The Brummie Con

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  “Yes, I’m graying,” Charlie says. “Now come on—” She holds her arms out for a hug. “—when was the last time you came to see me?”

  I skip over and give her a hug. It has been awhile—usually I send Puo. And we don’t usually hug, but I chalk it up to the long time and all the recent near-death experiences. I even resist the urge to show off and lift something from her sweater pocket. Her woody perfume is comforting, bringing back memories of her playfully swatting at me, causing wafts of scented air to pass over my head, which always made me think of a peaceful forest. Her hand brushes up against my left butt cheek and plants something. She’s not as good as she once was. The thought makes me sad.

  I step back. Charlie is a large African-American woman nearly the size of Puo. You wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but her thick fingers were once more nimble than a surgeon’s. She really must be getting older for me to feel her plant on me.

  “And stop looking at me like that,” Charlie says. “It’s just a little gray.”

  “No,” I say, “it looks good. But I felt the plant: left butt cheek.” I feel kinda bad mentioning it.

  “Did you?” Charlie cocks an eyebrow at me. “Now why do I doubt that?”

  I reach back and pull a note from my back pocket and hold it up for her to see.

  “Well?” Charlie asks.

  I look down and unfold the note, “You forget who trained you, girlie.”

  Damn it! When I look up again Charlie has unlocked my pocket tablet that had been resting in my front jacket pocket and is flipping through it.

  “How’d you open it?” It was locked with Puo’s protocols.

  “Did you forget who trained Puo as well?” she asks me with righteous indignation.

  “You had to bring in extra teachers to train Puo,” I remind her. Right from the beginning Puo proved to be exceptional with computers.

  “I knew enough to get him started,” Charlie says still sorting through my pocket tablet.

  “Yeah, well,” I say, “I still felt the plant.” Take that Miss High and Mighty.

  “You felt it because I wanted you to feel it. You always were way too focused on your ass,” Charlie says as she continues to dig through my private life.

  “Preserving it mostly,” I mumble back. I knew I should’ve lifted something from her during that hug.

  “Which brings to us why you’re here.” She locks my pocket tablet and hands it back to me. “You really stepped into the middle of it this time, didn’t you girlie?”

  Uh ... yeah.

  But before I can think of a response she asks again, “But you didn’t answer me before, where’s Puo?”

  I stare at her and read her annoyingly knowing expression. “You already know, don’t you?”

  “Pretty much. You left him to watch over the third body that fell from the sky onto Lower Pryor Bridge.”

  I nod. Freaking Charlie, her eyes are everywhere. That was only seven hours ago.

  “Is it serious?” Charlie asks.

  I shake my head no without meeting her eyes. “He should be fine.”

  Charlie regards me seriously but then shifts gears by licking her lips. “Any word on your father?”

  It’s as if the question sucks all the emotion out of the room, leaving only a vacuum of silence. There hasn’t been any sign of my father. No threats. No demands. No ransoms. No taunts. No news stories. Not even a rumor. Nothing. And up until about fours ago, we’ve been too busy to dwell on it. It’s like a terminal diagnosis of someone close to you—if you let yourself get busy enough and not talk about it, you can almost forget what’s coming. Almost.

  But now? Now, without something to steal? Without something to smash? Without something to ... do? Now the thoughts of what might be happening or how this will end swirl on the peripheral no longer held at bay. They dart in unexpectedly. Consume the quiet space between moments.

  I fastidiously straighten and restraighten my coat and shake my head.

  Charlie bravely plows on anyway, “And that business at your father’s place last night?”

  I shrug. “I always thought that gatehouse was ostentatious.”

  Charlie barks a laugh. “Now there’s the girlie I know. Tell me about it.”

  I oblige. I start the story with setting up shop in the Seattle Isles, and slowly the unwelcome thoughts of what they must be doing to my father fade back into the periphery. Charlie is a good listener, not interrupting; laughing, cheering, and scowling at all the appropriate places—she totally gets me.

