3.
Jamal
“I always thought being a PI would be cool,” Augustus groused, his head against the driver’s side car window of our rental. He sounded like a child who’d opened up his Christmas presents to find rat crap or something instead of … I dunno, whatever kids are into nowadays. Hatchimals, maybe? “But if I’d known it was like ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent excitement … dude, I’d have thought about going into something that has a little higher action to boredom ratio. Like being a greeter at Wal-Mart.”
“Yeah, I think they kinda work security there, too,” I said, staring out the window into the grey day ahead. The skies were not clear over Cleveland, Ohio, where we currently found ourselves sitting. In a rental car. Watching a warehouse.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Augustus lifted his head off the window. “You know that at least a person a day tries to shoplift at Walmart. So you’d be seeing action every day. I could be in the thick of it, stopping the pretty criminals before they get out the door. Bringing them to their knees with my superpowers.”
“Mmm,” I said, kinda listening to him but mostly numb because we’d been sitting out here all night. “I doubt they’d be pleased if you ripped up the entry to their store to stop a shoplifter from walking out with a pack of gum. How much damage do you figure that’d do, having to replace concrete floors and—?”
“I’d just leave a pile of dirt next to the door and bind ‘em up in that,” Augustus said, waving me off with a dismissive hand. “Hell, as amped up as I am these days, I could almost do it with a handful. I’ve been practicing. And I’m gonna tell you something, too—whenever I got to Walmart in winter in Minnesota—” He mimed the motions of being cold, like it triggered some subconscious memory for him. I could sympathize; Minnesota was cold like nowhere else I’d ever lived. “—they got all kinds of dirt on those floor mats, tracked in with the soaked-ass snow that melts everywhere. Everything’s so damned dirty all the time up there, it’s gross, you know? Like—”
“We got movement,” I said, sitting up a little straighter in the passenger seat.
“Yeah, awright,” Augustus said, sitting up, too. “To be continued.”
I frowned at him. “We really got to continue the discussion about the dirt content of Walmart entry mats in winter time in Minnesota?”
“Yeah, because I ain’t done griping about ‘em yet,” Augustus said. “Every store in Minnesota in winter. Every one. It’s terrible. I hate winter. I wish we could have drawn the assignment for Louisiana this time. Why’d Friday and Olivia get the one in the Deep South while we get stuck with Ohio?”
“Personally, I’m wondering why Olivia drew the short straw and got stuck with Friday at all,” I muttered under my breath, trying to watch the minimal action ahead of us. “What’d she do to Reed to piss him off and get paired with Friday?”
“I think it’s a random rotation,” Augustus said. “Like, he keeps a list of all of us, and sometime your number just comes up, you know? Like the worst lottery you can imagine. Maybe worse even than the Shirley Jackson one.”
“You think being paired up with Friday is worse than being stoned to death by your friends and your family?” I paused. “You may have a point there.”
“That’s what I’m saying.” And he turned back to the scene before us.
Under the grim Cleveland morning we had a light industrial warehouse-district scene, painted in the greys of late winter. No fresh buds on the trees, nor any trees at all; the only green was a few ragged spikes of grass sprouting from cracks in the sidewalks. The aged warehouses before us had been around back when Cleveland was a little pre-industrial powerhouse, and definitely before it all went to hell and manufacturing left in droves in the last thirty years.
It was seedy. Sketchy, even. I’d seen a good half dozen junkies pass through in the last twelve hours. You could tell by their thinness, by the glazed look in their eyes. They were miles away, even though they were here. Our rental car might have been in danger of losing its hubcaps if Augustus hadn’t peppered the kid who tried to steal them with pebbles until he left. Just kept pinging him with them like little BB’s until the bastard gave up and went home. Didn’t even notice us inside, watching him, giggling every time he took a hit, swatting at himself like he was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.
“Yo, I think this is our guy,” Augustus said as my phone buzzed in my pocket, the light vibration triggering me to jerk slightly.
“Mm-hm,” I said, fishing for my phone. I extracted it and lit it up, and a text message was waiting for me. Unknown Number.
You’re looking in the wrong place.
“Cryptic,” I muttered. Who is this? I answered back, my finger communicating directly via 1’s and 0’s.
“He’s just standing there,” Augustus said. “Why’s he just standing there? Oh. Lighting up a smoke.”
I glanced up; sure enough, there was a skinny white dude up there blazing a cigarette, the fire-red glow of its tip lit, and he was putting his lighter away. I grunted acknowledgment, and waited a second.
