The Storm Giants (13 page)

Chapter 28
: Making the Cut

After the
feast Celeste confronted Everett, Tobias and David before they could join in and help the chattering, laughing diners clear the table.

“Phil wants to talk to all three of you
,” Celeste said. “We feed anyone that knows how to act, but you have to pass muster with him before you can stay on.”

She gave one more distasteful sniff at
Everett, but the garbage had dried and the scent was no longer as overpowering.

Phil’s study was on
the third floor of the rambling house. The walls were lined with book shelves crammed with tomes. There was a wheeled ladder on a rail that you could roll around the circumference of the room to reach the volumes on the higher shelves.

Phil
favored practical reading matter, at least in terms of mind fucking people. Among them Green’s “48 Laws of Power,” Gracian’s “Pocket Oracle,” and a couple Alinsky first editions. He had Chomsky and Machiavelli, Sun Tzu and textbooks on NLP. Phil’s working library was a war room for psychobabble.

Phil was seate
d in a wheeled orange office chair that had seen better days. Aaron stood next to Phil, and the three newcomers stood in an arc in before them.

Behind Phil
a door stood ajar. Through the doorway was a tiny bedroom with an unmade bed, the private room as messy and disordered as the study was organized. Catching Everett’s glance into Phil’s disheveled pigsty sleeping quarters, Aaron reached back and drew the door shut, making sure it latched.

A
s Everett had hoped, Phil’s eye fell on Tobias first. Tobias exuded the glaring predatory hum he always did, and Phil’s head cocked to the side as he studied the little death dealer.

“Do you hate everybody
, or just the Man?” Phil asked.

Tobias took a breath
, ready to snarl one of his witticisms. He stopped with his mouth open, pinned by Phil’s accepting gaze.

“Not
everyone,” Tobias said in a flat voice. “Leastways not all the time.”

Phil
turned to David, studying the handsome gutter snipe. “You have the right kind of eyes,” Phil said. “’Eighteen going on eighty.’”

David
was trying to be as hard as Everett and Tobias, as if they were a bonded triad of comrades. David was young, and his eyes shone at Phil like at royalty.

Phil aimed his attention at Everett
, his gaze a honed weapon in the hands of a master. Phil turned to Aaron. “And this one, doesn’t he look a little saurian, like one of those velociraptors in Jurassic Park?”

Aaron shook his head.
Phil appeared not to notice Aaron’s look of puzzled distrust as he turned back to Everett.

“You
do look like one of those raptors, if it had just developed a genius level I.Q.” Phil smiled.

I
t would be a mistake to act stupid with this guy, Phil saw right through it.

Everett
was a kid when he discovered he put off vibes that some people picked up on. Total strangers would stare at him in fear or rage as he made their alarm bells clang. Guys would walk up and attack him without preamble or conversation on a regular basis.

He
’d learned to be more and more inconspicuous. Almost everyone he encountered now, their eyes just slid off the blandness he projected. But it still didn’t always fly, and it sure wasn’t flying here.

“Do you a
lways hold back?” Phil asked.

Everett
looked at the floor. It was urgent to establish rapport with this man now that attention had been paid. The line was unclear to that goal and he couldn’t afford a mistake.

Phil aimed his presence at Tobias: “You two
are some kind of pair. Does he always hide behind you?’

Tobias snorted.
“I’ve been thinking for a while that he’s past his prime. His game is weak.” Tobias glared Everett’s way with friendly malice.

Phil
returned to his study of Everett. “No, you’re not a raptor, that’s the wrong image. There’s depths to you. You remind me of one of those Shaolin monks, all fake humble and quiet.”

Phil
extended a closed fist, palm up. “Can you snatch the pebble from my hand, grasshopper?”

“Only if
a pebble is there to begin with,” Everett said.

Chapter 29
: Job Assignments

Downstairs Aaron snagged D
avid, claiming him for his own. Aaron muttered a few words to Celeste and then he and the boy disappeared.

Celeste beckoned to Everett an
d Tobias. “You guys made the cut, Phil likes you both.”

