Checkmate: Checkmate, #8

by Finn, Emilia

  I need to see proof of his incarceration, and I need to know he’s not enjoying his time locked away.

  Almost every single time I visit, he gets worked up and lands himself in trouble. Thirty days in segregation? Yes, please.

  Many prisons have moved on from in-person visits, and instead provide the inmates with screen time. Seven dollars for ten minutes of video calling is the best they get these days. But I’m a cop, so when I visit, I get concessions that standard visitors don’t.

  Sipping my water, I walk around my counter and snatch up the remote for my TV, flick it on, and toss the remote back to my couch. I live alone, and I’m totally fine with that, but I still like the noise. I like feeling like someone is here, even if they’re not talking to me.

  The screen flickers on to the nine o’clock news roundup of the day. Highlights catch me up on anything I’ve missed, which is basically nothing. The local news speaks of an attempted robbery at the gas station. The sports section talks of local fighters and an upcoming bout. And then the national highlights come up, and the lion logo we all know makes me pause.

  “Griffin Industries has made shockwaves today as they sell their shares in an international tech company coming out of China, despite predictions stock values are set to rise. When requested, Mr. Griffin declined to speak with us, citing scheduling conflicts and personal travel. Stock market insiders are claiming Mr. Griffin’s constant demand for seclusion might have finally caught up with his mental well-being.” The camera pans away from the anchor in a studio, and instead stops on a younger man standing in front of the high-rise building known as Griffin Plaza. “What do you think, Garry?”

  “I say he’s a freak!” The young man being interviewed throws his hands in the air with exasperation. “He sold twelve million in shares today, which is great and all for those of us who gobbled them up, but this time next week, that twelve million will be worth fifty, easily! I’m certain of it. I don’t know what he’s smoking, but it got into his brains and jumbled things up. The dude has more money than sense.”

  “And now he has thirty-eight million less than he could have.”

  “Right!” Garry rolls his eyes. “If he doesn’t like money, I’ll take it. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Did you buy some of the shares while they were going cheap, Garry? As our financial expert, would you suggest regular moms and dads should take a look at dipping into the stock market?”

  “I can’t tell the good folks at home what to do with their money…” He pauses and stares right into the camera. “But I bought stock.”

  The news program runs through a montage of everything Griffin. I’ve seen it all before, because the company isn’t exactly low-key, though it’s possibly not something you’d notice if you weren’t into the new technology hitting the market. Many folks in the street know the brand the way we know Kleenex is a tissue, and Pepsi is a drink. They know their laptops have that lion logo on the front, and their phones have the lion insignia on the back. But beyond that, it’s doubtful they think about it. It’s just there. We’ve been conditioned for more than a decade to know that brand, so although everyone spends their money on Griffin tech the way they used to automatically spend their money at Apple, most don’t care enough to know who sits behind the helm.

  Today wasn’t the first time Theodore Griffin has been asked for an interview. And it’s not the first time he’s declined. His reputation is based upon being unseen. If you Google “Griffin Industries,” you’ll see the logos, but you won’t see Theodore himself. If you ask around, many will say they’ve met him, but none will produce photographic evidence of such a meet. If you spoke to a Griffin employee, they will almost exclusively wax on about how wonderful it is – strict, hard work, but rewarding – and how they never intend to leave.

  The common belief is that Griffin is good to people, but he doesn’t do press. He doesn’t do events. He doesn’t do TV. He doesn’t do any of the things the world expects of him.

  And I guess I can respect that about him.

  My job can often become synonymous with the press and relations with the community, but I’ll be the first to run away and hide when asked for an interview. Alex spoke to the local news anchor today about the gas station burglary. Oz claimed he was off-duty, and I hid in the bathroom, but Alex is our chief, so he was suckered into stepping in front of the camera, where he questioned his ability to be a people person. His snapped answers made me smile.

  None of us want to dance for the circus, so I can respect Griffin’s need to stay away.

  I don’t deal with the stock market. I don’t do tech. I hardly upgrade my phone, and only when I absolutely must because the operating systems have been updated so much that my phone becomes a brick in my pocket.

  I live a humble life and do nothing that would ever appear to be connected to my father’s world.

  Big houses, nope. Fancy cars, nope. Next year’s devices, nope. I cook at home and eat in six nights out of seven, and almost never order takeout. I accept no free coffee at the local fast food restaurant, despite their pledge to feed the town’s first responders for free. And every year when we run the cops-versus-firemen charity baseball game, a game played to raise funds for the children’s ward in the local hospital, I make my donations anonymously, and play the game with the men. Because I can hit a home run with the best of them.

  Turning my TV to the music channel, I toss the remote down and walk back to the kitchen to get started on my dinner. It’s late, I haven’t slept in almost forty hours, I’m spending another Friday night in. I intend to cook chicken and rice, land in bed forty-five minutes from now, and tomorrow afternoon, I’ll hit the gym like I do most other days.

  I was a short little fat girl once, who was picked on by skinny bitches with attitudes far bigger than their muscles.

