Percy
I would have passed out and fallen off the bench if it hadn’t been for the paper fluttering in the wind that hit me in the face. Actually, I would’ve fallen regardless because the paper scared me so bad that I sprung off the bench and dropped on my ass. I could only wonder how that would’ve looked to people passing by: casually walking down the street at 4:40 AM when suddenly you hear some woman at a bus stop scream and punch at the air while a wad of paper is stuck to her face. Although, it’s probably best if I don’t think about that and get embarrassed. They may remember the screaming, but it’s not like they’ll remember the face attributed to it… I hope. Shit, hold on, is it actually 4:40? I shuffled back to a standing position and whipped out my watch. Thank God, it’s only 4:26. I still have four minutes left… Shit! Four fucking minutes left!
I had been sitting on the bench for over half an hour, and a bunch of my shit was still sprawled out around me. There was a neat stack of papers next to me while I was zoning out, but now it’s been kicked out everywhere. My laptop was sitting on the ground, narrowly missing my feet after I fell over. My camera, phone, and recorder pen were on the other side of the bench, and four different hard drives were lying next to my backpack. I took out most of this while looking for my wireless phone charger.
I don’t want the papers to be out of order, but I don’t have time to sort through them all. I scraped them all together before the wind caught them again, stuffing them in my backpack as quickly and messily as possible, which I’m probably definitely going to regret later on. The laptop got shoved in next, going on top of most of the paper and leaving even more fold marks on them. I stuck the hard drives in the front pocket and jammed everything else in the middle. My phone is in my coat pocket, my work junk is in my backpack… yet the rest of my pockets are empty. What am I missing?
4:29. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. My keys! Where the fuck are my keys! I looked under and around the bench, rechecked my coat pockets, rummaged through my backpack and further messed up the papers, re-rechecked my coat pockets, and searched the sidewalk. The keys are still nowhere to be found. Dammit. Dammit. Dammit! The area started to light up from behind me. Not now, please not now. I started shuffling around in a panic as the light came closer. I looked back at the ground in front of me and found my glasses still lying there. The light came to a stop behind me while I kneeled to pick up my glasses, only to stand up too quickly and hit my thigh on the bench. There was something in my pants pocket that jabbed my leg.
I took the keys out of my pocket and shook them at Adrian as he stepped off the bus. He stared blankly for a moment. “What the hell was that about?” he said.
“I fell asleep and lost my keys in my pants pocket. Not my finest moment.”
“It wouldn’t be out of character.”
“Dude, shut the hell up. You are the last person who should be calling me stupid.”
“Who’s the first?”
“Literally anybody else. I would have Rudy Giuliani call me stupid before you.”
A stranger passing by would likely assume we were worst enemies who ran into each other on the street, as would probably anybody else, given that I just compared him to Rudy Giuliani. It probably caught Adrian off guard too.
“God, that stupid key fucked up this entire moment,” I continued. “I had this whole conversation planned out in my head. You step off the bus full of wonder and excitement like it’s your first time seeing normal civilization, and I stand up off the bench with open arms and shit and say, ‘Welcome back!’ And then you make some snarky comment about my hair, I make a snarky comment back about yours, and then I give you the letter Graham wanted me to give you and—fuck! I forgot to bring it!” Adrian stood there frozen for a moment, I assume trying to process whatever it was I just said. “Your first words were not supposed to be ‘What the hell was that about?’”
“Wow. You have not matured one bit since I’ve been away. I would say I’m impressed, but still, what the fuck did happen to your hair?”
I’ve gotten a grand total of two haircuts in the four years since he got deployed and resorted to putting it in a french braid last year so it would stop getting in my face when I looked down. Adrian, on the other hand… got shaved. He told me about it over the phone before, but it’s still weird seeing it in person. I told him about my hair as well, but I don’t think he knew what a french braid was.
“I might ask the same of you, Aaron Paul,” I rebutted.
He slightly smiled, and his eyes trailed down towards the landfill in my backpack, which I left open foraging for my keys. “That’s a lot of paper,” he said bluntly.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Great observation.”
“And… you have glasses now?”
“They’re blue light blocking. Helps me go to sleep when I’m staying up until 11:30 every night.”
“I assume the business is running smoothly then?”
“Well, it’s running, I can say that much. Here, I’ll explain it more when we get to the car, the key to which” —I held the key out in front of me once more—“is no longer missing.” I grabbed my backpack, and we started walking down the sidewalk. A few seconds of awkward silence passed, so to break the silence I caused by delaying our previous conversation, I asked, “Do you miss all your army friends yet?”
