Catharsis (Book 2): Catalyst (19 page)

            Flicking my mic back on, I quickly tell Ren my plan.  "Solved it.  I know what I'm going to do.  On the back patio of the house there are two plastic chairs where I stuck the first mike," I say excitedly.  "I'm just going to put him out there on a chair where they can find him.  It'll seem strange, but at least they won't be looking to us for an explanation.  Maybe he'll just look like he passed out or something.  How's that sound?"

            Without waiting for a response, I lift up the lightweight man and hoist him onto my back.  With energy zipping through my veins now, this trip shouldn't take very long.

            "Not a bad idea," Ren finally says after mulling over my suggestion.  "But you'll need to be quick.  His absence is being noticed."

            "On it," I tell him and take off jogging across the backyards.  I'm guessing that last warning means our surveillance tech is already paying off.  Ren must be keeping track of what's going on inside.  Good.

            Halfway between the two houses, I nearly die of fright.

            Without any buildup or warning, music starts to blare right next to my head.  It is so abrupt and loud that it physically stuns me, and I stumble to the ground dropping my unconscious cargo on my way down.  Shaking my head to clear the wisps of pain that are still clinging to me, I realize I recognize the song.  It's a classic, guitar-heavy piece from the seventies that my dad used to play all the time.  But what is it doing playing out here in the middle of these backyards at night?   

            Then I notice the sound is coming directly from Comatose Guy's pocket.  His pants are singing?  It doesn't make sense.  Until it does.  His phone!  They're calling him to find out where he is.  It's his ringtone.

            "Kill it!" Ren hisses in my ear.  "Now!"

            Knowing what caused my pain makes it is easier to focus and block it out.  Reaching over with my left hand I lift the man off the ground and sling him onto my back.  With my right hand I reach into his pocket, pull out his phone, and dismiss the call killing the song in mid-guitar riff. 

            With that done, I get ready to return the phone to his pocket as I jog, and then I realize it might go off again.  Not wanting another surprise (or have them be alerted to my presence), I do my best to flick through menus while running until I can find a way to kill the volume completely.  Moments later I'm approaching the shadow-covered back patio as I fiddle with the phone.  Finally getting both the phone's ringer and vibration silenced (it was easier to turn off both rather than work through another menu option), I try to push it back into his pocket while I creep towards the brick sitting area, but it's too awkward of an angle to manage.  Not wanting to distract myself so close to the other people, I just push the phone into my own pocket so I can give it back to him once he's off my shoulder.

            "At the patio," I tell Ren.  "Still dark."

            "Not for long," he hisses in my ear.  "Go now!"

            Heeding the insistence in his voice, I sprint towards the chair that I didn't put the microphone on (Just to be safe.) and gently lay the man onto it.  He looks peacefully asleep laying on the chair, but it might not be enough to distract the men from why he suddenly came out and fell asleep.  I wish there was something else we could do to add to the distraction and keep the focus away from us.

            And then an idea comes to me, and I giggle.  I can't help it.  Knowing I only have seconds to spare before one of the men gets close enough to see me (Ren is nearly screaming from my pocket that they're coming.  They're coming to check the back.  Right now!), I quickly adjust the man and put my plan into action.  I finish wiggling him into place just as I hear someone walking into the room on the other side of the glass.  Pushing just a bit of my adrenaline to control the speed of time, I turn and sprint across the lawn and into some bushes in the neighbor's yard.

            "Clear," I whisper to Ren.  "Made it."

            "Barely," he grumbles back.  "That was way too close.  What were you doing?"

            Giggling again before I can respond, I just tell him, "Problem solving.  Thinking outside the box.  And incorporating something I saw in a movie once.  Now shush.  They're coming out."

            Peeking through the bushes, I watch as someone turns on a light that drenches the backyard with brightness. 

           
Should have expected that
, I realize and dig through my backpack for my sunglasses and put them on.  With my eyes protected from the second story-mounted halogen lights, I watch as a large, burly man steps onto the stones of the patio.  I can hear the bear-like man breathing even across the yard, and I realize this guy must be Raspy Breath that I had heard earlier.  His size and apparent strength make me very happy it wasn't him that I had run into in the hallway.

            "I found him," he rumbles in a baritone voice back over his shoulder.  "He's out back."

            He then turns to Comatose Man, steps up and wallops him with an open hand across the back of his bare head.  Being unconscious, the man in the chair puts up no resistance, and the smack hits him hard enough to lift him out of the chair and knock him sideways onto the gray stones.  It's at that moment, with the man sprawled out on the ground that Raspy Breath notices what I had done.

