Gatac
The way Sean kept staring at the ‘24/7 Laundry’ neon sign in the window could perhaps only be expined by a concerted attempt to sear the gaudy advertisement onto his retinas for some clever, yet half-baked agenda. He was across the street from the building, sitting in the passenger seat of Anne's gray Nissan, with the half-loaded shotgun wedged in between his legs while he had a clear pstic bag of 12 gauge shells sitting on the folded-down lid of the glove compartment. His hands were just about marinating in sweat inside disposable vinyl gloves, and because Anne apparently had a borderline obsessive fascination with owning spares of everything, he'd been made to wear one of her bacvas — still rolled up looking like a beanie hat, of course, wouldn't want anybody getting the wrong idea just yet. Having gotten to inspect it up close, Sean noticed the mask had holes cut into it for the ears, with strips of leather sewn around the fringes of the holes to reinforce them — and with considerable craftsmanship, considering. As he rubbed his wrist against the rolled-up bacva in an effort to get rid of an itch on his scalp without getting any of his hair on the outside of the gloves, he wondered briefly if criminals had their own set of tailors or if Anne had a markedly domestic side. The thought quickly deteriorated into imagining her dressed like a 50s housewife. Fantasy Anne smiled at him and leaned in for a kiss.
Sean snapped out of that mental picture so fast he could almost pretend to never have thought about it at all. He closed his eyes and scrunched up his face in lieu of pinching the bridge of his nose. Bad idea.
His heart skipped a beat when he heard a rap on the window to his right; he twitched away from the door in reflex before correting the dark broad shape outside with Anne's ‘tactical’ getup. He let out his breath and cracked the door open. The interior light of the car sprang to life and for the second time in as many seconds Sean felt a stab of panic as his hand found the light switch almost by itself. With the illumination crisis resolved for the moment, Sean pushed the door fully open and climbed out of the seat, Anne stepping to the side to make room. For a moment, Sean regarded the shotgun he was gripping in his hands, wondering how to carry it across the street without drawing attention to it.
“Did you see anything?” Anne asked.“Just a few cars passing by,” Sean said. “Freddie hasn't moved.”“Who is Freddie?” Anne said.“Uh, the man behind the counter,” Sean said. “I decided to call him Freddie, he looks like a Freddie type. You know, the kind of guy who works the graveyard shift at a undry counter. He's got his eyes down on the counter a lot — he's reading a book and I'm pretty sure it's not Proust.”“That is very…perspicacious of you,” Anne said.“You want to correct me on the name?” Sean asked.“I don’t know him,” Anne said. “I don’t mingle much with Ilya’s men. Even then, we spend little time with each other outside of official council business.”“And here I had you pegged as a social butterfly,” Sean said. “How’d the recon go?”“I did a quick tour of the block and didn't see any obvious lookouts,” Anne said. “Did you notice any cars rolling past you twice?”“No, but I can't say for sure,” Sean said. “You think they have a patrol route?”“Could be,” Anne said.“Makes sense, I guess,” Sean said. “Anyone driving through here can check up on Freddie over there — rge window front, bright lights inside. If he's gone, or he gives a signal, they'd know something was wrong. So, ideas?”“The backdoor is worth a shot,” Anne said. “I may be able to force it open. From there we just have to figure out a way to keep Freddie in pce.”“You could sneak up on him and hold him at gunpoint,” Sean suggested.
Anne turned to look at the undry across the street, but the way she quickly moved back to look at Sean was all the dismissal Sean needed.