  It’s a long story and midway through my stomach starts rumbling so loudly she insists on having brunch brought in. So now we’re having a picnic on the floor in the middle of the empty training ground munching on warm apple-cinnamon blintzes and fresh strawberries and blueberries. And coffee, gotta have coffee.

  I finish my tale with my arrival here and take a bite of my blintz. The sweet apple filling deliciously oozes out into the recesses of my mouth. The blintz itself is seared in butter for nice contrast in textures. Damn that’s good.

  Charlie sits there silently chewing on her own blintz (looks to be cherry filled) thinking over the situation.

  Between bites I ask her, “Do you know anything about the Cleaners?” Do you know anything I don’t? Some secret reason for all this?

  She shakes her head no. “Not that would explain all this. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “It feels like you unknowingly stumbled into something. It makes sense that they’d come after you for your role in Chavez’s death—”

  It does? Damn. Christina Chavez was the Guild Master of the Cleaners in the Seattle Isles. Colvin may have been the one to pull the trigger but we dressed her up in a bulls-eye package and delivered her. I thought our connection to Colvin and my father would present enough of a shield from any reprisal.

  Charlie continues, “—they wouldn’t go after Colvin—he’s too high up. But they could make an example of you.”

  “You think that’s what the tour boat explosion was?” If we had died in an accident or terrorist attack then the Cleaners would have enough gray area to make insinuations without taking credit.

  She nods at first but then stops. “Yes, but no. That’s what I would think if it had been successful. But it wasn’t. And when it wasn’t—”

  “They launched an all out war on all the Bosses. Kidnapping my father.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie says. “It doesn’t make sense. Why all the Bosses? And why signal you out by grabbing your father?”

  I shrug—that’s why I came here. “So, who do you go talk to when things don’t make sense and you’re not sure what to do next?” I ask her, half jokingly, half seriously.

  She puts down the half-eaten cherry blini and dusts her hands off. “Are you sure you don’t have something they desperately want back or want to prevent you from finding?”

  “That’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it?” I haven’t told her about the Skim Job and stealing that shit-stain Cleaner Ham’s code.

  “Chavez’s squeegee,” Charlie says when it’s clear I’m not going to say anything. “You said she was the Guild Master, right?”

  Oh, shit. “You think there’s something there we’re not supposed to see or know about it?” That might actually make sense.

  “Have you looked at it?”

  “Puo has,” I say. “He didn’t mention anything.”

  “Have him look again.”

  “Duh,” I say without thinking.

  “Don’t ‘duh’ me girlie.”

  Pet peeve of Charlie’s. “Cause you’re the epitome of civilized conversation,” I dig in anyway.

  “You came to me, girlie. So respect your elders. See the gray?” She points to her temples with both hands. “Respect it.”

  I open my mouth to respond when she cuts over me.

  “Respect. It.”

  “Shall I bow or kneel?”

  Charlie actually breaks into a smile. “Curtsy.
”

  I stand up and curtsy, pretending to wear an old-fashioned ball gown. “Better?”

  “You don’t know how to actually curtsy, do you?”

  “Nope,” I say. “Pretty sure it involves this somehow though.” I turn around and waggle my ass at her.

  “Thank goodness I didn’t waste etiquette lessons on you.”

  I sit down, take another bite of my blintz and stick my food-covered tongue out at her.

  “Kind of you to doubly reaffirm my decision.”

  “We’ve done all right for ourselves,” I say through my food and shrug.

  “That you have,” Charlie agrees with a nod. “All the people that’ve tried to kill you aside, of course.”

  “Of course,” I agree. After a silent few seconds I ask, “So you think there’s something on Christina’s squeegee they’re trying to protect?”

  “It’s the only thing that seems to fit the data we have.”

  “But that wouldn’t explain why they went after all the Bosses.”

