Mister Petty #4
“I’m in,” Viti said. “So are they. They’re getting in the elevator now.” Keys clicked. “Oh, she’s rather obvious as well. Copying files to the thumb drive.”
I took the folder, slid it into my shoulder bag, and carefully replaced the mirror. Then I went back to the computer and grasped the thumb drive. “Ready to go when you are.”
“Fifteen seconds,” Viti reported. “Ten. Five. Now, Grey.”
I popped out the thumb drive, shut down the computer, and paced back the way I’d come.
I got to the stairwell and slid into it just as the elevator doors opened, wafting out the scent of ghoul, an acrid odor with a faint reek of decaying flesh, buried under too much cologne. I shut the door silently and froze as the ghouls passed me and went into the office of Acumen, Inc.
Then I went back out the way I came.
“So,” Viti said. “The ghouls have Ms. Montecrist under surveillance.”
We were back at the office. I produced the thumb drive, and she seized it like a raven with a peanut. Then I took out the legal folder from my shoulder bag. “Apparently,” I said. “But what is she doing that’s worth surveilling?”
Viti put the thumb drive into her laptop, sat down at her desk, and cracked her knuckles while her machine booted up. “Shall we find out?”
I started going through the contents of the folder. Viti took the thumb drive.
Ten minutes later I looked up to find my assistant looking back at me.
“What you got?” I asked.
“She’s Petty’s accountant,” Viti said. “He’s lost a great deal of money in bad investments in the last eight or nine months. Sixteen million.”
I held up several pages. “I have here records of sixteen million dollars in assets in an offshore account.”
Viti sat back slowly in her seat. “Embezzlement.”
“She’s taking Petty for everything he’s worth,” I confirmed. “Including a ten-thousand-dollar wire transfer taken out in cash the day before yesterday.”
“Sheryl Petty’s retainer,” Viti noted. “She is Sheryl’s accountant as well. Mrs. Petty has also lost a great deal of money in the markets.”
I went to the next section of the folder. “Uh-huh. Here it is. Cammy is scamming them both.”
“Hmm,” Viti said, her face thoughtful. “This behavior seems somewhat less than ethically ideal.”
“Correct,” I said.
She smiled faintly. Viti was not insecure about much, but she often had trouble grasping fundamental ethics.
“So,” I said. “Sheryl Petty, besides sleeping around on her husband to get him to divorce her so she can take his money, is also siphoning a lot of money from him and using it to hire me to deliver unto him a fate worse than bankruptcy. Maurice Petty is sleeping with his wife’s little sister to get her to divorce him so he can keep his money.
But he can’t, because Cammy is embezzling his balls right out from his pants, while simultaneously cleaning out Sheryl, too. ”
“Which is…wrong?” Viti guessed.
“Wrong to the third power, at least.”
She nodded firmly. “Where do the ghouls fit in?”
“Must be where she heard about me,” I said. “Cammy tells her sister about me, to keep Sheryl focused on Maurice. Even provides her with the money to hire me, because what are sisters for?”
“What a tangled web we weave,” Viti said solemnly.
“Very nice. And LaChaise and his people have Cammy’s office wired, because she’s coming into about twenty million bucks and they want to know when and where and how she gets it.”
“So that they can subtract her and keep the money for themselves,” Viti finished.
“And as a bonus,” I said, “Petty has nothing left. And his wife has me after him. They offer him enough money to keep him going, and they own Marcone’s money guy.”
“Couldn’t he go to Marcone for help?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But guys like Petty look out for themselves first. And Marcone doesn’t tolerate much nonsense in his organization. I think Petty would do anything to hide it.”
I pursed my lips thoughtfully.
“What are we going to do about it all?” Viti asked.
I thought about it for a moment and then smiled slowly.
Viti tilted her head.
“I have, after all,” I said, “been paid, and paid well, to balance the scales.”
I got my meeting with Baron Marcone at dawn the next day, in a building that was under refurbishment.
He sat behind a battered old desk, a mature man in a tailored suit, with silver at his temples and no signs of weakness.
His square, strong hands were folded into a steeple, his pale green eyes were calm, and a Valkyrie in a business suit lurked over his left shoulder, watching me closely.
“Mister Grey,” Marcone said, his tone pleasant and meaningless. “What brings you to me today?”
“I’m walking in your yard,” I said. “I wanted to let you know about it.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Please explain.”
I did. I laid everything out, including a report that Viti had generated for me.
