The Soak

by Patrick E. McLean

  She looked back out the window to hide her eye roll. Fucking pig. The ugly side of the damsel in distress. It was all just a cover for taking advantage of a woman in a vulnerable situation. That old fairy tale was just a good-looking duvet on a thick comforter filled with centuries of rape.

  “You seem like good people,” he said, and put a hand on her knee. It was the kind of gesture a father might make, or an uncle. Yeah, thought Wellsley, an uncle, the kind that likes to touch little girls when nobody else is around. She was proud of herself for not screaming. “I don’t think any of my partners would have done this for me. Be lucky if any of those pricks showed up at my funeral. And if they did, it’d just be to bang my wife. So if they ask me, I don’t know nothing.”

  She choked out the word, “Thanks.”

  When they found the car it barely qualified as hidden. As they drove by they could see the back of the ancient Dodge from the street. Mazerick pulled a U-turn and eased up next to the patrol car.

  “Haven’t seen anything since we spotted it,” said the cop.

  “Thanks,” said Mazerick. And to Wellsley, “You want to take a look?”

  “Ladies first,” said Wellsley.

  Mazerick grinned.

  As they approached the alley, Mazerick asked, “You got a piece?”

  “No,” she lied.

  Mazerick stepped behind the fence and knelt. He pulled a wheel gun from his ankle holster. A hammerless, blued .38. He handed it to her low, where the patrol cop couldn’t see, saying, “It was my grandfather’s. It’s good luck.”

  No, it’s not, she thought.

  “If you shoot somebody with it, we’ll figure out a story,” he said, and winked with a leer.

  She instantly thought of a story in which the man got a hold of Mazerick’s backup piece and killed him with it. She ran it several ways quick in her head. Would it be better for the story if she said she got Mazerick’s gun and killed the old man? Or would it be better if she said Mazerick got the shot off? It would depend on the scene, but it would be better if he got the shot off. The last act of a hero cop, killing the guy who’d shot him and saving her. Because, of course, she didn’t have a weapon. She was on suspension. Yeah. That would be better. Make that damsel-in-distress shit work for you.

  They each took a side of the overgrown dirt alley between the mansions. Guns out, stepping carefully, they advanced toward the car. Mazerick moved smoothly and cautiously. He wasn’t great, thought Wellsley, but he was good, and, in contrast to his big mouth, he was careful.

  The windows were rolled down. From opposite sides of the car they peeked in, guns first. Trash, and a terrible smell. On the backseat Wellsley saw an empty condom box.

  She pointed to it with the tip of her weapon and said, “Classy.”

  Mazerick said, “Full service.”

  Jesus, thought Wellsley. “So where’d he go?”

  Mazerick looked around. “He holed up somewhere.”

  “Stole another car?”

  “Has to be tired. He’s an old man, and wounded,” said Mazerick.

  They walked around to the back of the car. As Mazerick peered through the dirty glass of the hatchback, Wellsley asked, “You wanna go a little further?”

  Mazerick frowned.

  She could see that he wanted to call for backup. That would fuck everything up. So Wellsley leaned in and kissed him hard. To keep the bile down, she thought about killing him. When she let him up for air, he was flushed and had a stupid look on his face. She could see that all the blood had rushed from one head to another, so she said, “He’s an old man. Let’s just go get him.”

  Mazerick smiled and nodded as if he were John Wayne. He was a dumbass, thought Wellsley. Just the dumbass she needed.

  TWELVE

  Hobbs had crawled into the master bed and drawn the comforter around him like an animal. There were no sheets, but he was too tired to care.

  When he awoke, he didn’t open his eyes. He had slept so deeply that he couldn’t feel his body. His thoughts drifted between waking and sleeping. Where was he? What did he have to do? And why?

  As it came back to him in pieces, he had less and less desire to open his eyes. He wanted to sleep. To sleep forever. But he knew that the growling in his stomach and the pressure on his bladder would force him to move sooner than he wanted.