“I suppose I could,” she said. “I would have to be somewhere with line of fire on him but out of view of the street. I should also be seeing his front to make sure he doesn't signal. And it has to be a safe distance away so he doesn't get any ideas about jumping me.” She regarded the undry building again with a tiny twitch of her lip. “Tough.”“Yeah, tough,” Sean agreed.“Not to mention sneaking up on him at all,” Anne said. “It is the dead of night and he might be all alone with nobody to distract him. My boots have steel toes. Every step I take is going to echo off the walls in there.”“Yeah, but you managed to sneak up on me over snow,” Sean said. “That was pretty fucking ninja.”1Calling back to a Chapter 6 footnote, I just had to find a way to get the other word choice in there. Can’t have the 80s without a ninja.Also couldn’t resist my favorite Generation Kill quote, so there’s that, too.“On a cold morning in powder, 2This isn’t quite Miss Simmons’s Sense of Snow and I haven’t conducted experiments myself, but it stands to reason that walking through soft, fresh powder snow is not quite as loud as snow that has been partially thawed and refrozen on the surface (known as ‘crust’ for obvious reasons). still wasn't that easy,” Anne said. “I should not say it is impossible, but I would have to be going so slowly there is a good chance someone would see me anyway.”“Okay,” Sean said, “can we stop this? I get that you’re right but this is starting to feel a little like, you know…”“Like what?” she asked.“Like you’re just…like you were humoring me enough to get here but now that we are here…well, you don’t want anything happening,” Sean said.“…I suppose I did come off like that,” Anne said. “I am sorry. Usually, my agonizing over the correct approach does not have an audience.”“Right,” Sean said.“In any event,” Anne said, “I do have another suggestion. You could go in there and distract him. Take your wool jacket from the trunk, tell him you need the blood out and just keep arguing with him. I will go through the back and search the rest of the pce. If you chat him up, it should be enough to cover any noise I make.”“Okay, my turn with the criticism, I guess,” Sean said. “There's still a price on my head. You want me to go in there and distract a guy who's been ordered to kill me.”“He would have to recognize you,” Anne said.“These guys know my name and where I live,” Sean said. “They had a killer coming after me at my pce two hours after the warehouse shoot. The guys in that drive-by attempt got a good look at my face. For all I know, Sidorov passed around pictures of me so his men can recognize me on sight. And even if you don’t know Freddie, he’d have heard about you, so we can't switch pces, either.”Anne nodded. “Fair points all,” she said. “Any other ideas or should we call it off, then?”“Well,” Sean said, thinking for a moment as his eyes swept the undry's window front. “No. No, we're too close to throw in the towel now.3This is an example of (pn) continuation bias, also known in aviation as get-there-itis. Basically, we are unconsciously predisposed to continue with our original pn even when complications arise. This is particurly dangerous when several different negative factors compound, with each one not severe enough to scuttle the pn right there, but their cumutive effect eating into any sck you might have until you’re at a point where you have no safety margin left, at which point anything else going wrong will spell disaster. Again, in aviation terms, if there’s good weather at your destination, you fly, no problem. Bad weather at your destination, you know not to fly, no problem, either. But bad weather forecast to roll in just an hour after you’re scheduled to nd there? That might tempt you to make the attempt, and then if anything else goes wrong on the flight that deys you, you’re in trouble.A reted phenomenon is target fixation, where looking at something makes you unconsciously steer toward it. Driving safety tip: look at the road you want to stay on, not at the tree you want to avoid. I'll go in there and try my best at keeping him busy. It's risky, but it's the best pn we have.” He looked back to Anne. “Assuming you're still up for it.”“I am,” Anne said. Looking at Sean, she felt compelled to add “Leave the shotgun.”
Anne may have told Sean to leave the shotgun, but her hand wasn't far from her own pistol when she circled around the block to get behind the undry. The sidewalks were empty and lit from the street lights, leaving her with nothing much to blend into, and every window she walked past felt like it was hiding a perch for Sidorov's surveilnce detail. Even the dark of the back alleys was little comfort. Her mind iterated on the coming minutes again and again, building and discarding scenarios in a futile attempt to gain an advantage over the unknown ahead of her. As the undry's backdoor came into sight around the st corner, Anne found her mouth opening for a yawn, and instinctively she raised her left hand to cover it. When she lowered it again, she sucked the inside of her left cheek between her teeth and bit down gently, using a smidge of pain to bring her mind back into focus and stave off the exhaustion. With careful steps, she walked into the cone of light cast by a bulb in a wire cage over the door. She crouched down there and inspected the lock while she slipped out of her leather gloves and repced them with a set of disposable ones.
It was a recent instaltion, retive to the age of the door it was mounted in, but it didn't look particurly fancy — just your everyday pin tumbler lock, Anne reasoned. She tried Kyrill’s keys for certainty’s sake and found them too tall for the keyway. With the easy option eliminated, she reached into her coat to retrieve her tools from their little leather case. The first thing she needed was an L-shaped tension wrench.4Often given short shrift when it comes to depictions of lockpicking, the tension wrench is the tool you use to put and keep tension on the rotating core of the lock. The idea is that as pins are put into the correct position, the core will turn a bit further, keeping the picked pins from dropping out of position again. Sometimes, you may see screwdrivers used for this in media. They fit in the keyway and they’re easily avaible, right? But the reason that the tension wrenches you’ll get in lockpicking kits are delicate L-shapes is so you can more easily put precise amounts of tension on them and have a visual indicator of the cylinders’s position as you do so. Screwdrivers are bad at those, as you’ll be holding them in an awkward position with your other hand and you can’t tell at a gnce how far they’re turned. They’re also often too big in general. If you should happen to own a lock you don’t mind messing up, you can see this for yourself: pick a fthead screwdriver thick enough to stick in the keyway and put tension on it, then see how much room it leaves you to also stick in a pick or rake on top of it. Also, stabbing the lock with the screwdriver will likely produce visible marks on the outside and may even damage lock internals. So, again, don’t do this with a lock you’re actually using. She gingerly slid its thin head into the keyway and gave it a wiggle. Too loose. While the clock kept ticking in her head, she browsed the leather case for the next bigger wrench, gave that a try and found it held tension on the core. With the fist tool settled, she let her finger drift over her selection of picks, skipping the various fine hooks in favor of a long rake. She put the rake in, tensioned the core and quickly jiggled the rake back and forth. It might have been a cheap shot, but it worked nonetheless; she felt the core turn slightly, even if it didn’t want to yield just yet. Anne took a breath, careful to keep the tension on the wrench, and tried to dislodge the st few pins.
