The Solid-State Shuffle (Sunken City Capers Book 1)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  We stare at each other in the shadows, until Hayes finally grimaces at me and says, "Fine." Like I'm going to let manboy dangle me four stories off the ground.

  He picks up the replica vase the size of a basketball and leans over the railing at the waist, holding the vase in both hands over the atrium.

  "Wait," I say, having an idea. I slide my hands around the front of this pants for his belt clasp.

  "Hey," he says.

  I undo the clasp and whip the belt off, then drop down to wrap it around his ankles and secure it. "Now I have a hand hold. Ready?"

  "Go," Hayes says.

  All this tech and this is our best solution. It really seems like we should've come up with something better. Puo and I would've. But if the primary job is to tie Puo, Winn, and I up and not really steal anything, then this plan may seem like a good idea to manboy and company here.

  I lift up his feet, wrapping both my hands in a solid grip on the leather belt. He immediately jerks forward with the weight of the vase in his hands. I strain and get control of him.

  "Ow," he says through clenched teeth—which I'm assuming is from squeezing his junk over the railing unexpectedly.

  I lower him down, until I'm using the railing as leverage for my straining forearms and getting a good view of the soles of his shoes—there's old stained pink bubble gum on the bottom of his left one. They also stink.

  "Can you reach?" I ask. "Are you tall enough?"

  Hayes says some choice words back to me.

  Why are short people so touchy about their freaking height? Little Napoleons. It was an honest question.

  There's a noticeable drop in weight as he sets the replica vase down on the ledge and then makes the switch, getting heavier again.

  "Okay," he whispers.

  I grunt as I pull him up. The front of his knees butt up against the railing, not bending the right way.

  "I'm going to turn you around," I whisper. Before he can say anything I lower and then rotate him a hundred and eighty degrees in the air.

  Now his knees bend the right way, and he can grip the railing with his calves. I reach over the side and grab his pants around the waist and heave him up.

  Hayes is straining with the jade vase above his head in both hands. "Brilliant," he says sarcastically through clenched teeth, the muscles on his jaws popping out as sweat begins to line his face.

  "Oh, shut up," I tell him, "and do a sit up." Manboy.

  Hayes struggles to do as told.

  With my left hand anchored on his waist I reach forward with my right hand and grab his shirt in the center of the chest and pull him into a sitting position on the railing.

  He lowers the vase into his lap. "Backpack," he croaks at me, while lowering himself down.

  I retrieve the backpack, and Hayes slips the vase in. He starts to put the backpack on.

  "Sure you can handle it?" I ask.

  He finishes putting the backpack on and says, "Let's go." He starts moving the way we came.

  Let's not. I back up to head in the opposite direction. "I'll meet you there."

  "What!" Hayes spins around, a wild alarm in his eyes. "What are you doing? There's no time."

  "Then you better hurry," I say.

  What am I doing? Throwing a wrench into your damn plans to try and get me killed asshole. I start running deeper into the house.

  Hayes swears at me, and follows after me. "Stop!" he calls, and then starts to call me not nice things.

  I spin around when he gets close enough and drop him with a punch to his jaw. "Haven't you ever—?" I start to yell at him.

  "Damn it!" I swear in surprise.

  "What?" Puo breaks his radio silence interrupting the symphony.

  "I knocked out the Oompa Loompa."

  "Whoops," Puo says dryly. "Leaving now for your pickup."

  "Make sure you have both drives," I say. We need both the fake and the real one for the next phase of the night.

  "Roger, that," Puo says.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  HAYES FINALLY STARTS to stir two minutes later, more than a minute past the eighty-six seconds we originally had.

  I'm crouching across from him, the olive-green canvas bag with the jade vase securely on my back.

  "Never learned to take punch, did you?" I ask.

  Hayes sits up and looks woozy. He tries to say something, but it comes out slurred.

  "How hard did you hit him?" Puo asks.

  "Not that hard," I say. "Who knew Oompa Loompas couldn't take a punch?"

