by M. D. Cooper
When Schramm’s message came, it was everything she’d hoped.
It might have been her imagination, but she sensed a plaintive tone in the text message.
A long moment ensued. Reece sipped her whiskey. Ah. Okay, with a hint of…what was it? Some sort of nuttiness. And it had just the right amount of burn.
She sighed in a moment of pure bliss. “Nizhoni, you are antisocial and mean and hate me for no particular reason, but I love you all the same for producing this nectar for humanity.”
Reece raised her tumbler at the woman of honor, in all due deference.
Nizhoni’s eyes narrowed, but Reece knew her well enough now to recognize the glint of pride in them.
She took a moment to consider her response.
When he responded, she imagined a mildly amused tone, though she might have imagined it entirely.
She laughed out loud.
After a pause he added,
She liked his professional tone. It made it all feel kind of…special.
Sometimes, it was the little things that made life worth living.
Reece giggled.
“That’s enough for you.” Trey moved to take her glass.
She clutched it like a dying woman hanging on to her last crust of bread.
“I will cut you,” she hissed.
Then she laughed.
Trey eyed her dubiously, then laughed too. Most importantly, he released his hold on her glass.
Gus watched them with an odd expression but didn’t offer to get involved. It seemed as though he hadn’t yet figured out the dynamic between them.
“So we wait?” Trey guessed.
“Yep,” Reece confirmed. “So far, so good.”
“What if he balks at the next step?”
She’d worried about that, too, but didn’t want to admit it. “He’ll come through.”
“You sure?” Trey prompted.
Reece grimaced. She felt honor-bound to be honest with him. “Eighty-five percent.”
Trey pursed his lips. “What would Marky think about those odds?”
Reece grinned. “Damn good.”
“All right then.” Trey shrugged.
Reece laughed, and in a moment of solidarity, put her arm around his shoulders. “Just think. This time next month, something might be different. Better, maybe.”
“What a pep talk.” Trey gave her the kind of look usually reserved for someone brushing their teeth with an egg salad sandwich.
“Should I try again?” Reece asked.
“Please don’t.” Trey wore a long-suffering look.
“Okay. For you.” She gave him some meaningful, I-do-it-all-for-you kind of eye contact.
They both broke down into gales of laughter.
“You two are fucking stupid. I can’t decide whether to hate you or put you in my next ad campaign.” Nizhoni stared at them like they were amoebas, or paramecium, or some other tiny organisms that could be wiped out at her whim.
“Is there a happy medium?” Reece asked. “As much as I’d like to do an ad for H&P, it’s probably not cool with my employer.”
“Assuming your employer isn’t on his way to kill you,” Trey pointed out.
“There’s that,” Reece admitted. She let out a long sigh. “Okay. Do you think we’ve waited long enough?”
“Probably.” Trey checked the time. “Let’s do this.”
Reece paused. “I feel like that wasn’t the moment for a ‘let’s do this’. I think you were a little premature, dramatically speaking.”
He fixed her with a look of disdain with his synthetic eyes.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s do this, indeed.”
She stood, adopting her best action-hero stance, looking off into the distance with a certain indifferent defiance.
Trey sighed. “Never mind. Let’s just go.”
* * * * *
“I feel like this is a moment to drive to my own destiny.” Trey frowned at the autotaxi’s controls.
“No can do, pal. There are two modes in an autotaxi: Go and stop. There’s no choose-your-own-adventure.” Reece watched Trey, amused.
“I’ve changed my mind entirely about these things,” Trey decided. “Autotaxis are evil.”
Reece laughed, then told the vehicle their desired destination. “Weren’t you the one complaining about not having autotaxis inside the cities?”
Trey made a face that looked suspiciously like a pout. “Yeah, but this isn’t what I meant. Why can’t I just drive a damn car?”
“You’re not licensed. You can be, if you want. I don’t know the process, but becoming a commercial driver takes about six months.”
Trey let out a soft sigh, indicating that this was not the ideal solution.
She tried again. “As far as world faults go, this isn’t as bad as getting your eyeballs ripped out, right?”
Finally, he turned and gave her a long, baleful look. “Will subtlety ever be your strong suit?”
“Probably not,” she admitted.
“Fine. Point taken. How’s the situation with Schramm looking?
Reece had kept her Link active ever since talking to her boss. “Good. He’s doing as directed.”
“No tricks?” Trey asked.
“Not as far as I can tell. But tricks are designed to take one by surprise, so I can’t say definitively.”
“Are you taking this seriously?” Trey squinted at her.
“Entirely.”
“Because I don’t feel like it.” He continued to squint.
Reece sighed. “This is how I tend to deal with high-pressure situations. I spin it light. I find the humor. I try to keep from getting inside my own head and psyching myself out. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She turned her head toward him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Makes sense. I can work with that.”