  How had it started? And now that it had started, how would it end? He thought of Grace, and her golden hair in the wind, and the light off the lake. He thought of the wonder of having found her. He had told himself that he needed nothing and no one, so many times that he had almost believed it.

  For an instant he thought of seeing if there was a phone in this shell of a house. But he could not call her. He did not exist. And he could not be linked to Grace. Maybe a pay phone? To hear her voice again. To feel her soft touch and her silly whispers as they lay in bed in the early morning. He had always thought that these desires were weakness. But now he drew strength from them.

  He couldn’t call. He couldn’t go back. Not until it was done, one way or the other. And not until he was clear of it. When he got that money, what would Grace want to do? Could she even launder all of it?

  He knew without having to ask her, as he knew the rhythm of her breathing while she slept and the spaces between her heartbeats as she lay still after they had made love. She wanted nothing else but the simple lake house and a life with him. But why was that not enough for him? Why was it that whenever he was with her, he wanted to be away? And whenever he was away, he wanted to be there?

  He had been a fool not to be content with what he had. A more philosophical man would have seen a kind of justice in his predicament. Hobbs missed the irony, but recognized that he had taken a job he didn’t need for more money than he could ever use. He just couldn’t stop working. He was too old to do anything else. He had always believed that he was an old soldier who would die in the harness, come wind, come wrack. But now, during this pause in the action, he wondered if he could truly escape.

  If he could walk away, sidestep all of it. He recognized these thoughts as symptoms of weakness and fatigue, but he did want to talk to Grace. To tell her those things he never had. To tell her he was sorry that he was the way he was. That he was undeserving of her. And that all he wanted to do was come home.

  But he would not be able to promise that when it was done, he would stay. That he would never work again. The call itself would only increase the chance of her being in danger. A stupid risk. By now she probably thought he was dead. What had it been—three months? Four? Theirs was a relationship out of time, as if from the days of sailing ships, one of long separations and happy reunions.

  He had to see it through to the end. For Hobbs there was no way out but through. Then he remembered how it had started. He had been shooting squirrels.

  He heard a noise from downstairs and opened his eyes.

  PART TWO

  TAKING UP THE GUN

  ONE

  Three months before

  The drugs were late this week. Alan knew, because he kept track. He quantified just about everything. How long he slept, how many steps he took, when the guy brought his mother’s drugs. But he didn’t need a calendar to keep track of that. When she ran out, she’d get all shrieky and angry. And she was running out earlier and earlier each week. Even at twenty-two Alan knew not to try telling her that. He knew what she was. And so did she.

  When all the pills were gone, she’d start calling Uncle Tommats. First she’d yell at him. “Where is that dirty spic with my medicine? I think he ran off with it. Send somebody else.”

  If the “medicine” still didn’t come, she’d start feeling so bad she’d beg. “C’mon, Tommy. You know I don’t have anybody to take care of me now that my husband is away.” She’d never call Alan’s dad by his name. Always “my husband.” And she’d never say “prison” or “jail.” It was always “away.”

  She’d never say what Tommats was. A gangster, not exactly like in the movies, bu
t close enough, and her lover. But everybody knew. Everybody knew what everybody else was, except Alan. Nobody knew what he was. Not even Alan.

  Mostly he kept his head in his laptop. Except when one of his quantifiable alarms went off. Then he would get up and do the perfect number of exercises for his fitness level. He was doing push-ups when the drugs came.

  At the front door of the apartment, his mother snatched the brown paper bag and slammed the door without saying a word. She scurried through the living room and slammed the door to her bedroom. Thank God. Having her passed out would make it easier to focus on what he had to do.

  Alan racked off another ten push-ups, then returned to the couch. He hooked a pair of closed headphones over his ears, opened his laptop, and disappeared from the real world. Not for the first time, he thought, The real world sucks. But when he quantified that statement, he had to admit he hadn’t seen much of it.

