It was a maxim Kera took to heart.
She had only owned Zee for about two and a half months. He wasn’t new; she’d bought him used, but he was new to her, and she was still learning his individual quirks.
Prior to that, she’d had a 2009 model. It had only cost her a fairly reasonable $4,500, but she’d had to fix the damn thing up. Repair work was a fun way to spend her time, but it ate up a certain amount of time and money. There was always the temptation to get in over one’s head or do an ill-advised upgrade.
Finally, right before she’d finished college, Kera had sold the ancient thing at a profit, her maintenance and improvement skills paying off in a big way.
And lo, the Z900 had become attainable, so she had attained it. She knew it would give her massive torque and power on the 110 while also providing a more...civilized...riding experience in the thick of downtown LA.
The best of both worlds.
A drop of oil splashed on the bike’s hull.
“Aww,” she exclaimed, picking up one of her emergency rags to wipe it off. “Sorry, Zee. Here, let’s get you cleaned up.”
Zee, of course, said nothing, but she liked to think he enjoyed being clean.
Soon, the task was done. She stood and admired her handiwork, then took off the work shirt and gave her hands a thorough cleaning. She still had time to leave for work a good ten minutes early, which would continue her streak of zero late days. Her boss Cevin was strict about coming in on time, and so far, Kera was the only one who’d managed to do so every shift.
In fact, she had enough time to stop and see Mr. Kim on the way in. She pulled a white button-down shirt over her tank top and denim shorts and added a leather jacket and leather pants on top of that. She often ran into people who thought leather was merely a fashion statement, but it provided better protection against abrasions during falls than most other materials. That was why bikers had adopted it.
And why it was particularly stupid that so many had dispensed with it.
She opened one of the tall wooden doors, swung a leg over Zee, and fired him up. He responded instantly, and she smiled at the smooth roar. He was running well again.
She pulled the motorcycle out of the warehouse, closed and locked it behind her, and drove into Los Angeles, the city that had become her home.
The day was grayish and damp. It wasn’t the sort of weather people usually associated with Southern California, but a certain amount of rain was expected in the winter. Kera didn’t mind. It kept things interesting, for one thing.
For another, no matter how gloomy the weather got here, it couldn’t touch the bone-chilling cold of the northeast, where Kera had been born. She’d take that trade all day long.
She wove her bike through traffic, noting with approval how smooth a ride it gave at the restrictive speeds within the city. Only one motorist honked at her. She was driving sensibly, but there was always some asshole who had to lean on the horn.
The convenience store was approximately halfway between Kera’s warehouse-apartment and the Mermaid. It lay tucked between an oil change place and a comics shop. Kera didn’t have much need for the former, but she’d thought about checking out the latter sometime.
What held her back was that she had a sneaking suspicion the guys at the comics shop were going to form the same impressions of her as the guys in college.
She parked in the corner of the lot and took her helmet with her into the convenience store.
As usual, Mr. Kim was behind the counter. He was an older gentleman of Korean descent, better-dressed than his job technically required, with a full head of graying hair.
“Hello, Kera,” he called.
“Good morning, Mr. Kim!” Kera waved back, then checked herself. “Or good afternoon. Morning for me, though!”
“Yes, you keep very late hours.” She came in often enough that he knew a little bit about her, including her job. “How are you doing today?”
“I’m great,” Kera told him. She plucked a bag of trail mix off a shelf, then headed to the line of coolers against the far wall. “I just got Zee cleaned out. You know, like when someone drinks a high-fiber smoothie or something. Anyway, how are you?”
“You have some strange ideas of what to put through motorcycles,” Mr. Kim quipped. “I got that tea you like.”
“Thanks!” She opened the cooler and reached for a can of lightly sweetened green tea. This brand had quickly become her favorite, and the Kims had started ordering it regularly for her.
At the register, she laid out her purchase and watched Mr. Kim punch in the numbers from memory. He winced slightly and caught her worried frown.
“My arthritis is flaring up again. Such a pointless condition, but that’s life.”
Kera smiled sympathetically. “Yeah, one of those things. What flares up, though, must flare back down, right? So wait it out, and it will get better again.”
He grumbled something about how he wasn’t so sure anymore, but the twinkle of amusement in his eyes suggested it was only for show. She paid him, waved goodbye, and headed back outside, where Zee waited for her.
Pauline Smith stood before a white dry-erase board she’d set up within a small office in downtown Los Angeles. Her hair, almost a white-blonde, had been dyed a darker golden color. Her nails were immaculately painted with black polish, the sort of touch a trend-conscious, younger professional might add to an outfit. You would only see the unusually pale blue eyes if you looked closely enough to realize she was wearing brown contacts. Her figure, currently encased in a tailored suit, showed a combination of natural slimness and strenuous dieting.
Everything about her public image was carefully chosen and executed to perfection, and she was prepared to pull off the same thing with her newest venture.
She looked around the room with a perfect smile. “Everyone knows that Los Angeles is currently in the midst of a crime wave,” she said. “This violence is regrettable, and we will do everything in our power to eradicate it.”
