by Ramy Vance
Reuben suddenly felt very anxious with the thought. He was starting to realize he was obsessing over Aki for the wrong reasons. He tried to put the thought away. To think about Aki and what she needed, but before he could think of anything, it was over.
Aki was gone, back to work, or at least pretending to work.
He went back to his desk, and a ping came through his work orders. Tech needed to replace the destroyed computer. The agent who worked on it had nowhere to work.
“Right,” he muttered.
He did have real work to do. Chasing Aki wasn’t going to stop the bomb. It took him a while to replace the computer, and by the time he was done, the office was back to normal operating order. He finally found a chance to read his maple syrup story.
The maple syrup story was odd. It had happened on Wednesday the eighth at the Detroit/Windsor border. Windsor, Ontario was the town on the other side of the US/Canadian border at the Detroit crossing point. Apparently, as three semis had been crossing the Detroit River bridge, customs on the US side had opened one of them up and found it was full of an illegal shipment of maple syrup.
“How could maple syrup be illegal?” Reuben wondered.
He read the supporting documents. It was apparently raw, unregulated syrup contained in regular mason jars with handmade labels. But all three semis, apparently, were full of this stuff, stacked top to bottom.
As customs had moved to seize the goods, however, one of the drivers had produced a semi-automatic weapon and fired warning shots at the border officials. The border officials, of course, emerged in full SWAT gear. But not before the semis made a break for it. Border police had chased the semis, shooting out their tires. The drivers of all three semis had pulled out guns and fired back.
Choppers had been called out, and a full police chase had ensued through the streets of Detroit for the better part of the morning. Finally, police had apprehended two of the semis, arrested the suspects, and confiscated the contraband. As of three days ago, the final suspect remained at large. His semi, when they'd found it abandoned in a warehouse district, was empty.
The suspects in custody had given very little information. But what they did know was that the shootout was related to a mobster known as “the Canadian.” The same guy Mike was asking about.
Reuben printed out everything he could on this guy, threw his research into his bag, and headed home.
Reuben—Thursday, February 9, 6:27 p.m.
On the train ride through the city, Reuben texted Marshall to find out what he wanted to do for dinner. By the time he arrived at his stop, he still hadn’t received a response. Most likely, Marshall was out drinking with his old cop buddies for the night and would leave him alone. As many problems as they had, he knew Marshall needed the camaraderie. Once upon a time, his dad had been someone who young cops looked up to. Some still did. It was good for him to be around people who remembered that.
Reuben had lost sight of it, that was for sure.
He stopped and picked up Chinese takeout and a case of beer and anticipated a long, restful night without Marshall. He wanted some time to really dig into this Schaeffer case, and without Marshall underfoot, it sure would be easier.
But outside the restaurant, he heard a grating voice say, “Mr. Hash Brown, everything’s about to change.”
He turned to see the same homeless guy from that first day he’d died. “You!” he said, cautiously approaching him. “How do you know about my mom’s nickname for me?”
“Nickname?” the homeless guy tilted his head in confusion. “That’s not your name? Mr. Hash Brown? Or maybe it’s, Brown, Hash Brown, 00-00.”
“Dude,” Reuben said, realizing that because he couldn’t die, he didn’t have anything to be afraid of. “Who the fuck are you?”
The homeless guy smiled, exposing two rows of yellow teeth, “I’m nobody except the guy who remembers just like you. I remember everything.”
Reuben’s eyes widened. “You can time warp, too?”
The homeless guy nodded, and leaning in close, whispered, “I can. I can also do the Funky Chicken.”
He started flapping around doing what Reuben had to admit was the best rendition of the Funky Chicken he’d ever seen.
With a cackle and a howl, the homeless man danced away, leaving Reuben with his Chinese takeout.
He arrived at the apartment and stiffened when he saw Sheera outside. She calmly watered her plants on the stoop.
She smiled pleasantly. “Good evening.”
“Good evening,” he repeated.
She continued with her gardening, unannoyed. Today was the day before Marshall had royally pissed them off, and Reuben was relieved.
Given he was on a new timeline, maybe it was possible to keep the Saturday morning debacle at bay?
“That would be nice,” Reuben muttered as he took the stairs to his apartment.
When he opened the door, he didn’t expect what was waiting for him on the couch.
“Martha?” He tossed the Chinese food onto the counter. “Martha Dragone? What are you doing here?”
Chapter Twenty
Martha—Thursday, February 9, 7:03 a.m.
Gigi’s Breakfast Café was more crowded than Martha had expected. Hidden in a tiny strip center, it didn’t appear to be much. But at just after seven a.m., business was booming. It was a good thing she didn't have to go into the precinct early this morning.
The café was trendy enough inside, appearing as if the design came from a mid-century ice cream shop merged with early aughts coffee culture. The room was brightly lit, all done in soft pastels with candy-colored high-backed barstools at laptop counters. Soft jazz played overhead, and at mid-morning, the clientele was primarily preschool moms, college students, and the occasional businessman puttering with a laptop while lingering over coffee.
Martha finished the last couple bites of her cinnamon apple crepe, washing it down with a couple sips from her cooling coffee.
