“I hope that statement you wanted to make was worth what we paid in jet fuel to get that,” Deek went on.
“What price can you put on payback?” I asked in return, panning the Val around and dry firing it.
“Roof?” Q asked.
“Absolutely,” I agreed, pulling two mags out of the ammo box.
The roof access was on the shop side of the building, so it worked out perfectly. It was a warm, humid Florida evening with a light breeze out of the northeast.
“Over there,” I pointed to an area that was about 100 yards away. A drainage ditch that ran along beside the railroad tracks with a soft mud bank. It wasn’t well lit but enough to make out a white paper cup on the bank.
Q adjusted the sight on the Vintorez racked the bolt and squeezed the trigger. It barely made any noise at all. Just the quietest PFT! It was so quiet you could hear the firing pin hitting the shell. The shot landed short and right. Q made an adjustment to the scope and next round moved the cup. PFT! PFT! PFT! Q squeezed them off and the cup danced in the half-light.
“Sweet!” he concluded. “There’s hardly any recoil.”
“My turn.”
The scope on the Val was more of a quick point without much magnification but it was bright even in the poor light. My first shot fell short, but the next three tore what was left of the cup apart.
Q put his hand on my arm and pointed to the street to our right where a West Palm black and white was rolling up the street. We ducked down and were going to crawl back to the door to the stairs when the car turned down the side street and went on its way.
We picked up our brass and headed back downstairs.
“Hey, Mat,” I yelled at the van. “You guys have a gun rack in that thing?”
He stuck his head out of the side door. “Actually, we do,” he said with a grin.
It was a slide out rack under the van about three inches deep with foam padding in the bottom. The slide out mechanism was sticky but we worked it loose and the guns and ammo fit with room to spare.
“You guys think of everything,” I grinned.
“We aim to please,” Mat agreed.
That was enough fun for one night so Q and I decided to turn in. Deek and Mateo said they had just a few more tweaks on the van and they’d call it a night. I didn’t notice the music had ended in the warehouse and Bobby, V, and Anita were kicking back in the living room.
“Everyone know where their rooms are?” I asked. They assured me they were checked out and I headed upstairs to the office for bed.
Amber was waiting and she had the covers arranged so I could tell she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
“What happened to that song and dance about the rest of the team?”
“That was like an hour ago,” she reminded me. “Things change.”
As I turned out the light I had a feeling a lot of things were going to change.
Chapter 21
I woke up unclear about exactly what time it was and momentarily disoriented. My phone said it was 5:30 and I decided to text Deek about breakfast after hitting the head. Making my way downstairs I noticed I didn’t need to bother. The warehouse had been cleaned up overnight, trash cans emptied and a new breakfast buffet laid out.
Anita was already up using one of the mats to do her stretching routine.
“Sorry if I’m interrupting,” I said, looking through the breakfast buffet, which was quite nice.
“I’m almost done,” she informed me. “The ritual helps me keep my bearings.”
“Sleep alright?”
“Surprisingly well,” she said. “I’m going to call Nick this morning.”
“Your friend up in D.C.?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she affirmed, laying her head on one knee. Personally, I couldn’t figure out how people do that. I could never stretch like that, even when I was a kid. It was painful to watch.
“Last chance to bail out,” I reminded her. “After today this becomes a commitment.”
“I think that ship has already sailed,” she said with a certain air of resignation.
“There’s a slight but non-zero chance this will work out in your favor anyway.”
“And?” she asked, getting to her feet and helping herself to a piece of bacon off the buffet. “Suppose it does. Then what? I claw my way back up to hunting escaped felons.”
“It’s a tough life.”
“Have you ever been stuck in a dead-end job?”
“Not really.”
“Let me tell you about tough,” she said, waving her bacon like a pointer. “Every day I have to will myself to open that door. I have to deal with people I secretly despise...and I don’t mean the criminals. This,” she said gesturing around the warehouse but encompassing our entire organization, “is the first time in months that I haven’t had a knot in my stomach.”
“Not that I don’t think you could make it, but do you have a fallback if it doesn’t work out?”
“The same one I had when I couldn’t take it anymore, going private.”
“Bail jumpers?”
“It’s not so different from what I do every day and it pays better,” she reminded me. “There’s a group out in Arizona I could hook up with to get started.”
“I think that would be a waste of your talents,” I said truthfully.
“So is what I’m doing now but it pays the bills.”
