A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion]

by William Lashner

  “A as in aberrantly ambitious?” said Riley.

  “A as in abnormally abased?” said Gordon.

  “A as in apparent imbeciles?” said Kief.

  “That has an I,” said Gordon.

  “It can’t; my math teacher always told us there is no I in imbecile.”

  “I suppose Teach was wrong about that,” said Riley.

  “A as in fucking asswipes,” I said.

  Our laughter drew satisfyingly suspicious glances from the crew around Mr. Maambong.

  It wasn’t long until Mr. Maambong and his people made their way off the roof, leaving the eight candidates to congregate in a large pile of bland smiles and polite chatter. But already it seemed sides had been drawn. One by one the A team yawned and stretched and headed to the hotel to grab some sleep before the next day’s sport, until it was just Riley and Kief and Gordon and myself on the roof patio, along with Bert, of course, who stood dumbly behind the bar in his red vest, ever ready to mix our drinks and refill our nut bowls. We arranged some chairs in a circle and lit some cigarettes—only Gordon didn’t smoke—and talked about this weird competition we had somehow volunteered to be part of.

  “Does anyone know anything about this outfit we’re prancing around like fools for?” said Gordon.

  “No one I asked knew,” said Kief. “It’s a mystery.”

  “I maybe found something,” said Riley. “I went into this darknet I have access to and put out a request for information on Maambong and this address. I set it up so that none of the traffic could be linked back to me, and then I sat back like a rockfish waiting for a school of minnows to swim by. I hit a lot of rumors, warnings, the usual bullshit stuff that floats around onionland, but one thing came back enough times to hook my attention.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Wait a second,” said Kief. He stubbed out his butt, slipped a spindled joint from a pants pocket, and sparked it up. “Anyone want to get baked?” he said, as he held the first drag in his lungs.

  “Man, we got ourselves a competition tomorrow,” said Gordon.

  “Exactly,” said Kief. “A good night’s sleep is not just optional, but imperative.”

  “Go ahead, Riley,” I said. “What did you snag?”

  “Just a name, but it gives you an idea of what they might have in mind for us. Among those that say they know, they say Maambong is the front man for something called the Hyena Squad.”

  We all stayed silent for a moment to let that sink in. Kief took a long drag from his joint.

  “They want a pack of hyenas,” said Gordon, finally.

  “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?” said Kief, before letting loose a smoke-filled cackle.

  And the rest of us joined him, if not in the drug, at least in the laughter, because it sounded so right. The Hyena Squad. Which meant we all were now aspiring to turn ourselves into vicious little scavengers with sniveling laughs. That knowledge seemed to burn away any pretenses we might have had with each other. And in that atmosphere of openness, with the sweet smoke of Kief’s reefer swirling around us, I volunteered my tale of how I became mixed up with the mysterious Mr. Maambong. I started it off by describing my failed careers as lawyer and gold salesman, before detailing how I got the boot from Joey Mitts, and how he slipped me Maambong’s name and number. I tried to keep it light, and didn’t stint on my description of Shelly Levalle’s breasts, but I told it all. It was not a history of which I was particularly proud, but the perception of candor is always more important than candor itself, and I couldn’t be sure what Mr. Maambong had told anyone else about my somewhat sordid past.

  The move seemed to work, because after my confession, one by one my fellow competitors made confessions of their own.

  7. The Last Chance Crew

  Riley: “Kuta Beach. It was all about Kuta Beach. Man, I’ve never been, but I see it in my mind’s eye like I was born there—the white sand, the laid-back beach bars, the long symmetrical break of the waves. I don’t surf, but I would have on Kuta Beach. Cowabunga, bitches. Okay, I’ll be honest. There was also a girl.