No one spoke yet. There was Johnny, slender, bronze-skinned, and black-haired; Sven, broad and pale and grim-eyed, with reddish hair; and Lia, a trim young Korean-American woman with an impassive face and wavy black hair that reached her waist. All of them, like Pauline, were in their mid-twenties and none too far removed from well-respected institutes of higher learning. All three of them also wore tailored suits.
“It is absolutely necessary,” Pauline said, “to create happiness and motivation in the population so that peace can be achieved. There must be a sense of allegiance, access to a good life, an appreciation of the social order.”
Johnny opened his mouth to speak but closed it when Sven kicked him under the table. He had been born and raised in Los Angeles, left for business school in Austin, and signed on with Pauline after Lia had sought him out two weeks ago.
He also had zero idea what was going on. This didn’t sound anything like the job he’d been led to believe he would be doing.
“Unfortunately, people cannot always be trusted to make good decisions,” Pauline said simply. “It is a sad fact, but one we must embrace in order to move forward. What we must harness is our potential clients’ desire for self-betterment. We will project that image ourselves, so we’ll rise naturally to the top of the ecosystem.”
Johnny stole a glance at Sven and Lia, both of whom were nodding. He nodded as well, making a mental note to speak to Sven at the earliest opportunity. He just hoped he could get out of this meeting without embarrassing himself.
“Our goal is to bring stability to downtown Los Angeles,” Pauline said. “We will need to reach out to business owners and community leaders and grow mutually beneficial relationships. Mr. Jensen, Mr. Torrez, this will be your role in the organization.”
Johnny plastered a smile on his face and nodded. Please let her not realize he was completely out of his depth. He’d gone to UT Austin, for fuck’s sake. He’d graduated near the top of his class. He still had recruiters calling him at all hours for
ridiculously boring jobs.
He was going to call some of them back just as soon as he was out of this clusterfuck.
“These relationships are crucial for us to understand the lay of the land,” Pauline said. “We must be aware of the terrain in which we navigate. This allows us to plan out our strategy in advance and adapt quickly in the smaller details.” She nodded at Lia, who had raised one slim hand. “Yes, Lia?”
“Do you have preliminary timelines?” Lia asked her.
Timelines for what? Johnny wanted to scream.
“A good question. I was coming to that. I simply wanted to ensure that everyone was on the same page. Mr. Torrez, Mr. Jensen, any questions?”
Johnny shook his head emphatically.
“Excellent.” Pauline smiled. “Now, as per Ms. Min’s insightful question, our goal is to control ninety percent of supply within three to five years. However, this long-term goal only manifests if we lay the groundwork now. That is why our next steps are so important. Ms. Min, for our next meeting, please bring me dossiers on all suppliers who have sustained increased or decreased market share in the past quarter. Mr. Torrez, Mr. Jensen, I would like you each to identify six business owners or community leaders with whom you will begin networking. Is everyone clear?”
Johnny nodded again.
“As you will learn, I prefer short meetings,” Pauline said crisply. “I will see you all tomorrow at 10 o’clock. Do not be late.”
Johnny stood, buttoned his suit jacket, and nodded to Lia and Pauline before following Sven quickly out of the room. The two of them had been acquainted in high school, and he would rather ask Sven about this shit than Lia.
“Yo, Carrot Top.” He snapped his fingers at Sven.
“Mr. Torrez.” Pauline stood in the doorway behind him. “Public image is deeply important. Please maintain professionalism at all times.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Johnny gave her a nod.
There was a faint flicker on Pauline’s face at the word “ma’am,” but she nodded in return and went back into the meeting room.
Johnny caught up with Sven a moment later. “What the hell was that?” he demanded under his breath.
“Not here,” Sven said, also sotto voce.
“She wasn’t making any sense!” Smart as a whip, Johnny had been educated on the dime of several family members and a lot of grants, but he had never outgrown the common sense his rancher grandparents passed down to him. When it came to business, he preferred plain talk, not whatever the flavor of the week in corporate America was.
It was one of the reasons he wasn’t keen to take any of the jobs the recruiters were calling him for.
“Not here,” Sven muttered again. Louder, he added, “Let’s go grab lunch. You wanted to show me your new car, right?”
“Uh, sure.” Johnny led the way to his brand-new Mustang Cobra.
Or new to Johnny. The last Cobras having been manufactured in 2004, but it was only lightly used, not a scratch on it, and the hint of pearl in the torch-red paint job glimmered in the noonday light. A quick press of the remote fob and both men climbed in.
Once inside, he looked at Sven. “So? What the hell was that shit about?”
“Drive,” Sven said. “I’ll explain as you do.”
Johnny sighed. “What do you want for lunch?”
“Tacos.”
“Right.”
Sven only spoke once the Cobra was gliding down the street past palm trees that seemed to droop in the thick, mild air. LA’s smog was nowhere near as bad as it had been a few decades ago, but it was far from nonexistent.
“All right. I recommended you and Lia brought you on, right?”
“Right, but what she said was—”
“We’ll get to that,” Sven interrupted. “First thing you gotta know is about Pauline. That’s not her name.”