“If you go with us you won’t have any bills, unless you incur them on your own. If you want to gamble, you do that with your own money. If you’re a compulsive shopper, we’re not picking up the tab for that. Our accountants will tell you what we will and won’t pay for, they’re brutal but fair.”
“That’s so hard to imagine,” she said, shaking her head and finally taking a bite of her bacon. “What do you spend your money on?”
“Ninety percent of the stuff people fill their lives with is just junk. We’ve consolidated all that into collective junk which we pay a logistics group to store for us. They bring us what we need, when we need it and it goes back to a warehouse when we don’t. They also keep our stuff clean and in good repair. If whatever it is takes batteries, they keep them charged up.”
“What about your car?”
“We have a motor pool. You need a car, just go check one out. We have boats, motorcycles, a helicopter, a couple planes.”
“Just like that.”
“Yup. Where you stay depends on where you’re working. We have property management companies that take care of those. Some are houses, some are trailers, commercial buildings like this one and, sometimes, hotels. We try not to put people in hotels too often because there’s a lot of traffic and hotels are surprisingly difficult to secure. You can live on one of the boats; Q and I do that a lot of the time. The majority of our inventory is empty at any given time so you’ll have lots of options. We had one guy who lived in the back of our cargo plane from time to time.”
“What happens if you’re not working?”
I shrugged. “Stay wherever you like. Working, not working. Some of our people are idle for months at a time.”
“Months!? And they’re still getting paid?”
“You’re looking at this from the standpoint of a traditional employer and that just doesn’t work here.”
“What about time tracking? Status reports? Performance reviews?”
I gave her a blank look. Q and I had never had a day job in the traditional sense and the mountains of overhead bullshit that went along with it always mystified me.
“Doesn’t anyone get fired?”
“All the time,” I assured her. “More often they quit. If someone in ops can’t adapt to the lifestyle or decides they’ve had enough, we shuffle them off to a corporate job and if they don’t perform there they get fired like anyone else. We have people move back and forth between corporate jobs and ops all the time. One of Fred’s people got pregnant a couple years ago, we sent her over to corporate. A couple people have gotten married and wanted a more traditional lif
estyle....pretty incompatible with what we do. We lost one of our best people not long after we met. She worked on the boat at the marina that day you showed up with Nick. Her name is Jennifer and we really liked her.”
“It’s just so hard to get my mind around,” she shook her head, a physical manifestation of the internal struggle.
“It takes some time to adjust,” I cautioned. “While you may not be working all the time, you have to be ready to leave on a moment’s notice. I mean run out to the store and not make it home for six months. That kind of thing happens all the time. You might be off for months but then you might be on assignment and working for the next five years. That tends to be hard on relationships. It takes a special kind of person and not everyone is cut out for it.”
“How do you pay for all of it?”
“That’s the easy part,” I chuckled. “We’ve made quite a lot of money over the years. When you’re not paying a CEO, president and VPs tens of millions of dollars and you don’t have to pander to shareholders, a company can make a crapload of money. The broader economy is set up so money flows to a relatively small number of pockets, we don’t work that way. Many of the companies we started to work for us ended up making money selling the same services to other companies. Some of them made so much money we had to spin them off.”
“It’s almost like socialism,” she said, trying to get a handle on the concept.
“I would hesitate to put any kind of label on it,” I cautioned. “It’s efficient, it’s liberating, and you already know it can be dangerous.”
“What about my salary?”
I was getting tired of the questions and I wanted to eat so I just started fixing myself a plate. “We pay pretty well and you don’t have most of the expenses of day to day life, so most of our people just end up banking it. And then there are the bonuses.”
“Bonuses?”
“We cut people a share of the recoveries and salvages.” I could see Anita was having a hard time trying to process it all.
“Don’t they retire?”
“Once in a while. Jennifer retired,” I reminded her.
“How old was she?”
“Short of 30,” I kept it vague because it wasn’t any of her business. “Most of our people have enough money they can retire anytime they want.”
“Then why don’t they?”
“A lot of reasons, but most of them boil down to liking what they do, what we do. Do you mind if I eat? I’m getting kind of hungry. Get a plate and join me if you like.”
“Sorry,” she said automatically. “Always the interrogator.”
“I get it,” I said piling on the bacon. “It’s a lot different than what you’re used to.”
She fixed a plate that would have been a meal for a good size Chihuahua. We were interrupted when Mateo wandered in from the garage.
