Temper

by Alex C. Hughes

  I cut off an idiot driver trying to get in my lane on an interstate merger and kicked the engine into high gear, the anti-gravs whining as I pushed them up, up, too hard. I snuck in in front of a massive Mack truck hauling something heavy, my bumper barely clearing his as I gave him the one-fingered salute and hit the accelerator.

  Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the public parking lot off Decatur Square, my breathing still hard, but my mind no longer reeling from the anger. The driving had given me back my control, had given me that vindication of power I had needed so desperately. And if I couldn’t park in the police lot across the street that I’d been going for by instinct, well then, I’d park here. Plenty good enough. Plenty.

  I put on some crime scene gloves that I’d left in the car, to preserve whatever evidence I and half the world had left on this thing by now, and opened up the ridiculous hollow book to start looking through the loot I’d pushed so hard to get.

  I know what you did, read the first letter, all the way from the bottom of the book box. The edges were crumpled, but the message was clear. Thirty-five hundred ROCs or the world knows. A second letter, very similar, with instructions as to where to leave the money—under a trash can in a park, of all the uncreative things. In cash. Unmarked, of course.

  You don’t want them finding out what you did to the messenger, the third one read. This time it’s four.

  Four every month or I tell.

  Five and a half from now on. There’s a block of concrete and the Chattanooga waiting for you if you don’t. And I don’t even have to lift a finger.

  Hmm. Something about that last note sounded familiar. And more importantly, the block of concrete implied the stereotypical mob—the kind of Italian mob that had existed in the North well before the Tech Wars—which told me two things. One, the person blackmailing Collins wasn’t the mob, clearly, or they wouldn’t go for such a stereotypical film reference. They’d know how things were done in Atlanta. And secondly, the person thought that something Collins had done would anger the mob if they knew, so much that they would kill him.

  I know what you did to the messenger.

  Wait, Tyler had said that as near as he could tell, Collins’ steel mill wasn’t paying mob protection money. As near as he could tell.

  And Petrov had said that Collins had gotten lucky, that The Rabbit had disappeared right before visiting him for blood money. What if this wasn’t luck at all? The Rabbit guy disappears with the mob’s money, right in the middle of the worst territory fight Atlanta had seen in a long time—right when it would benefit Collins and the factory the most.

  What if Collins had taken this guy out and planted the evidence that he’d left town?

  Or, maybe even a better fit for the facts—the union. The union had gotten a good deal last year, during a strike, for no good reason. A better deal than they deserved, they’d said. Could the union have engineered The Rabbit’s disappearance? Mob skimming could be just as bad for them as it was for Collins. Or, even weirder, maybe the union and the mob were in bed together, and when The Rabbit disappeared, the union had gotten a good deal to get them to shut up?

  There were too many coincidences here, too fast, for me to believe that Collins was being blackmailed over materials at this point. My gut said the disappearance of this mob guy, this messenger was what this was about.

  So, then, who would be in a position to know about that and yet not in a position to call it in the mob immediately? I had work to do here.

  The car around me pinged as it cooled in the winter air, and my breath started fogging as I thought.

  I needed to talk to Collins, and then I needed to stop by a private lab here in Decatur and visit with a man who owed me.

  I’d get to the bottom of this and find the justice here. I would.

  The Collins Steel & Manufactory plant was about what you’d expect, big blocky buildings with high ceilings, plenty of heat and safety gear with several large, red-hot vats of molten things, and a small army of workers taking the raw materials through all of the processes and steps before they became steel bars. I had a few cousins who’d worked in jobs like this, on the line, where each step of a long process is the responsibility of some individual guy pulling a paycheck. The main warehouse section, separated from the tanks, was hot but not as hot as where the tanks were. The area for the managers, of course, was even more separate and even more air conditioned—even in the dead of winter.

  Collins had the big office on the third level, large glass panels looking out over the floor of the place. It had the big door and the big assistant’s desk outside, unmistakable markings of an owner’s office. Surprisingly, the first person to even ask me what I was doing there was that assistant, a mousy man in his thirties, who I disliked on sight.