  Hayes slurs at me more. He stops and rubs at his jaw in confusion.

  I let him collect himself for another minute.

  Finally, he manages to ask, "What happened?"

  "You slipped and knocked your jaw on the railing."

  Puo snorts over the comm-link.

  Hayes pulls himself up into the standing position, and sways where he stands. "The vase," he observes on my back.

  "Yeah," I say. "I couldn't carry you with it on your back now could I? Come on, we need to move." I move opposite the way we came.

  Hayes obediently follows.

  I lead him through the top of the dome room, which connects to a more richly decorated hallway with larger bedrooms off of it for guests (I think). The air tastes stale here, like long settled dust.

  "Where are we going?" Hayes asks. His voice is becoming stronger, but he’s still confused.

  "We're leaving," I say. "Your little nap locked us in."

  We travel down the hallway, and where the hallway turns left for another row of bedrooms, there's a spiral wooden staircase leading down.

  The staircase isn't as grand as the main one, but it's definitely a step up from the narrow, claustrophobic one for the servants. Even in the nightvision, one can see the stairs polished to a sheen, and there's even a railing.

  Hayes tentatively reaches out for the railing. "What about the Cleaner?"

  "Gone," I say simply. Freaking Cleaners. "We're on our own."

  We make it down one flight of stairs when he starts mumbling to himself. "I had the vase. You ... you ran away." He's silent for a second and then I hear, "You caused this!"

  "No," I say over my shoulder as I keep moving down the stairs. "Your lack of manners caused this."

  He starts to speak in choice words to me again.

  "Careful," I say, stopping on the stairs. "Or I will teach you the proper way to speak to a lady."

  Hayes stares foggy daggers at me but stops where he is. "You've ruined us. The Cleaner is gone. The house is locked down. The authorities are on the way."

  I'm counting on it. Their best response time is three and a half minutes. "Then we better leave," I say.

  Puo breaks in over my comm-link, "Authorities are en route. They're sending four cruisers, and plan on blocking off the streets to the front and back of the house. They're taking it more seriously than a false alarm. Two, maybe one and half minutes out."

  I resume the descent down. There's not much time to waste.

  Hayes lingers for a second before realizing he has no choice but to follow.

  We come out on the first floor in another hallway, and I immediately turn right to duck into the kitchen through a double-hinged swinging wooden door with framing to match the hallway.

  The kitchen is a large space designed for a number of servants to be working in—of which Locklear has none. The room takes up the back corner of the house. It doesn't appear Locklear has spent any time remodeling the space. Long rows of cast iron cook-tops and ovens run along the left, a large island with pots and pans hanging over it take up the center.

  I move over the light-maroon clay tile toward the back corner.

  "You're kidding," Hayes says when he sees it.

  "You didn't expect me to sit up there and dote over your crumpled body, did you?" I used what seconds we had to prop the back kitchen door open with a bust of some famous Chinese person.

  Hayes exhales in frustration at the comment.

  It amaz
es me in this digital age how often analog solutions get overlooked. It doesn't matter how great your security system is if you stick a fifty-pound stone in the door, no amount of tech is going to be able to close it.

  Sure, the security system can detect an obstruction and correctly use that to identify intruders and alert the authorities. But right now, that's just killing two birds with one stone. I love efficiency.

  I slip out through the door and down three cobblestoned steps to the back alley. The night's humidity hits me at once. It's not as awful as it was, but after being inside the carefully controlled humidity of the house, it feels like getting hit with a wet blanket.

  "Well," I say to Hayes and hefting the canvas bag with the vase. "This was fun. I'll contact you when things calm down enough to move it."

  "What?" Hayes stupidly asks. "Where are you going?"

  "Anywhere but here," I answer. I turn to saunter down the back street. Puo is on his way with the real and fake drives to pick me up for the second phase of the night.

  Sirens pierce the air.

  Hayes asks, "You’re just going to walk down the alley toward Spring Street and leave?"

  "Yup." And who, my little homunculus, were you just communicating my movements to?