All the while, she thought about how she was going to find the Canadian.
On a whim, she pulled out her phone, and with a quick search, downloaded an old issue of the society magazine, The Scene, searching for famous Canadians.
Who knew? Maybe her criminal mastermind would be hiding in plain sight? Outside of a few comedians and actors, only one hit came back, the venture capitalist Alister Pout.
Guess there aren’t many Canadians investing in New York? she mused.
The first page was a stunning cover shot of his signature half-grin, piercing blue eyes, faint stubble, and wavy dark hair. He was one good-looking guy.
Alister Pout lounges on the deck chair of his Park Avenue penthouse and sips a glass of wine. The 32-year-old almost-billionaire is the whole picture. The penthouse, the wine, the scenic view of the city, and most of all, the women. A half-dressed Swedish model had to be safely stowed away on the yacht for the duration of the interview. He handed her the keys and promised to meet her in an hour.
“This shouldn’t take too long,” he’d promised her with a sensuous peck on the lips. She’d stared at him longingly and left with a coy smile.
Now, we’re sitting on the deck to talk business. Or, at least try to. He’s the most eligible bachelor in the city, and he laughs at the idea that he might be just a bit…cliché.
“Cliché?” he says. “Maybe a bit. But I think you’ve got to buy into the system before you can reform it.”
Reforming the system is definitely an objective since he founded RedBook, a revolutionary online platform related to social media. According to its marketing campaign, RedBook isn’t social media. It’s a new platform that will redefine what is quickly becoming the bane of modern existence.
“I hate it when people call RedBook ‘social media,’” he remarks with disdain. “It’s not. I think people hate the term and what it stands for. I don’t blame them. I hate it myself.”
Indeed, RedBook calls itself a “communications platform,” whatever that means. Alister explains it w
ith the gusto reserved for tech moguls in mansions.
“What we’re doing with RedBook,” he says, “is creating a platform that is as revolutionary to the world Facebook was in 2006. Facebook has lost its relevance and has been declining for a lot of years. Zuckerberg will likely take out a hit on me for that. Print that part, for security reasons, please.”
He laughs, but it’s not entirely clear if he’s joking.
“But I don’t care,” he continues with a devil-may-care glint in his eyes. “I’ll say it anyway. I predict we’ll see the end of Facebook and the decline of social media in general within the next decade. RedBook is going to replace it by taking the essence of what social media can do and readapting it to meet the needs of the dawning decade.”
Pout’s plan for doing that is an unclear cacophony of buzzwords and hyperbolic testaments to the team at RedBook’s parent company, S-wire Media.
The rest of the article was a straight-up advertisement for RedBook, complete with boilerplate paragraphs lifted from their marketing materials.
Lazy reporting, Martha thought. It sounded like the interview was a bust, and the writer was looking to fill space. That figured.
She did a quick online search for RedBook and S-wire Media. They had a strong media presence, carefully crafted posts, and slick web copy. Sifting through their social media accounts, she still didn’t have any idea what RedBook actually did.
Maybe that was the thing. Maybe RedBook was a scam. A fake product used as a front for…what?
Her search on S-wire Media proved just as inconclusive. Their official website had a list of company officers, and she searched them all. At the outset, they all seemed legitimate. They were verifiable technology professionals and investors, all with the right credentials. Stanford, Duke, Yale, former board members of Dell, HP, Chase Bank. All respectable and all the right kind of people to invest in a company like this.
She sighed. Alister Pout was no more a criminal mastermind than that sheep bleating outside her window was a wolf.
But still, there was something nagging at the back of her mind. There was something about Alister Pout that intrigued her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
He’s good-looking, she thought. Who knows, maybe I’m just yearning to move to Canada to find me a sexy Mountie and free healthcare.
Martha chuckled at the thought as she tossed a five-dollar bill on the table and left. This was the day she had set aside to get answers on this case, and she wasn’t any closer. She needed air.
She took the street slowly, mulling over what little she had on the Canadian. Maybe she should send it up the ladder. But she wouldn’t. Her career depended on it. She would, instead, get more information.
A driver whizzed by. “Hey lady,” he heckled, “get your head out of your ass.”
She hadn’t even realized she had wandered into the crosswalk. What was wrong with her? Car horns honked at her, and she waved apologetically and scurried to the other side.
That was when she noticed the van from Mr. Sudds Dry Cleaning sitting at the red light. She stopped on the sidewalk and stared at it.
The logo was a big, meaty hand wrapped around a pink sponge, surrounded by lots of blue and white bubbles.
Why would you use that to advertise your dry cleaning? she thought. No one wants to associate their expensive suits with bubbles and soap. They want to see their suit as pressed and put together with little to no effort on their part.
But something about the whole van inexplicably bothered her. There was nothing wrong with having a dumb logo. So, what was it that made her suspicious of this van? Was it because the door hinges had little bits of rust on them? There was nothing wrong with having a little rust on an old van.
What is it about this van? No. It wasn’t the van. It was that odd dry cleaner logo. Mr. Sudds. She felt like she knew it from somewhere, felt like she’d been there before, although she knew she hadn’t. Had she?
