9-News: 40.075 – Doubling Back

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9-News: 40.075 – Doubling Back

Post by RonCo » Wed Nov 27, 2019 9:23 am

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Heidi Hickman stood on the barge’s deck and scanned the Chicago skyline as the brilliant September sun rose to the east. Wind whipped her hair and bit into her cheekbones. She pulled the collar of her bomber jacket up over her ears. She was tired from the lack of sleep that comes from spending a night on a cot down in the spare hold with its rusted out wall and echoing hallways, but she couldn’t help it. She loved the lines of the city, and getting up early was worth it.

She sighed, thinking back only a few months ago when she’d been so thrilled to be able to come back to Chicago, and to work in baseball no less. The Black Sox were coming back. The team her dad and her mom had followed, rest her mom’s soul. Standing in the cold lake wind, she thought back to the phone call where she told her dad that she’d be working for the team. “That’s great news!” he’d said, his voice so full of joy that she could almost forget the way he was suffering without his wife. Heidi’s father had taught her everything she knew about what it meant to be a good person. Loyalty, passion, and courage. “Do the right thing, baby,” he’d told her when she left for school as a semi-adult. “Do the right thing and you’ll find the world will see you through.”

That was a long time ago now, it seems. Now the Nine were Heartland division champions, and the Black Sox were just another sub-mediocre team thrown on the dung heap of history.

She cleared her throat and spit into the lake.

It had never taken her three days to travel from Ohio to Chicago before, but it was important she was alone now, and she’d been tailed on her return trip to Yellow Springs, as well as when she slipped out of her apartment at 3:00 AM two days ago. That had been on purpose, of course. She'd let them see her--going as far as to wait longer to leave a rest stop when the tail had ducked to the men's room to make sure she didn't lose him. Just as Triple Axe had let himself be tailed to their meeting in Armstrong Park a few days prior. “It’s important they think they know me,” he said to her when she asked about the dark form in the corner of the park that had arrived shortly after Triple Axe had. The command in his voice and the set in the pure angle of his body was comforting. Triple Axe knew what he was doing. If he wanted to be followed, there was a reason.

“I’ve got eyes here, too,” he added then, and Heidi believed him, even if she'd not been surprised when her own nonchalant scan of the area couldn't find those eyes.

Heidi pushed against the barge's rails to stretch the knotted muscles of her shoulders.

Satisfied of their arrival time, she went back to the hold to prepare herself and to eat an energy bar. It was going to be a long, long day.
# # # A half hour later, a barge docked, and machines began unloading the materials it had been carrying. It was one of a hundred such barges that would come to Chicago in any given week, long and brown with rust, flat and squat like an aircraft carrier on low riders. Its crew scrambled to secure the craft, attaching it to pylons and ensuring weather protection was in place so it could be loaded again in the evening, and ready for launch again in the morning. The storms were predicted to begin in two days, but sailors understood listening to meteorologists was a losers game.

An hour after arrival, the crew disembarked.

One of them was a thin, athletic woman with long brown hair done in a ponytail, dressed in standard fare of dirtied blue jeans and a faded jacket, duffel bag looped over her shoulder. They left the boat together, one-by-one over a gangplank that stretched to the shore. But where the group turned left and headed into town, the woman did not.

That was the arrangement, Hellscape thought as she swung from the dock down into a small motorboat that had been left where Triple Axe said it would be. The captain agreed to take her on without an entry in the manifest as long as she could get away without being discovered.

A minute later, the electric motor was humming.

She ran it up the shoreline, north.

Ten minutes later she tied the boat back where it belonged, shouldered her duffel, and, convinced she wasn’t being followed, disappeared into the city that—like Triple Axe—she’d known for most of her life.

It was time to get to work.
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