  The theme music of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called the Universe of Strife filled his ears. The only sound in the apartment was the gentle scratching of gaming mouse against cushion, and the muted clicks of the W, A, S, and D keys as he tapped them to move his character through the game.

  In this other universe, he and everybody else knew who he was. A level-seventy dark elf assassin named Romagos. He was powerful. He was respected. He was feared.

  In the game he was traversing a range of purple iridescent mountains on a griffin that streamed fire from its wings. As his steed crested the mountains, Alan joined his guild channel. Immediately the voices of friends and allies poured into his ears. “Romagos!” they cried. “Romagos is in this with us, now we are sure to win.” He landed in the middle of a massive guild battle against the Red Swords of Tyndalos Guild.

  The plan was that Romagos would envelop himself in concealment, sneak around behind the skirmish line, and bring down as many of the enemy as he could. He would start with the healers, which in turn would make it easier to bring down the frontline fighters, known as tanks.

  When the barrier dropped and the match started, Alan pressed F2 and his character turned invisible.

  Then he hit the backtick key and typed a very special command. A world away—he knew not where—his request was answered in the affirmative.

  His invisible sash changed colors from blue to red and put the Knife of Night to work on his former guild. He tore through the back ranks in under a minute. By the time his stealth effect timed out, the Swords of Tyndalos had won. Alan didn’t concern himself with the mopping up. He logged out of the game and opened a web browser. When he checked his account balance, there it was! Thirty thousand dollars in cold digital currency. Alan giggled. This was an act of treachery that would live forever. Nobody had ever done it before, and he was sure that both the game developers and the players would work hard to make sure that no one could ever do it again. He had changed the game forever.

  But most important to Alan was that he had planned, plotted, and executed a perfect crime. It wasn’t against any laws in the real world, but he had broken laws and customs and trusts—the norms of reasonable behavior—and been well paid for it. He closed his laptop and got up.

  The urge to play the game, which had once been all-consuming, was now gone and would never return.

  Thirty thousands of dollars. He could understand, but he couldn’t believe it. He knew what the game had meant to him and what it meant to other people, but that the Red Swords would take up a collection, and pay that much for dominance in a game, a game that wasn’t in any way real…

  Because that’s what this crime had done for him. It had made it real. Alan didn’t need money. Nobody needed money with Uncle Tommats around. But Uncle Tommats’s gifts always came with strings and control. He liked his uncle, even though he was pretty sure his uncle had gotten his dad sent to prison so he could rail his mom. From what he knew of his dad, Alan was pretty sure he was better off with his uncle. But Alan would never be his own man trapped under Tommats’s wing.

  He wanted a place in the world. A challenge, an identity. Mom wanted him to go to college. Uncle Tommats wanted him to go to college. But Alan thought that was for suckers. He wanted to be a criminal, not like his dad, but like his uncle. He hadn’t gone to college. And he was rollin’ in cash. He didn’t put up with shit from anybody.

  Why not? He watched the news. They were all criminals. Everybody successful was shady about something. And everybody knew it. Playing it straight and working hard was for suckers. So was trust. Nah, man, he wasn’t gonna be a gangster, or a mobster. He wanted to be an organized, quantified criminal. For real. Besides, he was smart. Smart people really shouldn’t have to work hard.

  He got up and snagged a Diet Coke from the fridge. He tried watching TV, but his attention span didn’t let him lock on to anything.

  TWO

  When the fan on his laptop stopped, Alan opened it again. His chat program was going nuts. Questions, death threats, people wanting to know what the hell had happened. He killed the window and the program. In an instant, all that bored him. He had been a somebody, but not in the real world. He had pulled a job, but not in the real world. He needed…

  He didn’t know what he needed, but he needed something more.

  Out of boredom he started digging through a dump of files from a JPMorgan Chase breach. This was old, dead data. There were so many credit card numbers available online, individual numbers now went for less than a dollar. But those weren’t all that was in here. Those were just all that everybody he knew online was interested in.