Déjà vu. That was all she could blame it on.
Still, it was such an odd feeling that she felt compelled to follow the van and see where it led to.
Raising her hand, she hailed a taxi.
Chapter Twenty-One
Martha—Thursday, February 9, 8:08 a.m.
She stared through the taxi’s windshield at the white van they were following.
“This is what going insane must feel like,” she muttered to herself.
“Excuse me?” said the taxi driver.
“Nothing.” Martha grabbed the side of the seat until her knuckles hurt. “Can you go any faster?”
“Lady, we’re in gridlock. Unless you want me to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang this, we’re stuck.”
He was right. They were stuck in gridlock, and he really was going as fast as he could. But the van was several cars in front of them. If it turned and they got caught in a light, they’d lose it.
The light turned green, and the van moved forward.
“Go, go,” she prodded, almost bouncing in her seat as they gained a few yards on the van. “Cut into the middle lane.” She put out her hand and waved her badge at the car behind them. “Now.”
“I’m going, I’m going.” But there wasn’t a traffic rule this guy was ignoring. All this playing it by the rules was really slowing them down.
When the cab finally caught up with the van parked against the curb in front of them, Martha took out her phone and snapped a photo of the plates. She texted it to Jake. Can you run these plates?
“All right.” She turned toward the cab driver and pointed toward a curb opposite the van and the shop it was parked beside. “Right here.”
“That’s it?” The cab driver protested. “All that for a dry cleaner’s? I thought we were going on a chase.”
She didn’t say anything. She just watched from the cab’s window as the van pulled up in front of the dry cleaners, and a guy in a hoodie stepped out.
A moment later, a fancy car that looked like it had accidentally turned down the wrong street pulled up, and a man wearing a fedora stepped out.
The two of them spoke for a minute, with the hoodie-wearing man handing Fedora Man an old cell phone, presumably a burner.
Then they split up.
Martha didn’t know who to follow. The fancy car or the van. She had already texted the plates to the van, so she went for Fedora Man.
The cabbie trailed the fancy car through the streets until they wound up in the financial district. The car stopped beside a skyscraper with one of those modern sculpture monstrosities out front and Fedora Man stepped out, sans fedora.
Martha’s jaw dropped. Was that who she thought it was? Alister Pout, the Canadian venture capitalist and founder of RedBook?
What the fuck was he doing in front of Mr. Sudds?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Martha—Thursday, February 9, 11:42 a.m.
It was cold outside the precinct building. The air was clear and cloudless, and patches of ice dotted the sidewalk and melted into muddy puddles in the gutters below. Martha shivered as she pushed the glass doors open to join the freezing masses stepping outside to grab lunch.
As soon as she got outside, she passed a handful of officers shooting the breeze on a smoke break. They stood huddled in a group, smoke wafting around them like winter fog. It reminded her of some sort of animal pecking order, packing together for warmth and first-world social survival.
She rolled her eyes at the whole scene.
At the top of the pecking order would have been Tom. Tom was one of the senior officers and had been there longer than Captain Kenneth, a fact that made him think he owned Kenneth. While the current police chief could certainly hold his own in a power struggle, it was rare for anyone to get anywhere in the precinct without Tom’s approval. This, she knew, was precisely why Jake kept his distance from her.
Martha had, by way of having a vagina, been excluded from Tom’s list of favored players. Jake, by way of association, had to play both sides, working with Martha yet still being cool
enough for the boys’ club. Martha wondered how the dynamic between Jake and herself would have played out had Tom not been around.
Today, Tom was surrounded by a couple of his other douchebag buddies, neither of whose names she could recall. The loud, raucous laughter spoke of end-of-the-day comic relief, coupled with the strains of bottom-of-the-desk-drawer stress reliever.
“No, no.” Tom held up his finger. “It was at the Detroit-Windsor border.”
“How many semis?” asked a red-headed, baby-faced officer.
The kid didn’t look more than twenty-three and had a rounded, well-fed physique that spoke of three square meals a day courtesy of mama’s home cooking.
“Three,” Tom explained. “So, the border patrol tried to confiscate the contraband—“
“Maple syrup?” the ginger-headed officer interjected. “Bootleg maple syrup? Really?”
The whole group burst out laughing, and even Martha raised an eyebrow.
“No, it’s not cool, man.” Tom’s face turned sullen. “Three officers were shot at.”
“Ah, fucking no!” the ginger officer swore.
The profanity rang heavy with unaccustomed vulgarity. He was trying too hard. He didn’t talk like that over Mama’s blueberry pancakes, and he overcompensated at work. At least Martha wasn’t the only one trying to impress the boys’ club.
“Two went into the hospital,” Tom confirmed. “And the other… Well, they don’t think he’s going to make it.”
Martha stood on the sidelines and listened to the gorillas beat their chests and curse up blue streaks.
“That’s just bullshit.” The dark-haired officer shook his head. “We oughta go down there and bust a cap right in their cop-killing skulls.”
“Shit, yeah!” the ginger-haired cop agreed. “Did they take them down?”