“Well…okay, then.”
He grinned. “I’m not even going to mention the fact that this is all your fault, with your big plan about stealing contract data. See how magnanimous I am?”
She fixed her eyes straight ahead, as if looking at something via her Link. “Can’t hear you right now. Listening to a message.”
“Are not,” he said.
“Am too.”
“Are not. If you were, you wouldn’t keep responding to me.”
She sighed and ignored him, but it was a little late for the purpose of her charade.
He was growing to know her too well. But maybe that wasn’t all bad.
* * * * *
Step two in Reece’s plan to meet with Schramm involved a playground, some tape, and a colorful, hand-written sign.
Actually, ‘playground’ might have been stretching the word a little. There had once been swings on those bars. That sagging metal contraption had long ago given way to the vagaries of time. It had been decades since the nearby school had been demolished due to a waning population in the area, but somehow, this sad remembrance of the children that once played here was left behind.
Visit the woods, the sign read. Don’t worry. Nothing creepy
is in there.
“I feel like your sense of humor is misplaced here,” Trey remarked as they waited, watching the camera they had trained on the playground just beyond them.
“If I can’t make a joke about us murdering our boss in the woods, why are we even here?” Reece asked with mock-indignation. “It’s like I don’t even know you.”
Trey smirked and rolled his eyes, which either meant that he knew she was as funny as she thought she was and didn’t want to admit it, or, conversely, that she was nowhere as funny as she believed she was.
Reece preferred to assume the former.
They watched Schramm approach the sign attached to the sad jungle gym. He stared at it for a minute before shifting his attention to the tree-line beyond that thickened into a small wooded area.
Then they watched him approach the woods. More importantly, they saw no one in his wake. He appeared—as he had all along on this trip—to be alone.
Could he be for real?
Looking uncertain, he stepped into the woods, and beyond the scope of the tiny cameras they’d set up.
Schramm had entered to their north, so Reece and Trey turned and walked to meet him.
He saw them at about the same time they saw him, edging around a young tree.
Schramm stopped and held up his hands. “I’m unarmed. I’m alone. I really am here just to talk to you.”
Reece nodded to Trey, who closed the space between him and their boss, and checked him over for monitoring devices.
“Here.” Trey tucked a large metal disk into Schramm’s breast pocket. “Hang on to this for now.”
“Link jammer?” Schramm asked.
“You got it.” Trey nodded.
Reece approached when Trey waved her in. “What do you have to say?”
“I don’t really have much of anything. What I really want is to hear what you have to say,” Schramm said. “From my perspective, a bomb went off in my employee’s apartment. Then he and his partner disappear. What should I make of that?”
Reece and Trey exchanged a look.
“I know what I’d think,” Reece said.
“That my employees are guilty or something?” Schramm asked, a frown creasing his normally placid features. “Yeah, it crossed my mind. But as much as I dug, I didn’t find anything. So, either you’re innocent and I need to protect you from whoever attacked you, or you’re guilty and way better than I thought you were, and it’s still in my best interest to keep you in my pocket for my own purposes.”
“That’s…pretty smart,” Reece admitted.
“So, which is it?” Schramm asked.
“Kind of a combination,” Reece hedged. “We’ve done nothing to betray Rexcare except to check to see if Rexcare has betrayed us.”
“Tricky.” Schramm nodded slowly. “I can tell you for certain that Rexcare isn’t responsible for what happened at Trey’s apartment. As far as I know, there’s no plot against you. If there is something against you, it would have to come from very high up, intentionally keeping me out of the loop. Which is extremely unlikely.”
“But not impossible,” Trey noted.
“Almost impossible.” Schramm ran his fingers through his hair. “You’re not the only ones who like to watch their backs to make sure nothing stabs them.”
“Really.” Reece watched him with a newfound respect. She hadn’t suspected Schramm of such duplicity. Perhaps that should concern her, but since it benefitted her at the moment, she was willing to look the other way. For now.
“I didn’t get to where I am by being naïve.” Schramm raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m not just some button-pusher, you know.”
Reece smiled. “I guess we’ll see. Come on.”
She tilted her head in the opposite direction he’d come from.
“Where are we going?” Schramm asked. He didn’t seem apprehensive. Just cautious.
“To a place we can defend.”
As Trey ran back to collect their cameras, Reece and Schramm got a head start to the autotaxi.
Reece wondered as she walked silently alongside her boss, whether he might prove to be an asset.
* * * * *
“So, what are we looking at?” Schramm sat in Nizhoni’s dining room with Gus and Petal giving him some suspicious side-eye. He looked calm and composed, considering the hassle Reece and Trey had put him through.
Reece and Trey exchanged a look. They’d agreed that if Schramm seemed legit about being on their side, they’d fill him in on everything.
So they did—after sending Gus and Petal out.