“They want you in the kitchen
,” Celeste told Tobias.

“Sure thing
, girl,” Tobias said with an admiring leer replacing his usual grimace. He reached out to pat her shoulder.

Celeste faded
from Tobias’s attempted touch as if his hand was red hot. Her pretty face contorted into that of a Medusa, as if her gaze could paralyze.

“Nobody touches me without
permission,” she said, her calm voice in contrast to her hectic expression.

Tobias
booked down the hall toward the sound of clinking crockery, escaping his faux pas. By the time Celeste pointed her face at Everett it was calm again.

“Aaron has a different job for you
,” she said.

She led
Everett in the opposite direction and stopped in front of a bathroom. “I’ll put some fresh clothes outside the door. You can clean the shower while you’re bathing in it and getting rid of the stank.”

Cele
ste held out a bowl brush. Everett took it from her and stepped inside to say hello to the bathtub, sink and toilet that awaited.

Chapter 30
: The Zen of Shininess

Everett
was on hands and knees scrubbing around the toilet base. As he finished mopping up the piss stains and pubic hair, Celeste showed up with the kind of creeping stealth he’d already come to associate with her.

She’d never be
able to sneak up on him though. Her brain ran so hot and fast she thought too loud. He’d always be able to feel her approach.

She was a little hottie
, but it was plain they weren’t going to be an item. Her sights were aimed a little higher – maybe at about Phil’s altitude, judging from the proprietary looks she kept sneaking when the big man was around.

“Not b
ad,” Celeste said, looking at how clean the bathroom had become. “A lot of people would pitch a bitch doing this kind of work. You don’t mind cleaning?”

“It’s good to
make stuff shine,” Everett said.

A
Zen like feeling overcame when you polished and sharpened a blade to a keening edge, or dragged a patch through a dirty barrel before making your gun gleam with oil. Since he’d been with Kerri he’d discovered that housework and ‘honey-dos’ gave him the same sense of accomplishment. And of course, people rarely screamed when you swabbed out a toilet bowl.

“Maybe you have a career in janitorial
,” Celeste said, her eyes twinkling. She looked puzzled, and sniffed. “Do you smell something electrical? Never mind. Phil wants you soonest. He just got the word on the scanner there’s something going on in town, and you’re riding along with him.”

Chapter 31
: Citizenship & Donuts

A
snack truck was parked in one of the out buildings. Everett inserted into the shotgun seat at Phil’s direction. A steel plate was set in the cement floor under the truck; it clanked under them as Phil backed out the door. They headed out the double gates, which were closed after by a couple guys Everett recognized from the dinner table.

Amicus felt
even smaller now that full night had fallen, and they didn’t have that far to go. As soon as they hit the grid of streets adjoining the property, Everett saw two Amicus Police Department rollers parked at random angles a couple blocks ahead on the other side of Broadway. Their strobes were pulsing, their spots lit up the front of the house. People were moving around on the front lawn.

A
s they approached Phil said, “We try to stay on good terms with local law enforcement. They have a very tough job, almost impossible for a human being these days. We purchase a little good will by bringing them coffee and snacks when there’s a fire or some other emergency.”

“Spendy
,” Everett said.

“If you’re here for any lengt
h of time, you’ll discover we have our assets,” Phil said. He glanced over, but Everett stared straight ahead at the crime scene as if incurious and focusing on the immediate.

A cop saw the
snack truck approaching, and he smiled as Phil parked and killed the engine.

“Officer Redd
,” Phil said, planting a warm helpful smile on his face mirroring the cop’s.

“Hi
, Phil,” Officer Redd said. His eyes lit on Everett. “Who’s the new guy?”

Phil loomed forward in
his seat a little, accidentally shielding Everett from the law dog’s inspection. “Just my latest protégé. He’s going to be very helpful to me.”

“Great
, great,” Redd said, staring past Phil and Everett into the depths of the truck, more interested in its contents than anything else.

Phil stepped
into the working area in back of the truck, “Open the service window,” he told Everett.