“This is bullshit!” she heard Sean shout, all the way from the front of the undry, and her fingers almost slipped at the shock of that. Her train of thought quickly turned to a hundred different scenarios pying out with Sean in the line of fire, and none of them were kind. Anne closed her eyes and bit her tongue as a few beads of sweat rolled out from under the rim of her bacva and onto her crooked nose. One, two, three, four more times she raked the lock without dislodging anything further. Still keeping the tension on the wrench, she eyeballed the right size of hook tool in her case and brought it out. This was an even simpler design than the sawtoothed rake, just a rod of spring steel with a bent, rounded-off tip, but it was an easier fit than the rake, and a few seconds ter Anne was feeling for movement on the pins. The front half of the set seemed to be well in pce, but the #4 pin felt free still, so she set to nudging it into alignment.
“Listen, pal!” Sean continued in the front. “You see this? That's blood. You think four quarters at the undromat are gonna fix this? 'cause I don't think so. But what do I know, I'm not a professional fucking dry cleaner.”
#4 clicked into pce, and the lock gave way to Anne's gentle persuasions, letting her swing out the door just a little bit. She wedged her foot in and repced the tools in her leather case. After a final gnce around outside, she pulled the bacva over her face and retrieved her pistol from its shoulder holster before she opened the door wide enough to slip in. Sean, bless his theater skills, was cussing up a storm that echoed through the whole of the building, easily covering up Anne's footsteps and the sound of the door as she gingerly pulled it closed behind her.
What was there to say about the back of the undry, then? Anne had eyes for two things: one, the washing machines and tumblers lining the walls of the room, all eerily quiet for a business promising next day pickup on its signage out front, and the linoleum floor she had to move across. She had already left a few slushy footsteps coming in, but the evidence of her intrusion wasn't the worrying part — the way the cold and wet rubber soles of her boots would rub against the floor and potentially squeak in doing so was. Pstic bags from her toolkit wouldn't be helping much either, and considering the in-and-out nature of her little trip here, taking her boots off wasn't going to work either. Nothing to it but moving on. With a few quick gnces at the bead curtain between her and the front room of the shop, she took a tissue from her coat and started wiping, first cleaning and drying the soles of her boots, then a quick wipe of the prints behind her on the floor, not entirely removing them but enough to smear them beyond any use in identifying her shoes. Another pocket in her coat, lined with a pstic bag held open by duct tape, became the temporary resting pce of the tissue. Five meters of lino took a minute to cross quietly and felt even longer for the quiet that had taken hold of the front room, but Anne forced her mind back into focus once more. Whatever Sean was doing was not her problem. Getting the evidence was.
Across the room was her destination, another door, dull gray steel body with a bck pstic handle and the gleam of a new lock. The cylinder jutted out of the door, surrounded by a heavy guard ring, and the front pte of the cylinder held an engraving of a brand name she actually recognized. Just the look of it had Anne not even bothering to reach for her tools. It promised security pins5A security pin is a special kind of pin used in cylinder locks to try to defeat lockpicking. Basically, they’re designed to bind up when picked, only releasing when tension on the whole lock is released - i.e. the lockpicking attempt is aborted. There are different types and whether any particur one will resist any particur lockpicking technique is an excellent question I can’t possibly answer. This is what separates locksport from lockpicking for criminal gain: when you’re at a locksport convention testing your skills in the ‘vilge’ of locks put out for you to try and open, you know what make and model of lock you’re up against and you also have experts standing by to teach you techniques. When you have a door that you need to force open now-ish, you won’t know any specifics of the lock nor have time to experiment., relockers6Commonly found in safes, relockers are mechanisms that prevent a lock from opening under certain conditions, either when a pte of gss is penetrated or a certain temperature is reached (which would indicate an attempt to defeat the safe via thermal nce or such). An overblown worry for a door lock, then, but Anne’s justifying the abort to herself, so she’s free to imagine the lock as unpickable as it could be and move on to Pn B. and other such niceties she didn't have time for, and even if that was the locksmithing equivalent of protective mimicry,7A strategy many animals use for protection: rather than incurring the cost of actually producing poison, they have evolved to just look like a species that is poisonous.Incidentally, “poisonous” means the animal/pnt has poisonous tissues to deter being eaten, while “venomous” animals deliver that poison into their opponent via fangs, spurs or other kinds of natural weapons. the chance that fumbling around in it could seal the door for good left her little choice but to leave the lock alone. The keyway wouldn’t fit Kyrill’s keys either. That, in turn, called for a new approach. The first thing that came to Anne's mind was to just sneak back out and abandon Sean. She was just here on Sean's behalf anyway, nobody had seen her, nobody was in her way — it would be a clean exit in every regard. She hated thinking it, and when the first cogent objection to it that came to her mind was that Sean knew too much about her and might talk if Ilya squeezed him before killing him, well, she hated that thought even more.