            "Are you kidding me, Leroy?"  He groans and steps forward to the prone form of Comatose Guy.  "He's been at it again," he says back towards the door a little quieter than he did the first time.

           
What?
the thought startles me.  I had planned on leaving a distracting surprise, but this is better than I could have expected.

            A tall, stick-thin Asian man appears in the open doorway that overlooks the patio.  "That man needs some therapy," he says shaking his head and then just leans against the metal doorframe without stepping out.

            "I know," Raspy Breath responds and nudges the body lying on the ground with his booted toe.  "I think I may have knocked him out this time," he says in a raspy tone that matches his breathing.

            "Good," Asian Guy tells him.  "Serves him right for peeing outside again when we have perfectly good bathrooms in here.  He's going to get us kicked outta this place if he keeps it up."

            "Well, I'm leaving him until he wakes up then," Raspy Breath says.  "I ain't pulling 'em up for him.  Let him get cold and learn a lesson."

            "I can't believe you caught him with his pants down this time.  Let's see how he denies this one."

            The large man finally stands up and walks back towards the Asian man in the doorway.  "Move over," he tells him.  "I'm also locking this door, so he can't get back in.  The idiot."

            I wait until I hear the door click and the flood light flip off, before I stand up myself and start jogging back towards the hidden Zero.

            "Heading to the bike," I say through a smile.  "And then on to my last stop of the night."

            "What was that?" Ren asks I as jog back.

            "What?" I say as innocently as possible.

            "Cat," he replies sternly.  "What'd you do back there?"

            "Nothing much," I finally respond.  “I just found a way to take the pressure off of them looking for us, and it turned out much, much better than I had planned.  That was fun."

            "Specifically?"

            "I just, uh," I pause not sure how to explain this without giggling again.  "I pulled his trousers down to his ankles and then dropped both of his hands into his lap."  Thinking about the words I just said and who I just said them to, I quickly continue with, "I figured it would distract them from thinking about the 'why of him being gone' if they were focused on the 'why would he be outside with his pants down'.  It was a classic distraction technique.  Get them looking somewhere else."  I swallow and then finish in a squeak, "It worked in a movie I saw once."

            He doesn't say anything until I am back on the Zero and moving down the dark streets of the neighborhood. 

            "Nicely done, Cat," He finally tells me with only the slightest tinge of anger to his voice.  "It worked.  Now let's focus on this last one."

            It was probably a good thing that I didn't realize until much later that I had also forgotten to leave our little Final Solution surprise at the house, too.  With all the excitement, it just wasn't on my mind.  Not that I would have said anything even if I had thought of it.  Not with the mood I had Ren in.  I'd just have to hope that it was a decision that wouldn't come back to haunt me later.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

            Not only was our last location of the night the closest to our own warehouse, but it was also designed to be the easiest to bug.  Or, actually, it would be the toughest of the three to get inside of by far, so Ren came up with a plan to avoid entering the place at all.  Because it was so dangerous, we were going to avoid the risk of an entry all together.  That meant all my work would be performed outside and from a distance.  And after that last house, an easy visit is absolutely fine by me.

            Ren had picked up rumors about another "action house" that had sprung up in the last month, but we hadn't had a chance to visit and decommission it.  An "action house" was what Ren used to refer to the buildings where the drugs were actively stored and sold.  Essentially these were the only types of places I knew about when I started out, and I spent my first several months hitting them exclusively.  He then introduced me to the idea of "distance houses" which were the ones connected to the trade, but didn't keep anything incriminating on hand.  These "distance houses" would be the ones in nice neighborhoods where the kingpins lived and drove their businesses forward.  They were connected to the others, but they were kept at a "distance" so as to not draw attention to them by the authorities.  The lawyer’s house tonight was a good example of this concept.

            My first willful killing occurred at one of these houses.  I had spent a month tracking down a man that had nearly killed
me
and had inadvertently led to the death of my best friend at the time, Lazzy.  My decision to kill that man still haunts me to this day.  His death didn't destroy the organization he ran nearly as much as it destroyed my view of the world and my place in it. 

            But since that day and meeting Renny, I have made visits to a number of these places and left my mark.  Sometimes it is with the occupant of the house (Either attacking them or trying to scare them away.), and other times it is with the house itself (Like gutting the place and burning it to the ground.).  Ren has shown me that you don't always have to hit your enemy where or how they expect in order to hurt them.  Sometimes it is just a matter of striking fear into them and shaking their beliefs.  And there is very little in this world more powerful than having your home destroyed by an enemy when you had assumed they didn't know it existed.

