They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Read online

  "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 the 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 Tracey'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."

  Lee looked at me, and I just shrugged it off.

  "Don't look at your fuckin' friend over there," Kamikaze told him, coming around the table to step up face-to-face to Lee. "Next time, be here on time. You got it?"

  Lee just said, "Man, you better get out my face right now."

  "Say you'll be here on time tomorrow."

  Lee pointed to Kamikaze's chair. "Get the fuck out my face and go sit down."

  Neither one of them backed down.

  Tracey set her pen down. "Rory, sit down."

  "Say you'll be here on time from now on," Kamikaze said to Lee again.

  Then he jerked and spasmed and fell to his knees.

  He gasped for air, and Spencer stopped staring at the table to stare at the spastic on the floor instead. Rory gurgled on the Berber carpet, convulsing and crawling like a man out of control.

  I glanced at Tracey, who sat in her seat, checking e-mails on her phone. On the table beside her yellow pad of paper was a bloody piece of muscle and tissue in the exact shape of a bottle cap.

  Rory suffered in agony, his eyes rolling around and every once in a while locking on one of us with a begging look on his face. In one clean teleport swap, Tracey shifted the bottle cap out of him and the hunk of tissue in front of her back into him. She cleaned up the blood on the table with some wipes from her purse, picked up the bottle cap with another wipe and dumped the whole mess into a garbage can.

  Kamikaze grabbed his chest and cried.

  "Don," she said calmly, holding out the garbage can to me. I had turned away and stood at the bar waiting for it to be over. "Don. Burn what's in here. No evidence."

  I turned around enough so I could only see the garbage can and super-heated everything in it to a charred lump while leaving the can intact. I turned back to the bar.

  What felt like endless minutes of awkward, uncomfortable silence passed, but Kamikaze still went at it; shaking, sputtering, coughing, twitching. Even though none of us really cared enough about the little bastard to even think about calling an ambulance and risking going to jail, I told Tracey while I stared into a fresh plastic cup of Scotch, "Can you fucking finish this thing or something, Trace? Jesus."

  "Fine," she said, "Lee, get his phone out of his pocket."

  "The hell I am. I'm not goin' near that."

  "Lee," she barked. "Get the phone out of his fucking pocket before I put the rest of this bottle in your heart."

  "Trace--"

  "Shut up, Don. Lee. Do it."

  Lee held Rory down with his knee and quickly dug through his pockets. He wouldn't look in the kid's eyes. Rory's hand clutched at Lee's shirt, but Lee pushed it aside with a "Get off me." He got the phone and threw it on the table to Tracey, who thanked him and pulled her own cell from her purse.

  "Everyone be quiet w
hile I do this," she said, fingering through screens on her phone. A few seconds later, the air in the room sucked and hissed, and Rory was gone.

  "Two miles above the South Pacific," she informed us. "He's got an aunt in Singapore, so if they ever find him, they'll just assume he was flying to see her and fell out of the sky. The body will be too eaten up by fish to autopsy or anything. So we're all safe, guys. Everybody can relax and put it behind us. We've got a lot of work to do, so let's get started. Sit down."

  She snapped her fingers in Spencer's face to get his attention. He looked up at her with his dull eyes. "Tell your nanites to remove all traces of blood from the table and any of Kamikaze's fluids that may have gone into the carpet. Clean the entire room."

  He nodded.

  Tracey took a deep breath. "Now, everybody open up your books. I want to knock out a good chunk of this today."

  She didn't really give anyone time to think about what the hell had just happened, just moved on. It was the best way to make people okay with shit like that. Hell, I was more than happy to forget it had happened. I brought the bottle of Scotch with me to the table.

  "Go easy on that," Tracey told me as she flipped through the booklet written by the man she had just killed. "Wow, this is some dry reading. Why don't we skip the background info for now and cut straight to the shit that can kill us. Page thirty-one."

  We all turned to page thirty-one without a word.