Abandoning Sean was wrong. That's all that should have mattered, all that Anne wanted to matter. One more time, she reached into her coat to retrieve some gear — a suppressor for her pistol the size of a short D-cell fshlight. With quick moves, she removed the little thumb nut from the threaded muzzle extending from the front of her pistol's slide. She screwed the suppressor in its pce. Nut stashed and pistol at the ready, she crept toward the bead curtain. Time to ask Freddie some questions.
Sean's eyes wandered away from Freddie to the bead curtain behind him. He thought he saw a shadow move in the twilight back there, but his curiosity was cut short by that shadow revealing itself to be Anne with her bacva down and her gun up, slowly creeping through the curtain to take aim at Freddie. He didn’t move before she was in position.
“Hold it,” she said. “I will warn you once. No shouting, no sudden moves. Are we clear on that?”
Freddie said nothing, just looked at Sean, who gave him a semi-sympathetic ‘Welcome to the club’ kind of gnce.
“Yeah, I'm thinking Freddie's clear on that,” Sean answered, tapping his Beretta — no, the Beretta, not his — on the counter. Though he wasn’t aiming it at anything in particur, its muzzle pointed at Freddie’s midsection. “I mean, we didn't exactly talk terms but I feel we reached an understanding already. Nonverbally.”“I was wondering why you were so quiet,” Anne said.“Turns out I'm not that good a liar,” Sean said. “Quicker on the draw, though. It put a damper on the conversation.”“Freddie's piece?” Anne asked.“I've got it,” Sean answered.“Okay,” Anne said. “There is a locked door back there and I need keys.”Sean look at Freddie. “Well, Freddie?” he said. “This is the part where I want you to speak again.”“My name isn't Freddie,” Freddie said.“My bad,” Sean said. “In my defense, it looks like your name badge is on your other shirt. So, set me straight.”Freddie just gred at him.“Where are the keys?” Anne said.Freddie continued to gre at Sean.“Rumpelstiltskin?” Sean said. “Come on, man. You've got two guns pointed at you right now. How do you think this is going to end?”Freddie gred some more. “In the drawer,” he said, slowly sliding his hand over the counter toward a drawer without reaching down for it. “It has a green dot on the back.”
Sean looked to Anne, who made no attempt to leave her concealed position; he took a step to the side and leaned across the counter to open the drawer. Freddie looked down at him, a twitch in his hand at the sight of Sean within easy reach, but he turned his head to look over his shoulder and met Anne's eyes behind her mask. Freddie's shoulders slumped a little. He had already made the choice to live; this was not the time to go out cheap.
“Got it,” Sean called and tossed it to Anne. The keyring sailed through the beads and bounced off her arm, cttering to the ground. Anne hadn't flinched the slightest, nor taken her eyes off Freddie. Still keeping her gun aimed at him, she very slowly crouched down and grabbed the keys off the floor with her left hand.“Get back in position and watch him,” Anne said. “I will be a few minutes.”
‘A few minutes’ was a nice turn of phrase, an excellent fit for the task ahead of Anne and her degree of certainty about how much time it would take her to return. Considering all the things that could, pusibly, be behind a locked door, there was no telling what she had to look forward to until she actually put the key with the little green dot on the back into the lock and tried to twist it. When the lock didn't budge, she felt the inevitable stab of anger at being lied to, but when she leaned against the door and pushed it a little, the key did turn, and Anne downgraded her initial assessment of the door accordingly. Not much sense in a good lock with poor fit in her book, but then again, the door had stopped being her problem the moment it had opened, and so she left the thought at the doorstep and stepped through, pistol at the ready again. A staircase led down into the basement of the shop, notable for a few reasons: it had better wallpaper than the back of the shop, the air was heated, and the wooden steps didn't creak when she walked down. Two rows of fluorescent lights were suspended from the ceiling, casting a harsh light on two rows of tables. They were covered in pstic sheets, and each table held a stack of trays, a rge bundle of rubber bands and an electronic scale.