  Hayes stays with me.

  "Your car," I say, "is in the opposite direction."

  "I'm not leaving the vase," Hayes says.

  I slip off the backpack and toss it at him in a two-handed pass.

  He catches it with a heavy grunt that almost knocks him over.

  "You really need to learn how to take a hit," I say.

  He chooses some choice words.

  I take a threatening step toward him and he satisfyingly takes a step back. Good.

  I smirk at him and turn around to continue on my way.

  He continues to follow up, struggling with the backpack.

  The sirens are getting louder. "You're like an ugly puppy," I say over my shoulder, continuing to walk. "You know it was all act before, right? I'm not really interested. Go away."

  With possession of the vase, Hayes can't think of an immediate reason to be tailing me.

  I turn suddenly down a side alley several townhouses down from Locklear's that leads back to the front where we entered.

  "You're—" Hayes starts.

  "If you monologue my movements again," I warn him, "I'm going to hit you so hard, you'll wake up in the hospital with handcuffs on. Understand?"

  Hayes stops where he is.

  I walk backwards a bit while watching him.

  He stays silent and eventually moves out of sight, the backpack still on his back.

  I slip off my gloves and nightvision eyeglasses and shove them in my pocket, and turn around to face the direction I'm moving.

  "Think the house," Puo asks, "got an image of his face?"

  "One can only hope," I answer softly. If Hayes doesn't have a digi-scrambler then that's his fault. It would be sweet justice for the authorities to have his face in connection with a crime.

  One can't have a digi-scrambler running all the time.

  Especially when one is about to use a mass of cops as a screen. I reach up and fiddle with mine to turn it off—the pearl necklace Winn gave me. It really was the perfect gift for me.

  "Falcon told me he loves me," I say to Puo.

  "Whoa." Puo pauses to process that. "What'd you say?"

  "I called him a noob and told him to shut up. He was tempting fate."

  Puo guffaws. "Man, you're lucky he puts up with you."

  Yeah, I guess I kinda am.

  Blue and red lights swirl overhead, and sirens change pitch as the cruisers land in the street ahead of me.

  "Do you love him back?" Puo asks.

  Good question. I don't know. Maybe. To Puo I say, "I'm not sleeping with anyone else, am I?"

  "That," Puo says, "is a very Queen Bee kind of answer. Yes or no? No deflecting."

  "I'm coming up on the infested street," I answer instead. "What's your ETA?"

  Puo's silent for a second, and then decides to answer me. "About six minutes. Look, I'll drop it after this. But you really can't leave something like that hanging out there—"

  "Says the toad that's never been in a relationship."

  "That you know about," Puo shoots back. "Do you need me to tell you another story?"

  "Oh, goodness, no," I say, but can't help cracking into a bit of a grin. It helps me slip into character as I emerge out on the street.

  As I hoped, there's a crowd of neighbors gathering outside opposite the Locklear townhouse to watch. I quickly cross the street and make my way over toward them.

  There's about seven neighbors clustered together. They're all older, mid-fifties and above, dressed in affluent causal attire: slacks not jeans; polos and blouses, not T-shirts. One of the men is standing off a bit and smoking a dark-leafed cigar. The smell of the cigar is warm, almost spicy, the way properly cared-for tobacco should smell.

  I walk up to him. "What's going on?"

  He gives me a quick once-over and decides I pass his internal common decency test. He points his cigar at the Locklear townhouse across from us. "Alarm system at crazy-art-lady's house is going off. Again."

  "Oh," I say. "Does it happen much?"

  "More than we'd like," he says. "But never before with so many cops showing up."

  Another cruiser lands, making four. There's already about five cops gathered in front of the house. It doesn't look like anyone's gone in.

  We stand around for a few minutes watching the cops conferencing in plain sight.

  "Passing by?" he asks.

  I nod, keeping an eye on the cops. "I was on a date. It didn't go well."

  "Ah," he says softly. "I'm sorry about that."