Phil rummaged around in
the cupboard and hit some switches over the counter. Everett got out, popped the latches on the window and lifted it open on the fragile looking support pistons.

Officer Redd lurked
at the sill next to Everett, crowding the open service counter. Everett faded toward the cop’s blind side without making it obvious.

Phil leaned both hands on the sill and ducked down to stick his big cranium out the window.
“It’ll take a couple of minutes for the coffee to brew.”

“How ‘bout a donut to tide me over?” Redd asked.

Phil handed him an apple fritter and the cop seemed satisfied. He trotted toward the house even as he gnawed at the hunk of fried sugar dough.

“You’re a good citizen
, Phil,” Redd called over his shoulder as he went.

“’Citizen?’” Phil snorted.
“What does he even mean by that? You know we’re living in a New World Order, don’t you Henry?”

Up at the
house, a couple of alleged malefactors lay prone on the grass. Two young white bullet headed males with their hands shackled behind them. A bored cop stood guard.

“Not very political
,” Everett said. “Never given it much thought.”

“
America isn’t even capitalist anymore, if it ever was – just a high tech feudalism,” Phil said, pleased to spin another web of words in the air. “We serfs can slave away for whatever Master we choose, but it’s still just an oligarchy, not ‘freedom.’

“
They talk about ‘profit, and ‘productivity,’ Henry. All that means is we’re getting paid less than our work is worth. The stock market’s a roulette table where they daily gamble that the drones will continue working for less than a living wage – even if knuckling under to it means our children will serve the children of the wealthy, forever and ever, world without end, selah selah, Amen.”

Everett
listened to Phil with part of the brain, but most of his gray matter was devoted to PoPo. It was surreal to be this close to a law enforcement manned crime scene without having been involved with it.

O
ne of the cops finished donning a HazMat suit and entered the front door of the house. This was a meth lab bust, and this house could now be officially designated a toxic waste site by the EPA. As it had to be a rental, only the land lord would get fucked.

Phil had continu
ed talking while Everett devoted his attention to mapping every cop’s location and spatial orientation in his brain. When Phil came up for air, Everett realized just how much this man was in love with his own voice.

“So
what do you think about all that, Henry?” Phil asked.

“About what?”
Everett asked.

“About what
I was just saying,” Phil said in a stiff voice.

“Oh
,” Everett said. “It’s food for thought.”

Chapter 32
: Hearts & Minds

Next morning they had Everett and Tobias peeling p
otatoes behind the kitchen. Everett sat on an upended plastic barrel, cutting off precise strips of skin and digging out the worst of the dark spots. It was soothing and enjoyable, getting the skin off without taking any more of the white potato meat than necessary.

Tobias paced
up and down, whispering through the sneer inscribed on his bony face. His lips barely moved; his voice was pitched in a mumble that no one but Everett would be able to make out. “All right, so we’re in. Now we wait? For what?”

“
Don’t know,” Everett said.

He
examined the potato he’d just picked up. Before he met Kerri, he was more accustomed to foods he could snatch up and gnaw at on the fly. With Kerri and Raymond came domesticated attitudes toward food.

I
f Kerri was doing the cooking here, she wouldn’t remove the skin at all. When he got back, he’d have her mash some potatoes the way he liked them. Lumpy, with the skins on and lots of butter.

Everett
glanced at Tobias, noting his impatience. “There’s a line that needs to be taken, but it doesn’t exist yet. Can’t describe it any better than that. You need to chill, ‘Otis.’”

“Chill?” Tobias said
, and hugged himself as he snarled. “I’m crawling out my skin, ‘Henry.’”

Tobias squatted
, grabbed a potato and sniffed it, turned it over a few times with a sharp look of distaste. He tossed it onto the heap at Everett’s feet.

He
stood and looked around, then back at Everett, who continued to peel one potato after another like an assembly line, with no wasted motions. Tobias noted how precise Everett’s peeling was, as if the paring knife was an extension of him. Every peel was identical in width and length, as if a machine were doing the work instead of a pair of hands. This bothered Tobias.

