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Goodwill

10 Jan

She should have been suspicious when she saw a man smoking on the hood of an idling sedan across the street from her apartment building.  Her block wasn’t as dangerous as other streets in the waterfront district, but the entire neighborhood was too close to Old City to be properly monitored and few people chanced the streets after dark.  It was too easy to run afoul of criminals.

Hindsight was always 20-20, thought Joan as her brother-in-law rose from the couch.  Towering several inches over six feet, Adam smiled at her nervously as he cowered behind his smaller, older brother.  Joan glowered up at him and was pleased with the results.  If he had a hat, it would be twisted beyond recognition in his hands.

The twins, still awake despite the time, had gone quiet when she entered as if trying to fade into the background and pass unnoticed.  Joan jerked her thumb down the hallway.  “Bedtime, now.”

Joan slipped out of her shoes by the door while the kids scampered down the hall.  She couldn’t believe that the man who had ostracized her family in their suburban home, who had brought down a hail of government fines and restrictions forcing them to move deep into Rochester where the permits still allowed, who had left her children crying as he was dragged away, had the gall to be in her living room.  Once they were out of earshot she turned on her husband.  ”What is he doing here?”

“He has a situation at work.” Joan could hear the hesitation in Henry’s voice.

Adam moved to speak, but Joan held up a hand to hold him off and walked away.  She was cold, and her scrubs were filthy.  Twelve hours at the hospital had left her uncomfortable and weary.  If she spoke hastily, goodwill wouldn’t be on the forefront of her mind.

Henry’s footsteps followed her down the hall to their small bedroom.  He caught the door before it slammed in his face and slid into the room behind her.

“I just don’t understand why he had to come here, Henry.”  She slipped out of her dirty uniform without looking at him.

“He didn’t have anyone else to go to.”

“He could go away,” she pointed out.

Henry sighed, shuffled his feet in the doorway.  He was defeated.

“Can you just talk to him?  It’s late.”

She pulled a clean shirt over her head and counted to ten.  Her temper could be unmanageable.

“He’s my brother, Joan,” Henry said.

Joan sat on the edge of their bed and jerked on a pair of pants.  “He’s a criminal,” she snapped.

He took a sharp breath and she knew her words had hurt.  The brothers were in the same line of work.

“It’s lucky I’ve never been arrested, then,” he murmured.  Joan said nothing.  Her cheeks burned, shame tempering her anger.  He turned to leave when she met his eyes, pausing momentarily.  “I’ll put the kids to bed.”

Joan stood after he’d gone and paced the small bedroom.  She could hear boisterous laughter and giggles coming from down the hall.  No doubt the twins had requested a bedtime story.  She caught herself smirking.  The words were indistinguishable, but if it involved anything worse than the sombrero debacle, she didn’t even want to know.

Adam wasn’t a bad man.  He was just stupid, and her family had paid a high price for his mistake.  She couldn’t excuse his behavior, but mostly it was the fact that he’d forgotten to check for tracers when he’d come to their house after his last job.  The police caught the signal and swarmed.  Apparently they’d been on his tail for weeks.

The laughter won her over.  She walked toward it, careful to step over toys strewn across the hall by her absent-minded children.  The newest distraction left the oldest forgotten; right now, Uncle Adam, who hadn’t been back to visit for three years, was looking pretty shiny.

Madeline sat on Adam’s lap.  He was regaling her with the old story of Aladdin, though the names and events were switched in places to include such unlikely events such as Christmas and Adam himself.  Even Henry and little Ethan were listening intently.  They were all smiles and giggles as the wacky story unfolded.

She took a seat by Henry and listened to the story with her head on his shoulder.  Joan had forgotten that Adam had a way with children.  Not his own, of course.  They lived in Charlotte, and he wouldn’t get travel permits until well after his parole was up.  Until then, he had to live in Rochester with nowhere to legally go and no chance of being hired by employers once they pulled his background files.

Henry had been right.  Adam really didn’t have anywhere else to go.

-_-

            Once the story ended Henry corralled the children to bed, leaving Adam and Joan alone.  Joan pulled two mugs from the cupboard above the stove and poured lukewarm coffee.  Adam handed her the cream, a peace offering that came with an apprehensive smile.

“Adam, I don’t want anything to do with your two-bit drug running schemes,” she said, taking the carton.

“It’s not a scheme,” Adam corrected quickly.  “We have a guy who bit the bullet.”  He took a deep breath and continued without meeting her eyes. “He’s not… mobile, and he needs some help.  Medical stuff, you know?”