  Now I’m average height and don’t have fat dimples anywhere. I never wear Mary Janes, I never wear dresses, I never glut on complex carbs, even after a forty-hour sleep famine, and when I get to the gym, I don’t let the offered excuse of ‘You’re a woman, you don’t have to lift that much’ deter me.

  4

  Theo

  Enemy or Ally?

  Elizabeth Ellen Tate is thirty-one years old, has served eleven years on the force, and has no true blemishes on her record. I sit in the back of my car and scan the reports sliding along my Griffin Industries smart tablet.

  Glass of water in one hand, tablet resting on my leg, I read about the medals for bravery she’s been awarded, and try not to worry about the things she had to do to earn those. I smile at her almost perfect record for arrests. Almost, because a couple of the guys she’s brought in over the years have periodically complained she was rough with them. But those same guys were eventually tried and convicted of dangerous felonies. Maybe they were complaining just to be spiteful, or maybe she really was rough, but I feel confident in the fact they were scumbags.

  Cops disgust me, and for the first time since I was eleven, thinking of Libby makes my skin crawl. Residual anger toward her father. Residual anger toward the police in general, but where sliding into the Bishops’ accounts was mildly difficult, it’s alarmingly easy to slide into Libby’s.

  Knowing the deepest workings of her life eases me.

  Elizabeth Tate collects her meager police salary on the first and fifteenth of every month. She earns just over fifty thousand a year, and receives no extra bonuses, like a squad car to drive around. Her colleagues each drive departmentally supplied vehicles, so either she refuses, or they’re misogynistic pricks who don’t think their female colleague deserves one.

  Libby’s account shows no suspicious activity, no extra deposits or withdrawals, no strange account numbers, no exorbitant power bills, no expensive restaurant bills, nothing but a gym membership that is regularly used.

  That connection, the people who own that gym, bothers me a little.

  I know Libby’s routines just by scrolling; she pays her phone bill on the sixth, her cabl
e on the twelfth. She puts gas in her car just once a week, and around the twentieth of every month, she binge-buys things from a place called Jonah’s store, mere minutes before ducking a few doors down and stopping at a place registered as Dixie’s Ice Cream Parlor. Groceries and ice cream on the same day every month.

  It doesn’t take a genius to figure that puzzle out.

  One week a month, she fills her gas tank twice, and on that same day, she checks into the maximum-security prison that I know for a damn fact her father is locked up in.

  Is she checking in with him for good or bad? Is she making sure he’s okay, or that he’s still locked away?

  The most interesting part of my discoveries is the fact that the town Libby lives in is not the town I met her in. It’s not the town I met Colum Bishop, Abel Hayes, Sean Frankston, Raymond Tate, or the sour-sisters in. It’s not the same town my mother was murdered in, or the town that owned the alleyway I grew up in.

  No. That town is about seven hours from here.

  But stranger yet, and possibly the strangest of all, the town she lives in and patrols now is the same town the Bishop brothers have settled in. It’s the same town Colum died in, and the same town Sean Frankston was arrested in.

  Why, so long after the first meet, am I discovering that Bishop had sons, Libby became a cop, Frankston had a daughter, Hayes had another club, and they all live in the same small town like a cozy little family?

  Coincidences are never coincidences. That word is a completely fabricated social construct to explain away the things that make people uncomfortable to discuss. Coincidence is only coincidence because the guilty party calls it that.

  The evidence is almost damning against that cute girl I met forever ago. Her only saving grace is her meager bank account. Of course that would suggest she has others, hidden somewhere far away. But I’ve looked, I’ve had hours to comb through the internet and call in favors to find the data I need.

  Either Libby has access to the same hacker the Bishops do, or she’s truly just a cop. Either she has no clue of the Bishop connection, or she’s patrolling that town for that very reason.

  The latter would be the most convincing, if only the dates matched up. Bishops came to this town around three years ago; Libby has been here eleven. She couldn’t possibly have known eight years in advance who would end up assigned here, which brings me right back around to basically… I have no fucking clue.

  Guilty or innocent? Daddy’s girl, or Daddy’s downfall? Clean or dirty?

  None of it makes sense in my mind, and considering the nature of my upbringing, I lean toward suspicion. What can I say; it’s the street rat in me.

  “Sir?”

  I glance up as my car slows on a dark street just outside the apartment Libby has listed as hers. I look out the tinted windows, frown at the darkness, then glance down to my watch.

  It’s ten on a Friday night, and every apartment around hers is lit up like a department store. But her place is pitch black.

  “Do you want me to stop here?”

  “Yeah.” I toss my tablet onto the leather seat and unbuckle my seatbelt.

  I don’t instruct my driver to park a block away. I don’t particularly care about being seen. This is just a regular SUV. It’s black with tinted windows, but then again, most are. My driver wears a suit. Always. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen him in casual clothes once in our adult life. Our windows are tinted, but within legal restrictions. I carry no weapons that a regular search will find. I don’t deal in drugs. In fact, I’ve never in my life touched them, so a swab test won’t show a single trace.

  Taking my phone with me, I push my car door open and step out while my driver sits back and prepares to wait. I slide the phone into my pocket, lean back against the side of the car, cross my ankles, and then I do what I’ve always done when it came to Libby Tate – I stare.