Marcone glanced over the report. He was a speed reader. I suspected he had much in common with Viti, because he gave a micro-nod of approval as he finished.
“You are being uncharacteristically candid,” he noted.
“No reason to be coy,” I replied. “The ghouls are about to own your accountant.”
“So it would seem,” he said. “Petty has allowed himself to become a liability.” He closed the report and squared it carefully with the desk’s surface. “Why bring this to me?”
“Petty’s about to cause turbulence for your organization,” I said. “I thought I’d ameliorate things for you.”
He tilted his head. “Why?”
“I’ve been hired to balance the scales.”
“Not by me.”
I shrugged a shoulder. “That’s why we’re talking.”
“Respectful,” he noted.
“There’s no point in unnecessary conflict. I assume you have measures in place for when you would need to move on from Petty’s services. I thought it would be polite to let you know it was time to use them.”
“Are you telling me how I should run my business?”
“I am merely the messenger of an unfortunate reality,” I said.
Marcone steepled his fingers again for a moment, and then let them fall apart briefly, an acknowledgment.
“Why not simply walk away?” Marcone asked.
“First, I have been paid,” I said. “Second, the ghouls are using me without paying me. I can’t tolerate that.”
“What did you have in mind?” Marcone asked.
I told him.
He had a shark’s smile. “That hardly seems heroic.”
“I’m not a professional hero.”
After the meeting with Marcone, I stopped in the open street and called Viti. “Well?”
“You were right. The ghouls have realized things went south and they’re trying to clean up,” she said calmly. “They’re on you.”
“How many?”
“Six.”
“Only six?”
“Grey.”
“I know. I have an ego. Where?”
“Two cars, three each. Beige sedan. Black SUV.”
I glanced around until I’d spotted both cars. “Okay. Have they noticed you?”
Viti sounded mildly annoyed. “Grey.”
“We always check, don’t we?” I said.
“Hmph.”
“You pick a spot?”
“The silos.”
“Always charming,” I said. “Security?”
“Paid them out of petty cash.”
“See you there.”
And I got on my bike and started riding.
It was still early, and a weekend, so not much was moving. I rolled along at the speed of traffic, got onto Damen, and headed south.
Chicago is what passes for an old city in America, and I’ll give the place this much—in its lifetime it has lived a lot.
Rapid changes in technology, demographics, economics, industry, and politics have built the city in layer after layer of repurposed construction, which, for the most part, has resulted in a busy metropolis.
Here and there, though, there are loose ends.
Purpose-built locations that simply could not be readily made over to suit current needs.
One of those places is a complex of old grain silos on Damen.
An explosion in the late seventies left the site unusable, and it simply never caught up with the rest of the town.
Several hundred yards square of gutted red-brown brick buildings, steel girder skeletons, tunnels, and round concrete towers create one of those spaces where graffiti artists, urban explorers, and shady investigators go to pursue their craft.
In the middle of a thriving city, it is an island of silence and stillness where weeds and trees have begun to reclaim the ground.
It just wouldn’t have been believable to the ghouls following me if I hadn’t noticed them in the morning stillness, so I waited until I was a few blocks away, glanced over my shoulder, goggled theatrically—ghouls not being known as the brightest pixels on the screen—and began to pedal quickly in an obvious attempt to escape.
The property was fenced off, of course, and I drove right to the sign that read “State Property, No Trespassing” to ditch the bike and climb the fence. The cars roared up and the ghouls piled out, while I dashed into the abandoned cityscape.
I broke visual contact and opened up into a full sprint, maybe forty, forty-five miles an hour. I found an entrance to the tunnels, tossed my shirt and jacket one way, and went the other. I’d gained enough ground to take a moment, and I did.
Little changes, faces, hands, feet, they don’t take a lot of effort. Compare it to a regular person jogging up a couple of flights of stairs. Even becoming a completely different person, height, weight, and so on, that’s only moderately difficult. Run a mile at a moderate pace.
Turning yourself into a monster, though. That’s harder. A lot harder. And it hurts. It hurts a lot.
The part of me inside that isn’t so nice, the part that wants to tear limbs and rip flesh, capered about in glee as the pain started.
My face burned and ached and twisted. My spine lit up viciously as every single vertebra dislocated simultaneously.
Bones in my arms and legs cracked and stretched and swelled.
My heart rate went up enormously. Heat bubbled through me, my flesh covering itself in sweat even as hair dropped away and scales began to slide out of the pores and unfurl.