  To give him credit, the man tried to stop me from barging in on his boss, but I wasn’t exactly taking no for an answer.

  “You can’t go in there!” the assistant said, literally spreading his arms to keep me—or so he thought—from the boss’s space. That wasn’t very effective for him; we were already in the doorway, and the more I stepped forward, the more he backed up.

  Collins sighed and hung up the phone he’d been on. “It’s okay, Terry, let her in.”

  Terry gave me a look and sidestepped away. “Are you sure, Mr. Collins? I can call the—”

  “I’m sure, Terry.”

  Terry left very quickly.

  I closed the door and turned back to Collins.

  He stood, smoothing away a look of annoyance, replacing it with charm. “Isabella Cherabino. What a surprise. While I appreciate your vigilance, there was a reason I came to your office in the beginning. I’d prefer you not visit the factory during business hours.”

  “Look, you’ve got the charm, I’ll give you that, but you don’t get to lie to me.”

  Real annoyance flashed across his face then. “You work for me, Ms. Cherabino, not the other way around. I’ll do what I damn well please.”

  “I don’t know what happened to the ‘messenger’ the local organized crime boss sent here, but whatever it was, your blackmailer thinks it’s enough for them to have you killed.”

  He crossed his arms then. “I don’t know how you came to that information, but it’s not from me, and it’s not from my people. Furthermore, if I hear that you’ve in any way—”

  “I took this case back in the beginning, knowing you weren’t on the up and up,” I said, irritated with him, irritated with myself.

  “You’re not going to report me, or you won’t get paid.”

  “No, I’m not going to report you! I’m your PI. But you need to tell me things. How am I supposed to track down your blackmailer and bring him or her to justice unless I know what’s really going on?”

  “You didn’t need to know the details.”

  “Bullshit, I didn’t need to know the details! I can’t do my job unless and until you have the balls to tell me the real truth. Why is this blackmailer making you pay, and why aren’t you willing to just keep paying it?”

  Collins sat down, and I saw the power-player thwarted; his outer shell got a lot less attractive in that moment. “He’s demanding a million ROCs now.”

  “A million?” I said.

  “He thinks I can afford it.”

  “Can you?”

  “None of your fucking business!” Collins’ knuckles were white as he gripped the edge of his desk.

  Something occurred to me with a chill. “Did you take the mob’s money the guy was carrying? Is that what this is really about?”

  Collins gave me a look of such cold fury that I took a step back.

  I stopped moving and set my jaw, determined to stand my ground. “Why is this guy really blackmailing you?” I asked.

  Collins met my eyes, fury behind his gaze, a fury I met with my own. “We’re not dealing with the mob right now.”

  “I should think that’s obvious,” I said. “If we were dealing with the mob, you’d already be dead, and you w
ouldn’t be dealing with me.”

  He snapped his mouth shut, obviously holding back a retort out of sheer will. A breath went by. Two. Then he said, “The mob believes that their representative left town with a substantial amount of money to take advantage of the power struggle. He’s sent them postcards to taunt them with the information.”

  “Postcards from Bora Bora?” I asked, cynical.

  “Let’s say they’re from Brazil. For the sake of talking. It doesn’t matter because as long as everybody believes that’s what happened, everyone’s equally happy with it.”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  He just stared at me. “I don’t pay you to think. If I say that’s what happened, I expect you to believe it.”

  “I beg to differ. Thinking is exactly what you’re paying me to do. The blackmailer is obviously in a position to have this information, this very sensitive information. I take it that it’s been a lot easier to pay him or her than it would be to deal with the results if it gets out.”

  “The man is asking a million ROCs right now. A million. It’s untenable, and I won’t have it.”

  “Hmm,” I said. I had a decision to make here. I didn’t like this guy, and he had basically admitted to some pretty serious criminal acts. Not clearly enough or with enough evidence that I’d be able to convict, even if I had still been in the department, but enough that we both knew what was going on. If I kept working with him, I was as much as giving up on justice for this Rabbit guy and his ties to the mob.

