. “What’s that box thing he has? I can’t see well enough from here.”
“Signal jammer,” she said confidently.
“What? How can you tell?”
She sighed and showed him the receiver. “I’ve lost the signal. It was there one second and gone the next. Which explains why the police have had a little trouble.”
Davey swore and jumped to his feet. “Come on! We’ve gotta get down there. Maybe we can bug the truck itself.” He ran toward the fire escape they’d climbed up.
“Cool it,” Grace said. She’d already dug another tracker out of her pack. She ran up to the edge of the building, looking for any way to catch her fall. There. She ignored Davey’s wild protests, took a breath, and jumped. It was a three-story fall, barely time to pick up speed, but she reached out with her bracelet and grabbed a streetlight, turning her vertical momentum into a horizontal swing. She hit the ground at a run and, with only a slight stumble, sprinted down the dark street.
The brake lights on the truck turned off and it started pulling forward. Grace gritted her teeth and grabbed the next streetlight, flinging herself further down the street, using the building on her left, to steady her breakneck pursuit. She was close. Maybe if she could land on the bed, she could place the second tracker. She grabbed a third and final streetlight and pulled with all her might, throwing caution to the wind.
Her wild arc brought her flying toward the truck right as it began to accelerate. If she could get a hold of it, she could stick the landing. She grasped it for the briefest of moments and then felt it rip away as it moved out of range. Grace barely had time to push off the ground to keep herself from striking the pavement like a meteor. She hit at an angle and rolled end over end before landing on her back, bruised and bleeding.
For a minute, she lay stunned, before peeling herself off the asphalt and limping out of the road to the sidewalk. Davey found her a few minutes later, picking gravel out of the skid marks on her arms. “Just... Don’t say it,” she said through gritted teeth.
He closed his mouth and unslung his backpack to look for first aid.
“Told you the job was too easy,” she mumbled.
He still didn’t say anything, and Grace thought that she probably had the best brother in the solar system.
“WE LOST THE CAR, THE tracker, everything.”
Matthew winced as he listened to the tale. He took a sip from his morning coffee and set it back on the console. “What do you do now?”
The comm was quiet for a minute before Davey responded. “I’m not sure. Vicente gave us a key to his garage and let us camp out on the floor of the back room. I don’t think he’s going to be happy when he gets to work today only to find out we botched it.”
“No, I imagine not,” Matthew agreed. Outside the Sparrow’s canopy, the sun was just rising over the hills and flooding the Arizona plain with light.
“Did I mess up? Would you have done anything different?”
He heard the plea in Davey’s voice. Tell me I did okay, it said. Matthew wanted to tell him that yes, he would have done the exact same thing. But the truth wasn’t that simple. “Maybe,” he said. “Without having been there, I can’t say. Maybe I would have seen something different than you, or else I might have made the same mistake. But I’m not there and I can’t be there for several days.”
“You can’t?” The kid sounded miserable.
“Arizona wants my life story, apparently. And the Russians want Abigail’s. They won’t let her come home unless we cooperate.”
“What good is that going to do?” Davey asked. “You told them everything you know about Logan, right?”
“Twice. And you know how reticent Abigail is about talking about her past. From what I am hearing, they’re rather displeased.” Matthew sighed. “I’m sorry, but this is going to take a few days to sort out. You two are on your own.”
Davey was quiet again. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Maybe not,” Matthew said. “But you agreed to that job, so for now, you’re committed. Give it some thought, and we can talk about it this evening. You two are clever. You know what you’re doing. I trust you’ll figure something out.”
Silence again. “Alright. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Matthew stared out the window. Worst-case scenario, he and Abigail could sweep through Warszawa just before they left Mars. He really didn’t want to leave Vicente out in the cold, but he still had hopes the kids could pull this off.
