Chapter Thirty-Nine - Getting Sweaty

I was sitting on the control board for my old fold-out treadmill. It was a little awkward, since the board was at a bit of an angle, and it was bouncing with each step Sharp took. "Come on, you'll never hit that next level of Body if you don't sweat a little more," I said.

"I'm... sweating... plenty," Sharp said.

She was. Her old shirt was covered in a layer of it, and I was doing what I could not to recoil from the stench wafting off of her. We'd started Sharp's first morning at my place pretty simply, first by emptying the food that went bad out of the fridge, then by making a hearty breakfast.

And then it was hitting the gym. Well, my in-house little gym in that awkward loft space. The window was opened a crack to let some fresh air in, and all of my gym equipment was strewn about. We'd been at it for a solid two hours already.

First stretches, which confirmed that Sharp wasn't flexible at all, then some callisthenics on a roll-out mat, then we started to use the equipment I had. A few minutes on the exercise bike to work those legs, and now some light jogging on the treadmill to cool off.

"Here, we can make it better using your imagination."

"Huh?" Sharp asked.

"Sharp! A huge man is running after you!" I shouted. My paw came down on the 'faster' button and the machine beeped rapidly as the speed ramped up.

Sharp gasped and started to sprint all-out. Soon her arms were windmilling to keep her steady, but that failed as well and she flopped over and rolled off the machine.

"We're gonna have to work on it," I said as I tapped a paw on the off switch, then I leapt down from the treadmill. The other cats... well, two of them, were in the room, lounging around and watching. "Go take a shower."

"Urgh," Sharp replied. She was flopped onto the ground, legs and arms splayed out as she breathed hard and stared at the ceiling.

"Don't be overdramatic, it was just a bit of sprinting. Which is a very valuable skill."

"I guess," she said. "You could have warned me a little."

"Out in the field, you don't get warnings."

Sharp sighed, then turned around and pushed herself up. "Where's that shower?"

"The good one is in the master bedroom," I said. "I have some sweatpants and a loose shirt or two that might fit. We really need to head out and buy you some proper clothes."

"That'd be nice," Sharp said. She grunted as she stood, then wobbled her way into my bedroom. I saw her starting to look around for something to wear after pulling a towel off of a rack. I was going to have to show her how to do the laundry, but that could wait.

What couldn't wait nearly as much was our financial situation. This place, as nice as it was, wasn't free. For that matter, nor was food and consumables. We had a nice nest-egg, but we'd need more.

I had plans, and a lot of those would require a fair amount of discretionary funds.

So while Sharp figured out the shower, I strutted on down to my office. I noticed Cyanide following me from behind while Arsenic stayed put. He was laying in a sunbeam that was coming through the window and warming up the floor, so he wasn't about to move any time soon.

Using my desktop was out of the question, but I did have a tablet computer I could use... assuming I could get it out onto a flat surface. That required a fair bit of finagling and some awkward tugging to get it out of its case, but eventually I had my old tablet out.

The battery, of course, was dead.

I cursed and pushed a drawer open, found the right charging wire, and then plugged it into the PC. There were a few more curses as I discovered the pain of plugging in a USB was magnified a hundredfold when you didn't have opposable thumbs.

Finally, however, I had the tablet plugged in and was able to step on the screen to make it work. I knew it would work because I used to put on some cat games, where little fishies would swim past, for the cats to play on.

... I'd seen it on a video online and it seemed cute.

Since this was my home computer, I had access to some of my less secured accounts. These were the ones that were a lot easier to find, those that I expected the government to know about, where I paid my taxes from and where the profit from my rentals were deposited. A lot of small transactions passed through these.

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I nodded as I looked things over. Nothing too far from the ordinary. I had a local accounting firm that checked on things for me, including a yearly audit.

I had a quarter million sitting in my account. That was... okay money, but it could be better.

Fortunately, I had more elsewhere, but those accounts were designed to be trickier to enter. I'd have to take some time later to figure them out.

In the meantime... I hopped over to the internet and went to a small, rather niche, furniture selling forum. It was where I purchased quite a few items I had in my house.

It was also a subtle place for a few fixers on the East Coast to post contracts. I pawed through the more recent posts. There weren't that many of them, but some were somewhat interesting.

Folding Chair Set - Lightly Used

Condition: Excellent, though some minor scuffs from field testing.

Details: Perfect for temporary setups or swift adjustments. Requires pick-up from a high-altitude location. Bring your own transportation. Special features include "collapsible design" that allows for immediate removal once the deal is done.

Price: $10,000 (negotiable based on discretion).

Contact: @[email protected]

An extraction mission. Someone needed someone pulled out of somewhere. That could be interesting. The low price suggested a relatively low level of risk.

Obviously I was skipping past the six-figure jobs, those were the kinds of things that might take me a few weeks to plan and plot for. These lower risk, lower pay jobs were a lot more tempting.

Vintage Oak Dining Set [Seats Eight]

Condition: Classic, reliable, slightly weathered.

Details: Ideal for gatherings. Expect minor wear and tear during transport. Some messages carved into table, lightly damaged. Needs refreshing.

Price: $25,000

Contact: @[email protected]

Oh, an actual assassination job. Seats eight meant that there were eight targets. For that price, they were probably not much more than a local gang. Some toughs that took over a building as a gathering spot and who needed to be cleared out. Doable.

Luxury Sofa, Leather, Reclining

Condition: Pristine, very stylish.

Details: You'll need a team to handle its size and weight. As a bonus, this sofa is very flashy. Great compliment to a loud room.

Price: $50,000

Contact: @[email protected]

A single-target assassination job. Not too high of a pay, especially as it asked for a team, and to be flashy. No, this wasn't my kind of thing. I didn't like jobs that required that I be flashy and obvious. It was antithetical to how a good assassin ought to operate. Besides, we didn't have a team.

Antique Rocking Chair – Minor Repairs Needed

Condition: Sturdy, but creaky joints. Needs lubrication to function smoothly again.

Details: Available in a rural compound. Chair needs some TLC to rock again. A little loud, can be quiet if fixed.

Price: $10,000

Contact: @GrandpaFixer on Solonet

I perked up. The pay was trash, but that seemed like an easy enough job. If I was reading between the lines correctly, a facility out in the boonies needed some sabotaging done.

That was generally a very easy kind of job. The price was low, however. Ten thousand? That would barely cover the cost of a drone and some explosives to do the job safely.

Still, I didn't always have to explode things to sabotage them. There were plenty of ways to do that.

Any idiot with a crowbar and a free afternoon could wreck a place, and for ten grand, I would assume that it wasn't very well defended.

I logged onto a throwaway Solonet account and poked at the contact. Within a few minutes, I received a small package. It was all about this nice old chair... but adding the numbers on it together gave me some coordinates. Not based on any modern GPS system, but one frequently used by Solos.

The facility was a small storage space just twenty minutes from the outer bounds of Boston Two. Low security, if any. Half the pay probably came because it wasn't in the city and most gangs didn't like sending their people too far away.

It wasn't too much, but that was fine. A job like this would pad our pockets, give Sharp some much-needed field experience, and it could be what she needed to push herself to train some more.

I liked it.

***