  “Not unless—”

  “That’s what they were trying to protect. Their takeover plans,” I finish for her. Damn.

  Charlie sits up excitedly. “And when they weren’t successful in killing you, making sure the information was buried, they opted to act quickly rather than risk exposure and giving the Bosses time to coordinate a defense or go on the offense.”

  Holy shit. “They were planning this.”

  “They were planning this,” Charlie agrees. “Probably for years. This isn’t a random sortie, it’s an invasion, a conquest.”

  “And Christina had to be in on it,” I say. She was the Guild Master and she was planning to dispose of Colvin until we stopped her, since her plan included framing us to get killed.

  Charlie nods once. “Where’s the squeegee?”

  A spike of paranoia grips me into silence. If that thing holds what we think it holds—hard incontrovertible proof that they’ve been planning this for years—it could change everything. It could be a rallying cry for the Bosses to form their own coalition. It could reveal what the Cleaners’ plans are.

  Eventually I answer cryptically, “Somewhere safe.”

  Charlie accepts this and doesn’t press it. Her face passes from the thrill of figuring out what’s going on to a more serious face. She looks around wistfully and swears under her breath. “Shit.”

  “What?” I ask. Now that we have a working hypothesis, I’m itching to get back to Puo to tell him what we think is going on. I clean off my hands and grab the bag of chocolate croissants for Puo and Winn.

  “They really did their research on you, didn’t they?” she says.

  That’s a weird shift in conversation. I nod to encourage her to continue.

  She lifts up a hand and starts ticking off fingers. “They know about your father, and that you care enough to come after him.”

  The connection to my father is a poor secret at this point. That cat’s been out of the bag. But we’ve both tried to carefully cultivate an outward appearance of apathy toward each other.

  Charlie ticks off another finger. “They knew you were in Vancouver—”

  But not in England. That’s what Ham said he was doing there: hiding. And then it hits me, That pig-faced bastard knows what’s going on! That’s why he’s hiding. He knew this shit was coming down the pipe. We need to find him and make him squeal.

  Ham holds the keys to understanding what the hell is going on—I’m sure of it. His cryptic warnings are starting to make sense.

  We need to get to England.

  “What?” Charlie breaks off seeing my face. “You just figured something out, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I say, starting to explain about Ham in England.

  “No—” she commands and raises up her hand to stop me. “—no, don’t tell me. I can’t reveal what I don’t know.”

  “You’re going to run,” I say, realizing that’s what her conversational shift was about, “aren’t you?”

  “They did their research,” she says matter-of-factly, “I have to assume they know about our connection.”

  If few people know the true nature of my relationship to my Father, even fewer know about Charlie having trained Puo and me. We were her last students, separated from her previous students by several years and taken on in secret only at our unyielding, dogmatic persistence.

  “But, but,” I struggle with the thought, “you’re Charlie.”

  She says quietly, “I’m not invincible—”

  “You’re immovable,” I counter. She’s always been here, weathered everything thrown her way in an unflappable stubborn way.

  She points to her temple and says quietly, “See the gray.”

  I can’t believe it. Where will she go? What will she do? Will I ever see her again?

  Charlie’s face softens and she reaches out to squeeze my arm. “Relax, girlie. It’s not like I haven’t been planning for this.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since always,” she says with snap. “What do I always say?”

  Uh. “Stop looking at your ass, girlie?”

  “Always have an escape plan,” she says over me. “Good Lord, girlie, did you learn nothing from me?”

  “I learned everything from you,” I say back. “I just never thought— I never figured—” I finish lamely.

  “It was bound to happen at some point.”

  “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  “You didn’t get me into anything. I knew what I was getting into when I agreed to train two pain-in-the-ass ten-year-olds that wouldn’t leave me the hell alone.”

  I smile at the memory but can’t help but ask, “What?”