He felt a twinge of regret when he thought about Abigail. There wasn’t anything he could do to bring her home. He knew she was this close to cold-shirting it across the Martian landscape in her suit to get back to Arizona, but that would put her in bad stead with the Russians and probably the Arizonans too, something they were better off avoiding. But there was no way they were going to get from her what they were hoping. Odds were good they wanted to know how to get their own shiny versions of her suit. If Matthew’s suspicions were right, she couldn’t help them even if she wanted to. He knew she’d be okay, but right now, she was swimming in an ocean of red tape. An ocean that probably only spoke in angry Russian.
He drained the last of his coffee and put her out of mind for the time being. He had enough problems of his own to deal with.
TO DAVEY’S RELIEF, Vicente didn’t say much about the loss of the car. He had a pained look in his eye, but Davey just reassured him that they had other avenues of investigation.
Grace was moving slow today. She’d been pretty banged up by her reckless stunt. He felt like yelling at her but knew that wouldn’t get them anywhere. The mess of her right forearm would probably leave some scarring. That was the worst part for him. He didn’t want his baby sister covered in marks from fights. It made him feel like a failure.
They hid in the garage’s backroom, away from Vicente as they ate their breakfast of vending machine donuts. “Well. What now?” Grace asked.
Davey paced the short length of the room. “I don’t know yet. We don’t have another car for bait, so let’s figure out what we learned from the first run.”
“These guys are good,” she said around a full mouth. “They hit fast, hard, and don’t leave a mark. That car was apparently more desirable than I thought it was. We should have set up closer to the bait.”
“None of that is useful.”
She shrugged. “Okay then. What did you learn?”
He closed his eyes and stopped pacing. “They’re not afraid of the police. They bagged a car that had only been abandoned for a few hours, which meant they weren’t worried about a trap. They think they own the town.”
“Maybe they do,” Grace said.
“Maybe, but if they’re cocky, they might make a mistake. They’ve got buyers to appease, so they’re making nightly raids. Probably scouts out looking for targets.” He started pacing again. “Maybe that’s the tactic. Start at the buyers and try to work back to the carjackers.”
Grace snapped her fingers. “The garages that are getting cheaper deals.”
“Exactly. We get a list from Vicente and camp them out.”
“And then we plant trackers on any delivery truck that shows up.”
Davey frowned. “Do you have enough for that?”
There was no missing the smug look on her face. “We all know how Abigail swears by these things. I brought a whole case. There’s like forty of them in there.”
He scratched his head. It was true that Abigail was a bit obsessed with them. But if it meant they had enough for the current job, he wasn’t going to complain. They were working an uphill battle at this point. “I’ll go get the list from Vicente. You find us a good map of Warszawa on the network. We�
��re going to have to record a lot of data to look for patterns.”
He left the room feeling more confident than he had the previous day. After all, they were professionals. It was going to be hard work, and maybe they would fail. But if he was going to fail, he was going to fail with his head held high.
THE NEXT THREE DAYS kept Davey and Grace busy. During the day, they split up, casing rival garages and tagging any delivery trucks that arrived. Thankfully, mechanics seemed to constantly need parts delivered, so they had nearly a dozen vehicles tracked by the end of the week.
What they learned was far more complicated than they had banked on. Davey found a print map of the city and mounted it to the back of a piece of glass. Taking the data from the trackers, they began marking routes and stops with markers.
“This is a lot to take in,” Grace said.
“You’re telling me,” he agreed. Most trucks stopped more than once per trip, adding new businesses to the map until it was an interconnected web of colored lines and notes. “Okay what’s at 3821 Wzgórze Street.” He’d massacred that word for sure.
Grace looked back down at her tablet. “Umm. The directory says it’s Pulkowski Automotive. They’re... yeah, another distributor. Legitimate business.”
Davey’s shoulder slumped. “All we’ve mapped is Warszawa’s supply network for car parts.” He gestured at the network of lines. “And in painful detail. There’s got to be something here.”
“We can send it to Matthew,” Grace suggested.
“I will, I will. But I want to figure this out for myself.”
She gave him a funny look but mercifully said nothing as she set aside her tablet. She grabbed her chopsticks and took another mouthful of noodles from the ramen shop they’d found a couple blocks away. “What if it’s one of the distributors that runs the chop shop?”
After Moses: Wormwood Page 16