Look but don’t touch

Gradie had spaced out a few minutes into the trip and was daydreaming about a shootout atop a five-way interchange when an auto shop to his left stopped sliding past them and rotated.

They had been driving through the part of town where vacant buildings stayed vacant for decades and empty lots shattered into patches of weeds and scraps of concrete. Used car dealerships blended into auto mechanic shops, little more than sheet metal awnings for the jacks, and the pattern paused only for cracker-jack bars that didn’t even bother announcing their names.

Now, as they rolled through an intersection surrounded by a fifty-pump gas station and drive-thrus almost on top of each other, the rest of the team shifted in their seats and scanned the scenery.

Gradie didn’t need to. He’d been here before, in another life. Michael’s explanation that he and the team had a “geographical predisposition” to the metroplex didn’t satisfy his suspicion of the fact that all their jobs and training, so far, had taken place in the same metro area he had grown up in. However, like so many other nagging doubts about his new existence, he decided to ignore it.

They pulled into a massive parking lot, separated from the road by at least a hundred feet of bare dead grass, a landing zone prepared for drive-thrus that never came. At the other end of the lot was a wide strip of shops, half of which was an off-price retailer that had clearly once been a grocery store, and the rest of it was divided between a gym, a Medicaid dentist office, and a pan-Asian restaurant. There was another small strip of shops off to the right. Nail salon, auto insurance office, medical clinic. Gradie fell into fantasies of drawing his gun, running head first towards the target, and gunning down his connection to places like this forever.

They had parked at the far end of the lot and could see the storefront over the tops of the cars due to the slope. Luke cracked the window and pulled out a cigarette.

“Aight Zoey. You got eyes inside?”

“Yep. Ashley got me in,” said EP in the earbuds.

Earlier in the morning, about an hour after opening, the associates in the front of the off-price store had watched an aqua green VW beetle roll into a spot in the middle of the empty lot. Some of them wondered why it hadn’t been parked closer to the front, while the others barely registered its existence beyond a dim understanding that a car in the lot might mean work at a register, which prompted an exodus to the back isles and the storeroom.

Then the driver got out.

Even through the streaked windows and from across the dusty lot, she was a knockout. Hourglass shape busting out of cutoff shorts and a tube top, bouncing across the cracked concrete on heels that carried her like magic. Despite the potholes and crevices, she might as well have been walking on a runway carpet thrown over the laser-leveled surface of a NASA factory floor. The morning sun flashed off her square white sunglasses, went soft on her skin, and cut swerving shadows around the swells of her body, a body that might have never seen a gym and would probably never need to, poured into place in exact proportions.

The clack of her heels was the hardest thing about her.

“Morning!” she said, to no one in particular, as the doors slid open. Her voice was like a beach vacation without clothes. Drew felt dirty just hearing it. Like porn had started playing over the loudspeaker. The doors slid shut behind her with the same dingy sound it made for geriatrics and meth heads shuffling in with pockets full of gift cards and faded receipts. The contrast between the sound and the sight of her was too much for Drew, doing recovery at the cell phone cases, and he chuckled thoughtlessly. She glanced at him, and his smile melted off like it had never been. He couldn’t bring another one up to meet hers, so he just watched her strut towards the copy print like she had his only hope of ever getting laid in her purse.

Matt had thought that adding a copy print kiosk to a store that sold mostly shitty pillows and reject father’s day gifts was about the dumbest fucking idea corporate had ever shit out to push sales, but watching this busty bimbo bounce over to him like a mobile porn ad, he understood the genius of it.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Yes mam, what can I do for you?” He almost shouted. Micah groaned and swore from electronics.

“Um, can you print stuff off of this?” She held up a cherry red flash drive and looked at him like he had the keys to the fucking kingdom.

“Yeah. That’s what they pay me for!” He laid it on too thick and his voice came out like gravel. Shit.

“Oh, good.” She looked around for a second. “Do I stick it in somewhere, or—” She laughed sheepishly, and he almost tripped over himself standing still.

“No, I’ll put it in.” Jesus Christ. There has to be a hidden camera or something somewhere.

She leaned over the counter to hand it to him and he got an eyeful. She didn’t even try to hide it. Just that same smile, like he was buying her a house. He looked away and studied the monitor.