  Tracey finished her water, opened another bottle and set the cap down on the table in front of her.

  I hated this shit.

  Chapter 7

  Recidivism

  The next morning somehow managed to get worse.

  "I swear to God if Lee doesn't walk his black ass through that door in the next five minutes, I will skull drag him from my Mercedes all the way back to St. Louis and throw whatever's left on his family's front stoop."

  Not even nine a.m. the morning after she had killed Kamikaze, and this was the shit that came out of Tracey's mouth. And she kept humming that Janis Joplin song 'Piece of My Heart,' which was nine kinds of fucked-up. This was the same girl who had made me breakfast in bed in Paris and gone to town on me while I ate it. She'd had no shame. A bottle of wine in her and she would do anything.

  I texted Lee under the table. WHR R U? GET UR ASS HERE NOW.

  Tracey slapped her pen on her yellow pad she was eleven pages of notes deep in. "Why do you keep looking at me, Don? What the fuck is it?"

  My eyes dropped to the blank notepad I hadn't written anything on. "I'm not fucking looking at you."

  She adjusted her low-cut top to cover her cleavage. "They're just tits. You've seen them before."

  I had checked the news back home on my phone the night before; the cops were pursuing an arson investigation for the Wilmont Avenue fire. More than likely, nobody would ever come to my door over it, but if it got enough attention for a Federal psychic to be brought in, which was about my luck, there was a chance they could pull my name out of the aura of the place or whatever. That was the only reason I fucking stayed in Missouri. If they tapped me for that fire and found out about all that shit in Europe, I was gonna need something I could bargain with if I ever wanted to breathe free air again. And this little planning session right here was exactly the kind of shit I could bargain with. Hell, I had already witnessed Tracey commit a murder. If I gave her another day she would probably give me enough shit to get me down to time served from the SCEIA. I just had to stick around and keep my mouth shut. Which was kind of asking a lot from myself, really.

  Under the table, I texted Lee again. Nobody had heard from him since the day before. It wouldn't have surprised me if he had gone back to St. Louis after the Kamikaze thing, but distance meant nothing to somebody like Tracey. There was no running away from her, and I hoped he realized that if he tried it would make his life unpleasant and, judging by the day before, short.

  Projected on the wall in the darkened conference room in front of me, Spencer, and Tracey were the main problems in the bunker we were trying to make a plan to handle. Because that's what we were supposed to be doing here.

  - Recombinant DNA test subjects in storage (not to be harmed)

  - Active denial pain transmitters retrofitted throughout corridors

  - Non-reflective light barriers on vault compartments trigger vault lockdown/chlorine gas

  - Radio pulse radiation fail-safe (brain death/permanent insanity)

  - Remote computer reprogramming not an option, no outside connections

  - Computer/nanite interface may not be possible with outdated interior systems

  - Shutting down power will trigger fail-safe

  - Teleporting within the complex will trigger fail-safe

  - Complex shielded from all outside psychic abilities

  Tracey stared at the words and polished off her third cup of coffee. "So you're telling me there's absolutely no way you can cut any of the systems in the complex? You killed a guy with a phone call, but you can't do anything with some 80's computer crap?"

  Spencer answered in a druggy, slow, monotone voice. He had been force-fed medication or something overnight and came close to resembling a sane person. "He died from complications," he corrected her. "I didn't kill that guy. I didn't mean to."

  "Jim, I swear to God--"

  He quickly piped up, "I might be able to do something with the stuff in there, okay? But the whole setup is low-tech, and without knowing the wiring layout or power relays or redundancy features or potential traps or--"

  "Jim, stop talking and get to the fucking point," Tracey interrupted. "Yes or no? On a scale of one to ten, how good are our chances of you getting the vault door open without any demolition?"