            Tonight I am heading out to a pair of local "action houses" to drop some ears on them in hopes we can pick up clues as to other locations that might be in operation.  In order to do that, Ren has devised a number of battery-pack driven microphones that can be hidden in plain sight.  All I have to do is get close enough to the houses to get within throwing distance, and we'll be good to go.

            The problem we had to overcome with these houses was that we wanted to get the mikes close enough to where guys would be standing or walking so that we could pick up what they are saying as they made their rounds.  But we can't have them see or recognize the microphone or the plan would be shot.  If I could just get close to the houses, then I could plant some of our wasp nests or sticky gum mikes around the place, but we were both leery about the idea of me even approaching the buildings. 

            Unlike the previous two houses, the men in these places are prepared for me and the gun-to-thug ratio is of Swiss-cheese creating proportions.  They have regular rotations of men walking the perimeter, and it's fairly busy with regular customers driving up.  That means the chances of me getting my hands anywhere near the brickwork are highly unlikely.  I'd run into a bullet long before I ran into a decent place to hide our tech.

            So that created a need to get our bugs over to the house from a distance without me ever setting foot anywhere near the property line or falling into the sight of the angry men with black, greasy assault rifles.  That meant finding a way to projectile fire the mikes into the area.  Good idea, but how do we do that without either breaking the tech in the fall, or letting the people there know that a listening device is sitting at their feet.  It was a problem that plagued us for days until an idea struck Ren while he was watching me run through some drills in the warehouse.

            I had been practicing my aim with a pile of stones I had pulled in from the rubble-filled parking lot and was chucking them at targets I had painted on our back wall.  Seeing me throw those rocks, Ren had said in frustration, "What I want to do is tape a microphone to a rock and just have you throw those at the houses.  Nobody ever pays attention to rocks.  Especially at a place like that where nobody ever does any landscaping.  Rocks sit there forever undisturbed and no one pays a lick of attention to them.  But the mike would never survive a throw like that.  It'd shatter once it landed.  Even if they didn't notice a rock with tape on it, a busted bug is a useless one."

            "Yeah," I had told him.  "Too bad we don't have those foam rocks my uncle used to use with his electric train sets.  Those things were great."

            "What foam rocks?"

            "You know," I'd said.  "The big, gray foam ones that they use to make the scenery around little toy trains.  Leyna and I would get in trouble all the time for taking my uncle's when he was setting up his trains.  We'd throw them at each other like stone-colored snowballs and laugh.  It was fun.  Plus it freaked out my mom, because once she actually thought they were real."

            I stopped to chuckle at the thought and shake my head.  "Good times."

            Ren just stared at me with his mouth open.  "Cat, my dear, you're a genius."

            And although I can't argue with his statement, it was more his idea and just my inspiration.  We had purchased several of those fake rocks and then hollowed them out to hold our mikes and a battery pack.  Soon after, we were in business.  I practiced throwing them for a few days in the warehouse to both make sure I could adjust to their light weight and to make sure they could withstand the fall without breaking.  Both were fine, and we had our solution.

            So tonight I just have to get within throwing distance of the two houses, and for me that means hiding behind a house across the street.  It's dark out and the rocks are virtually silent when they land (Thanks to that absorbent foam!), so as long as I don't have anyone within a few feet of where I'm aiming it shouldn't be a challenge.

            Noticing that the houses and stores around me are becoming more run down and decrepit with each block I pass, I let Ren know that I'm getting close.

            "Ok," he says distractedly, and I can tell his attention is not focused on me.

            "What's up?" I ask, prying, although I have a guess.  The boy just got his new toys, and he's eager to play with them.

            "Just listening in on the previous drops.  It generates a lot of audio, and I can already tell it's going to take me awhile to sift through it all.  This is going to take some practice to figure out what to ignore and what to key in to."

            "And you'll love every moment of it, Renny," I tease him.  "But I get it.  I'll try not to bother you except with the essentials."

            "Uh huh," is all I get in response.

            Checking my memory to make sure I have the correct cross streets, I bring the bike into a slow turn and head up an alley so that I can park my bike behind some dumpsters next to an old, burned-out fast food restaurant.  There are no "safe" houses in this area for the Zero as we can't tell which houses are unoccupied and which are just abandoned.  Plus anywhere we leave the bike is just asking for it to get stolen, so I figured this place would be as good as any.  It's unlikely to get much traffic as the smell of burnt grease is still strong in the air even though the fire destroyed most of the building months ago.  Industrial-quality food fat is impressive stuff.  I'll just have to try and be fast and not leave my baby behind for too long.