For a moment, Joan said nothing.  The somber expression on Adam’s face said this wasn’t one of his typical projects.  People were already injured, and Adam preferred money over danger any day.  He was out of his element and looking for help.  Joan rubbed the knot forming between her eyes.  This was not how she’d pictured her evening off.

“Are the police involved?”  She sat at the kitchen table.  He sat across from her, his meaty hands enveloping his cup, and shook his head.

“So you want me to, what, risk my family’s safety to babysit some guy until he can walk again?”

“Basically.” He looked at his coffee as if in need of something stronger. “You’d be paid double for missing work.”

Joan’s eyebrows rose, but her brother-in-law wasn’t laughing.  “You’re serious.”

“Believe it or not, Joan, but I’m not actually supposed to be involved in this.”  He sighed.  “I answered a phone call, and here I am.”

She believed him.  Adam could not afford to pay half her weekly salary even when business was good.  If money was being exchanged so frivolously, his boss was calling the shots.  Joan knew that small time criminals didn’t have bosses, though.  “Adam, what’d you get yourself into?”

Joan noted that Adam fidgeted under scrutiny.  “If you’re interested, we need to get him out of the cold.  Otherwise, I should get going,” he said.

[to be continued]

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Word Play: Evil

8 Jul

After abandoning his post with Sophie, Avery drove to Dr. Lewis’s veterinarian clinic and pulled up to the back entrance.  He made a very polite, very menacing phone call to the proprietor while his partner sat in the backseat with Apollo’s head in her lap.  She seemed incapable of following protocol; he’d reminded her three times to call the incident in to the Operator before she’d picked up her phone.

Miles would want to know.  He wasn’t just a recruiter any more than Sophie just played with computers or Avery just enjoyed target practice.  Depending on who you met, Miles was a brother, an uncle or a father.  He was the heart and brains of the organization, and everyone knew it.  Even the police knew it, which was why an untraced call to the Operator that would take hours to transmit would have to suffice for the bad news.

Avery waited, his gun cocked, and listened to the highway’s hum echo over from the Epstine Marshall Exchange.  As the metal door cracked open, emitting a sliver of bright light into the darkness, he thought that the road out of Rochester had never seemed so far away.  Avery leveled his gun at the veterinarian and watched the older man freeze on site, his muscles tensed for the anticipated shot.

And that was the problem with card holding citizens, thought Avery with a grimace of disgust.  They’re all afraid of their shadows.

“What’s the word?” he called out the window.

“We don’t have time for this shit,” hissed Sophie from the backseat.  With her silent vigil, he’d almost forgotten her presence.

“Allergies,” responded the man in a quavering voice, his eyes still closed tight.

Avery holstered his gun and stepped from the vehicle, glad to be free of the combined stench of urine and blood coming from the backseat.  The alley, however, was no better.  Night air pressed down heavy, combining garbage and animal stink with the various odors of the city itself.  The result was a soupy air almost too foul to breathe.

The man scurried into action, seemingly immune to the noxious odors of the street as he carried half the burden of Apollo’s dead weight.  The two men moved slowly, heaving the body between them step by step over slick cobblestones to the small gurney waiting inside the door.  It was too small to hold the young man’s lean form; his limbs dangled over the edges as they wheeled him down the corridor.

Avery followed the small gurney while Sophie moved the car.  The sterile room they entered was lined with stainless steel counters and unidentifiable equipment mounted on rolling racks.  They set the body down, and then the veterinarian rolled Apollo onto his side.  Human stench caught Avery hard, and he stepped back involuntarily; he’d seen what happened to men too weak to control their gut.

He hovered uselessly while Dr. Lewis cut Apollo’s bloody shirt away and prodded his torso for internal bleeding.  The wiry man assembled monitors, scalpels and oxygen tubes designed for canines without glancing at his observer.

“How bad?” he finally managed to ask.

“Too weak for anesthesia,” the vet answered without looking up.

Avery nodded at the confirmation of his suspicions.  Truthfully, Apollo probably wouldn’t feel it anyway.  His face was nearly unrecognizable beneath the blood and swelling, though Avery had never seen him before anyway, and he would have needed a medic even without the stray round.  At most the man would whimper; he was sure there would be no screams tonight.

Avery left before the scalpel had a chance to test his faith and found Sophie sitting in the half-empty kennel.  She didn’t understand either, he saw.  On the drive over, when he’d worked up the stomach to ask who Apollo Passos was, she had responded simply.  He was the shadow of Hesiod.

