They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (8 page)

Kamikaze gave the room a moment of silence before he continued, "Now, if Don here will let us all get back to making money--"

"Hold up," the big black guy said to him, his shoulders square, "I think you need to pay that man for fucking with his family."

"I didn't do anything to his family," Kamikaze blurted. "He will get paid for being here, are you guys understanding that? I'm being clear, right? Each of you will receive a $5500 consultation fee for being here."

It didn't sway the guy. "I think it would be professional and make me a helluva lot more comfortable doin' business with y'all if you gave him a bump for what you did. I think he deserves it."

Tracey slammed her purse on the table. "For Christ's sake!" From her wallet she counted out ten hundreds, folded them up and slapped them on the table in front of me. "There. Can we move the fuck on now?"

I left the money on the table and crossed my arms wit
h a nod. "All right. I'm good."

Kamikaze's jaw clenched involuntarily as he muttered, "Fucking unbelievable," under his breath. Little prick. "All right. Our objective is a stealth grab of some merchandise located in the facility that's outlined in your packets. Nothing major: five spiral-bound notebooks and two hard drives. Real exciting stuff."

"What on 'em?" my new black friend asked.

The kid folded his hands and looked directly at him.
"That's not important."

"Who're we jacking it from?" I asked.

"That's in the packet on page twenty-four. We'll be going through that tomorrow after all you guys have had a chance to read it."

I flipped to page twenty-four. It was titled 'Section 8 - A Brief History of Dr. David Dola
nd.' Didn't recognize the name.

"When are we scheduled to discuss the pay for the job?" I asked the kid.

"It'll be merit pay based on what tasks we each get after we've formulated an action plan. As I said, for this consultation, you'll each be paid $5500."

I nodded. "That square with you, Trace?"

"I'm here, aren't I?" she said without raising her head from the notes she made on her pad.

God, I hated these things. No wonder I was drunk all the time in Europe. I took a huge gulp of Scotch.

The squirrelly guy with the laptop that transcribed every word anybody said while it surfed the Internet, bought stuff on eBay, and played Angry Birds piped up, "H-how fast."
Whatever the rest of it was, he mumbled out too much to understand.

"I'm sorry," Kamikaze said, "one more time, man?"

Squirrelly Joe got annoyed and angrily repeated, "
I said
, 'how fast can you fly?'"

Kamikaze glanced at Tracey. "Me? How fast can I fly? Uh, okay, why?"

The squirrelly guy, greasy-skinned, bearded and stuck in a body built for celibacy, sighed like somebody in a coffee shop that was just told they were out of goat milk or cinnamon or whatever the fuck it was they put in those drinks. He didn't make eye contact with anything other than the tabletop as he pissed out, "Because your boss's plane is about to have an accident. Yeah, look around at each other like you don't know what I'm talking about, everybody. The guy pulling the-th--he set this all up. The guy you all work for and who's got us all here in this room. Are all of you going to tell me this is for a 'job?' Don't lie to me because I'm not stupid. I know what this is. Your boss wants my nanites, he-he has for years. That's what this whole fucking thing is all about. Not some 'job.' The man has got people watching me, spying on me and coming around my place at night and when I'm not around."

Oh, it got better.

"My cameras can't catch them because they're somehow invisible, some kind of light-bending tech that he stole from somebody like me, but don't think I don't know they're there, you assholes. I can see the dust move on the feed, I'm not stupid. I
feel
them out there every night, watching me, and I'm honing that sense. One day, I'll be burning invisible bodies on my trash pile. I invented nanotechnology in a
shack
, and he wants to act like I'm stupid. But when the nanit
es upgrade my eyes, Bill Gates'
private army won't be able to hide."

Tracey rubbed her temples.

I. Hated. This. Fucking. Shit.

Kamikaze held up his hand. "Mr. Spencer, nobody here has been watching you."

Spencer, who had to be that guy Jim Spencer who was on the FBI's Most Wanted list for killing people with machines or something, shook his head and kind of half laughed, half growled. He kept wringing his hands in his lap, except for when he felt like he needed to dig his fingernails into his forearm.

"Yeah, okay. Okay," he said. "If that's the case, then I guess it's not a problem that your boss's plane is going to crash right now because he's not your boss, right? He's on his way out of the country, isn't he? He's on his sleek private jet on the way to France right now," Spencer pointed up, "Waaaay up in the sky. Above all of us. On his
jet
that's infested with microscopic nanites from the nav system to the toilet where he shits. And they're all waiting for me to send a signal to down the plane. So I guess we'll see if you're fast enough to fly halfway across the Atlantic and save him, you fucking asshole."

Kamikaze looked at Tracey like he was searching for some help while ever
ything fell apart in his hands.

"Jim," Tracey said calmly, holding up the cap to her bottled water in her scarlet-painted fingernails, "There is no 'boss' here. Do not crash a plane, or I'll shift this cap right into your brainstem. Do you understand me? Calm down. Nobody here is after you." She rolled the bottle cap in her fingers to keep his attention on it. "Do you understand me? Think about it. Bill Gates is just a businessman, okay? He has
nothing
to do with this.
You
are off your meds, I know you are. It's pretty damn obvious. Let's settle things down, okay?"

Tracey pointed at me and my black friend. "You guys go get something to eat.
Keep your phones on, we'll let you know when it's time to resume this clusterfuck-in-progress."
Her eyes dug into us. "Stay close by."

Spencer's shoulders shook with anger. His laptop screen read "WHAT THE FUCK SHE'S GOING TO KILL ME" in giant type. Tracey teleported it away to who knew where with a hissing suck of air rushing in to fill the space it left.

"They're gonna kill me," he said, shaking his head, running his fingers through his slick hair. "Don't leave me here, they're gonna kill me."