Once they’d gotten him up to speed, Schramm sat, tapping his fingers on the edge of the table as he processed the information.
Reece leaned forward with her elbows and forearms on the table, watching him. Whatever he said next would determine their next moves.
She hoped he wouldn’t blow up and decide he’d put too much faith in them.
“Okay.” Schramm nodded slowly as he worked things through in his head. “That fits with some of what I know and throws a different light on things.”
“What do you mean?” Trey asked.
“For starters, the guy you caught here who was to be interrogated—name was Kaddox—he somehow managed to receive a top-notch corporate attorney. Not one of ours. One that works almost exclusively for Donnercorp. She somehow knew where he was and got him out of our custody shortly after we got him.”
Reece blew out a breath. “That’s huge. That means Donnercorp is connected to the attack here on H&P. But why would they want to do that?”
“You tell me,” Schramm said. “What did you find in those contracts you stole?”
“We didn’t have much time to look at them before the pulse bomb,” Trey said. “We had enough time to get Dex out of that apartment and run, so we lost the data. All we had time to find was a mention of enzymatic compounds and a Dr. Miral. That seemed very promising, but then we got distracted by the whole someone-trying-to-kill-us thing.”
Schramm pressed his lips together. “So Kaddox gets taken from Rexcare and becomes impossible to find, and we can’t find out who this ‘Matty’ person he mentioned is. Then on the other hand we have this Dr. Miral and her work on enzymatic compounds.”
Reece wanted to ask questions, but she remained silent, waiting to see where Schramm’s thought process would take him. She also hoped for a little more assurance that he was firmly on their side. He’d said as much, but she wasn’t fully satisfied just yet.
“Since Kaddox and ‘Matty’ are a dead end for the moment, we’ll focus on Miral. When I get back to Rexcare, I’ll pull all the information I can find on her.”
“You’re going to work with us?” Trey asked. “Even though we took documents we weren’t supposed to?”
Schramm looked from Trey to Reece. “The way I see it, you two have uncovered an angle we needed in order to get to the bottom of the attack on H&P. That’s your job. I don’t have a problem with your breaching Rexcare’s contract records, since it was entirely for the purpose of this case. In my view, you’d have been remiss in not pursuing every possible lead.”
“Even though it means crimes against our own company?” Reece asked, surprised.
Schramm’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “Oh, there are some in Rexcare that won’t see it that way. I’ll keep it between us, so long as you remember who is protecting you. All in the name of successful corporate warfare.”
Reece didn’t like the look in Schramm’s eye but nodded stoically. She’d taken the risk, this was the result.
“Then that pulse bomb definitely wasn’t Rexcare making sure we didn’t know more than we should?” Trey wrinkled his nose. “I mean, I hate to seem dense, but I want to be transparently clear on that.”
Schramm shook his head. “No. It definitely wasn’t Rexcare. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that they’d do something like that, but not while we need you to do a job for them. They’d let you finish that first, then squash you like bugs afterward.”
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At Trey’s grimace, Schramm hurried to add, “But that’s not the case here. Whatever’s going on with you, Rexcare didn’t try to kill you.”
Reece heaved a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s good. Because I have, like, eight weeks of vacation I’ve never used, and I really didn’t want to lose them.”
Schramm, having long ago becomes accustomed to her sense of humor, merely smirked and rolled his eyes.
Trey, on the other hand, looked at her like she was something he’d found stuck to his shoe. It was a special blend of disbelief and disappointment she didn’t think she’d seen before.
With a shrug, she got back to business. “So next, we look up this Dr. Miral, right?”
Schramm nodded. “Yes. Let me get back to the city and see what I can find out.”
“Okay,” Reece agreed.
“I mean it.” He pinned her with a pointed stare. “Let me exhaust all avenues of information, then contact you before you go off on some reconnaissance mission.”
“Okay,” she repeated.
“I’m serious,” Schramm said. “If you get some half-baked notion to go raid some place or other, I’ll cut ties with you. Understood?”
“Fine,” she said, peeved. “Understood. Good grief.”
Schramm continued to stare at her.
“I said fine!” she nearly shouted.
Trey snorted, then broke into laughter.
Schramm laughed, too.
“What? Are you two just messing with me?” Reece looked from one to the other, incensed.
“No,” Trey said. “You really need to not run out and do your own thing.”
“And why do you think I would?” she demanded. “I don’t have a reputation for that. Why are you two being weird?”
Trey scrunched up his nose in that idiosyncratic way he did when puzzling something out. “It’s not that you have a reputation for it. It’s just that the two of us feel, that under circumstances of duress, you might make extreme choices.”
Schramm nodded in agreement. “Well put. That’s it, exactly.”
Reece wished she could glare at them both at the same time, but their distance from each other made that impossible. She made the tactical decision to glare first at her boss, then second, but for longer, at her partner.