“Oh my god!” she gasped, and for a terrifying yet electrifying instant, he thought she had somehow read his thoughts.

“I’m sorry! Not that one!” she leaned over the counter again, this time bouncing frantically, and grabbed his hand, still holding the flash drive uselessly. He stood stunned as she snatched the drive away and pulled another one out of her purse.

“I'm sorry, oh my god. Here it's this one. This one.” She whispered the last words to herself and handed him another drive, graphite grey.

“Sorry,” she said one more time, and smiled meekly at him.

“tsohkay,” he mumbled and, after four tries, got the USB in the slot.

It was a simple black and white job, and before he knew it, she was scanning her card and he was thinking of ways to get her number, dredging up every pick-up artist video he had ever seen. All he got out was the total.

The silence was squeezing the life out of him by the second, but she didn’t leave.

“Do you have it?” she looked at him like the world had just fallen away from her.

“Uh,”

“The other drive. Um, the first one—” She looked around, under her purse, even patted her tits. He spun around and lifted up his keyboard just to be supportive.

“Shit. Oh fuck,” she said to the counter, then snapped her big round eyes up at him.

“Um, really, if you—” Her phone buzzed and she exhaled at the screen.

“Shit! I have to go. If you find it, please—” she scrawled a phone number on the back of her receipt and slid it over to him, tits to the counter.

“If you find it, please call me. I will be extremely grateful.”

He almost drooled on the counter nodding.

“Ok, great. Thank you!” She turned and bounced out the door.

He watched her all the way to the lot and stared at the bare concrete long after she’d left, fantasizing.

“God damn dude. What did that fine bitch want?” Drew came around the counter.

“Uh,” Matt snapped back to reality and looked down at the keyboard.

There it was. Cherry red flash drive. Peeking out from behind the point of sale terminal.

“I’m going on break.”

“It’s fucking eight-thirty dude!” Drew whined. Matt somehow made it to the training computers, in the far back of the dead empty break room, without melting into the ground. He plugged the drive into the corner pc, the one he knew was just out of camera view.

It was more than he had ever hoped for. Three full shoots worth. Two different penthouses and one yacht. By the second time he looked over his shoulder, EP had all the access she needed.

“I thought you could get in anyplace?” Luke said. “It’s just a retail—”

“Well, that takes time, and I’m kinda swamped tracing this junkie back three months. Anyway, she’s afraid of getting rusty.”

Luke thought about some training he’d like to put Celeste through, but did his best to focus on the task at hand.

“So, any ideas where it might be?”

“Not really. If he stashed it here, he hasn’t touched it.”

“Aight. What’s our move then?”

“Watch and wait. That’s all were cleared for.”

“Got it.” Luke took out his phone. Sam watched him until she realized he was done talking.

“What, we’re just gonna sit here?”

“Yep.”

“But—”

Luke looked up from his phone and explained to the dash.

“I know we’ve had some rough jobs since you joined, but you gotta get used to sitting around and waiting.”

“Ok, but we’re right here, and he’s in there scanning fucking barcodes—”

Luke cut her off with a dramatic sigh.

“It’s probably not on him, so we gotta wait to see if upper management can find out where it could be, then we make moves. And before you get all excited, those moves might not even involve gunfire.”

He went back to his phone. Gradie looked over his shoulder and saw him playing chess on his browser.

“Well, why don’t we just grab him and ask him—” Sam said.

“Cause he can just lie.”

“Ok, so we just rough him up?”

Luke looked at Sam with a glazed smile.

“Think it through.” He went back to the chess.

“So, ok, we would have to get him without getting arrested, which wouldn’t be hard because this is the kidnap mobile—”

Luke nodded along, but didn’t look up.

“Then we just get him to tell us where he put it.”

Silence.

“Gradie, what do you think?” said Luke.

“Boss is not gonna ok torture.”

“Bingo.”

“Wow, that’s it?” Sam said. “He’s not a civilian! If it was a hit, we’d just kill him anyway! What’s the difference?”

“Besides our boss being a bleeding heart, torture is a no-no.”

“What do you mean? We—”

“It’s one of those old Hardworlder codes you might have heard a certain recently promoted member of our team going on about.”

“Oh ok, so dumb rules just cause. Got it,” Sam said.

“Yep.” Luke smiled at his phone and the computer took his rook.