“We could torch
the place up?” Tobias suggested. “Barricade them all inside somehow, and then it’s crispy critter time.”

Everett
shook his head as he placed another peeled potato in the bucket of water to his left. “Too involved, too complicated, and too many ways to go south. Too messy. What would you say to the Fire Department and the Man when the neighbors 911ed? How would you deal with carting two tons of red hot gold out of the smoking ruins? You got a dump site in mind for cleaning up the bodies?”

“Clean up?” Tobias said
, his snarl mutating into smarminess. “I’m a ‘leave ‘em where they lay’ kind of guy.”

Everett
stared at him. “Need them to give up the location of the gold first. Too many places it could be hidden. This isn’t a hardware venue – you need to learn their hearts and minds like Phil has. Until the blood starts to flow, it’s always a people situation.”

Tobias giggled.
“And you’re a people person Henry? You’re gonna claim you’re not like me, that you wouldn’t mind seeing pretty much every human on earth die screaming?”

“You’re too bloodthirsty
Otis,” Everett said. “Anyways, didn’t say you had to like them, just know them enough to work.”

Tobias sneered at him in good humor.
“You got it bass ackwards, bo – think I haven’t seen the byplay between you and Phil?”

“C
heck this,” Tobias said, jerking his chin at something behind Everett.

Everett
turned as if indifferent.

David and Aaron were just entering the house through the ga
rden door, deep in conversation. David wore a black suit and tie with white shirt, a younger handsomer clone of Aaron. While Aaron spoke continuously, David nodded continuously in reply to whatever pearls of wisdom Aaron deigned to share.

Everett
flipped the paring knife so it embedded itself handle deep in an unpeeled potato at his feet, uncoiling to stand. They strolled to the garden door.

Beyond
the segmented glass panes of the french door, several dozen computers were arrayed in back to back rows on long folding tables. Most of the people from the feast were in there, sitting in front of computers with headsets on. Many of them with their mouths moving, deep in conversation with whoever was on the other end of the line. They looked as rough around the edges as ever, however they were all dressed in the uniform of the house, button shirts and dresses.

It was some kind of boiler room.
If the telemarketing game was dead in Amicus, Phil’s people had figured out how to make their way amidst the ashes.

Inside
, Aaron left the room. Everett took that opportunity to go in, with Tobias close at his heels.

“Hey
, you guys,” David said.

Tobias
reached out and fingered the lapel of David’s suit coat. “So when do we get our monkey suits, kid?”

“Soon
, I’m sure,” David said. He gestured around the boiler room with pride. “How do you like it? Cool, huh?”

To
Everett’s front, a stocky older Mexican guy stared at a major bank’s web page on his screen, saving files of some sort with a click of his mouse. He wasn’t just surfing the site or editing it. He had administrator privileges. It was unlikely Phil had a contract to do web maintenance for a big bank like that.

The next c
omputer down, a thin brown haired girl in a business suit was text messaging somebody using an IM program. As she typed a seven digit SSN, Everett saw tattoos on the backs of her hands, covered over with makeup.

Th
e family was phishermen. Identity theft and wire fraud: this seemed the source of the new money train here.

“Aaron and Phil made all this happen
,” David said. “Because we all live together we can keep expenses down. We can do collections and telemarketing cheaper than if it’s outsourced. We’re a bargain, Aaron says.”

“Ah
, there you are grasshopper,” Phil’s boomed from the doorway.

He
strode up to Everett with hand extended. Everett took it, gave a pump and let go as Phil cocked his head and looked at him with gleaming eyes.

“What do you th
ink of our little operation?” Phil asked.

Everett
started to open his mouth but stopped as Aaron came into the room. Phil turned his back on Aaron, seemingly as a deliberate insult. Taking Everett by the shoulder, he steered him outside, leaving Aaron staring after them.

“
You’ve heard about Amicus’s plight, I presume?” Phil asked. “It’s been hard for us, regaining our credibility.”

Behind them
through the French door, Aaron was haranguing David.