  “Even then,” she says, “you had a bull-in-a-china-shop attitude and a temerity I hadn’t ever encountered in someone so young. And coupled with Puo’s damn-near savant digital skills, I figured the two of you without some guidance were going to get yourselves killed before you even became teenagers.”

  “Um, what?”

  “You two are dangerous,” Charlie pronounces.

  That’s why she trained us in secret, I suddenly realize. “Then why train us at all?”

  “Because I like to give the universe the finger when it deals an extra shitty hand to orphans. Because two kids, without training, managed to break into my auction house and hijack my systems to demand I train them or erase all my data. But mostly because I had you followed from the moment you first made contact with me and I saw who you and Puo were when you thought no one was looking.”

  Shit. I never knew that.

  “And, of course—” She smiles. “—with the greatest risk, comes the greatest reward.”

  And there’s the business side of her.

  We stare at each other awkwardly for few seconds before I exhale heavily and stand up. “I got to get back.” The brown paper bag crinkles as I pick up the chocolate croissants for Puo and Winn.

  Charlie pushes herself up from the floor and comes over for one last hug.

  I don’t want to let go. Why didn’t we hug more often?

  I step back and hand her the packet of gum I lifted when the food came.

  She laughs to herself and hands me back my pocket tablet that had been resting a few seconds before in my front pocket. “I’ll be watching.”

  “I hope so.”

  Time to go tell Puo to pack a suitcase.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE SMALL GREEK grandmother in front of me in the customs line at the Birmingham transport hub smells like sour olives with an ill-advised perfume bath to cover it up. It’s clear she’s been traveling for a while and is new to it—her long dark hair is greasy and disheveled; her clothes are wrinkled from a long transport, and she keeps checking her customs form every thirty seconds. She shuffles a step forward to the blue line painted on the white tile that indicates she’s next.

  Still, I’d take another one of her over the line Nazi behind me. Ugh. The squat mid-forties businesswoman has become incr
easingly more annoying the closer we get to the customs officer. I keep having to remind myself to behave, and not lift her pocket tablet or flag down a customs officer and tell them she offered me money to carry, and not open, a sealed package.

  Line Nazi clears her throat.

  I smile serenely and look around, not moving. The customs area is a freaking mess, a huge sea of tired humans waiting in a seemingly never-ending line.

  “This is absolutely ridiculous,” she mutters yet again under her breath. “Ah-hem,” Line Nazi says more forcefully, clearly eying the two feet of empty space in front of me.

  I ask her innocently, “Yes?”

  “Could you please move forward?” she asks impatiently.

  “Oh, sure,” I say with an apologetic smile and step forward. “You know,” I say under the guise of being helpful, “that they have a Fast Track option?”

  “I know!” she practically howls at me. “I have it, but they’ve shut it down—”

  I valiantly fight off a smirk that wants to form. Puo and Winn came through on earlier transports and told me it would be like this. The Brits closed down the Fast Track option in response to the British Museum heist.

  “—This is completely ridiculous,” Line Nazi continues to huff and puff, “like the thieves would be stupid enough to come back.”

  I shrug back my response. Yes, completely stupid.

  The Greek grandmother is waived forward and I step up to the blue line to wait my turn.

  There’s a seven- or eight-foot gap between the end of the line and the row of glass stalls the customs agents sit behind. The entire space is brightly lit, not-so-subtle cameras are pointed at you, and other more subtle sensors peek out of the dropped-down ceiling tiles. And white. Most everything is some shade of white and scuffed up from overuse. It gives the space the feel of a hospital waiting room.

  “Pocket tablets away!” a guard yells for the twelfth time. As if all the signs weren’t enough, we get to enjoy the loud random staccato burst in England’s waiting room.

  I feel crappy, not even worried or anxious. Just exhausted, hungry, and tired of being on my feet. The last thing I ate was some oatmeal when I got off the transport, but it was gritty and it didn’t taste right. Of course, they called it porridge, so maybe it wasn’t oatmeal after all. It’s not exactly sitting right.