It’s 11:30 PM in Indianapolis. It’s warm for April, and Hellscape waits in the shadowed recesses on the Market Street corner, waiting for the bus from Chicago to arrive.
She’s tired, recently back from goings on in Portland that she’s still trying to get her mind around. The night with Kate Fiscus told her there was a lot more going on there than met the eye. Wilson seemed about as clueless as Collins was, and probably just as benign. She’d talked with Kate a bit before she left town, suggesting she get some space between her and the Lumberjack front office in the same way she had her space with Collins and the Nine’s situation.
“Nothing illegal?” Kate had questioned.
“Nothing too illegal, anyway,” she’d replied. When Kate raised one of those magnetic eyebrows, she’d added a disclaimer. “I mean, I drive 76 sometimes when the limit is 75, right?”
Regardless, the appearance of Fiscus the masculine threw a wrench into the plans. She was going to need some more information before she knew what to make of it all, but it seemed clear Dan Fiscus was a man who’d broken a few limits in his time, which, given his relationship with Kate only made sense.
She’s surprised when, fifteen minutes later, the bus arrives and her contact isn’t on it. Frowning, she’s considering her options when a rickety tow truck comes into sight. She’s seen it before—or one like it—the flaking Southside Towing logo is barely discernible, the image reminds her of pig slop. A moment later, the contact is ejected from the passenger seat to sprawl onto the ground. His bag arrives a moment later, thudding with soft impact. A baseball bat clatters to the concrete next.
Figures, she thinks, smiling to herself despite the man’s indignity as he gets up and brushes himself off like he’d just taken a high-hard one at chin level.
The truck clanks and clunks and belches exhaust fumes as it lumbers its way back north.
When Eiji Murata makes the check point, she silently goes to his bag, reaches down, and retrieves the tracking bug she knew would be there. She dropped it to the asphalt, and firmly ground the heel of her black boot over it until the contraption was shattered into pieces.
Certain they are now alone, she proceeds.
“Welcome back,” she says to Murata when he arrives.
Murata is an outfielder with the Yellow Springs Nine. Earlier this year, he’d been selected by Chicago in the Rule 5 draft—a process by which weak-sauce teams steal the vital property of the real organizations. The YS9 GM had been peeved to lose Murata, but also fairly certain he’d be back. “Those hacks don’t know talent when it hits them right in the kisser,” he’d said when he asked Hellscape to handle Murata’s stint in Chicago. “Get him loaded up.”
Murata scratched the back of his neck and peered into the darkness, obviously struggling to see her in the shadows. At 24 years old, he’d be playing in Indianapolis from here out. “Thanks,” he said. “I can’t tell you how good it is to be back.”
“What can you tell me?”
“They’re the cheapest damned organization I’ve ever played in,” Murata said. “and I’ve played in little towns with dirt lot for home fields.”
Hellscape chuffed a bit.
“Made you bunk up with families of cockroaches in Motel Six’s, and even pay for your own damned eye-black.”
“Sounds awful.”
“It was.” He proceeded to describe the few weeks he’d spent in the Black Sox Spring Training facility, their development regimen, and their nutrition program. “All you get is fruit,” he said, shrugging. “No scurvy, at least.”
Hellscape listened. When he was done, she left a long string of silence before digging down the next layer.
“Anything on the other assignment?”
Murata cleared his throat and looked right and left. Spy craft was not his thing.
“I practice safe sleuthing,” Hellscape said. “The area is clear.”
“Well,” he said. “There were thugs all over the place. ‘Drivers,’ you know?”
“Yes,” Hellscape said. “I know.”
“And they were always talking about breaking this or breaking that. Grinding things to salt, or burning them to ash, you know?”
“Yes,” her patience was wearing thin. Murata knew what he was getting into when he accepted the extra stipend. “Get on with it.”
“Two of them kept talking about Boise.”
“Boise?”
“Yeah,” Murata said. “one of them would joke about things like ‘Getting the Jump-drive on the Mr. Potato Head, and ‘Spreading the Ash across Spudville.’ Then the other would laugh and say “it beats pigshit outta the stink in Yellow Springs.”
Hellscape nodded.
She was looking for a link somewhere. The Feds had gotten nowhere on Operation Pig Dump, as the papers had taken to calling it—other than being sure it hadn’t actually been Portlanders who had done the deed, something Triple Axe and his underground informants concurred with, basically suggesting that no one in Portland was smart enough to pull that off. But it was clear someone had pointed the finger at the Jacks.
The words “jump-drive” and “ash” combined in her thoughts, as well as a memory of s bit of a flare-up between Chicago owner Vinnie “the Asshole” Vitale the Boise front office. It had been while she was employed with the Sox, and just before she’d leaked the half-assed thing he called a “Blueprint,” some kind of dick-measuring thing that waffled around a “Tread” or a “Wheel” or a “Grind mill,” or something Boise’s front office was creating, and Vinnie’s beloved Blueprint that had gotten her fired and started this whole mess in the first place.
The alignment of the moments felt powerful.
It made sense in an odd Vinnie Vitale way (was there any other) that Boise could be involved in this somehow.
“All right,” Hellscape said to Eiji Murata. “Go to the apartment and get rested. The team will need you soon.”
A moment later, Murata had gone, and Hellscape sank back into the shadows, taking allies and fire escapes, vaulting across gaps in the roof tops and then slipping through a series of allies, picking up fresh clothing, and adding a new look before emerging into the throng of a raving nightclub. A half-hour, five propositions, and a drink later, Heidi Hickman left the nightclub to retire to her room.
Tomorrow she’d be back in Yellow Springs with her secure connections. Maybe she’d call Kate, run some ideas around with her. If the answers came back, maybe Kate could do her thing around the Spuds organization.
Maybe.