My phone buzzed again: Only a year, and you’ve already forgotten me? I thought I had made a bigger impression.
“The hell?” I muttered.
A second later, the phone buzzed again, this time with a photo. It was the blurry black and white of a security camera shot, grainy and low-res, but there was a person standing in the middle of it …
And they had a drawn-on digital skull face over a trench-coated body. The photo lasted only a moment, the skull face looking straight out at me, then the photo disappeared as though it had been yanked out of the digital memory of my phone.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“He’s just sitting there smoking,” Augustus said. “Just sitting there. How much more boring could this be? Do something already, gangsta. I been sitting out here all night waiting for you to incriminate yourself, and you can’t even get your lazy self moving until it’s getting toward lunchtime. The early bird gets the worm, and you know what your sorry ass is going to get? Nothing. Nothing, you hear me!”
“I hear you,” I murmured, and texted back. Augustus didn’t need my attention right now anyway, not really. He’d be ranting until this guy decided to do something. ArcheGrey1819?
So you do remember me, the phone buzzed again a moment later, lighting up with her reply.
You’re not an easy person to forget, I replied. Being the best hacker I ever met.
“Just sitting there. Like the laziest-ass white boy east of the Mississippi. I ain’t saying they get lazier out west, but—you are lazy, boy. You’re so lazy they make a whole line of chairs with your name on it. Just do something, you piece of sh—”
Flattery will get you everywhere.
I paused. Why had she decided to text me now, of all times? You said I’m looking in the wrong place. For what?
The buzz was near instantaneous. Either ArcheGrey had magical thumbs or she was interfacing directly with an electronic device. Oh, you know. That thing you’ve been looking for in your spare time. That thing we talked about. Before.
“Ambition, son. ‘Early to bed, early to rise.’ I mean, I don’t care for the supervillain type, but at least they got ambition. Taking over the world means you don’t roll your ass out of bed at the crack of eleven and think it’s all going to work out, you know? And they be getting on with their evil promptly. Not sitting smoking a cigarette in a crackhead-ass neighborhood after spending their evening doing not a damned thing while my ass is stuck watching you and pelting idiot hubcap stealing kids for my own kicks—”
I was blazing back to her, interfacing directly with my phone to send quickly. I tended to get away from the habit in times of low stress, trying to disconnect more often. You mean the video file of you know who? In this case, I meant Sienna.
Maybe, she replied. Took a little longer, too, like she was teasing me or else thinking about how best to reply. Teasing me either way, I suppose.
Where’s the right place to look? I sent back.
“… this is the kind of villain that would think robbing a Chuck E. Cheese is the path to wealth. Can’t even be bothered with sticking up a Pizza Hut, no. Blinded by the bling bling of thin crust pizza and gaming, you go strutting your meta powered ass into a frigging kid’s game and pizza parlor on a Sunday afternoon and bring the thunder down on your ass—Thunder and Lightning, that’s what they should call us—”
“I don’t make thunder,” I said absently as I awaited Arche’s reply. “And neither do you.”
“Rocks rubbing together sound like thunder,” Augustus said. I could hear the heightened agitation in his voice. He was working himself up, but I didn’t pay much attention, because I was waiting for that text to come back.
Where it actually is, she replied, helping me precisely not at all.
Where is it, actually ? I shot back. This was the thing; the holy grail in our question of late. Please, I added a second later.
And he has manners. For this, I will reward you.
“That’s it. That’s it!” Augustus said, breaking into a shout. “I’ve had all I can takes, I can’t takes no more!” And he threw open his door.
“That … was a grammatically ridiculous sentence,” I muttered, still engrossed in my phone and ArcheGrey1819. The fact he’d thrown open his door and was getting out was lost on me for a second or so after he’d left and was driven home by the slamming of said door. “Whut?” I looked up.
Augustus was striding across the street toward the skinny-ass white dude smoking the cigarette, and my mouth fell open as I stood there, my phone in hand, trying to figure out what to do about it.
You should probably get after him, my phone buzzed, delivering this message to me. We can talk later. After you have a chance to think about whose interests you’re neglecting to consider.
I stared at that a quarter second longer than I probably should have, trying to figure out what she meant, when a shout cracked through the street like that thunder I couldn’t actually make. And not like boulders rubbing together, either, but like my brother, all worked up into a fearsome head of steam.
“HEY, YO!” he shouted at the man smoking the cigarette, and I sighed, throwing open my own door.
“Here we go again,” I said, hurrying out after him to catch up before it all went to hell.