  The thing was, I didn’t like the mob, and while I didn’t like Collins’ solution to the problem he faced, it was a solution. Like he’d said, there were hundreds of jobs at stake here if the factory closed down due to unprofitability, and it wasn’t like the mob guy was an innocent. I thought about raising my rates again now that I knew the truth, but decided that would make me scummier than Collins. I sighed.

  “What are you going to do?” Collins asked me, hand drifting towards a drawer behind the desk. Probably a gun there, or some kind of weapon; I kept my hands in plain sight.

  I made a gut decision. “You’re paying me to find a blackmailer for you, and that’s what I’m going to do.” Adam had said in the beginning that ethics for this whole PI thing were like ethics for a lawyer—you represented your client. Period. I hated it, but if that was the right thing here, I’d try to do the right thing.

  “Okay, then,” Collins said and moved his hand back to the desktop. He nodded. “I read you right, then.”

  I pursed my lips and decided not to pursue that last comment. After a moment and some thought, I asked, “How much do you trust your lawyer?”

  “King is honest. Or at least as honest as you can get as a lawyer. I pay him well enough; he’s not going to turn on me. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go in and scream at him, though. He’s charged me double his usual fee for your visit. Idiot couldn’t call me fast enough to complain.”

  “It was necessary,” I said, embarrassed but unwilling to admit fault and back down in front of this guy. “I’ll still be looking into him.” The easiest way to do that would be financials, but without the possibility of a warrant, I’d have to call in a few favors and maybe break into King’s office when he wasn’t there. If I could figure out how to do it without getting caught on the cameras he insisted were there—if they even were. I took a breath and asked Collins, just for the sake of it: “What about Abby Joiner? Your ex-girlfriend? She’s come up a few times in your list of enemies.”

  “That dumb bitch?” He laughed, a dark, judgmental sound. “No, the only thing she knows are screwing and driving cars into buildings. She’s not a threat here.”

  “Okay. Then who is? Who else would know about your indiscretion? The greedier they are in character, the more likely it seems they are to be our guy here. And you should look at your employees, too. Your rank and file isn’t thrilled to be here; if their body language is any indication.”

  Collins shook his head, a cynical motion. “Half the world’s after my money. I’ll send you a list of employees who’ve had grievances, but I doubt they’ve got the information.”

  “That’s a good start,” I said. Then, it occurred to me to ask what I’d wondered about earlier: “Is this why the union leader got the good deal for his people last year? Is that when it happened?” I realized almost immediately that I was tipping my hand again, but the words were already said.

  He frowned, hard. “I don’t see that that’s any of your business.”

  So a yes. Wow. I wondered how involved the union was, and how exactly they’d come to find out about the mob guy’s disappearance. There was a weakness there, I’d bet, for all this guy thought that the union was settled with their new deal.

  “I have enemies. I’ll get you a list of those, too. Or, really, I’ll have Terry do it. You should work with him. I expect results from you, you understand, and I expect them quickly.”

  “Understood,” I said, restraining myself from saying that he should have given me all of this at the beginning. It was odd that his assistant would have a list of his enemies, but hey, that was not the weirdest thing about this case at this point.

  “Why lie to me?” I asked, finally, unable to help myself.

  “You’re pushing your limits here, and I’d suggest you stop. You’re a hired gun,” he said, flatly. “I hired you, and I expect you to gun. If you don’t, you don’t get paid.”

  “You want me to find your blackmailer and bring him to justice—”

  He interrupted me. “I told you, I’m not interested in involving the police. I just need to know who he is.”

  I pursed my lips. “Uh huh. What is your plan for this blackmailer exactly?”

  He just glared at me.