Avery shivered now at the thought.  The man was young, his face hardly one to be mistaken for a murderer’s, but everyone in the Family felt his protective presence like a woolen blanket to ward off the dead winter.  He was a ghost, a man whose touch dropped men and women with fearsome impartiality and faded into darkness again without a trace, but he was their ghost.  In the old days men might’ve hunted, marked, cursed and denounced him as evil, but the embodiment of death could never die; he was immortal, and he kept the wolves at bay.

At least, he wasn’t supposed to die, thought Avery, his eyes on the bloodstains spotting the hem of Sophie’s shirt.  He wasn’t sure anymore.  If shadows could die, maybe men could, too.

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Word Play: Fungible

25 May

Circumstances had changed since the riots. The disenfranchised youth grew, understood and adapted. The Hesiod learned from its children, expanded and organized. The original components functioned; the new members lived.

Miles Rizden, financial wizard and orchestrator of Old City crime, had been behind the scenes since the beginning. He was a calculating child with a quicksilver grin and then a callous man with the golden touch. Success was inevitable. He earned the degree, found the connections and built an empire – impressive in the days of strict government oversight. And then, as the world turned to madness and the government screamed for control, he realized that his purpose was to undermine its power.

There was a time when his bosses called him charming when he was sly and clever when he lied. He was persuasive, believable and clear-headed. They called him reliable. He excelled, and they called him Boss.

The Hesiod called him Recruiter.

When he brought Apollo Passos into his world of darkness, it had been for the organization. The boy wasn’t a brother. Miles was a handler with a slick tongue, and Apollo was the new recruit, a man with the skill sets of someone he would never meet.

Each team member had the abilities of another. The parts were interchangeable and managed to form the same composite no matter how they were jumbled. It was the smartest way to avoid government infiltration. Each team member was to be fungible, a simple commodity to be traded for an identical skill.

At least, that is what he’d thought at the time. Circumstances changed. They always did. Beliefs became devotions, coworkers became friends and business got personal. It always did.  Before he knew it, the little radicals he guided onto his side were more than pawns.  They were family.

It was the phone that woke Miles. He sat upright in the darkness of the bunker, surprised at the chill, and fumbled for the light switch as the caller disconnected and redialed. His fingertips brushed rough concrete, and he sighed heavily before clapping twice.

The light was blinding. Given the hideous surroundings, Miles was almost glad he couldn’t see; the gray slab walls would bore him to death if he saw them much longer. The room was a cellar once used as a cistern during the early twentieth century. It had been retrofitted with electricity and plumbing since then, making it an adequate but dismal living quarters. The natural surfaces were gritty and had a tendency toward the damp, so he didn’t risk decorating.

He reached the phone and answered on the third redial. The monotonous voice relayed the message, and his stomach dropped.

We found the sun halfway across the River Styx. He’s visiting friends with allergies.

He sat back on his cot and digested the words with his head in his hands. Apollo had been missing for months. A search of his apartment turned up nothing but rumors, which was to be expected. A search of the prison, however, turned up empty. He had vanished, a ghost among phantoms. When Jack Kohel walked free, Miles had expected the worst.

But the boy was alive. That much, at least, was a relief. The message indicated that he was badly injured but breathing. Allergies… They were taking him to Dr. Lewis, the veterinarian, for help. Miles did a mental scan of his peoples’ positions across the city and hit upon the industrial complex in the southeast Erstine District as the most likely spot of origin.

The concrete door had never seemed like more of an imprisonment. The room was a glorified bank vault, but it was the safest place to hide while his possessions were being seized by the government. Miles had an undying faith in reason. He knew better than to leave this cell, walk outside and head east until he arrived at the animal hospital; routine police scans would catch him before he made it three blocks.

By all rights Miles should be there, though.  If ever his little brother needed him, it was now.  If ever there was a place he ought to be, it was by Apollo’s side.  The kid had never let him down after all the years and horrible things he’d been asked to do, and Miles knew his absence tonight was pure failure to live up to that trust.

He paced anxiously from cot to shower in twenty well-traced steps.  The phone would not ring again.  The message would not be repeated, and protocol forbid radio communication if there was a death.  He would never know unless he opened the bunker door.

After fifteen minutes he turned to the door, his jaw set.  He was a mastermind.  He was clever, a quick thinker and a smooth talker, but as he wrenched the heavy door open he felt only naked fear.

If ever there was a benevolent force at work, he prayed, let it work tonight.

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