  Who is she now?

  She was my ally in that club. She was the only person I had on my side, and though I could tar her with the Tate brush and assume she’s one of them, the same could be said of me. My heart pumps Bishop blood whether I like it or not.

  Is she like them; dirty and shameless when money exchanges hands? Is she like me; a mutiny upon her own blood, determined to make right all of the wrongs our fathers committed before us? Or is she Switzerland; uninvolved, untainted, separate, just as we stood in Switzerland at the top of those stairs all those years ago?

  I intend to find out.

  There’s no flickering TV coming from her apartment windows. No light from a laptop or phone. She lives on the third floor of a five-floor walk-up on the south side of town, halfway between Main Street and the retirement village by the lake. It’s neither a good street, nor a bad one. The drugs are kept away from this complex, though not too far away. A cop lives here. Whether she’s dirty or straight, they see a uniform, so they would have packed up business and relocated the day she moved in.

  There’s minimal security, and for a stranger passing through town, it wouldn’t be a terribly smart idea to loiter outside, but for the most part, my protective instincts don’t worry for her safety here.

  Something tells me the other tenants consider her the security.

  Digging my hands into my pockets, I jiggle keys in my right hand and consider my next move.

  I need to go to her, to decide whose team she plays for. If she’s in Bishop’s pocket, then, well…

  I shake my head. “Fuck.”

  If she belongs to a Bishop, then she’ll be removed from society just like they will be. After twenty years of ignoring her existence as a type of self-preservation, will I be forced to see her one last time mere seconds before I take her out?

  I hope not.

  If she’s as clean as she’d have everyone believe, then I’ll bring her on my side and have her play for me. It’ll take some convincing, I’m sure, but so few have said no to me in the past.

  Soon, it’ll be time to make contact with the Bishops. I don’t want a war. Just like with Libby, I want them to be an uprising. I want them to be a new wave of clean unlike our fathers, but the evidence leaning against them is so much heavier than that leaning against Libby.

  Which is why I’ll go to her first. On paper, she’s the safer bet.

  Nodding, I jiggle my keys one last time, then step up to the driver’s side window and tap it until he opens up.

  “Sir?”

  “I’m going inside. You know the protocol; buzz me if something isn’t right. I’m not sure how long I’ll be. Maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour. Stay sharp.”

  “Got it.” He waits for me to cross the street before winding his window up and settling back to get comfortable.

  Pushing through the glass double doors at the front of the apartment block, I make my way past a wall of mailboxes and an out-of-order elevator. Most of the tenants here are awake – televisions make the walls vibrate, and muted laughter follows me as I move up the stairs. The folks on level one like to cook with spices, and the folks on level two like to fuck.

  Loudly.

  Against the front door.

  I stop on three, 3A, then 3B. I study each door, then stop at 3C. My hands remain in my pockets, lest I touch something I shouldn’t. I have to remind myself I’m standing at a cop’s door; not a little girl from an empty club, not an engineer with a shitty attitude, and not a woman who enjoys expensive gifts and her Christmas bonus each year.

  If I get caught letting myself into a cop’s home without permission, shit could go bad, and everything I’ve worked for could unravel. I’m not into buying cops, so I can’t buy my way out of trouble the way Colum did. I’d have to use other means to get out – and usually, those means include running from bullets. But I don’t have the luxury today that I had back when I was eleven. I can’t change my name and make myself disappear the way that boy did. If I’m caught, my troubles will follow me.

  And yet…

  I take a pair of rubber gloves from my back pocket and slide them onto my han
ds. It would seem that I came prepared for a little breaking and entering. Premeditation; that’s what the cops call it. Glancing down the hall, I make sure no one is watching, then I lean in close and slide my pick into the lock, straining my ears to listen as I go to work breaking into the home of the girl to whom I promised a lifetime of loyalty, of love, of family. She’s the girl who was once short and chubby and had dimples on her knees.

  Jesus, for that one hour of my life, even knowing my mom was in a dangerous place, my world was kind of simple. I got to talk to Elizabeth Tate. She was smart, stubborn, cute, and sassy as fuck. She was forced to take shit from girls she hated, but she wanted to fight back. She wanted to fight against the hierarchy that had ruled her life until that point.

  When the lock snicks, I inch the door open, pocket my pick set, and step into the dark. Libby’s home is pitch black, just as it was when I was outside. I allow my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, something I was able to hone and learn when I lived on the streets, until a long counter materializes on my left. A galley kitchen. A couch. A television. This place is small, so if I thought she was hoarding her dirty money and living a life of luxury behind closed doors, that idea escapes like water through a sieve.

  There are no valuables lying around. The TV is a modest forty-inch, and the couch has a long tear along the far cushion from overuse. I take slow steps through her living space and look everywhere at once. There are no ornaments by the TV, no jewels carelessly tossed aside after a long evening amongst the rich and self-proclaimed elite.

  I pass the couch, the coffee table, the television, then step into the hall. This place is literally smaller than my office, so it’s easy to find my way; door on the left is the bathroom. Door on the right, partially open, is the sole bedroom.