            Kicking out the Zero's balance stand, I lean her over slightly and dig through my saddlebags for the final satchel.  It's the largest of the bags I brought tonight to accommodate for all the foam surrounding the tech, but that also makes it the quietest.  There is no gentle
clack clack
of metal and plastic tapping against each other as I move.  I might as well be running with a sack of pillows around my waist for all the noise they make.

            "Off the bike and heading into position," I tell Ren without expecting a reply, which I don't get.

            The crisp night air is almost pleasant as I cross the several blocks it takes me to get near the two buildings housing the drugs and money for the neighborhood.  If I was anywhere else but here I could almost imagine myself relaxing and enjoying myself.  It's the kind of night where you can't quite see your breath, but it's chilly enough to make you want to put on a warm jacket and zip it up.  The kind of night I used to love in my past life.

            As I get closer to the houses, I can tell it's not going to be a simple drop-and-run event.  The smell of the car exhaust gets heavier as I approach the area, and it mingles with the salty scent of people - lots of people - the closer I get.  Apparently they are doing some solid business here.  That's bad for society, but good for our chances of leeching information from them.  It's also not so good when it means that I can't get anywhere near the place without bumping shoulders with an ill-tempered man armed with a large rifle.

            Keeping a few houses between myself and the center of the action, I skirt the furthest perimeter I can while still maintaining a line of sight with my target.  There appear to be almost crowds of people circling the place in crisscrossing patterns, but after I hunker down behind a detached storage shed and watch for several minutes I realize it was just my anxiety and nerves getting to me.  There
are
several groups of men patrolling the outside area around the houses, but there are also large enough gaps when they pass each other for me to be able to drop a foam stone on them.

            As I watch a pair of men with machine guns cross between my hiding spot and the back corner of the closest house, I pull out two of the foam rocks and cradle them in my hands.  The two men turn the corner, and I can anticipate about ten seconds of dead time before the next group will hit that spot.  That's not nearly enough time if I had been planning on running up and approaching the house on foot.  But if all I want to do is throw something at the wall?  Plenty of time with seconds to spare.

            Judging the distance between myself and the house's brick wall, I pull my arm back and launch the first rock through the air and watch as it soars cleanly through the darkness and
plumffs
gently into the grass and rolls right up next to the house.  I hold my breath as the pair of men turn the corner and walk right past the rock without noticing.

           
Perfect drop
, I think. 
One down and several more to go.

            Getting up from my hiding spot, I run hunched over through the shadows until I find another good place to watch the house - behind the slide of a dirty and disused play set.  My new location gives me a view of the alley of lawn between the two houses which would be an optimal place to have some ears.  Optimal, but also risky.  Lucky for me, "risk" isn't really a deterrent in my life anymore.

            Sitting and watching the patrols for several minutes to get an idea of their patterns, I realize that there is no downtime between the houses where at least one group of men isn't looking in the area that I want to throw.  Normally that could be a problem, but not tonight.  Tonight, I have no plans to fail.  I'm on fire.  If they're always looking where I want to throw, then I just have to get them looking somewhere else.  Even if it's only for a moment.

            Scooting back and looking at the rusted swing set in front of me, I reach out and grab one of the bumpy, red supports that time itself has already attempted to eat through and give it a quick turn and yank.  It releases from the metal assemblage with an audible
ch-tink
, but it isn't enough to carry across the yards and fight through the growl of multiple car engines waiting at the far curb.

            With the pole in one hand, I pull out two more of the rocks so that I have several resting in the clutch of my left elbow.  With a slow exhale, I close my eyes and center my thinking to prepare myself for the precision that will be needed for what I want to do.  I will need to be perfect for this work.  Opening my eyes, I wait until the men walking across the sparse grass are mere steps from where I need them to be, and then I whip my arm forward and send the hollow, metal pipe sailing through the air and towards the house across the street from the ones I'm watching.  Anyone looking up at that moment would have seen the long, metal straw tumbling end over end above them, but as I suspected, no one had a need to be looking up around here at night.    

            Counting to a beat of four seconds in my head as I watch it soar, I quickly release the other three foam stones in a short arc to land in the lawn near the men.  The pipe
tangs
off the roof of the house, bounces a few times and then rattles against the shingles as it slides down to the gutter.  It's loud and gets everyone in the area to turn and look in that direction.  But with the darkness as my friend, by the time they figure out where the sound came from and focus their eyes on the right building, the bar is no longer visible and just makes its scraping sound as it slides against the ancient asphalt dust covering the roof.