“Just need a coffee,” he said, brandishing a big plastic cup.
“Have you and Deek been up all night?” I asked.
“What time is it?” he asked in return.
“5:40,” I said, checking my phone.
“Then yeah,” he grinned. “We were kinda having fun,” he explained.
“You should get some sleep, we’re going to need you later.”
“Just about done,” he assured me, filling up his cup from one of three big plastic containers of coffee.
Anita ate half of her Chihuahua breakfast and told me she was going to take a shower and head out for her part of the festivities later today.
“You clear on the plan?”
“I am,” she confirmed. “I’ll be waiting for your call.”
“We’ll see you later then.”
She made her way upstairs and passed V coming down.
Unlike Anita, V helped herself to a plate full of food that could have fed a lumberjack and joined me at the table.
“I like her,” she said between heaping mouthfuls of scrambled eggs, grits, bacon and toast washed down with black coffee.
“That’s good because I’m thinking about you and her teaming up to upgrade our offshore logistics infrastructure.”
“She can handle it,” V observed.
“I know she can handle it, but I don’t want everyone running back to me all the time.”
“You mean I would be like her boss?”
“More like a mentor.” I had to explain the word to V.
She continued to shovel her food in silence as she mulled that one over. For virtually her entire career with us V only had to look after V. On her ranch out in BF Nowhere Brazil she had her orphans. She rescued kids from the same slums she came from and put them through an educational and training program she ran out of her ranch. When they graduated she’d send them out to get jobs and integrate with society. V had her people in government, private industry and the military and they were fiercely loyal to the lady who rescued them from what certainly would have been a life that was nasty, brutish and short. But Anita wasn’t one of her kids.
“Okay,” she said after thinking on it some. That was that with V.
“Can you cover for Deek at the beta site today?” I asked. “He’s been up all night with Mateo working on the van.”
“I could,” she agreed, “but why don’t you let the hooker give it a try.”
“She has a name,” I said with a touch of annoyance.
“Deek says she’s not bad, but I’ll do it if you want.”
I thought that over for a minute. V rarely made suggestions and I felt like I should listen.
“Okay,” I agreed. “We’ll give Amber a try.”
“That’s such a faggy name,” V complained.
“She didn’t pick it,” I reminded her.
“I see why you like her, though.”
That was a rare compliment. “I’m actually glad you approve.”
“Gotta do something about that name, though. Can’t be a badass in operations with a pussy ass name like that.”
“Maybe we’ll work on that,” I said more because I didn’t want to get into an argument over it.
Q came downstairs, looking wide awake as usual. I left him with V and went to check on Deek and the van.
“Some people sleep at night,” I informed him. “You should try it sometime.” For all their labor the van looked pretty much the same as when it got here, although there were a couple odd additional antennas.
He handed me a tablet. “Watch this,” he grinned.
There was a whirring sound from somewhere up above and quad-rotor drone lifted off from the roof of the van and went straight up about 10 feet. I could see myself next to the van in the tablet screen.
“You said I should look into drone technology,” he reminded me. “Here you go. Autonomous flight, obstacle avoidance, high definition video with night vision, infrared, and four hours of flight time between recharges. Keep watching.”
The display updated and my phone data started playing out across the screen.
“We integrated it with the IMIS catcher,” he boasted. “We can tell it to follow a particular phone by tracking the pings.”
I had to admit it was impressive.
“We added a few more bells and whistles,” he informed me. “Better integration with the beta site.”
“Speaking of beta site,” I began, handing the tablet back to him. “What would you think about Amber covering for you while you catch some Zs before tonight?”
“I think she’d do okay,” he agreed.
“Now that we have V and Amber there’s less need for overlap,” I pointed out. “I’ll need her back before we move on the club.”
“No problem,” he agreed. “I’ll have her down there in plenty of time for the festivities.”
“You should get some sleep,” I suggested, he really did look tired and older.
“Yeah, we were having fun. But that fun catches up to you this time of day. Should I text Amber?”
“Nah, I’ll get it. You have time to grab some breakfast.”
I made my way u
pstairs to wake Amber and she was her usual cheery morning self.
“Fu-u-u-ck what time is it?”
“Not quite six.”
She sat up knowing that if she laid there she’d go back to sleep.
“So you want me to fill in for the pervert?”
“Deek and V both backed that idea,” I informed her. “I had no idea you were such a techno-babe.”
The Blue Tango Salvage: Book 2 in the Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series Page 24