“Really?” Johnny had seen a lot of people give themselves new names, but none of them had chosen a new one quite as boring as Pauline Smith.
“Yep. It’s actually Polina…Testre? Testrovsky? Tchaikovsky? No, not that. Something like that, though.”
“Sounds Russian,” Johnny commented.
Sven stared at him for a long moment. “That’s the point,” he said finally. “It is Russian. She’s Russian.”
“Okay.” Johnny waited to take a left, and, a moment later, did a double-take at Sven. “Wait, seriously?”
“Mmhmm.” Sven nodded.
“So, all that stuff about making peace and people not necessarily choosing the best path on their own…” Johnny drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Mmhmm.”
“Okay, so when Lia brought me on…”
Sven leaned back in his seat and waited, a smile playing around his lips.
“She was talking about the same thing Pauline is talking about.”
“Yep,” Sven said.
“So, those documents I got about our KPI, A/B Testing, B2B, B2C, churn rate, conversion rate, cost per acquisition…”
“Mmhmm.” Sven was grinning now. He looked out the window at a pair of women with artfully blown-out hair and long tanned legs.
Johnny was too caught up in digesting this new information to spare much attention for them. LA was full of beautiful women, but things like this didn’t happen too often. If he took the information he’d been given in that meeting and translated it out of business-school corporate bullshit-speak, that meant…
“What a pile of self-serving horseshit.” He shook his head. “Does she believe it?”
“I’ve found that with the Russian mob, it’s best not to ask.”
“You got me recruited by the fucking Russian mob?”
“Not precisely, but I think it’s safe to assume she’s got ties.” Sven shrugged. “Look, you and I both knew we were not going to come back from business school and go on the straight and narrow, right?”
Johnny wanted to object, but he cracked a grin. “Yeah, you’re right.” He sighed as he pulled into the drive-thru of his favorite taco place. “On the other hand, did you ever think you were going to use your world-class MBA to sell meth to tweakers?”
Chapter Four
The problem, Christian thought, wasn’t so much that he was yet another anonymous employee in a cubicle, wearing a white, collared shirt and drinking passable coffee under the glare of fluorescent lights.
It was that he had another forty years of this ahead of him.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. He’d been staring at the screen for two long hours, and he really, really needed a break. The calendar next to his computer had a nice picture of a tree, but also a lot of work notes and scribbled due dates.
He leaned back in his chair and craned his neck to look down the aisle between the rows of cubicles. He wasn’t one of the lucky ones who got a view of the city, but he could see the windows if he leaned the right way.
Except for right now, when a small group of middle managers was blocking the view while they talked and gestured emphatically about…something.
Honestly, he didn’t care. That was part of his problem. He turned his head back to his computer and sighed again. His current project was a report on a strange quirk at the intersection of banking regulations and technology that meant the company would save a significant amount of interest by moving their money through one more shell account before the checks hit the final debited account.
He was good at this. It was one of the reasons he’d been hired, and also one of the reasons he kept getting incremental raises and turning down repeated entreaties to move into management.
He hadn’t anticipated how mind-numbing this job was going to be and how much of a trap career progression was.
As their floor supervisor strode off to supervise someone else, one of the employees who’d been standing by the window strolled over to Chris’s cubicle and leaned against its makeshift doorway.
“Good afternoon,” he drawled, then took a swig from a coffee mug.
Christian swiveled his chair
around. “Hey.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Still working on the money movement report. You know, just in case you came here to draft me for another project.”
Ted cracked his neck and smiled. His full name was Theodore, but he only used that when he was trying to impress chicks with his upper-crust background and estimable breeding. Born and raised on the east coast, Ted had attended one of the multitude of private schools with English-sounding names and liked to complain about things like the lack of good intramural lacrosse leagues in LA. Fittingly, he worked in Human Resources, far from the ho-hum existence of the cubicle drones.
For all that, Ted was one of Chris’s favorite people. Unlike most of the other managers, he didn’t take the rules and regulations of the office too seriously, just like he didn’t take his own background too seriously. His sense of humor made him one of the best people in the company to work with.
“Of course,” Ted said. “You’re busy, you’ve got too much on your plate already, et cetera, et cetera.” He gave an easy grin and sipped more coffee. “Not why I came.”
“No?”
“No. I saw you the other day coming out of the Mermaid.” Ted raised an eyebrow. “You know, that bar and grill in Little Tokyo?”
Chris blinked. “Yes. Yes, I do know. I was…there.”
“Right. Have to say, that doesn’t really seem like your kind of place.”
“Just trying something new.” Chris took a sip of his own coffee to keep from meeting Ted’s eyes. He wasn’t a great liar.
“Oh, didn’t I mention?” Ted sounded excessively casual. “That was the second time I saw you there.”
Chris heaved a sigh. “Fine,” he said. He knew it was pointless to lie. Ted would simply pester him until he got the information he’d come for. “I heard one of my college classmates was working there, so I went in a couple of times. I’m…working up my nerve.”
How to be a Badass Witch Page 3