Anne wondered idly how much the powder residue on the pstic sheets might be worth. Enough for a fun night on the town, at least, regardless of whether you put it in your nose or your wallet. This wasn't the evidence they were looking for, though, and so she pressed past the improvised cocaine processing area and into the doors on the other side of the room. Two of them led to restrooms — male and female — with various safety and hygiene warnings printed on signs in Russian, the manufacture of which Anne figured to be a business with a suspiciously limited clientèle. Maybe a clue for a hotshot young Detective to look into, given a few minutes of spare time. Another door had faint voices whispering to one another behind it — women's voices.
Anne guessed it only opened from the outside and was locked on top of that, but didn't feel the calling to test her theory. It was better for those women, she reasoned, if they could truthfully say they knew nothing about what would happen that night, because if Ilya kept them there to work his drug b, they were no longer capable of making money in the quote-unquote hospitality trade, and their lives accordingly worth approximately nothing to their captors. If they were to see something inconvenient, something that might get them to quote-unquote act out, it would be all the easier for Ilya to just…to just kill them, chop up the bodies and dump them in a mass grave, no funny quotes around that. Anne felt the thought threaten to pierce clean through her armor, but cold-hearted thoughts quickly flooded in to contain the emotional damage: what was the alternative to leaving them there? Bring them all to the safehouse and then what, run a women's shelter on the side? Just set them free and then what, let them to make their own way in a foreign country with nothing but the clothes on their backs? Call the cops on this pce to free them and then what, get them deported back to whatever horrors they originally tried to escape? And Lord, that was just one room in one building owned by one crew, just a sad, miserable drop in the ocean of human trafficking. What good would come of anything she could do right then and there?
“Be quiet,” she said toward the door. “You heard nothing.” And so there were no more voices from behind the door.
Anne moved on to the st door. It was offset from the restrooms, and as a quick test of the door handle proved, also locked; she went back to the keyring and got it right on the second guess. “Mother lode,” Anne muttered, stepping into Ilya Sidorov's office.
It was every bit as gaudy as she had imagined it. Lord have mercy, the man had a trophy case, filled with lots of shiny mannequins, trinkets of contests without consequences, and it was aligned so you could get a good look at it from the wraparound white leather couch opposite it. The wooden table the couch wrapped around had gotten the benefit of a direct topical application of white powder without a pstic barrier between wood and drug. In pces it looked like someone had snorted the varnish right out of the surface. Anne turned her attention to the other half of the room, dominated by a skeletal-looking steel desk and some locked file cabinets. A quick browse of the keyring showed Freddie wasn't being trusted with access to those. Her check of the desk came up empty, ‘secret’ stash of uppers aside, and so she turned back to the cabinets. Not a big deal to force a drawer open, given some gentle persuasion with a sturdy bde; but to open up a dozen and browse the contents for a smoking gun, that was a different story.
So much for going in, grabbing ‘the ledger’ and getting out.
Anne made her way back upstairs, where she found Sean and Freddie in very much the same position she had left them in; still, she took care to stay behind the bead curtains, her eyes flicking every half minute or so to the cars passing by outside.
“Well?” Sean said, taking his eyes off Freddie for just a moment to stare at her.“I suppose the evidence is down there in Ilya’s office, between the cocaine residue and the squash trophies,” Anne said. “But it is going to take a few hours to go through it.”“So, there's a lot to search?” Sean asked.Anne bit her tongue. Would telling Sean about the women help? She told herself it wouldn't. “I went through his desk and found nothing of substance, but there are three file cabinets,” Anne said. “All of them locked, so I can't rightly say how much is in them. Whatever we do next, we ought to move fast. I don’t trust we will be alone much longer.”“Okay,” Sean said, running some numbers in his head. “If there are three, I guess two are mostly full and the third's just getting started. Figure about a hundred pounds of paper per drawer, assuming they left some space to actually get files out — four drawers to the cabinet?”“That is correct,” Anne said.“So we're looking at somewhere between a third and a half ton,” Sean said. “Do you think we can move that?”Anne did some thinking of her own. “I can bring the car around and get the heavy-duty bags,” she said. “I suppose it would take me about an hour if I had to do it by myself.”“And less if Freddie and I help,” Sean said, turning to the man behind the counter. “How about you close up and take a little smoke break?”
Freddie didn't invest the energy to come up with a new and fresh reply, he just continued gring.