  He paged and paged and paged, looking for—anything, nothing, everything, something. It was hopelessly boring accounting data. There was probably something cooked about these numbers, but it was a con that the bankers had already run. It seemed there was nothing to hack.

  Then Alan had an idea. Instead of looking for something that looked good to him—a bored, tech-savvy kid with a computer, just like a million other bored, tech-savvy kids with computers—Alan decided to seek out the most boring, useless piece of data in the entire archive.

  Bank branch reconciliation statements were pretty boring, but they did show where the cash was and how it moved. The kind of data that a bank robber might use if those idiots were smart enough to do anything other than rob a bank. But nobody except Alan had much time for it. Why? It was so much easier to steal on the data layer.

  After invoking strange words of command-line power—sed, grep, awk—on those files, he decided that data wasn’t useless enough. He copied it all off in a directory for later, and kept looking.

  He found a bunch of files—huge files—all with broken headers, all out of sequence. After some fiddling he put them back together. They were a record of federal and state benefit payments. A little Googling revealed that JPMorgan Chase processed EBT and disability payments for the federal government and most of the states. JPMorgan Chase took a cut of every penny provided through a range of programs that had once been known as food stamps.

  Alan shook his head and whistled in admiration. This was a skim. A real game. Made guys like his uncle look so small they disappeared. And his dad? Well, his dad had always looked like an idiot to Alan. That’s why he’d wound up in jail.

  He found a line that read, “Physical transfers.” It was all listed by state and route and date. There were transfers and amounts and location addresses. It was a massive amount of data, impossible to make sense of just by paging through.

  He opened a text file and in the first line he typed, “import gmaps.” Twenty minutes and seventeen syntax errors later, a map of the United States showed transfers pulsing in real time as the time scale at the bottom traveled through the last year. He set it on loop and stared at it for a while, letting his mind blank out.

  As he watched he wondered if this nonexpectant blankness was what the drugs were like for his mom. Probably not, he thought. She just slept, numb to the world. The anger came from deep within, but he pushed it aside. Feeling sorry for himself. He could
have had it a lot worse. She could have abused him. He never considered that being ignored was abuse, and maybe worse than being hit. Maybe worse than being burned with cigarettes.

  Then he saw it. It was the kind of thing you could easily miss. Every other week, a fat pulse across the top of Florida. A very fat line. It was so big he thought it was a glitch, some bad characters in the source file, but it wasn’t. It was a shitload of cash on a truck. He zoomed in on the area and watched the money flow.

  He had just made $30,000 by being smart. But it was chump change. By being smart and having some balls, he could really pull one over. Take everything he could ever need and then some. He’d be done. Fuck the whole crazy, full-of-shit world. Fuck Mom. Fuck Dad. Fuck Tommats. He’d have his.

  It was exactly the kind of thing that kids who sat behind computers could never pull off. Leave the house? Nah, there’s not even air-conditioning out there. Talk to other people? Scary.

  Even as he made fun of them he recognized that he was one of them. He felt the shivers run from his neck down to his fingertips. He couldn’t pull this off. No way. Not alone. But there were guys. Pros. Guys with untraceable guns. Guys who knew how to open an armored car. Guys with money to finance. He had $30,000. That had to be a start, right? But he had the feeling that $30,000 wouldn’t be enough.

  He thought he would sell the job. But after pulling up a web browser and masturbating furiously to Japanese porn, he realized he didn’t really want to sell the job. Just as he didn’t really want to make love to a girl on a screen. He wanted the real girl. He wanted the real money. He wanted the real action.

  He wanted a real life.

  THREE

  He could smell her and hear her breathing, but he couldn’t see her from the doorway. The room was dark, and it smelled as if she had pissed the bed. Wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. He didn’t even like coming in here. He loved his mom, as all boys do, but she loved pills more than she loved him—than she loved anything.