  “Isn’t that how all these stories begin? There was a girl. In a bar. Crap, is there a more clichéd cliché? But that night, in that Austin dive, it was like Terry was looking for me, the way she zeroed in. Hell yes we hooked right up, and I can tell you, it was like all my life I had been looking for her. She was tall, almost a foot taller than me, with shoulders and hips and a feline smile with a little pink tongue. Terry bowed her head to me and lapped like a leopard and all my defenses unspooled. After one night with her I was lost.

  “Is there a problem, Kief? My God, if you saw her, you would have melted into a puddle of want.

  “It didn’t take but a week before, along with the confessing and the laughing and the screwing, we were planning. It’s sort of a girl thing, you know, to be so quick on the draw. First a place together maybe, so we could keep our crappy jobs. Or what about just packing up a van and going all Kerouac on America’s ass? Or better yet, what about a trip to Bali? Yeah. Bali. That was the ticket. There was a beach she told me about where the surfers hung and Bintang was cheap and nobody cared about anything but that evening’s sunset. Kuta Beach. It sounds sexual, doesn’t it? Kuta Beach. My Kuta got wet just thinking about it.

  “The only issue, of course, was money. I was working in some tragically hip coffee shop, and she was an office manager, and between the two of us we were barely cranking out enough to get by, better yet to jet off to some Asian paradise to live out our lives barefoot and free. But then Terry came up with an idea.

  “See, I was only pulling espresso shots because I was on probation for a hack on a government database that I still can’t talk about or, I have been informed, I will be immediately shot. The case, though, got a fair amount of publicity at the time and I was a celebrity in the hacker world for a minute and a half. But my probation kept me from getting work in the technical sector, or even from going online—though I fudged that because, hell, it was too easy not to—thus the crappy indie coffee shop. Terry said she didn’t know any of this until I told her the whole sad story, but in the telling it gave her an idea.

  “There was a small customer who paid her company electronically. The amounts weren’t large enough to really matter, no specific person was keeping tabs on the account. And best of all, the customer’s system was antiquated. If we could break into their system, we could divert the payments to an account of our choosing. It wouldn’t be much, we might be able to divert twenty, twenty-five thou before the missing payments would be discovered, but by then we could be halfway around the world, with enough to get a start on a new life on the sandy edge of the Indian Ocean. Terry told me all this with her lips on my neck and her hand a butterfly inside of me, and let me tell you, in that position it made perfect sense.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s as obvious as rain now, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shocked when the FBI showed up at my door. And it wasn’t twenty or twenty-five thousand, it was more than half a million. And it was gone, all of it, along with Terry, who I later learned actually made it to Kuta Beach with her boyfriend, a surfer dude named Flap Top. In a way, I think that hurt the most. Flap Top? Really?

  “When I got out of jail, there was no one waiting for me, not my mother, or my brother, or the friends who had never visited, or any Silicon Valley giant anxious to use and abuse my slick talents. I was a two-time loser and I was alone, and lost, and wondering what the hell to do with the rest of my sad, pitiful life.

  “Three days out of prison I got a text message about a lucrative employment opportunity. The only requirement was absolute discretion. If I was interested I was to show up at an interview the very next day in Chicago. I was given a time and the name of a hotel and nothing else. I was in Austin, but I drove fifteen hours straight, showed up when told, and that was when Cassandra brought me up to the presidential suite to meet Mr. Maambong.”

  Kief: “Maambong got hold of me when I was out of wor
k, too. But my unemployment, unlike Riley’s and Phil’s, wasn’t my fault. At the time I was being considered by the cops as, get this, a person of interest in an arson investigation. Let me tell you, that sure as hell puts a crimp in your employment possibilities. No top-paying company would even glance at my résumé. There were some possibilities at this start-up or that start-up, all with pay less than my unemployment, but I decided I’d rather sit home all day with Netflix and my bong than put in with another damn start-up. The hell with slaving for a group of preening weenies desperately trying to crank their earnings by underpaying their engineers. And, in all honesty, my track record with start-ups wasn’t so sizzling.