“Maybe if you told me your name,” Sean said. “I mean, I can keep guessing. I know a lot of names. You’d be surprised.”“The way I see it,” Anne said to Freddie, “there are two ways this can go and one way it can't. The way it can't is me doing this by myself while you two stare at each other, because it would take too long and I am getting the notion you are already stalling for time in the hopes of your friends coming 'round to check on you. Now one of the ways it can is we do what my partner there suggested, split the work and get it done quick. Then we will be on our way and you will in turn be free to call your boss or skip town or try to simute getting worked over, whatever you calcute being in your best interest. The other way — ” She paused to let the implication hang in the air.“You think your threats scare me?” Freddie hissed.“No threats,” Anne replied. “Facts. Help us or I will make very sure you don't get in our way. Ask Bolesv and Rusn how serious I am.”Freddie's eyes widened. “You?” he said. “You killed them?”“They forced my hand,” Anne said. Her head turned just a little to the side. “I just set the record straight on the warehouse, by the way,” she said to Sean.“Well, sure,” Sean said. “By all means, let’s get the truth out there. I’ve had to live a lie for too long. And, I mean, if anyone deserves to hear it, it’s our good pal Freddie.”“Yan!” the man shouted. “My name is Yan, for fucking — fuck! Yan! Not Freddie!”“Now was that so hard?” Sean said. “Don’t answer. Rhetorical question.”“You are going to help us, Yan,” Anne said.“Fuck you, Simmons,” Yan said.“Yeah, look,” Sean said. “I get it. I’ve been there. ‘Fuck you, Simmons’ is easy and satisfying. And everybody’s gonna be real proud of you at your funeral. Stood up to Mary-Anne fucking Simmons! What a way to go. Your momma crying over the headstone while your friends drink to your memory, I can see it now. They’ll shell out for the real deal. Granite, gold-embossed lettering. Here lies Yan, died December 5th 1989. Beloved son, respected criminal. Quotation mark, fuck you Simmons excmation mark, quote ends.”“Fuck you, too!” Yan said.“Oh, I’m fucked, don’t worry about that, there’s already a line around the block,” Sean said. “We’re both stuck in the mess Simmons made. But word to the wise, if you wanna get your big bad revenge at some point, you’re gonna have to live through this night first. Considering what happened to your friends —”“What do you care?” Yan asked.“I’m Sean Collins,” Sean said. “Detective Sean Collins. The guy your boss put a hit on, which is how we’re all in this fucking mess?” Sean paused. “Does that ring a bell?”
Yan said nothing.
“Guess you don’t want to admit to conspiracy,” Sean said. “See, I knew you were smart. By the way, your pal Kyrill is still alive. He’s at Dolr’s.”“…I know,” Yan said.“We are not here to do more than we have to,” Anne said.“Look, all we actually want is for you guys to back off, take a chill pill and go back to where nobody was trying to kill anyone, okay?” Sean said. “The warehouse was a mistake, okay? Give me five minutes with your boss and this whole thing can be over tonight. How about it?”“No,” Yan said.“Let me guess, because ‘Fuck you, Collins’?” Sean asked, which earned him another gre from Yan. “Okay then. So we’ll need leverage to force your boss to come to us. That’s actually why we’re here, we’re here to take his books. Not a big fan of stealing but we’re out of other options. I mean, you could be reasonable instead, but you’re not. Okay. I respect your commitment to being a dick. Now, before you strain your eloquence again, I imagine you don’t like us taking the books and I can’t make you like it. But I can advise you to act smarter. See, you’re acting like a problem. All the same to me, I’ve got a fairly high tolerance for bad attitude, but Simmons here isn’t too fond of tedium. How many of your half-hearted ‘Fuck You’-s do you think she’ll hear before she shoots you in the face and goes from there? I’ve seen her do it, you know. Blink of an eye. You’d be dead before you even finish saying ‘Fuck’ again.”“…and if I do what you tell me, you let me live?” Yan said.“You have my word,” Anne said. “Now I would have your answer.”“What can I say?” Yan spat. “Fine.”
‘Fine’ was not how Sean's back felt after lugging his share of four drawers full of files through the basement, up the staircase and out of the back to the waiting Nissan. No, it was more of an ’knotted’ feeling, edging into ‘sprained’, and when he climbed in and sank back into the passenger seat, he couldn't help but produce a contented huff. The huff was indeed loud enough to be heard outside the car, where Anne and Yan were finishing up their business with all the warm coziness of Yan's single cigarette flickering in the frosty night.
“So,” Yan said, staring at Anne's masked face. “Is this my final smoke?”“You were good to your word and I will keep mine,” Anne said. She looked past him for a moment. “Coerced as it was, thank you for your help. And would you please pass on that I am sorry about Bolesv and Rusn,” she said.“Sorry does not bring my brothers back,” Yan said between drags of his cigarette.“All the same,” Anne said, “we would rather speak to your boss over a table than over a gun. If he is willing to come and sit down with us, I am sure we can settle this somehow.”“I'll tell him when I have the chance,” Yan said, then briefly kinked his head toward the car. “And the cop?”“My problem,” Anne said. “Your gun is in the basement. I took the liberty of taking it apart for a quick inspection. It looked good. Very clean.”“I see,” Yan said.