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. Then I sighed. He had hired me and I had agreed to work with the scumbag. Ethics, damn it, but even ethics didn’t require me to be a part of any wrongdoing. “Let me see what I can dig up, and I’ll see if I can’t bring you a solution at the same time. It’ll save you a few steps.” And make me feel better because I knew how he’d handle it. A nice, settled, non-lethal solution I could live with.

  That made his face soften a little. “You do that, and I’ll take you out to dinner somewhere fancy. If you wear a nice dress.”

  “I’ll wear a fancy dress if you will,” I said and then smiled to soften it. He was scum and worse, maybe, but I still wanted him to pay me.

  “Nobody likes a woman who mouths off,” he said in a nasty tone.

  I forced down my temper. “People like me just fine. People other than you, maybe. Just let me do the job you hired me for, okay?”

  After one more errand, I was back on the road for, hopefully, the last time today. I was pissed and tired, and Atlanta at three p.m. was just the kinder, gentler version of the die-now-please rush hour we’d all come to know and love—just as clogged and dangerous and frustrating as ever. But I did get to flip some people off.

  I pulled up to a small building a few streets away from Decatur Square and turned the car off. Took deep breaths. Then picked the paper bag that was the result of my errand up off the passenger side of the car.

  I missed Adam, I realized all at once. I missed having him here, to talk to, to complain to, just to be there. I hadn’t heard from him since yesterday while he was off doing important things for the police department, and I was angry and sad and wished I was there, doing what he was doing. Or, better, wished for him to be here, doing what I was doing. Wasn’t that what this whole PI firm thing was about in the first place? I thought better when he was around. I had to explain things with him there. I had to think—or at least tell him to get out of my head, which made me think. I felt testy and blocked-off without him.

  Tyler’s words came back to me, and I got angry. I wasn’t—I pushed the thought to the side. Adam wasn’t—I grabbed the bag and a box, got out of the car, and slammed the door too hard behind me. My breath fogged in the February air; I’d forgotten my scarf at Collins’ o
ffice and my neck was cold. Well, let it be cold. Adam wasn’t here, he wasn’t going to be here, he had better things to do, and we weren’t together anymore. We weren’t together, and Peter wasn’t…well, there wasn’t any danger I’d forget him for someone new, now was there? Somebody like Tyler, he was good, he was a known quantity, a friend—supportive, kind, but not demanding. Peter would have understood Tyler if he’d known he wasn’t going to be here. Adam, now…

  I pushed away from the car, gathered my thoughts together, and marched up the brick stairs, past the sign that said COMPLEX DIAGNOSTIC SPECIALISTS to the small converted house. The front door stuck; it always stuck, but I got it open.

  I stomped my feet on the mat on the inside and said hello to Rhonda, who was filling out paperwork in the main room. Unlike the exterior, the interior of the building was all tile and gleaming white surfaces filled with microscopes and diagnostic equipment of all kinds, a laboratory for medical types that sometimes handled the DNA testing overflow from the DeKalb Police Department’s lab when it got too backlogged. Or when, like today, a certain Isabella Cherabino needed her evidence processed faster than the brass would otherwise make possible.

  The fact that today wasn’t an official case for an official department didn’t matter. Probably.

  “Is Armand here?” I asked Rhonda.

  “First door on the right,” she said then looked up. “He’s in the middle of a clean room procedure, though. Probably easier for him to come to you than the reverse.”

  I pulled the bag out and fished around until I produced its contents for her to see. “I’ve got two tickets to Squirmy Wormy Derby Live,” I said in a coaxing voice.

  She smiled, then, a big smile that reached all the way to her eyes. “His daughter will love that.” She reached over and called back to tell him I was here.

  Armand’s daughter was nine, with a developmental disability that put her in a lot of constant pain. Squirmy Wormy was one of the few things that would make her light up, and Armand would do anything for his daughter, even take her to the world’s stupidest children’s show for the fifty-billionth time. One of Peter’s old friends knew the showrunner, so I could always get tickets to something in the franchise, even if it wasn’t usually as cool as the roller skate show. This one might actually be worth seeing.