  "It happens," I say. "Think one of the cops would mind if I asked for an escort? I have a friend picking me up at the end of the street in a few minutes."

  He raises an eyebrow at that and takes a puff on his cigar. The smoke curls up out of his mouth and over his face. "No, I shouldn't think so. Everything all right?"

  "Oh, I'm fine. It's not the date that's the problem. It's the ex."

  The man nods sagely and says something that's lost in Puo breaking in.

  "Queen Bee," Puo sounds terrified. "I'm being boarded."

  "Good, Lord," the man with the cigar says. "Are you okay? You just went as white as a sheet."

  Puo has the real and fake drives still on him—the real fucking drive!

  The other neighbors who had politely been dividing their attention between the spectacle before them and the oddity talking with one of their own all now look at me.

  I— I ... uh. "Yes," I manage to say. "Yes. I thought I just saw him—the ex. That's all."

  The man looks grim. "Well if the cop won't walk you, I surely will," he says.

  There are horrifying sounds of a struggle over the comm. Puo groaning and yelling. Someone's voice—a woman's. Christina's? And then silence.

  "Do you need to sit down?" the man asks me. He then tells one of the woman standing by, "Livinia go fetch a chair for the young woman."

  "No," I say. "No. I need to go. I— I just need to go." I turn to walk away.

  The sound of someone grabbing the comm-link out of Puo's ear rustles loudly in my ear.

  "Isa Schmidt," Christina Chavez says into my ear.

  My stomach drops out from under me—she used my real name.

  "You little liar," Christina continues. "If you want your fat friend to live—" She audibly cocks a gun. "Then you are going to do exactly as told. Understood?"

  I can't work the moisture back into my mouth to answer. I hurry down the street.

  "I'm going to take your silence as acquiescence," Christina says. "A black SUV is about to drop down onto Martin Luther King. Get in it."

  The man with the cigar makes to follow me.

  I spin on him. "Please!" I plead. "Just leave me be."

  His eyes widen in offense and then soften. He nods, but stays where
he is watching me.

  "Is that an admission of guilt?" Christina gloats at me, thinking it was directed at her.

  "Does Colvin know?" I ask, my heart beating against my ribcage.

  "I'm the one that ordered it," Colvin's deep voice intones in my ear.

  He's on the comm-link. And Puo has the real and fake drives in his possession. Oh, fuck!

  Colvin continues, "I may not be able to kill you immediately, but that doesn't apply to your friends. Get in the car."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  MY HEART NEVER stops racing, a constant thrum pulsing in my neck. It only just fades a bit from awareness as I frantically try to think through the situation while I sit in the back of Colvin's black SUV air vehicle.

  Hayes and company, the treacherous trio, copied a fake of Colvin's drive. They shouldn't have been able to move on us. My only terrifying thought is, it doesn't matter to them that it's a fake. They'll say they raided our house and found the drive and hand it to Colvin for judgment. And if they had just happened to find the real drive on Puo, so much the better.

  A goon in a dark three-piece suit I've never met before sits next to me in the back of the black SUV. He looks soft, skin hanging down off his chin. He stares at me without making eye contact. The gun in his lap with his finger on the trigger—just another part of his suit.

  The treacherous trio adapted quickly. I expected something after the Locklear job—it's why I brought in the cops as a screen to get away so we could finish the night's work.

  But I didn't expect them to be able to get their hands on Puo mid-flight. And what of Winn?

  The yellow lights of the Center Island pass by below us, interspersed with bright specks of halogen lights. Sounds of the city leak in through the luxury air vehicle doors: horns, wind, motors.

  The treacherous trio got to Colvin first. For our game to work, Colvin had to come into the game blind. He couldn't suspect we had insider knowledge.

  The SUV angles downward toward Eon Building, the tallest skyscraper in the Seattle Isles. The top of the modernist building of graceful curves is cut flat, Colvin's three-story penthouse made of glass and stone dumped on top like an ugly barnacle.

  My stomach flutters. Cold sweat lines my palms, soaks my feet in my tennis shoes.