  Spencer blinked slowly and licked his dry lips. "I won't know exactly what to have my 'bots target or what kind of fail-safes or programs could be triggered by my sabotage. We would need somebody to either sense where all the wires are in the walls or we could spend weeks there drilling and digging and finding pathways ourselves by trial-and-error. This is all pre-internet stuff wired through there. Nobody uses this anymore. And my nanites are microscopic machines. They're so small you can't even see them." He held up his hand. "They're all over my skin right now, but you would never be able to tell without detection equipment. That's how small they are."

  I found that unsettling and suddenly felt like I could feel them crawling on me.

  Tracey rubbed her eyes. "I know what nanites are. Would you stop talking in circles and--"

  The door of the conference room opened. Some middle-aged woman in her Sunday best and a large portfolio stuck her head in. "Oh, excuse me," she said, embarrassed.

  "Get the fuck out!" Tracey yelled at her. The woman got a horrified look on her face and shut the door, and Tracey stomped over and locked it with a "Jesus Christ! What is her problem?"

  She thumped her elbows back on the table and cradled her head. "What the fuck good are you to me, Jim? Either of you. Don," she snapped her fingers to physically let me know that I was being addressed, "This vault door lockdown. Forget getting past the alarms for now, let's just say I go in and the security door comes down. Would you be able to melt through it? How fast could you make that happen?"

  "What's it made of again?"

  Spencer said, "Stuff that's estimated to qualify as a Grade 38 Titanium alloy. That's armor plate grade, which will very likely have a melting point at over two thousand degrees."

  "Shit, that's a little much. I could try it, but the chlorine gas that'll flood the vault I think's pretty flammable. If I get it that hot, that's gonna be bad."

  Three internet encyclopedias confirmed it was. "It's a strong oxidizer, so he'd cook anybody in the room as he heated up the metal, maybe cause an explosion since it'll be a sealed space, and then that triggers the radio pulse fail-safe that fries our brains."

  "Then that fucks us," Tracey said. "So we need a lifter to take the door and somebody to sense the wiring layout and somebody to sweep the place on si
te for security measures since it's fucking psy-shielded to the outside world and somebody to wipe our asses in case we have to take a shit. Fuck!"

  She stared at the words on the wall again like an idea would jump out at her. This was all going badly, and she knew it. She had talked to the client the night before and explained that she would be taking over the project from Rory, so now this was all on her. And it was a little more difficult than looking at two pictures and thinking hard. Even in Europe, the most she had ever contributed to a planning session was an idea or two. I had contributed even less.

  "Didn't you used to know a lifter, Don?"

  Fuck.

  "I did, yeah, years ago."

  "Kamikaze had his name in his phone. Will Bowman, right? Could we call him in on this?"

  Shit.

  "I wouldn't. He just got done with parole and still has to do check-ins with the SCEIA three times a year. He's not exactly reliable, either. Kind of a fuck-up, y'know?"

  "We just need him to lift a door, not build a space shuttle. Can you call him?"

  "That's not a good idea. I'm telling you, he's not somebody you want to work with. I don't want to contact him."

  She icily said, "I'd prefer to work with people we know for this."

  "No. We're not calling him." I took another hit of Scotch. Yeah, at nine a.m. My phone buzzed.

  "Is that Lee?" Tracey asked.

  I checked the message. SHE'S A BITCH, ISN'T SHE? YOU CAN KILL HER WITH A THOUGHT, RIGHT? YOU SHOULD DO IT.

  I glanced up at Spencer, who glanced up from the tabletop at me for a second. Little creepy shit.

  "It's not from Lee."

  "Dammit. Okay. Okay. We'll try to find a workaround without your friend. Fine. We're trying to avoid having to bring in anyone else for this job, anyway, right? We're already getting my girl Rosemary to do the remote sense for us. We're not trying to figure out how many different people in the world we can bring in that could do this instead of us. So what other ways can we do this with the three of us and, at most, two others? Forget Lee for now."

  My phone buzzed again. DO IT. KILL HER NOW. I HATE HER.