It wasn't like he had pnned to scramble for the gun, run back out with it and shoot the car before it could drive too far away. He wasn't sure he would have ever thought of it. But if this was the opposition Simmons expected, then perhaps it really was a good thing he hadn't even tried. He took a final drag from the cigarette and dropped it to the ground, grinding it beneath his heel. Anne locked eyes with him.
“That is all I needed from you,” she said.“You didn't mention the women to the cop,” he said.“I don’t need another complication,” Anne said.“You know, Simmons,” Yan said, producing a new cigarette from his pack. “I heard a lot about you. I used to feel sorry for you. Now I see why you are not popur among my brothers. Have you ever considered…being nice? Maybe smiling? You could be so much…prettier.”8Yeah, we’re pretty much just rolling out the greatest hits of negging. Yan smiled, as if to demonstrate the concept.“Your fantasies don’t interest me,” Anne said, resetting Yan’s expression. “Let me be very clear about something, Yan. I am looking for an end to the bloodshed. Do not assume anything beyond that. And take heed now: should anything happen to the women downstairs, it will very shortly happen to you next.”Yan's eyes narrowed into a gre — one more for the road. “So that’s how it is,” Yan said. The cigarette between his fingers went between his lips. He took his sweet time lighting it, then looked back at Anne. “Fine,” he said. “This is what your apology is worth. You’re gonna get what’s coming to you, Simmons. And if I ever get the drop on you, girlie, I’ll put one through each of your knees and stomp your smug face into the ground.”Anne fshed a smile. “If,”9Philipp II of Macedonia, threatening the Spartans with invasion: “You are advised to submit without further dey, for if I bring my army into your nd, I will destroy your farms, sy your people, and raze your city.”The Spartan reply: “If.”I’m considerably less fond of the Spartans overall, but even I have to admit there are worse quips to copy. Incidentally, Sparta being located in Laconia is where the term ‘Laconian’ for dry, minimalist snark came from. she said, then her smile disappeared with the same quickness. “I don't intend to point a gun at you again, Yan. Pray that doesn't change. Now run along.”
Yan turned away and went back inside. He blew a puff of smoke into the night as he did so, never looking back at her once.
Anne climbed into the car, started the engine and slowly rolled the car back onto the street before she took off toward the safehouse. And that — bacva only getting rolled up after leaving the scene — was that. Well, except for Sean watching her and still clutching both the spare mask and the shotgun in his gloved hands. Anne felt his eyes on her, but kept hers on the ck of traffic ahead.
“So,” he said. Somehow he expected one word to spin off into a full-blown conversation without further effort on his part, but Anne didn't take the bait, and so Sean switched his heavy lifting mode from physical to conversational. “Pretty sure he’s gonna need a new pair of undies.”“I expined a few things to him,” Anne said.“Keeping the mask on was a little silly,” Sean said.“I find it creates the required emotional distance to reinforce my points,” Anne said.“Like with Bizzie B?” Sean said. “Is that how all your days go, Anne? Just going around, making friends?” Sean paused for a punchline Anne knew was coming. “No, wait, not friends. The other one.”“Oderint dum metuant,”10Supposedly written by the Roman poet Lucius Accius, but more popurly associated with whatever Emperors you don’t like, this charming little phrase means “Let them hate, as long as they fear.” Anne said.“What?” Sean said.
Anne said nothing, and after a few seconds of looking at her, Sean gave up and continued.
“Thanks for not rubbing it in, I guess,” he said. “So what do you think we've actually got? I mean, did you get a good look at any of this stuff?”“No,” Anne said. “I wouldn't know what to look for.”“Oh, come on,” Sean said. “You've got to know something useful. You are in the same line of business.”“Less so than you seem to think,” Anne said.“Right, my mistake,” Sean said. “Thought you were here to do get this done with me.”
This was one of those rare times where a red light appeared at just the right moment. Anne brought the car to a halt and turned her head to look at Sean, who shrunk back a little.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, Sean,” she said, “but what exactly do you think I have been doing all day?”“Hey, it's not that I don't appreciate the help so far,” Sean said.Anne looked at him. “Well?”“Uh,” Sean said. “Thank you?”“You are welcome,” Anne said. The light turned green.“So what do you think is going on, then?” Sean said. “Do you think Yan doesn’t know where Sidorov is or is he just protecting his boss?”“Hrm,” Anne said.