  “Out of school I scored a primo job with GE, and I didn’t know how good I had it, the pay, the lunches—ripping lunches at a reasonable price; they had veal every Tuesday. Veal! But I ditched that for a bioengineering start-up on its second round of financing. They said they were hot on a cure for Crohn’s Disease, for arthritis, for cancer, for God’s sake. Cancer.

  “You want to make a bundle in this world, dudes? Cure cancer.

  “The company’s founders had hit on some way to genetically engineer these things called monoclonal antibodies that target diseases like a bullet. I could give you all the bio mumbo jumbo, but who cares, really. The pay was only okay, but the stock options were rich, and if it panned out like we all expected, I’d be done by thirty.

  “I was on the team in charge of evaluating the experimental treatments. We killed enough mice to feed a third-world country if they didn’t mind picking tumors out of their teeth. My job was to keep the diagnostic machines running. We had everything from spectroscopes to electron microscopes. I wrote the machines’ programs, performed mechanical repairs when necessary, compiled the results—basic mechanical engineering stuff—while the bio-brains engineered the antibodies.

  “And this is what we found as we cranked in the numbers and tallied the results: nothing. Not a damn thing. One experiment after another, all failures.

  “Trust me when I tell you I know what failure tastes like: it’s like sucking the wrong end of a dead goat. Our funding was drying up, we were graduating people left and right—that’s what the managers called layoffs, graduations, which tells you all you need to know about those assholes—we were bleeding money and the results showed nothing. We weren’t going to get a third round of financing, and surely not an IPO. My stock options had turned into toilet paper. My father died on his construction job. He worked and he died. It’s enough to get you thinking, if you’re not blowing dope every night to chase away the anxiety.

  “Then a miracle. Hallelujah, brothers. Correlations started linking up. Progress was being proven with every graph spit out by the machines. We were on to something. The attitude around the place pinked right up. It was like we had all just popped the perfect pill, something like Molly cut with coke. I even started dating a lab tech from the third floor with pale-blue eyes. And the good vibrations weren’t restricted to the company. The venture boys started circling again, throwing their money at us. A letter of intent to sell out to one of the big pharma firms was signed, and as the due diligence began, we were, all of us, promised ginormous bonuses. I was too excited about the future to be concerned about the hired guns sent in to check on our results.

  “The fire wiped out everything. The building went up like a bale of hay, man. The company was renting three floors of a six-story building and everything we had was fried, along with the deli on the first floor and the offices above us. The cops suspected arson and one of the law firms on the fifth floor represented criminals and so that seemed to explain that: disappointed defendants, angry victims, the world turns, and fire cleanses, right? But what it meant for the company was a quick, sad death. All their lab samples, their technology, everything that could prove up the glowing numbers we had produced were gone in the blaze.

  “Luckily for me, I had already removed all my stuff in a cardboard box. The guards had given me a few minutes to do that, at least, before they marched me out of the building. It was still standing then, the building, though my dates with the lab tech on the third floor no longer were. But even before the fire, the sale with the pharma firm, the sale that would make me rich as a king, that was as good as torched. It seemed that, quote, irregularities, unquote, in the findings had been discovered by the hired guns. The corporate assholes needed a scapegoat and decided I was it. So they graduated me, and marched me right out the doors. I remained under suspicion even though any evidence of how the irregularities got into the results was destroyed in the fire along with everything else.

  “It was during my period of forced unemployment that one of the lawyers for the pharma firm showed up at my apartment. He was wearing a suit; I was wearing a pair of boxers and a ratty robe. He was clean shaven; I wasn’t. He had showered that week, probably more than once. I had gone through so much weed I couldn’t remember if I had showered that month.

  “With two fingers, the pharma lawyer lifted a sock from the couch before sitting down. He leaned back, spread his arms wide, smirked like the kind of asshole who told everyone he met he had gone to Harvard, which he had, and he did. He said how impressed he had been by my efforts to bring about the sale. He said everything I had done was so clean, that the slight alterations I had made in the code and the equipment were virtually undetectable. It would have been the perfect scam, he said, except for a certain piece of information that had slipped out of a certain third-floor lab tech during a night of rather prodigious sex. His smile let me know that a Harvard man had done the investigative work personally.