“Some more than others. Most had already finished their tour before I did, but they don’t live anywhere nearby. I guess that’s for the better, though, for obvious reasons.”
“So none of them know what we do here?”
“Me, not we. And only two. They helped me get ahold of some of the shit I mailed you guys."
“Cool. But you still didn’t answer my question.”
“Do I miss them? I mean, I liked most of them as people, but I wouldn’t say I was that close with them.”
He was talking like he had rehearsed this exact conversation in his head. “Oh, really? Is that why you would always talk about them every time we called? Because you ‘weren’t close with any of them?’ I’m sorry, but I’m calling bullshit on that.”
“Right, because if anybody would know what it was like living in the military for four years, it’s the one who wasn’t living in the military for four years.”
“I don’t have to have been there to be able to tell when you’re completely full of shit. I’ve known you a long time, and I think we both know how bad a liar you are.”
Adrian must have seen we were approaching the car and quickly shifted topics. “You parked outside a clinic?”
“It’s early morning; who’s gonna be awake to stop me?”
He stared at the building while walking down the parking lot. “None of this was here before I left.”
“Oh, yeah. This place went under construction a couple years ago. The area looked like shit anyway.”
I unlocked the car, threw my backpack in the back seat, and sat down. I couldn’t help yawning for a good five seconds before starting the engine. Adrian stepped in and took a deep breath. “I have told you so many fucking times to get an air freshener in here.” Little does he know, I did get an air freshener after he left, but I stuck it in my bedroom last week just to piss off Adrian when he came back. But I’m not telling him that. “Whatever, that isn’t important. The business, go.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, our current target that we’ve been focused on for all of Q4 is a self-described local charity stationed in outer Cleveland. Do you remember ever seeing all those billboard advertisements for a place called Solaris?”
“Sounds familiar, but that’s the extent to which I know anything about it.”
“Well, they’re a charity that gives money to small businesses, and Graham used his tech powers to find out that they are not as charitable as they say they are, hence why we’re targeting them. I don’t know all the specifics, but they apparently function almost exactly like a small business lender/bank, but they’ve wiggled through enough legal loopholes to define themselves as a charity and dodge federal regulations. They put billboards and other trashy advertisements in areas where small businesses are more common, so when they have financial troubles and such, Solaris is the first thing they see. They then apply for however much money they need, but the contract says it has to be paid back just like it would with a bank loan; only the catch is that they can take the money back if their requirements aren’t met. They aren’t met in a majority of the cases, so Solaris keep a lot of the money they lend. It’s fucked up, but for some reason, they’re completely allowed to do it.
“Then comes our plan on how to deal with them. So, somewhere around Ohio City is a small business of math tutors who work in some guy’s giant house, so we struck a deal with them. We would have a truck driving by suddenly spin out of control and crash directly into their house, knocking out two walls and the solar panels on their roof, along with their wiring and their water pipes and such, all in one fell swoop. They would then apply for a roughly $650,000 ‘donation’—most of it paying off the solar panels—and once we qualify, Graham will take advantage of some security flaw in the organization’s servers to multiply the donation threefold—almost $2 million. Skyler would then sneak into the Solaris CEO’s mansion and erase all trace of us ever getting money from them. Graham also set up a network of other small businesses in the area to flood them with requests, so we won’t have to worry about anybody remembering we exist and fucking everything up. Solaris will eventually go under due to the huge loss of money, and we’ll be away scot-free. We and the tutoring business will split the cut 60 to 40, which amounts to about $780,000 for us. Graham will explain it better once we make it back, but that’s pretty much the gist of it. It’s risky as hell, but could you imagine how much shit we can do with 780 grand? It’s fucking nuts.”
Adrian stared out the windshield, soaking in what I just told him. He took a deep breath in before saying anything. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah. It’s one of our bigger projects.”
“And… what stage are you at in… this?” His face looks like it’s stuck in one position.
“We’re going to get the loan sometime this afternoon, and everything else is prearranged. The house break-in, the loophole in their server, the flood of loan requests after the fact; the whole shpiel.”
“Jesus. I mean, this had to have taken months to plan and pull off. If anything doesn’t go as planned, the whole operation could go under. We could go under.”
“But we haven’t. And we intend to keep it that way.”
---