“
Our little boom town shriveled up and returned to farmland obscurity as fast as it arose,” Phil said. “We’ve had to really lower our rates to stay in the game.

“Globalization
killed us,” Phil said like they were dirty words. “It’s like the flow of water downhill from the first world to the third world. The multi nationals are square in the middle.

Phil looked off at the air as if posing for a photo opportunity. “Our j
obs move downhill to the slave nations. Our money is siphoned into offshore accounts. We first world workers take major cuts in life style to remain ‘competitive.’

“A downward spiral
, but someday the water levels will equalize, as it were.” Phil’s hands gestured in accompaniment with his spiel. “Then the corporations and the financiers will take our money and move on.”

Phil looked at
Everett as if to gauge his response. “When globalization goes belly up, the first world – America – will be a society of gated communities for the wealthy, surrounded by masses of permanently unemployed living without any form of government safety net. Welcome to the banana republic of America.”

Everett
smiled bleakly, and Phil looked startled.

W
hat, did Phil think Everett was a fascist? A communist? Phil’s game couldn’t be that strong, if he thought Everett was the type to hope for ‘change.’

The
wealthy didn’t owe him anything. Everett almost admired the way they stacked the deck in their own favor at every opportunity. If people didn’t like it they should do something about it.

So t
he rich take their money and run, sitting on their loot in high tech fortresses? They’d be isolated by their wealth, only having contact with the riff raff through their household menials and sex workers.

Guns would still be for sale on every corner. The private armies guarding them would be
easily corruptible rent-a-cops. They’re easy meat. The top predators in that world would gobble them up, only such beasts’ relative rarity saving the rich from decimation. Everett would have no trouble finding the big dogs and running with them, he’d land on his feet like always.

“Wha
t do you think about it, Henry?” Phil asked. “You’ve got to have a position.”

“
No, I don’t. You can’t fix things, Phil,” Everett said. “The Citizens don’t care. What, you’re going to start some kind of revolution like Charlie Manson?”

“I have my f
amily right here,” Phil said, his eyes grown larger. “You have people too, Henry. You’re not the hermetically sealed loner you project yourself to be. That would be completely anti-life and I see you’re a survivor. I see a friend or two, a woman.”

Phil closed his eyes.
“I see a child, too. A boy. A son.”

Everett
looked at him, and Phil laughed: “It was fifty-fifty odds on the gender, Henry. I’m just having fun with you, is that alright?”

Everett
kept his eyes flat against Phil’s probing. The storm giants yammered alarm. Danger, Will Robinson.

Phil
said, “This is the world your son will grow up in, grasshopper.” His voice had gone soft but firm. “This is the world your son will inherit.”

And in
a weird involuntary flash, Everett saw that Phil was right. They’d shoe horn Raymond into their scams, brainwash his son into a docile robot. A wave of rage washed over Everett as he incorporated Phil’s appraisal of their threat to Raymond.

A domino train had been
constructed in his head and now commenced to topple. He shuddered as synapses fired in unforeseen ways. Phil continued to drone on while Everett wrestled with this distractingly intense anger. Phil leaned closer and his voice was a smooth, low, penetrating murmur dripping into Everett’s ears like poison: “. . . You must do this for your son, you have no choice.”

Phil’s eyes
seemed to be spinning hypnotic cartoon disks. No, how could that be?

Everett
cut off Phil’s whispered spiel, irritated and unsettled by the Phisherman’s satisfied look. “What did you just say, Phil? You want me to think you’re Atlas, trying to carry the world on your shoulders? You talking some kind of crusade, the unwashed masses standing up to the Man? That’d be slapping a band aid on top of a severed femoral artery and calling it fixed.”

Everett
squeezed the rage away and stashed it in the lock box. He was shocked with himself, being manipulated to forget the bland diplomacy he should project toward this man. He had to give the old mind bender credit for a good psychic blow. With a few choice words Phil had rocked him somehow.

“Keep walking that lonesome
road of yours, you’ll be easy prey, grasshopper,” Phil said. “Seek safety in numbers.”

“It can’t be fixed
,” Everett said.