She let out a little breath and got the car rolling te, the light already going back to yellow with the car just halfway across the white line. That might have been dangerous, if there had been any other traffic in a two-block radius.
“Okay, what is it?” Sean said. “You're being weird about this, and I have to admit I'm a little proud of myself that I can tell your weird silence from your usual silence 'cause it’s a fucking subtle distinction, like the deli slicer doesn’t go that thin. So, is it that you didn't get to kill Yan?” Anne's calloused fingers tightened around the wheel while Sean continued. “You know, leave a witness? Because that's how it's going to be. We're not killing any more people. Uh, unless it's stone cold 100% self defense. Like, dead certain, Kyrill wakes up and shows up at our door with a gun again, that kinda situation. That's my line in the sand.”“No,” Anne said.“No what?” Sean asked. “Come on.”“No, that is not it,” Anne said.“Okay, fine, we're pying Twenty Questions,” Sean said. “Is the thing that's upsetting you a person? Is it an abstract concept? Bigger than a breadbox?”11Not how the game is pyed, Sean.“You,” Anne said. “I am worried about you.”“My mom worries about me, you’re just big dogging,” Sean said. “I mean, I had my gun on Yan before he even cleared leather.12With apologies to Marty Robbins. I kept my cool through the whole thing. What the fuck else proof do you need that I can handle myself, huh? 'cause I'm way over your Kindergarten act.”“Calm yourself, please,” Anne said. “I am not talking about your competence.”“Well, geez, now we're really nailing down what you're not talking about, Anne,” Sean said. “What’s my next hint?”“Pinly, then: what do you intend to do?” Anne said. “If we come to an agreement with Ilya.”“It doesn't change a damn thing,” Sean said. “He put a price on my head and sent his guy to kill me. What’s to agree on? What's he going to say? 'Oops, my bad'?”“And if he does?” Anne said.“Seriously?” Sean said.“Or other words to that effect,” Anne said.“No kidding,” Sean said. “You actually think he's going to ask me for forgiveness.”“I don't see the notion being too fanciful,” Anne said. “After all, the hit was apparently based on faulty information. Now suppose Ilya did not actually know about the drugs. Bolesv and Rusn working into their own pocket would expin a lot. And the council has a vested interest in making sure this ends quietly. Grudges are the opposite of good business, grudges against police officers are beyond even that. So apologize, shake on it, have a few shots of vodka together. It can be that easy.”“And then what?” Sean said. “Good game, see you next week, everyone goes home and has a brewski?”“I will pay the consequences of my actions, but they are not for you to worry about,” Anne said. “The threat to your life will be over. You got to see some action. And you didn't get hurt too badly.” She paused for a moment. “I can't speak to your perspective, but from where I am sitting, that is a good outcome.”“Really,” Sean said. “That's all it takes in your eyes? Fuck my investigation and fuck all the people who got killed over this crap, Sidorov says he's real sorry, case closed? That's what you call good?”Anne nodded slowly. “You could do worse,” she said.
Sean pondered it while the Nissan rolled around the st corner, bringing the ‘Hotel Superior’ neon sign into view.
“So, okay,” Sean said. “I’m trying to appreciate what you're saying, what you want to do — you just want to hit the rewind button, everything back where it belongs. I get it. But think about it for a second and you know that won’t happen. Yesterday's gone, the cat's out of the bag.” After a moment, he added “Pandora's box is empty.”“I should like to try a metaphor of my own, then,” Anne said. “When your car breaks down, do you let it sit at the curb and walk off to buy a new one? Or do you pop the hood and try to fix it first?”“That's a really bad metaphor because organized crime isn't like a car in any way, shape or form, at all,” Sean said, “but even if we stretch that far it assumes whatever arrangement you guys had yesterday was working. Pretty sure I can dig up people who’d disagree with you. See, dig up, because they’re dead.” He breathed. “Well, I also disagree and I’m not dead, yet. There’s that.”“I suppose,” Anne said. “You are wrong about at least one thing, though.”Sean leaned back into the seat. “Do tell.”“At the end of the story, Pandora's box wasn't empty,” Anne said. “It retained hope.”
Sean looked at her for a moment as he tried to figure out how serious she was. Tried and failed.
“So your hobbies are reading and pedantry,” he said.“Educating yourself and being able to recall factual information go hand in hand,” Anne said.“And just like that,” Sean said, “I get what it must be like talking to me.”Anne smiled at Sean briefly, but then her gaze turned back to the street. “Mr. Dolzhikov is here,” she said.“What?” Sean said.“His car,” Anne said, as they rolled past it. “Keep the shotgun handy. You may have need of it.”Sean's hands tightened around the shotgun again. “I'm not even gonna ask,” he muttered.