"You're gonna be fine," I told him. "Right, Trace?"

"Right. We're just going to talk."

"I'm a dead man."

Me and the other guy left the room and shut the do
or. Tracey locked it behind us.

We cruised the strip and pulled over at Mickey Gilley's place for barbeque. There was a fucking depressing air in the car with us. Three beers apiece and a lot of brisket
later, we finally loosened up.

He introduced himself as '
Stagga
Lee' out of St. Louis.

"
The Beast of Fire
," I replied. "Ohio."

"Cool." He didn't act like he had ever heard of me, which was fine by me. He polished off a Heineken and set the empty bottle on the table. "So what'chu think about all this, man?"

I gnawed a hunk of meat. "I think I would've turned it down like a fucking fat girl the day before prom if the little slanty motherfucker hadn't threatened my people. I got no interest at all in being here."

"True," Lee nodded, "That was fucked up. But we all here now. Holdin' on to what he did'll just make it worse for everybody. Just get paid now. Keep your mind on that. Just get paid. This your first time with something like this?"

"No, unfortunately. I've been retired for a while, but I've been around this kind of thing before. How 'bout you?"

"Oh, I get up to stuff like this, but nothing major. I never been paid for a consultation, you know." Then he moved straight to the main event. "So what is it you 'bring to the table' as th
e man says. I guess 'The Beast of Fire
' is kinda self-explanatory, right?"

There was always a pause when we sized another Post-Human up to decide if it was okay to spill our secret. When somebody knew what you could do, even just a part of it, they had power over you. From that moment on, they could start figuring ways to overcome your ability. They could start figuring out who they could sell that knowledge to. It started the process of your downfall if you told the wrong asshole. The smarter of us made the call never to do it without having some kind of dirt on the other person first. But Lee seemed all right, and Tracey was seeming less all right the longer I had to be in a room with her, and I needed somebody I could trust in there.

I kind of glanced around the empty place and lit a little fireball for him see. "You?"

That took some of the tension out of the conversation, and Lee opened up way more than he should have. Wasn't hard to tell he was inexperienced at this. "Very nice," he said. "I got a split-level set. God threw some damn darts at the power wall when he made me. I can get inside dogs' heads and communicate with 'em, first off, I got like a electrical thing where I can make like computers reboot and TVs get static-y pictures and crap, I can move stuff with my brain, just nothin' over ten or fifteen pounds, and I'm stronger than a regular guy my size. Little bit of leadskin, too."

"Shit, you're all over the map, man."

"You ain't lyin'."

I pushed my plate back, guts full of cow. "You're a pretty big guy already. How strong are you?"

"I can bench around seven hundred-sixty-five. Puts me at stronger than I should be at this size, but not, like, rip apart a car strong or anything."

"You bulletproof?"

"See, no, I got the shit end of the stick again on that. I'm tough enough that I don't get scratches or scrapes from anything, but a knife with enough pressure'll slice me up like anybody else. I don't get into shit like this job here because my shit don't measure up to people like you or Tracey, you know, but they want my advice and they want to pay me for it, I'll make the drive, you know? But your shit's cool, though. I had no idea I was sittin' around with people like y'all when I came or I would'a kept my fucking mouth shut, you know? I mean, your shit is cool, man."

"It's a pain in the ass most of the time."

He showed me his left forearm. It had fleshy scar tissue from elbow to the thumb. "Talk about pain in the ass? Pit bull in Atlanta didn't like me in his head when I was a kid. Tore up my arm and all down my back. Would'a ripped my ass crossways if my momma hadn't shot the bastard. Just 'cause I was fucking around like a kid'll do. But what you got, I'd give a nut to have something good like that. You can do a lot with that."

"Yeah, but I still retired broke. I don't know why the fuck they want me here so bad, anyway. Hell, I was just the damn lookout most of the time."

He laughed. "I
hate
lookout, man. I get my dogs to do that for me."

"No fucking way."

"Yeah, nobody gives a stray dog a second look. They sure as hell don't think he's helpin' rob a place, you know."

"Ha. That's tight." I took a long drink before I said what neither of us wanted said. "So what do you think they're doing to that guy Spencer in there?"

Lee shook his head and
signaled
the waitress for another beer. "Straightenin' him out, I guess. I hope. I ain't come here for a bunch of violent shit."

"Yeah." I wiped my mouth on a napkin. "I got out of this shit because of shit
like
this." I glanced around to make sure nobody was coming near our table. "If he's not, though, if we go back there and he's gone. What do you think?"

Lee shrugged his shoulders without a clue. "I don't know, man. Bail out?"

"I don't know. I guess. I don't want in on that shit."

Both our phones buzzed with a text message from Tracey: COME BACK TO MEETING.

I ordered another round and we took our time. 'Cause, y'know, fuck those guys.

When we did make our way back to the out-of-the-way conference room, Spencer had settled down to having a quiet staring contest with the table. His laptop had been returned to him, but the screen just had a word processing program open that slowly filled with random letters and half words. He had a bandage on his arm where it looked like
he had been given an injection.

"Everything all right?" I asked Tracey.

She tapped her pen on the table. "We stopped him from crashing the plane. And thank God because my ten thousand shares of Microsoft would have taaaanked, and I am
not
trying to be poor."

Sitting in his chair like the damn Godfather, Kamikaze asked, "What took you guys so long. We sent you that text," he looked at Trac
ey's phone, "half an hour ago."

"We got stuck in traffic," Lee replied.

"Fuck traffic," Kamikaze said like he had suddenly grown brass between his legs. "When it's time to get here, you get here. Anybody that wants to get paid and wants to win doesn't make excuses."