  “I asked him if he had come to gloat and he said yeah, a little, but then he gave me a card with a phone number on it. It was the number of somebody he had done business with in the past and would do business with in the future and could put my skills to good use. And then he told me to make sure that Mr. Maambong sent the referral fee.”

  Gordon: “When I was growing up in Fountain Park in Saint Louis, was a cat on the corner name of Nomar, just a few years older than me, who ran a pack of young boys selling drugs to those suburban cars driving by. The boys would take the orders, take the drugs from beneath the rock where they stashed it, take the money to Nomar, and take the arrests when they inevitably came on down. ‘They just boys,’ Nomar would say when confronted by this mother or that brother, ‘a few months in juvie will do them good.’ Every morning when I walked by that corner on my way to school, Nomar would call out, ‘I’m a get you, Gordo. Yes I am.’

  “But my mother was strong, and damn, she knew how to hit. There was no way she was going to let me become the tool of some lowlife, low-level dealer man. After school she had her hooks in me, taking me to art classes, to sporting leagues, to swimming lessons. Swimming lessons. My mother. But whatever she did, it worked, and I stayed on the mostly straight and somewhat narrow. ‘You got a future,’ she would tell me over and again, and after a while it looked like I did.

  “I was a star on the field, the can’t-miss kid. I was good in the classroom, too, my mother made sure of that, but on the field I was big and I was fast and I hit harder than even my mother could. By my junior year I was fielding offers from Maryland, Florida, Florida State. All through my high school career, as I ran onto the field, I’d see Nomar standing in a place of honor on the sidelines. He was now levels higher than that corner, he was a man with an aura of power, a man heading ever higher, heading right to the moon. And as I passed he’d yell out, ‘I’m a still get you, Gordo. Don’t you doubt it.’ Nomar, man.

  “I went away to college, Miami, majored in football, the can’t-miss kid, feared all across the ACC, violence personified on the field, yeah. Until I busted up my knee junior year. By the time I came back I was a step slower, and let me tell you, that step made all the difference. I could still play, but I had been projected for the second round and ended up in the seventh to the Browns. I made the Cleveland practice squad my first year, the Indy practice squad my second. Hopes were high that
I’d make an active squad, finally, my third year, but in camp with Indy the knee went again and that was that.

  “Okay, it happens. I got a few checks, a few thrills, I came close, no tragedy, right? But you see I was the can’t-miss kid, and I had been prepping my life for the can’t-miss kind of success. My mother died when I was still in school and after that I went a little crazy. I had a son with one girl, a daughter with another. I married a third and we lived like I was earning those sweet game checks even before the damn draft. I had an agent’s moneyman slipping me loans to pay my child support and my car payments and my party expenses as we waited for that first big contract, loans that were still due, and the moneyman wasn’t being so patient anymore. I could keep the balls juggling with the practice-squad money—six, seven thou a week in season—but even so I was always falling further behind. My time in the Colts camp wasn’t so much about finally letting my dream come alive, it was about needing the money, man, to keep my life spinning. There was nothing joyful about it and I pushed it too damn far. My knee didn’t go because of a hit. I was just running and it went, no one near me. Pop went that weasel.

  “After the second operation I felt my life slipping away. Drip, drip. I watched television, I drank, I closed down to anyone who cared even a damn for me. All I had was the alcohol and the gym. I worked out, I worked out fierce, that’s what I knew, and I rehabbed the knee like a demon, but it was over. My wife divorced me, the mothers of my children sued for the child support I wasn’t paying, I had nothing left, no money, no future. The can’t-miss kid was dead. A gun in the mouth didn’t seem desperate so much as a sensible move.